Hussar said:
The role of the DM was frequently very openly adversarial. I don't think that's an unfair characterization. So, the players had to work together to beat the DM. The DM had almost all the cards - he set the stage, he had time to plan, but the players had the advantage of having six or eight heads working on a problem.
This touches on an issue that has recently come into my game.
It is only in the last several years that I have enountered players saying "this isn't balanced"
I know I sound like a grognard, but in the old days, I never heard a player say that. If we encountered something completely out of our class (which happened quite frequently...so much for the old tables of monsters by level) we would either run, try to negotiate (including wagering stuff in riddling contests), or fight the battle pulling out all the stops and using everything we could think of to win.
When I ran Forge of Fury for my players, I ran the Roper as a straight up encounter, nearly killing 2 characters. They ended up killing it by improvising a stalactite as a thrown weapon, doing damage basically as a giant's hurled boulder, with some bonuses. Up to that point, it was looking like they would loose several characters permanently, if not TPK.
Do you know who came up with that plan?
An old school 1st Ed. player.
And who whined about how it wasn't balanced and was an unfair encounter?
The 3E players.
People are entitled to their own opinions, and maybe their experiences are different from mine, but over an over, in the real world (games I play in and run) I see a major difference between between the old school and the new school in play-skill, and the new school pales to the old.
To re-iterate, my point here isn't to bash.
I am attempting to provide an analysis, based on my real world experience and these are the conclusions I am inescapably drawn to.
I suppose I could restrict myself to only saying nice and complimentary things about 3E, but what would be the point of that, other than to spare the sensitive feelings of some?
Don't get me wrong, 3E did do some good things. Flat footed and touch ACs cleaned up some clunky areas of the previous editions. The universal d20 mechanic for challenge resolution, etc.
The problem IMO, is that it also did some really bad things as well, far outweighing the good of the good things. The bad things affected the entire attitude of the game, the fundamental assumptions of gameplay, impacting player skill among other things.
Basically, when I run 3E, I run it like a 1st edition game, changing rules constantly (much to the distress of the rules lawyers, for whom the rules are sacred or something) and totally disregarding the contemptable notion of game balance, both for the monsters and the PCs.
And its a blast.
The above example of player skill demonstrates why pretty concisely, I think.
