The "Old School Revival" - The Light Bulb Goes On

[MerricB]

And then it happened: This year, after 20+ years in the hobby, I started actually GMing.

I've always thought I could be a pretty good GM; I tried a few one-shots in the past with varying results (some good, some bad). I had to learn not to railroad, and it took a little bit of work to find the balance between preparation and flexibility, but I've always had a knack with creating interesting characters and story (I'm a professional writer by trade, and have done college-level and semi-professional theater), and right now my current Pathfinder group seems to be having a very good-to-great time.

But—It's become totally, brutally apparent to me now, having GM'd for six months, just how "heavy" the Pathfinder / 3.x rules really are.

The difference between being a player and being a DM and how the rules present to you is really significant. Most players I know enjoy options - having more and more things that their characters can do. However, they're only dealing with one PC. If the NPCs the DM uses have the same rules, then you quickly move towards overload if the NPCs are built on a level that requires a separate player to run each one!

I can't move back to 1e or B/X D&D because my players prefer the later editions for their character options. I've just found it's easier for me to run 4E than 3E.

Cheers!

 

[Filcher]

It doesn't make one system better than another, but I was poor GM in 3.5, and I now do a pretty bang up job in B/X (I don't really get into the C, M or I).

However my dice roll, below, indicates that I failed my diplomacy check.

 

[Jack Daniel]

You know what drove me to the OSR back in 2007? My 3.5 campaign reached 15th level. And my brain exploded.

After a few abortive attempts to convert to 2nd edition and Castles & Crusades, I finally settled on the Rules Cyclopedia, and I knew that something was different. You know what's great about high level campaigns that use the Cyclopedia or the green box Companion Set and black box Masters Set? They actually work. Without a lot of constant tweaking and fixing, Mentzer's rules for high level gameplay hold up. The monsters, items, and spells are pretty well balanced, and the dominion and war machine rules, while a bit clunky and in need of some streamlining, still do their job. In short, there's plenty of room for the DM to wing it, but what rules there are still pull their weight and do the heavy lifting when it's called for.

Now, granted, I couldn't entirely let go of all the sensibilities that were instilled in me from playing 2e and 3e. I dislike most arbitrary restrictions -- so, for example, I tend to allow all classes to use all weapons and armor, because I don't mind clerics wielding edged weapons or mages wearing armor. Likewise, I prefer a robust skill system, open to all character classes, which includes (rather than crudely overlaps with) thieving skills. These two features essentially compensate for the lack of multiclassing in my Classic D&D campaign. Want to be a fighting mage? Play a mage, wear armor, carry a sword. Want to be a thieving priest? Play a cleric, take a few roguish skills. Paladin, ranger, bard? Fighter with Religious knowledge, fighter with Tracking skill, cleric or thief with Performing skill.

On the other hand, race-as-class is awesome. It means that elves are elves, dwarves -- you'd better believe it -- are bloody Gimli-type dwarves, halflings are hobbits, and humans are always special enough to be worth playing. It's conducive to PC parties that feel like the cast of a fantasy novel, rather than the kitchen-sink, anything-goes nonsense of a more unrestricted landscape of options. Much to the betterment of all the campaigns I've run since, I might add.

P.S., THAC0 is still wacko. A much better alternative is to create an Attack stat equal to (21 - THAC0). So, for example, a 4th level fighter (THAC0 17) instead has a base Attack score of 4. If this fighter were to attack an orc (AC 7), all you have to do is add the numbers to find that your chance of hitting is 11 in 20 or 55%.

 

[Smoss]

This was one reason I created my own system. I wanted all the modern goodness - PLUS easy DM-ing. As I am pretty much a constant DM. Of course, it was only one reason (Wanting my gritty and "real" feeling in there and other such things were others).

But yes, being able to fudge NPC stats on the fly is easy for my system. I remember the long time spent crafting up NPCs and stuff for 3E. I loved the system but I don't miss it now. I like a game that makes it easy to DM - Fast and deadly combat - and more time spent on the roleplaying part than anything else (combat, rules lawyering, etc)
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Smoss
Doulairen

 

[Celebrim]

I have always understood the impulse, but I should say as someone with 1e experience, that D&D has always 'blown up' both in terms of the difficulty of balancing the game and the difficulty of running the game somewhere above 13th level. High level play is just difficult. Your best bet is to slow down the rate of advancement and concentrate on story and adventure as your goals rather than arbitrary character attainment.

Likewise, table arguments from rules lawyer-ish players are nothing new, and if anything, were much less of a problem in 3e than they were in earlier editions. If you think 'having a rule for everything' is a problem, wait until you get to 'having ambigious guidelines for everything' if you want to see what real rules lawyer hell is like. Streamlining the rules doesn't help as much as you think. It just makes the players that much more willing to question whether your decision was the right one. When you don't have firm rules, what you end up with is each player telling you how you should interpret the situation based on their personal real world experience and/or what they read somewhere.

Anyway, welcome to DMing. Above anything else, what I hope you take away from this experience is how you should approach the game as a player. Once you've DMed a while, you get alot more sympathetic to your DMs.

 

[Stormonu]

I had not realized it, but 3.X/PF and 4E rules lawyering was really killing my gaming desire. I had thought I had just been getting tired of D&D. When I started running lighter fare WoD, Savage Worlds, I suddenly realized that own rule lawyering (and that of one particular player) was killing my enjoyment of the game - looking up and defending rules was simply taking too much time away from the game.

I've managed to start pulling myself back from being such a rules lawyer, but I'm having a somewhat difficult time getting my one player to back off on rule lawyering. Sometimes I still just have to pull "Executive Decision, deal with it."

But yeah, I'd still like to play PF (but being rules dismissive), but I'm leaning these days more towards going back and doing some BECMI basic. And I've always avoided the game at higher than 12th level, regardless of version.

 

[howandwhy99]

I started playing OD&D back in 2005 after having played 3.0 and 3.5 for a few years. It was vastly easier for me as a player, but I think it is harder for the DM/Referee. 3.x d20 is incredibly complex though, so I wouldn't know for sure. I have DM'd many games of 3.5 and it isn't impossible. I'd say playing OD&D is hardly more difficult and probably less. It depends upon the amount of "code" one wants behind the screen anyways. It isn't a 1-page RPG or anything, but the vast amount of rules in d20 is very hard to remember.

I think of 3.x as trying to streamline AD&D2E and then adding all kinds of extras by defining a long list of target numbers under skills and even more complexity in the combat game. I think of OD&D as having as few rules as possible for one area of the game, but those rules being as elegant as possible. So, like Go, it has only a few things to remember, but an enormous amount of potential configuration within it.

 

[thedungeondelver]

It's funny, because in many ways 3e was more pro- DM customisation than any other edition ever! Somehow that got lost in the public perception though...

what

 

[thedungeondelver]

P.S., THAC0 is still wacko. A much better alternative is to create an Attack stat equal to (21 - THAC0). So, for example, a 4th level fighter (THAC0 17) instead has a base Attack score of 4. If this fighter were to attack an orc (AC 7), all you have to do is add the numbers to find that your chance of hitting is 11 in 20 or 55%.

You know, you can ignore the attempts to shoehorn to-hits into a formula and use the chart, right?

I'm a rare creature in that I think AD&D's charts are the awesome.

 

[thedungeondelver]

I think of 3.x as trying to streamline AD&D2E and then adding all kinds of extras by defining a long list of target numbers under skills and even more complexity in the combat game.

I remember one of the things that made me scratch my head was hearing a lot of "Well this is how we played anyway" talk when 3e first came out. That people by and large had a unified XP chart. That people already used feats/superpowers/etc.

Having played some 2e, I never saw that in play at all. Ever. So, I was a little nonplussed.

I think 3e was admirable for it's initial goal of going "back to the dungeon" though; that was very cool.

And Paizo definitely "got it" when it came to their GREYHAWK contributions and collaborations.