What is 3.0 & 3.5 missing that previous editions had?

[hrafnagud]

I played 1E for many years, skipped 2E entirely, and have dabbled in 3E. My conclusion? 3E places far too much emphesis on balance and fairness. In my experience (and this is only my experience, for all ye naysayers), 3E players gravitate towards the expectation that all things are closely calculated to be fair. As a 1E GM, I was never fair. My players were left to their own judgement whether or not to pursue a given course of action. If they erred, they got hammered. Believe it or not, they loved it that way. Kept the game 'dangerous.' Now players can calculate on the fly just how overmatched they truly are, which feels too mechanical.

I never felt the need to balance encounters; players scrapped for their EXPs anywhere they could take em. Obviously, many people will feel this is a barbaric approach, but then I do come from the bad ol' days.

 

[Pants]

Kept the game 'dangerous.' Now players can calculate on the fly just how overmatched they truly are, which feels too mechanical.

I dunno, 3E is still 'dangerous' just ask my players.
Besides there's nothing floating above a monster's head in 3E that says 'CR = such and such.'

 

[Staffan]

- Releases afordable and spaced out far enough that everyone could own every product.

Uh-huh.

Number of WOTC D&D releases in 2003: 15
Number of TSR AD&D/D&D releases in 1993: 64

You were saying?

 

[Zappo]

- Releases afordable and spaced out far enough that everyone could own every product.

Eeeh?! Staffan beats me to the obvious, but in any case, no thanks. Who cares about owning every product, I much prefer having many releases and therefore a wide choice to pick what's best for me. WotC isn't doing nearly enough releases for my tastes, but that's well and good because the invention of the OGL more than makes up for it.

 

[Malk]

ok i had to dig out some of my 2e books...only one i could find off hand was skills and powers...and there are like no pictues in 3e that compare to the cartoonishness of this book...eeh....

 

[Zappo]

Now players can calculate on the fly just how overmatched they truly are, which feels too mechanical.

No, they can't. They don't know the encounter's CR, and they cannot calculate it from what they see either, because (unlike 2E where all monsters of a given race were identical), now any monster has as much variability as a PC.

 

[Remathilis]

I think what Monte Cook has coined "the implied setting" of D&D has become more dilute.

The D&D-isms (like racial level limits) had to change from setting to setting, so that Dark Sun elves and dwarves were very different creatures than the ones of Ravenloft, Krynn or the Players Handbook. The 1e and 2e Player's Handbooks were really setting books. The 3rd Ed. has taken another route.

WotC made the decision that D&D would be a basic rule-set and that a lot of the "flavor & soul" would come from third-party d20 publishers. To do this the rules became very bland - not because the designers were bland people, but because they wanted the rules to fit as seemlessly as possible into other people's worlds.

To get this level of flexibility, the chameleon-like qualities of 3E also mean it has no character of its own.

SNIP

You hit the nail on the head. 1e/2e had an implied "D&D" setting. While 3e has some measure of it (and I disagree, I think the Iconics are designed to give a greater sense of a common world to the various books.) the fast majority of "D&Disms" (or sacred cows) that died in to make the game more flexible, fair and balanced also killed the quirky, wonky flavor of the game.

 

[MerricB]

You hit the nail on the head. 1e/2e had an implied "D&D" setting. While 3e has some measure of it (and I disagree, I think the Iconics are designed to give a greater sense of a common world to the various books.) the fast majority of "D&Disms" (or sacred cows) that died in to make the game more flexible, fair and balanced also killed the quirky, wonky flavor of the game.

Actually, there's a fair deal of the implied setting left in the descriptions of the races and classes - far more explicit than in the 1E or oD&D books.

The 3.5E DMG gives as a set of variant rules the class/race restrictions of 1E!

Cheers!

 

[Urbannen]

A friend and I were talking about this subject this week. We came to the conclusion that Basic and AD&D were rooted in a mythological culture of Western Civilization, meaning Europe. The U.S. is becoming more inclusive and so is D&D. I have no problem with Ember being black, for instance. However, there really weren't any black Europeans or Asians (she's a monk) to speak of in medieval times. The racial composition of D&D humans is American, not European. White Americans (or, to be less "racial") Anglo-Saxon/European Americans have less of a connection to a mythological European past than we used to, IMO. What was LotR, but a modern creation of European mythology? The creators of D&D were from the north central US and were influenced by medieval wargaming and European mythic fantasy such as Tolkien. They were white and growing up in the 60s and 70s. Our culture has shifted, so that our traditional European identification has weakened. Now D&D is more like American culture of today - more interested in the future than the past, trying to create a diverse popular culture. Look at how all the limits have been taken away in 3E. Well, why should there be limits? Why should the circumstances of your birth, or culture, or race limit your career advancement, as they did back in OD&D? Modern American culture doesn't accept such limitations, and really doesn't see the basis for them.

The universe created by the founders of D&D from a collective European fantasy is now a kewl place to have adventures, not a place to communicate with the collective thought of our ancestors. D&D characters may be placed in an archaic setting, but they speak with a modern vocabulary.

 

[kenjib]

Urbannen,

Great post. I think you just explained what that "intangible" thing that nobody could put their finger on is. The use of "she" for a gender neutral pronoun throughout the books is another bit of evidence.

"D&D characters may be placed in an archaic setting, but they speak with a modern vocabulary."

Now I have visions of Kevin Sorbo running around in my head. Heh.