Something 3E and 4E lost (that 2E had)

But something has been lost, and it could be called encouraged customization.
Men & Magic said:
Other Character Types: There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top, i.e., a player wishing to be a Dragon would have to begin as let us say, a "young" one and progress upwards in the usual manner, steps being predetermined by the campaign referee.
I think the example in earlier printings was a Balrog (among the expurgated Tolkien references). The encouragement was precisely in the absence of rules discouraging customization. Oh, and of course:
The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures said:
We have attempted to furnish an ample framework, and building should be both easy and fun. In this light, we urge you to refrain from writing for rule interpretations or the like unless you are absolutely at a loss, for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way! On the other hand, we are not loath to answer your questions, but why have us do any more of your imagining for you?

Why have us do any more of your imagining for you? The great division in D&D's evolution was between those who agreed with that view and those who disagreed -- as Man in the Funny Hat observed.

Stuntman's remarks and advice, I think, convey a sensible appraisal both of the design goals of 4e and of what remains the way to design a good new character class.
 
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I completely disagree with the OP. I hate 4e, I mean I really hate it, but it was specifically designed to be easily customizable. That is one of the few things I do like about it.

What was lost from 2e to 3e was creativity, as a couple of other people have already pointed out. Books were 75% fluff in those days, and that fluff was great. They created wonderful settings and then gave you rules to play in them. WotC went the opposite direction, they gave you a book with 75% crunch and then tried to create worlds around the rules, which leads to bland and sometimes dreadful settings. Nothing they've done has felt like a real world, it always feels more like a game than an adventure.

Luckily 3rd party companies sprang up to bring us great worlds like Midnight, the Mythic Vistas series, and a wonderful adaptation of Conan. Unfortunately that last bastion of creativity seems to be fading away as well.
 

In other words, what is lackingi s a DM's toolkit--not only for adventure and campaign design, but for game design. In many ways 2E is the least "sexy" of the editions: it doesn't have the classic simplicity of OD&D; it doesn't have the Gygaxian madness of 1E; it doesn't have the depth and quality of supplementation that 3E has; and it doesn't have the sleek gameyness of 4E. It does have tons of great and often innovative (at the time) settings, though, and it does have page 22 and 23 of the DMG.

Modifying/New Charahcter classes is on pages 25-27 of the 3.0 DMG. Easy to miss, since it just dovetails into the Prestige Classes on page 28+

Remember the original design of prestige classes was as a way for the DM to flesh out their world, and they were largely considered to be optional and customizable.

Now for 4E building a new class is a nightmare, simply because it involves creating a huge number of powers...
 

They treated the rules as officially sanctioned, unalterable and graven-in-stone. Never, ever, NOT ONCE since they have acquired D&D has anyone in an official capacity said that the answer to ANY rules question is EVER to just do what you want. The response has always been "DO IT THE WAY WE TELL YOU."

While I agree with your sentiment, can you realistically imagine the outrage of people who wrote in for rules clarification and received a response of "Do what you want?" Anyone inclined to simply do what they wanted would not bother to write in, and I can only imagine the nerdrage on these very forums if that was an officially posted WotC response.

It is reasonable for them to attempt to clarify or patch any perceived "rules holes", just as it is reasonable for a DM to tell his home game "Here is how I interpret this."
 

Never, ever, NOT ONCE since they have acquired D&D has anyone in an official capacity said that the answer to ANY rules question is EVER to just do what you want.

I guess putting Rule 0 in the 3e PHB doesn't count as official, eh?
 

slwoyach said:
They created wonderful settings and then gave you rules to play in them.
That seems to be the most commercially successful package, one with which Chaosium (starting with RuneQuest) was once able to make a significant dent in D&D's dominance. I think WotC has continued to follow the formula of comprehensiveness, even though the rules may come first.

Of course, all that is quite different from what Arneson and Gygax, to judge from their statements, at first envisioned! The shift in emphasis with the Advanced D&D line showed, I think, some grasp of the realities of the bigger market -- more "mainstream", and generally younger, than the initial base of war-gamers -- the hobby was then poised to exploit.

Players of the earlier wave often rejected and lampooned the new Official Rules mentality, whereas new players were more likely to notice how little the new "game system" was really systematic.

With 2e, the rules were in the first place more clearly defined. In the second place, the writers called out some sections as "tournament rules" and others as even more "optional" than everything was for a home game.

Right from the start, there was room for supplements in, e.g., the temporary removal of assassins, half orcs, monks and psionics. The "kits" system encouraged the "gotta get the book" syndrome, as did the development of "setting canon" (such as in the TSR version of the Forgotten Realms).

Had that been merely a one-way appreciation, it should have died out soon enough. In the event, it was a response to what was becoming the dominant D&D "game culture". White Wolf was also appealing to that demographic, one expecting to get served its RPG experience fully cooked.

The books you have bought belong to you; it is your game. You are always free to customize it however you like! However it is likely that, as Gygax put it in the 1st ed. DMG, "your players expect to play this game, not one made up on the spot."

The players -- more specifically, the subset of players who buy a lot of "product" -- drive the business. They seem for some time to have demanded, in effect, that "professionals" should indeed do more of their imagining for them. What the pioneers considered essential parts of play, fun nobody would want to have taken away, have come widely to be viewed instead as at best labor one should be able to avoid ... at worst as evidence of "bad" design.
 
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Hell, Gary himself never used a lot of the rules that were provided in AD&D and never really wanted to include them - he did so to please others who DID want them.

If the chef won't eat his own food, that doesn't give me any confidence in his cooking skills, y'know?
 

They seem for some time to have demanded, in effect, that "professionals" should indeed do more of their imagining for them.

More that we want them to do the actual design work on a game they're trying to sell us, rather than cop out and tell us to fix it ourselves if we have a problem.
 


Ah, but if the chef is a cordon bleu master of French cuisine, but can only make a living off a customer base that wants hamburgers, I want what the chef wants.

Then why is he running a Hamburg Joint? Really the move to better codified rules allows the DM more time to work on what is important: His/Her world not the rules that every has to relearn every time a DM/group changes. Few house rules easier it is to get new players because instead on not only looking for a DM that games their style they had to make sure the house rules where what they could live with.
 

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