Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="RyanD" data-source="post: 3290775" data-attributes="member: 3312">I honestly don't think WotC's R&D group believed the changes in 3.5 were as big as they actually were.  Part of the problem with R&D is and was that they for the most part are not into min/maxing PCs.  (They spend most of their days working on monsters and NPCs, after all).While running Living City, I worked with a team of about 10 people who were, in my opinion, as good at their "job" (finding and fixing problems with 3.0 as they related to PC powers) as the team I worked with in R&D.  We found so many issues that the Living City errata and change document grew to be about 30 pages long; and that included stuff that was just notated as "not permitted" because we never could find good ways to fix it.We saw a lot of that stuff incorporated into 3.5.  I'm not saying the R&D team lifted our work verbatim (and they certainly could have, since by license it was all owned by WotC anyway) but even if they did the same kind of work in parallel and found the same problems and the same kinds of solutions, much of what we did to Living City to make the game work better was incorporated into 3.5.However, we had the advantage with Living City of seeing how our changes directly impacted the play pattern.  When we changed various spells, we saw the reactions of the players as they switched tactics.  That in turn became reflected in the adventure design guidelines that we were using to create content for those PCs.  (And in 3.0 Living City we didn't change the durations of the buffs, but we discussed it, and knew what kind of problems doing so would likely cause).  With 3.5, I believe that WotC made a lot of changes to make the game better, but didn't have the ability/interest to see how those changes would radically alter the way the game was being played.  I think that if they had understood how far-reaching those "minor" changes were, they may not have made them.Mechanically, 3.0 and 3.5 are virtually identical games, with the exception of a few things on the margin.  But component-wise, the 3.5 spells and some of the 3.5 extraordinary and supernatural abilities make the play experience so different that adventure material written for one is almost certainly compromised when used with the other.  That was, I think, an unintended consequence.Ryan</blockquote>

Verification