Was there a TSR-made 3rd Edition? Forked Thread: Why THAC0 Rocks

[Greg K]

Both PO: Combat and Tactics and PO: Spells and Magic were well received among the gamers that I know, but not PO: Skills and Powers.

 

[Primal]

I never worked on the Player's Option stuff, although some of that material (created by Rich and Skip) was influential on 3E to be sure.

Yeah, it's been a while, so I thought I might remember it wrong. Although I'm pretty sure someone who worked on PO said that... maybe it was Skip? Or maybe I misunderstood the comments?

 

[HardcoreDandDGirl]

This is exactly correct. At TSR, we tossed around 3E ideas, but that was about it.



I'm sorry, but none of that sounds familiar.



I never worked on the Player's Option stuff, although some of that material (created by Rich and Skip) was influential on 3E to be sure.

Thank you Monte

/kiss on cheek

I do wonder how much of the rumors are true for what it would have been like, but I guess they never made it past planning/thinking about it stages, so we will never know.

 

[Michael Morris]

By individual groups, perhaps. But IIRC a lot of Dragon Forums and Alt.TSR.DnD web-posts back in the day seemed to dump on it, with a few vocal and active supporters (Mike Morris being one) supporting it and trying to fix the imbalances.

That said, PO: C&T and S&M have fingerprints all over our third edition from AoOs to new spells, etc. Similarly, some of the DMO: HLO stuff appears in 3e (rogue's evasion for starters).

Ah, I remember my work on Player's Option. Still have it in fact. Dusk II was 390 pages by the time 3e arrived, and almost all of it was Player's Option rebalances. Wonderful concepts in those books, but terrible executions.

3e came along and my rule changes dropped from 390 pages to 10 if you just go by a brief summary. The Dusk III book I use (banned from public distribution by WotC) is 320 pages and is far more 'fluff' than 'crunch'. It has a lot of new materials, but unlike the Player's Option days the rules are additions that build upon the 3e base - not outright rewrites.

As for 4e - I imagine I'll need to generate at least twice the material to make it work with my world in a manner I'm happy with as I did for Player's Option. And I don't know if I want to do that. Maybe at long last I've become a grognard, which saddens me to some extent because I'm not used to not being on the avant garde of D&D as it were. But I just don't like 4e at all.

 

[Janx]

Almost getting back to the THAC0 thing, I remember when WotC first bought TSR, and Dragon magazine started printing again, Peter Adkison wrote an editorial, and he put in a house rule suggestion to refactor THAC0 and AC to work as they do now in 3e. This was before 3e was announced.

While he wasn't the only person to think of the idea, it is the highest person in the company suggesting a rule change publically. It was no suprise then, when 3e released, to see that this rule was adopted (rule 0.5, always incorporate your CEO's ideas into the product).

As for "not having resources to finish it" I'd suggest that anybody with a house rule binder large enough and a copy of MS Word had the resources to finish it.

The key then, is that it sounds like nobody was formally charged with the project of "assemble a new edition of D&D" until WotC took over.