D&D General Refresh my memory on the lethality of 3rd ed

[Maxperson]

If AD&D is hard mode and 5E is easy mode, how does 3E fit into it?

From what I can recall, it was about the same as AD&D but more HP? Things like really high AC bogged things down.. way to crunchy as things got into higher levels.

I’d look in a book but i sold those years ago

3e is in the middle. It's more high powered, but with saves and spells players can avoid most of the lethality, despite having save or die spells. It's also much more fun if you like to build characters. Between tons of classes, subclasses, races, skills and feats, you can create virtually any character concept you can imagine.

 

[Deset Gled]

Pounce and Rend I did not consider particularly PC negating powers.

Pounce was just full attack after moving, sometimes in limited circumstances (first ambush of the combat, only after charging). Rend was just extra damage if both claws hit. Mostly just potential damage that can be concentrated on a single character.

Just a full attack after moving? You say that like action economy wasn't the most important part of combat in 3.x. Most of my 3.X characters would have given their left feat for Pounce.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Oh, yeah, let's not forget 3e still had ability damage, which was just an end-run around the HP system AND added more of the 'frustrating in bookkeeping = challenge' aesthetic.

 

[Maxperson]

The 50 damage instant death thing was more likely in 3E as well.

Only dragon breath in AD&D would hit 50 damage generally.

It was there, but it was an easy save. I don't think I saw anyone actually die to it without rolling a 1. We eventually removed it because at high levels taking 50 damage was so common that eventually you were going to roll a 1 and we don't make resurrection easy.

 

[Oofta]

I don't know about other groups, but we just stocked up on wands of cure light and healed up after every fight or got rings of regeneration. Funny thing is that at higher levels it actually became more accidentally deadly because you died at -10. While I played a lot of Living Greyhawk that had to follow official rules in our home games we went to death when you hit half your total HP.

But like always in D&D even if your PC did die all it meant most of the time was that you did something else while the group dragged your corpse back to the local cleric to get raised. Unless of course I played an elf. Then they were perma-dead every time.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't know about other groups, but we just stocked up on wands of cure light and healed up after every fight or got rings of regeneration. Funny thing is that at higher levels it actually became more accidentally deadly because you died at -10. While I played a lot of Living Greyhawk that had to follow official rules in our home games we went to death when you hit half your total HP.

But like always in D&D even if your PC did die all it meant most of the time was that you did something else while the group dragged your corpse back to the local cleric to get raised. Unless of course I played an elf. Then they were perma-dead every time.

Not everyone played with magic shops, though. Getting time to make many of them was hard to do if the DM didn't put the adventure on hold for your wizard to finish up.

 

[tetrasodium]

It depends on the level range, how deadly the GM wants it to be, & so on. I don't think that this discussion can be covered rightly without admitting the influence of DR/SR & TouchAC & iterative attack penalties*. Those each provided the GM with tools they could use to adjust (or just choose) monsters that would pump the breaks on certain combat strategies or put a ceiling/floor on things so even combat as sport didn't always feel that way

Spoiler: here are some examples

• 5e full attack bonus to all attacks vrs Iterative attack penalties. For simplicity imagine an example L11 fighter with 20 strength in both with a +1 weapon. (I'm going to ignore dex based because it needlessly complicates the example due to system differences). I'm picking level 11 just because it makes a good comparison on this mechanic
  • in 5e the fighter makes 3 attacks with +5(str)+4(prof)+1(weapon)=10 while a paladin barbarian ranger hexblade or whatever with an appropriate 20 makes 2 with the same bonuses. In 3.x the fighter & barbarian are going to make one attack at +11(BAB)+5(str)+1(weapon)=17+d20, a second attack at +6(BAB)+5(str)+1(weapon)=12+d20, & a third attack at +1(BAB)+5(str)+1(weapon)=7+d20. That means that a monster can have an AC range that sets a target d20 for any of those without becoming trivial totally random or simply implausible to hit at all. The same applied the other way around with PC AC & monstertohit
• TouchAC. Again dex was special but gets into an endless rabbit hole of different tradeoffs & system differences. This basically meant that an attacker could ignore (most) forms of armor & just target 10+dex with their attack roll. Usually it was either a spell that consumed a spell slot or a terrifying monster like the wraith but those touch spells tended to be SR:yes making it hard to become outright immune to all attackers like can effectively be accomplished in 5e rather easily.
• SR, spells came in SR:yes & SR:No with SR:yes spells trending towards save or lose & big nukes with good bang for the slot. SR:no spells tended towards weaker damage options & reciprocity heavy save or suck type reciprocity spells that leaned on the rest of the group to be (more)awesome.
• DR was a flat value deducted from each attack that didn't bypass it. This could be used to shift the damage output around a bit with some builds being hurt more or less than others by it.
  • There was a flat elemental resistance too but tit's a rabbithole unless you go for simple comparison of a set of spells like burning hands to scorching ray it was mostly useful for shifting the scales between bob's flaming weapon & alice's +N weapon or whatever since part of bob's damage was getting hit while alice's was not

It all combined to allow a GM more leeway in firmly setting what side of the speedbump that a given encounter was for monsters & PCs without resorting to a razor's edge between idle games like cookie clicker & nintendohard stuff like battletoads or dark souls
*This is more linkable & succinct than the PHB22 thing but same basic concept expressed differently if they learned to use it

 

[James Gasik]

Pounce and Rend I did not consider particularly PC negating powers.

Pounce was just full attack after moving, sometimes in limited circumstances (first ambush of the combat, only after charging). Rend was just extra damage if both claws hit. Mostly just potential damage that can be concentrated on a single character.

I can see Rend being a little annoying. "ok , the monster hits. hits again, ok now it does extra damage because it hit again..." and the player is just left annoyed because there isn't really anything they can do about it. Rake, swallow whole, grab, trip, they all require at least a die roll. Rend just...happens.

 

[Deset Gled]

I can see Rend being a little annoying. "ok , the monster hits. hits again, ok now it does extra damage because it hit again..." and the player is just left annoyed because there isn't really anything they can do about it. Rake, swallow whole, grab, trip, they all require at least a die roll. Rend just...happens.

Rend was only available for monsters that also had "Snatch". Using Rend was the DMs way of saying "I was given a choice of extra damage or bringing out the Grapple rules, and I have chosen the lesser evil. You will get no save against the extra damage, and you will still thank me for it."

 

[rgard]

1E was definitely deadlier. I had a magic user die writing a spell into his spell book.