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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="thedungeondelver" data-source="post: 4550893" data-attributes="member: 34865">Original D&D: The basic assumption that the players are wargamers and that some of the concepts of combat are universally understood.  The rules were spread out across one set of rules in a box, half of the combat rules were in CHAINMAIL, the rest in supplements I-IV and THE STRATEGIC REVIEW.ADVANCED D&D (1st edition): Organization.  I learned to love the way AD&D is organized but from a cold, critical outside view it is very messy.  The PLAYERS HANDBOOK for example lacks an index altogether.  While each section of the DUNGEON MASTERS GUIDE is well done the organization seems haphazard.  Initiative and surprise are screwed six ways to Sunday. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />ADVANCED D&D (2nd edition): in "fixing" AD&D, 2nd edition sterilized the game and made it pretty bland seeming.  Sure, DMs could (and many did) just stick the assassin and half orc right back in, along with demons and devils.  The shift of focus to adventure-as-story was cruddy, too.  Too many campaign worlds.  Fewer should've been published and more attention should've been given to developing a "proper" 3rd edition but I think that was probably beyond the abilities of TSR (financially) at that point.DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (1999): I'm going to level my biggest criticisms of this version of the game right here...firstly the "anyone as an anything" was a huge error, IMO.  The want or need to play a human just went out the door.  The addition of a hard and fast skillset took the game from being based on archetype to being based on how smart you could "build" a character.  The CR system.  The all-as-one experience table.  The negation of the fighter class.  The further (and, in my opinion, needless and baffling) division of the magic-user class (something that should've been left to a campaign rather than hard-coded into the rules).EDIT: I forgot one of my favorite whipping boys of this version of D&D and it's that god-damned "Sense Motive".  But I'm split on it.  On the one hand I could totally get in to playing a character cast in the mold of William of Baskerville from THE NAME OF THE ROSE, except I'm not really as smart as Baskerville was portrayed in the book.  However, with a good DM, sitting down and going "Okay, I've bought up sense motive and I want to use it at the appropriate time, when everyone else is maybe doing spot checks and so on" (or the DM basing it on the prerequisite that you have to have a WIS of a certain score to use it or so on).Unfortunately, sense motive suffers from the same problem that a lot of things in 3e suffers from and that's player entitlement.  Okay, the king says "Please go rescue my daughter from the evil high priest".  Player says "I want to make a sense motive check - why is he so willing to let us go do this when he just sprung us from the gaol?"  Well...the king said what he said.  Well no, no, the player rolled a "20" so you as the DM are bound to let the player know that no, the king's daughter is two kingdoms away getting married, he's just trying to send you to a more convenient doom since you're popular with the commoners.  But how did you figure that out, all he said was "X"?  Doesn't matter - you sensed motive!  There's no good mechanical reason (I mean game mechanics) behind why that damn skill should work at all other than the player going "WOO ROLLED A 20!" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />  It can be a game-wrecking roll.  Of course, DM fiat you could either lie to the player (and they'd possibly complain at you later when they found out that the king sent them to The Swamp of No Possible Return instead of the Dungeon of Papier-Mache Armored Sickly Kobolds) or you could tell them that they couldn't use sense motive under these conditions for whatever reason, and the entitled-feeling player has a thrombo because dammit they spent all those points jacking up sense motive for just such circumstances!  This isn't unique to latter-day D&D - players who moved from one original D&D game were just as subject to the whims of DMs who thought one thing or the other would wreck their game, but ultimately I think the biggest sinner is sense motive.  It's about as bad as HACKMASTER's "Change the Campaign" spell or card or coupon or whatever it is. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (1977): Poor J. Eric Holmes - tasked with writing what was supposed to be three games at once: a separate D&D ruleset, an introduction to ADVANCED D&D, and a clarification of original D&D.  Unfortunately, as cool as it is, it doesn't do any of those things well.  Extending only to 3rd level in character advancement, it "clarifies" the combat system by introducing elements used nowhere else in D&D, plus it includes audaciously powerful monsters that, assuming this was your only D&D ruleset, were wholly unusuable.DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (1980): Well, Tom Moldvay's re-invention of the rules were a little better, but they kept race-as-class, dropped back to the three alignments system, removed most of the cool "flavor" stuff like Paladins, devils, demons, rangers, assassins etc.  There's a time when being basic was too lean, and that set was it.DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (1982): Frank Mentzer's set kept all of the sins of the past and worsened them somehow.  Now the basic set came with a sort-of "Players Handbook" and a sort of "Dungeon Masters Guide" which was all well and good, but again with all the blandness of earlier "basic" editions.  The Companion, Master and Immortal sets were IMO needless addons that strayed so far from the very notion of D&D that I really scratch my head at them.RULES CYCLOPEDIA.  I'm gonna get rotten tomatos thrown at me for this but you know what?  This is one bland rulebook.  It just leaves me utterly flat.  They reintroduced subclasses but in a weird (and weirdly presaging) way that was similar to prestige classes in 3rd edition.  Also, did nothing to improve upon the funky systems put in place in the original Moldvay basic D&D.DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (2008): Good lord, where to start?  This seems more and more like Hasbro/WotC is driving the game into the ground and trying to turn it into DESCENT: JOURNEYS IN THE DARK.  3e was touted as "Back to the dungeon!", so what's this supposed to be?  Back to the single skirmish?  The whole game has lost focus on exploration and now just seems like "hey let's hop from battle to battle who cares about what's in between".  I'd also like to find the person responsible for that idiotic youtube promo they did and smack them.Phew.</blockquote>

Verification