What Aspects of Older Games Have Aged Well? (+)

[James Gasik]

Really in most games it wasn't bad. What would usually happen is:

You have your character's base ability (class abilities, ability scores, feats, magic items). You should be able to track these because you almost always have them.

You might get a circumstantial bonus (higher ground, flanking).

You could then gain a bonus from another character's spell or ability (Bard, Haste, what have you).

Where things got weird is when people found ways to bypass action economy via Permanency, Persist Spell (and of course, Divine Metamagic to fuel it).

Then you had parties with all day buffs.

The Dispel Magic/Antimagic Shell/Glove of Invulnerability/Dead Magic/Beholder/Disjunction minigame wasn't much fun, but it's not new to the game either- every high level character has to worry about their magic sword of belt of giant strength being turned off.

4e got rid of that, by assuming (rightly) that switching off gear wasn't worth the squeeze, and narrowing down buffs to "combat advantage", a generic +2 to hit, though temporary buffs still existed in things like Warlord powers.

5e has Advantage, but numerical buffs from Bards, Bless, and the like exist, they just are rarer, and the dispel minigame is back, but most groups don't have a lot of magic items so I doubt it comes up as often.

What's really changed is the sheer amount of debuffs have been pared down immensely. In 3e, for example, you could turn any dangerous monster into a useless pile of hit points with a lucky Ray of Enfeeblement, and it got worse from there.

 

[Hussar]

4e's larger issue wasn't so much in the need for a spreadsheet to make calculations but in the proliferation of status effects combined with the proliferation of off turn reactions.

It got ridiculous by the end. I remember playing on VTT and we made a game of "can we bury the token under status effects?" I think our record at one point was like 13 separate effects on the target at one time. I couldn't imagine trying to do that pen and paper. :wow:

Not something that aged well.

 

[John R Davis]

The simple rolling of a d20 has very well stood the test of time.

People getting together in person to play is still awesome.

I still like consulting "tables" in an RPG.

Dragonquest by SPI was my first, my favourite RPG, and I play it weekly at the moment.

 

[Jd Smith1]

The simple rolling of a d20 has very well stood the test of time.

People getting together in person to play is still awesome.

I still like consulting "tables" in an RPG.

Dragonquest by SPI was my first, my favourite RPG, and I play it weekly at the moment.

I agree in principle, although I have discarded both d20 and in-person gaming, and know nothing about Dragonquest.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I understand why 3e gets flack. The dev teams of later editions specifically call out the "mountain of bonuses" as something they want to replace. But ultimately, 3e's problem wasn't "lots of random bonuses" as much as it was "finicky situational bonuses". You knew what your character had available to them by default. It was when casters started throwing weird buffs around that you had to stop and not only identify the bonuses, but figure out which ones stacked. And that's where it descends into madness.

I think you're conflating two different problems. The problem with the large number of bonuses wasn't that they were hard to keep track of (though they could be, and that's the one you're looking at) but that the difference between someone who hunted for as many as they could and someone who didn't could be pretty stark, and that that person's capability was significantly beyond what he was theoretically supposed to have at his level, because the game design didn't assume he would do that, but in practice incentivized doing so.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, but, in AD&D, if anything tried to move out of melee, it got attacked by everything as well. When your baddies only take 2 or 3 hits to kill, that was really, really punishing. Which then tied into the morale rules (if you used them) where you could trigger a mass rout without a great deal of difficulty. In AD&D, most fights finished with half the baddies running away and then being cut down from behind.

The key phrase in this sentence is "if you used them". I can't say how frequently they were used in the AD&D days, but from what I saw back in the OD&D days, morale rules were ignored more often than not (sometimes for no good reason, sometimes because the GM had never even noticed them, sometimes because GMs thought they were too blunt an object for the purpose served).

 

[Thomas Shey]

4e's larger issue wasn't so much in the need for a spreadsheet to make calculations but in the proliferation of status effects combined with the proliferation of off turn reactions.

It got ridiculous by the end. I remember playing on VTT and we made a game of "can we bury the token under status effects?" I think our record at one point was like 13 separate effects on the target at one time. I couldn't imagine trying to do that pen and paper. :wow:

Not something that aged well.

As I recall, the usual solution was getting status tokens to put under a miniature or character token.

But yes, it could get to be a bit much; its occasionally dramatic when that happens in PF2e, but while possible its less common to get that many there.

 

[James Gasik]

What we used was different colored pipe cleaners to make little rings, and we assigned each status effect it's own color (or two colors, since it took two cleaners to make a ring).

 

[thullgrim]

Oh boy, I had the original FASA book and read it so much as a kid it fell apart on me.

I've wanted to get back into so bad, but saw there are a ton of editions under different companies. Any idea which one is the best?

I’d use the current 4th edition with the 1st edition timeline. 4th is pretty true to the original game, is currently supported and being developed, and if you need it, the books are formatted for read well on mobile devices.

 

[James Gasik]

I’d use the current 4th edition with the 1st edition timeline. 4th is pretty true to the original game, is currently supported and being developed, and if you need it, the books are formatted for read well on mobile devices.

If so, I need to check that out. Another book to spend money on that I'll never get players for...