Right. We got updates every week as they changed stuff. I remember when initiative got changed; we did it wrong for weeks, because we couldn't grasp our minds around the fact that you were only supposed to roll once per combat.
el-remmen said:
Can you talk a little about how you handled 3E conversions and what you did (if anything) to smooth over "continuity problems" that might have crept up with characters' abilities changing - and just the change in strategy that the players had to develop because of the new rules?
Did any of the PCs have "kits" from 2E and/or were any certain kinds of specialty priest with non-standard abilities?
I've already talked a little bit about how we eventually changed Nolin. The biggest problems came from the multiple changes to skills (I remember wisdomlikesilence recalculating her skills for about the 5th time, and for a while most of the skills used the phrase "intuit." Intuit danger, intuit direction, all sorts of things. To this day, just to be funny we still occasionally say "make an intuit jump check.")
Eltariel was a character in my game who was a 12th lvl fighter/magic-user (or whatever they were in 2e.) He felt really, really gimped by having to split his classes between fighter and wizard, because he lost all of his spellcasting and the prestige classes hadn't been invented yet. We ended up giving him a couple of extra levels to compensate, which made him overly powerful but helped meet his idea of the PC.
The specialty priest classes that changed into a normal cleric was most keenly felt in Sagiro's game, where we had three very different clerics in the party. One person (Morningstar's player) in particular felt that she lost a whole lot of flavor due to the change to a common spell list.
TomTom's psionics were tricky to convert until we got the PsiHB drafts. I think we sort of faked it, combining 2e psionics with 3e classes. It wasn't pretty, but it got us through.
It's funny how rules drive your expectations. The very first 3e adventure I ran was one where the bad guy was a dwarven wizard, and the PCs totally ignored him as a potential villain because they
knew that dwarves couldn't cast spells.
Incidentally, I just realized that the adventures preceding the Bearspittle game was probably my story arc involving King Josric, G2 (the frost giants), Unflaith the psionic spider, and the King's inadvertent insanity. Good stuff, but I think I picked the right starting place.