Things I Miss....

[Dice4Hire]

I have kept on the treadmill, but I, too, miss some rules from before.

I liked
the chance of a dragon being asleep
potion miscibility
Really fun wild magic tables
The original Deck. (You're dead. Sucks to be you.)
The original cleric turning table. (It's sad when a 10 hd skeleton is
harder to turn than a vampire)
Just pure randomness (The pool grants you +1 strength, permanently)
(Or it takes it away)

Newer editions are more streamlined, but I find them more boring in a way, too.

 

[13garth13]

Item saving throws.......man, I'm so tempted to bring those back, just so that a fireball or disintegrate spell actually means something scary other than just damage....

Yes, I'm a bad person, but I'm okay with that

Cheers,
Colin

 

[Diamond Cross]

I miss the way artifacts were done in the back of the 1e DMG.

I miss the critical hit tables in Dragon Magazine, and I mean the original one.

 

[pukunui]

I never played 1e and only played 2e briefly as a teenager in the 90s, but more recently I've been playing D&D 3.5 and D&D 4e as well as Star Wars Saga Edition, and all those little rules "flourishes" are definitely something I'm starting to feel is lacking from the overall d20 engine. I would agree that more streamlined = more boring.

Let's take the SWSE ruleset, for instance. It's still my game of choice, but I'm finding more and more that I want to insert lots of little "flourishes" like having some kind of "concussive blast" built into explosives (as it stands, you have to take a feat in order to be able to push someone around with a grenade, which is just crazy) or including a chance that you might drop your weapon if you get kicked to the ground or thrown across the room (which is something that happens with great frequency even to Jedi Masters in the movies, but which is something that can only happen in the game if the attacker deliberately tries to disarm the target).

Some of those sorts of things are still there, but in many cases they've been relegated to feats and other special abilities. In SWSE, you can't grapple someone without taking a feat first. You can't "bull rush" someone without taking a feat. Yes, 4e lets you bull rush someone as a basic combat action, but in many cases it's even worse with regards to "you have to have x, y or z ability to even try that".

I also miss a lot of the randomness from previous editions. Too many things are static now. Take the chance to recover after being knocked unconscious in SWSE. It's 10 rounds. Always. Why? OK, maybe it's easier to remember, but still ... it means that if a PC goes down early in a combat, then that player has nothing to do for the rest of the combat. I ended up changing it to 1d8+2. So a max of 10 rounds but a minimum of 3 so they don't bounce back up too quickly.

Anyway, I don't think I miss stuff like weapon speeds and weapons that do different damage depending on what you're attacking or whatever. That seems a little too fiddly for my taste. What I miss is all the little "flourishes" that make combat more dynamic and cinematic. As it stands, d20 combat just gets too static and boring.

And while you could dismiss me as a "mean" GM who is just looking for ways to do "mean" things to the PCs, to be honest, I actually want my players to be more interested in pulling these sorts of stunts and having these sorts of effects go off on the NPCs - instead of just always "taking a shot" or whatever. None of my players seem all that interested in expending character resources on pushing or grappling or tripping or any of those things. They just go for what I see as being the stale and boring "the quickest way to victory is to deal damage!" approach.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Remember in 2E there was this nifty chart that gave weapons certain modifiers vs. certain types armor? AD&D 1E had a chart like this in the PHB, too, but it was implemented a bit differently.
...
It also gave some credence between scale, splint, bronze plate, and such, since each had different modifiers for pointed, edged, and blunt weapons.

Here I like the Rolemaster implementation - if you're going to use a table, make it a good one. Each weapon had a set of tables - with each major armour category providing a different damage scalar and set of critical effects. It's therefore far more effective at getting the different feel of weapons than the minor modifiers are. (For instance scimitars bite deep into unarmoured and leather armoured foes causing a lot of damage but can barely even scratch plate armour).

Another rule I miss from 2E? Rate Of Fire. Man, in the right hands, someone with darts could do some real damage. They only did 1d3, but you got 3 attacks every round! If you had a STR bonus, that applied. Darts became viable weapons.

Reduce 'em to 1 attack per round, and...yeah...why would anyone ever go with a dart?

Ding dong the witch is dead. In 2e the dart was the uberweapon for fighters. Strength and specialisation/mastery made darts unbeatable as weapons for fighters. (I've played a dagger thrower - far more effective than the longsword wielders).

Why would people ever use throwing darts? Because they are lighter and more concealable than javelins. And better balanced at short range. They are a niche weapon physically and historically - but the ROF rules mean that every fighter should have been carrying darts because they are just that good.

OK, a third rule I miss: Speed Factors. SF's were handled differently in 1E, but in 2E, your weapon's SF adjusted your nish. Bigger, heavier weapons had big SF's, making the guy with the dagger tend to go much earlier than the guy with the two handed sword.

Again, ding dong the witch is dead. I don't know if you've ever used weapons. But in real life the person with the dagger swings last. He needs to get in past the arc of whatever he's facing. The longer weapons swing first. And can change their angle of attack much further and more easily - you only need to move your wrist as opposed to your whole body (I exaggerate - but not by much). The speed rules are therefore precisely backwards.

But, man, it sure made sense that some dude with a big, honkin' weapon would most likely go late in the round, swinging that big bad boy around.

And people with properly balanced two handed weapons go before either.

Thus, taking a dagger to a 1E fight wasn't that bad of an idea.

Indeed. Which is just weird. Daggers are not good hand to hand weapons. They are concealable weapons.

I'm kinda sorry they took some of this stuff out.

I see why you miss the quirkyness. But I do not miss very small weapons in the hands of very high strength warriors being the best combination.

What about you guys? Are there things you miss that have been discarded from D&D as the editions change?

XP for GP. It sets the whole tone of the game.

 

[Water Bob]

Hey, speaking as a 3.x player, Codex Martialis adds a lot of this kind of thing back into 3e. It might be worth a look for those who like 3e but miss weapon speed and variable bonuses against different armor types.

Yeah, thanks for posting. That looks like a worthy book. I'll check it out.

Item saving throws.......man, I'm so tempted to bring those back, just so that a fireball or disintegrate spell actually means something scary other than just damage....

Yes! Items saving throws!

How about FIVE types of character savign throws instead of three?



Here's one I really miss....In 1E, 1st level Rangers used a d8 Hit Die, but at 1st level, Rangers got 2-16 hit points!

Talk about surviving that 1st level dungeon!





And, I know it's sick, but I think I'm one of the few people in the world who actually liked having a chance to roll low HP for a character. In a game not too long ago, I had a 2E game with a player who rolled up an elf fighter with ONE FRIGGIN' HIT POINT at first level.

We all thought the character was a goner, but the player did an excellent job of keeping the character out of face-to-face fights, supporting the group with a bow.

Then, second level came along, and the player rolled 1d10 for the HP increase and rolled....no kidding...a "2".

So, at 2nd level, the character had THREE FRIGGIN' HIT POINTS!

Again, for the entire time the character spent at level 2, the player turned this elf into a heck of a bowman.

Finally, at level 3, the elf rolled 9 on his d10, for a total of 12 hit points.

When we ended that mini-campaign, the elf was still alive! Never died and was brought back by magic, either.

It was fun.

I'm not sure too many players would see it as fun, though, but we liked it.

 

[Water Bob]

Anyway, I don't think I miss stuff like weapon speeds and weapons that do different damage depending on what you're attacking or whatever. That seems a little too fiddly for my taste.

Well, without them, weapon selection in that game becomes a simple exercise of picking the weapon that does the most damage.

I mean, a fighter would never pick a mace when he could have a longsword.

But, if you use the Weapon Type vs. Armor Type chart, all of a sudden, a player very well could have his fighter fight primarily with this mace rather than a longsword.

It gave the player more choice picking the right tool for the job at hand.

 

[pukunui]

True. I actually think the whole "proficiency bonus" thing they applied to weapons in D&D 4e only exacerbates that problem, because now you don't just get people going for the weapon that does the most damage, but also the one that gives you the biggest + to hit. So yes, some weapons end up falling by the wayside by virtue of being mechanically inferior.

Still, I don't know that that's that big of a deal for me. As I said, what I'm more feeling the lack of is cinematic stuff. Why do I have to take a feat in order to make my grenades have a concussive blast? Why do I have to take a feat just to be able to do this or that? And let's face it, in the early d20 games, you could try stuff like grappling or bull rushing without a feat, but they made it so fiddly and stupid that it really was pointless to even try. They might as well have just made it so you need a feat to even try them, which is exactly what they ended up doing with the Star Wars Saga rules.

I realize that there are a number of things that have been classified as Not Fun (tm) by WotC and other gamer makers as the industry has evolved. I'd say probably making a PC lose their weapon is probably one of those, which is why you never see that sort of thing in mainstream RPG rules anymore.

But my complaint is that a ruleset like SWSE is specifically meant to emulate the cinematic feel of a specific set of movies, and yet without rules for dropping weapons and getting blown back by explosions and all that, it really doesn't do all that good a job emulating its source material, does it?

 

[Stormonu]

I miss rolling for initiative each round, AFTER you've announced your action. That was a huge thing, especially before the days of Concentration checks.

 

[drothgery]

But, if you use the Weapon Type vs. Armor Type chart, all of a sudden, a player very well could have his fighter fight primarily with this mace rather than a longsword.

It gave the player more choice picking the right tool for the job at hand.

... except that it was far, far more likely that you'd find a magic longsword than a magic mace (by the random treasure tables and in published adventures), so you almost always ended up specialized in longsword... at which point there was no advantage to dropping back to a non-magical mace from your +2 longsword. Whereas if you want to encourage swapping weapons in 4e, you use inherent bonuses and encourage players to take Master at Arms as their expertise feat and you're good.