Was 3rd edition fundamentaly flawed?

[Gundark]

Since the announcement of 4th edition we've been seeing the R&D people talking about ways that 3e was deficient as a game and how 4e is going to fix that. In fact J.Tweet talks about how he stopped running 3e as the . I myself came to a point where the thought of running 3e made me scream out in terror. I've always viewed 3e as the players game, it was fun to play however could be a nightmare to run.

Anyhow back to the topic at hand...Was 3e fundamentaly flawed and WotC knew it and continued to work with a seriously flawed ruleset...Or is this just the designers trying to convert us to 4e? Or what degree of in-between is there?

 

[JDJblatherings]

Since the announcement of 4th edition we've been seeing the R&D people talking about ways that 3e was deficient as a game and how 4e is going to fix that. In fact J.Tweet talks about how he stopped running 3e as the . I myself came to a point where the thought of running 3e made me scream out in terror. I've always viewed 3e as the players game, it was fun to play however could be a nightmare to run.

Anyhow back to the topic at hand...Was 3e fundamentaly flawed and WotC knew it and contintued to work with a seriously flawed ruleset...Or is this just the designers trying to convert us to 4e? Or what degree of in-between is there?

It's marketing-speak. Who they are marketing to (or who they think thye are marketing to) may have changed so they may genuinely be working to reach that market with a quality product but it's still marketing-speak.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Its not that it is fundamentally flawed, so much as the tools that it brought to the game were not intuitive to use, CR being the perfect example.

 

[Einan]

3.5 was, like any ruleset, burdened by supplements. I never had much of a problem running it, mainly because I viewed it as being fluid by nature. If a certain creature of an appropriate CR was too easy, I added some hit points and special powers on the fly and everyone had fun.

Incidentally, it was only when ToB came out that things got screwy. And given that they were essentially testing out 4e ideas in it, it now makes sense why they became screwy. Whenever you get two different systems trying to play together, someone's bound to lose out.

Anyway, I think 3.5 suffered from too many supplements, Rules systems get weighted down and can collapse under that pressure. Limiting choice was the price you paid to keep it flowing. Which is sad, but not horrible.

Einan

 

[kolvar]

In a way it was designed to become flawed, i.e. feats and prestige classes realy cried out for rules-supplements which brings with it the growing chance of introducing flaws.

 

[Henry]

Since the announcement of 4th edition we've been seeing the R&D people talking about ways that 3e was deficient as a game and how 4e is going to fix that. In fact J.Tweet talks about how he stopped running 3e as the . I myself came to a point where the thought of running 3e made me scream out in terror. I've always viewed 3e as the players game, it was fun to play however could be a nightmare to run.

Anyhow back to the topic at hand...Was 3e fundamentaly flawed and WotC knew it and contintued to work with a seriously flawed ruleset...Or is this just the designers trying to convert us to 4e? Or what degree of in-between is there?

I think it's neither, especially since most of the designers so far has just said that they like 3E, but there's ways to make it better, instead of being "fundamentally flawed." I think it's like any other man-made invention. They made it, and the more they used it, there were certain things that kept bugging them, that could have been streamlined.

Take a telephone, for instance. The core invention is sound - it transmits sound across a distance. But you can only talk to one person on the single "party" line, so the concept of a manned switchboard is developed. Then, someone says, "it's a major hassle to have one or a bank of people manually moving connections", so automated switching is eventually developed. The dial is developed, but someone figures out that push-buttons work better, so that's added... and so on. I'm over-simplifying here, but the point I've going for is that they're reworking the same premise in the effort to get a better-working whole.

Any complex invention is ALWAYS flawed -- there's always room for improvement. Some improvements, however, aren't improvements, and things have to be rethought and sometimes redesigned from the ground up, still working externally the same, but internally it's using an entirely different mechanism to get the job done.

Some of us however, like the rotary dials, however, because of its aesthetic, and we get ticked off when we can't find one on the market.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I think 3E was burdened by a system that got more burdensome the deeper you got into it - this makes it inherently tough to figure out before hand, since its only when you take a character up to 20th level and above that you realize how things play out, and how it puts a burden on a DM on a weekly basis.

That said, no game is perfect - and a game that one person finds to be near-perfect won't be to another person.

Anytime you've played with a system for years, you're going to see ways that it could be improved, especially if you're a game designer by trade. I don't see a problem with the designers pointing out areas in 3E that are less than ideal, and explaining how they plan on fixing them. I don't see that as bad-mouthing the system. If you, as a designer, cannot objectively criticize your own product, you're unlikely to be able to improve upon it.

 

[Henry]

It just occurred to me that Quasqueton's old thread about differences in WW I, WW2, and jet era airplanes is a great analogy. The P-51 Mustang was not fatally flawed - but it could be improved upon.

 

[TerraDave]

Theres the push, and theres the pull

Push: Not fundamentally flawed, but a little harder to play in some situtations then it needed to be.

Pull: With all the books they cranked out, those designers must have come up withsomething. A new edition is a way to incorporate these new things into the game in a more integrated, better working (less broken), less book intensive way.

Of course, that doesn't mean 4ed will actually be a better game in practice.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I would say "emphatically not."

3e has a LOT of flaws from my perspective - many grandfathered in from D&D's past, some new, most where new and old met. Those flaws, however, were not fundamental. They were the finicky details (and, in some cases, the AMOUNT of said details) rather than the system as a whole.

The fact that a 95% compatible rulesset (Star Wars Saga Edition) fixed the vast majority of what I considered flaws demonstrates how surface-level and superficial those flaws were.