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Message: <blockquote data-quote="brehobit" data-source="post: 3038168" data-attributes="member: 12032">Old school, IMO, can be summarized in three words:Life isn't fair.Broken down you get:You can die or get hosed really easily.  As others have mentioned, traps, NPCs and opponents can be unfair.  Things like a module for 4-7th level chars and a baddy who get 4 attacks, each doing d6 damage.  And you have to make a save (vs. Spells) or be unable to survive out of water.  Cured only by 4th level cleric spells.I just ran a 3.5 game where I killed the PCs over a more-or-less random encounter.  The opponents were tough, but they had a 1 day warning.  The PCs played poorly and were making metagame assumptions about the baddies.  This resulted in death.  One player (who plays a LOT) commented it was the first PC he'd had killed (ever, in 3.0 I'm not sure).The balance part of "fair" isn't there.  Balance in terms of magic items/gold is missing.  One adventure you might get a lot of loot, the next one a rust monster might eat your stuff.  Heck, there were baddies that had a % chance of causing even magical weapons to shatter!  While our group (in 2nd ed) had a very small amount of this happen, happen it did.PCs weren't equalI'd claim most classes are getting closer and closer in power and flavor and PCs are getting more and more similar to eachother. The book of battle (whatever it is called) adds spell-like effects to warriors.  Wizards are not horribly useless in hand-to-hand combat anymore.  Folks argue all the time that there should be no d4 classes (and I agree).  This is very new-school.  In old-school a 3rd level wizard might well have 9 hit points.  Rolling stats could easily give you a +0 CON modifier.  Now, with point buy (which most use from what I can tell), CON is generally the 2nd highest stat for a wizard.I'm not claiming one is better than the other.  But they are different.Kids these days....<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />Mark</blockquote>

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