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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5026020" data-attributes="member: 32740">BD&D (Holmes):Good: Simple rules, easy to learn and play. Bad: Perhaps just a little TOO basic since the common usage by DM's was to proceed to make it rather more detailed and complicated.  Needed to deal with greater level range of characters. Ugly: For a game that grew out of miniatures wargaming and which required use of rare (at that time) dice it now seems foolish indeed to have not made both miniatures and dice at least as widely available seperately as the game rules if not moreso. 1E:Good: More comprehensive rules, better selection of race/class options for players.  More firmly established ideas of how to run/play the game.  Still fertile ground for DM's to customize rules to suit. Bad: Even the most important/basic of rules - initiative and combat - are spread everywhere and often so badly explained that to this day they are arguable.  Clunky, patchwork rules design.  Game begins to break down with increasing character levels. Ugly: Too many rules of needlessly complex design, badly designed, or of outright questionable inclusion in the first place.  For all the added detail still too many gaps which were now needing to be filled in by DM's in addition to reworking other stuff.  Rules bloated by hardcover supplements. 2E: Good: Simplified a lot of 1E's worst offending rules.  Great campaign settings.  More prominent inclusion (albeit still optional) of a (much-needed) skill system. Bad: Eliminated classes and races many players liked.  Failed to deal at all with a great many things that had long been sources of complaint in 1E.  Outrageous rules bloat with supplements.  Reduced sophistication due to re-orientation towards children and deplorable bows to Political Correctness Ugly: Gygax driven out and the eventual sad, wasteful, pathetic destruction of the company producing the game. 3E/3.5E:Good: The ground-up reconstruction that 2E should have been.  d20 system.  Better balance among characters at a given level.  DM tools for encounter and campaign design.  3.5 revision was generally a further improvement.  New and interesting concepts such as feats and finally a skill system built into the game, not a weak structure left to be tacked on.  Greater player freedom of choice.  Concentration of rules upon tactical miniatures combat. Bad: Concentration of rules upon tactical miniatures combat.  The 3.5 revision not repeated with similar, additional bouts of wholesale restructuring and solidifying of rules despite the even stronger need of it as time went on due to INSANELY out-of-control bloat of optional rules from ALL sources.  3.5 revision made too soon after initial release. Ugly: All the skills, feats, etc. mean DM prep time drastically increased even at lower levels.  Too much focus on rules and unrestricted player choice shifts FAR too much control of the game away from the DM and significantly alters the tone of the game itself from shared adventures to competitive character design.  Prestige classes, originally included to be a DM campaign design tool is allowed to be perverted into a munchkinism/powergaming/player entitlement. 4E:Good: Balanced characters to a very fine degree. Bad: Even greater focus than 3E upon tactical miniatures combat.  Healing surges are a mechanic with potential, but stink from a flavor standpoint - and much other terminology stinks as well.  Feels like choice of class is approaching irrelevancy if characters are deemed to have to be THAT closely balanced. Ugly: Gutted everything I found fun and interesting about playing a spellcaster.  Dragonborn and Tieflings as player races.  Use of MMO character role terminology if not design.  For all its color and detail the art everywhere in the game is less inspiring than ink line drawings or charcoal sketches of decades ago.  Assumes use of D&D miniatures which are only available in individual, NON-random means on the secondary market.  The whole thing - to ME - feels sterile and over-processed.</blockquote>

Verification