NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5693367" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I think 3e TRIED to be an improved 2e in essence. You can definitely see what they were aiming at. I have to say though, not all of the things that were issues in 3e were simply a matter of things getting twisted up in development. The skill system particularly was simply a bad design. Had someone put out that skill system in say 1978 I'd just chalk it up to the immaturity of game design in general at that time and it would compare favorably with other systems of its vintage. 20 years later, in light of all the excellent work done in the 90's in particular, it was simply a fumbling attempt, 10 years behind the times, and rather uninformed. Again it just strikes me as someone taking the rudimentary NWP system and just generalizing it without actually thinking about how it fit into the greater whole of the game.In fact IMHO the roots of most of the failings in 3e really go straight back to the design. They aren't the kind of 'math error' sorts of things you see in 4e, or hacks that someone found were needed late in the cycle because of other changes, like Masterwork Armor. Instead they were fundamental misapprehensions about what the purpose and use of various subsystems was. Maybe some things were late issues like adding vastly overpowered buff spells and giving wizards ways to circumvent the restrictions AD&D put on casting in combat. I think the issues started much earlier though with a failure to truly understand AD&D at a deep level. Ironically the first things out of Monte's mouth in this latest L&L clearly seem to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of 4e as well. I'm not impressed so far.[MENTION=39596]Unspeakable[/MENTION] Yeah, I hear you. I think mudlock is right about the 1/2 level thing though. Now, maybe there's some other way to approach that instead of a scaling bonus, but he's got a point. The ability score bumps I agree with you about. I think those were a bad idea on the whole. I get what the idea was, but it really messes with the math a lot and buggers up the range of skill bonuses, amongst other things. Were I making something like 4e now I'd consider alternatives to the 1/2 level bonus, but I'm not sure yet if you can really get rid of it, or exactly what to put in its place.</blockquote>

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