What was so bad about DMing 3x?

[nerfherder]

When did your preference shift? Was it after playing 3.5 for a while?

It's gradually shifted over time - before 3.0 came out. One of the things I loved about RQ was that everything used the same rules - PC, NPC, monster. A monster was just an NPC with a different race, after all, and an PC is just an NPC with a player running them. I craved complex rules, and house-ruled my AD&D game all the time, in order to be more "realistic". I bought Phoenix Command to replace Traveller's combat system. I even bought the Phoenix Command advanced rules and extra hit location tables.

But, I gradually found that the extra complexity didn't lead to an increase in enjoyment. I learned that simpler often produced the same results, with less preparation time.

Also, how long have you been reffing SWSE now?

I got it when it came out, and have run about a dozen sessions. Prep time has been much shorter than my AE game, but everyone has been having as much fun.

 

[Vigilance]

While I've never encountered any issues running 3e with my group, I occasionally run store games, and I have encountered some players who feel positively entitled.

If a monster did something they had never encountered, they would break character in the middle of combat and ask "how did he do that".

Most would be put back on track with a simple "you don't know", occasionally, the more pointed "your character doesn't know", but as a long time player, I was sort of off-put by the instant demand to know everything going on behind the curtain.

I suspect it's just me being old and out of touch.

But a return to monsters with abilities not available to every PC doesn't shock or appall me.

 

[Benimoto]

I enjoy DMing 3rd edition, but I'm looking forward to the 4th edition way of building NPCs and monsters. I'm probably repeating what people have said here, but I thought a few points needed reiterating or rephrasing.

The 4th edition system lets you design a NPC from the top down, as opposed to the bottom up. One problem with building the NPC from the bottom up is that it gets more laborious the higher level you get. As other posters have mentioned, each new level is more feats, more spells, more class abilities, skill points and equipment to choose. My hope is that in the 4th edition system, it will take as much time to design a 26th level NPC as a 6th.

The other main problem with starting from the bottom up is that you're never sure what you're going to get until you're finished building him. You might build a whole NPC only to realize that he's a total creampuff who's going to die immediately, or isn't even capable of the evil plots you had in mind for him. With monsters, you might go through the whole process of advancing a monster by hit dice, only to realize that it's mechanically inferior in almost every way to other monsters of its CR. Or that it has way many HP, or an attack bonus that makes the party's ACs irrelevant. But you don't generally know until you do all the math.

So you end up doing a lot of work that gets bad results, and then you either have to throw it away, spend time reworking it, or use your inferior/overpowered monster. Good judgment can help with the problem, but only so far.

And, as mentioned a lot of the stuff you do for a NPC is not going to be used at all. If you spend time fleshing out non-combat stuff for a monster than ends up just fighting, you've just wasted half your effort. Same thing if you spend all your time buying equipment and choosing combat spells for an NPC who doesn't get into a fight. And because it can be a lot of work, it can be frustrating to do all that for no payoff in any way.

 

[Remathilis]

Another way of saying this is they're making the game more "predictable."

I'm not so sure that's going to be all it's cracked up to be, though it'll certainly fix the problems encountered in 3.5E.

It'll be interesting to see what the general complaints are about 4E a year or so in.

Depends on your definition of predictable. Whether a 10th level fighter (bab +10) can hit the AC of a 10th level wizard (AC 10, barring magical items) is easy to predict. As is having a rogue20 with a +7 will save face a DC 27 from a CR 20 Balor (dominate monster). The predictability comes from barring those magic numbers (A "1" on the fighter's atk, a "20" on the rogue's save) the fighter is always going to hit, the rogue is always going to fail.

However, by scaling the numbers roughly equal, the wizard has a slightly better chance of avoiding the hit and the rogue has a slightly better chance of making the "save" (or now, having the balor fail its will attack). Sure, the rogue will still have a harder time resisting it than a cleric would, and the fighters going to hit more often than not, but the scaling keeps the probability to the roll of the die, not merely the static bonus eclipsing the die.

However, I agree it will be interesting to see the complaints in a year from now...

 

[Remathilis]

I suspect that you'll find that after the first splat books arrive, the inevitable power creep will set in and all those 'guidelines' will go straight out of the window. Or players will learn to build 'killer' characters or find loopholes in the rules that allow devastating combos. I really fail to see how 4e is going to solve the problem that the CR system had. It won't. Party composition differs, players differ, magical item combinations differ - you can't control everything. That's why the CR failed, and that's why I suspect this 'table guideline' system will eventually fail as well. As others have mentioned on this thread, the best thing a DM could do at the table was to know his characters and build challenges around them.
Pinotage

A lot of 3.x's power creep came from stacking bonuses that escalated numbers beyond reason. It became easy (and therefore requisite) to do this, especially as the system tried to compensate. The cloak that raised to your poor save to viability made your good save invulnerable. So far, 4e seems to be leaning more on "give the PCs more choices, not just making his one action good" but, as splats often do, things will change.

 

[TerraDave]

Set: I also remember how fast-paced, fun, and all around "this is so much better then AD&D" low level play could be.

Then starting somewhere around 8th level that started to slowly decline and I realized that I was thinking "what the *#@*" more and more.

I still enjoy it. But all those problems I had read about started to become mine...

 

[jaer]

While I've never encountered any issues running 3e with my group, I occasionally run store games, and I have encountered some players who feel positively entitled.

If a monster did something they had never encountered, they would break character in the middle of combat and ask "how did he do that".

Most would be put back on track with a simple "you don't know", occasionally, the more pointed "your character doesn't know", but as a long time player, I was sort of off-put by the instant demand to know everything going on behind the curtain.

I suspect it's just me being old and out of touch.

But a return to monsters with abilities not available to every PC doesn't shock or appall me.

I encounter this with my group all the time, actually. My players will look at what NPCs can do and try to reverse engineer them to figure out what they are. "Illegal" builds get and spell-like effects that my players can't replicate with magic get seen as me 'cheating' because 3e is typically set up as "NPCs are PCs played by the DM" which means my creatures must obey the same rules as my player's characters. 4e looks like it is doing away with that, and I am very glad.

Another thing I hated about high level 3e (which I think was mentioned): wizard spell books. Writing those up sucked! I don't even give wizards a full daily list of spells (I know they won't get to cast them all, and I figure, much like the PCs, they've probably used some of their spells already or have ones that aren't combat oriented), but then I had to figure out all the spells he had in his spell book so the PCs knew what they got? Ugh!

My biggest gripe about the CR system is that it does not do a good job of balancing one creature against a party. Single creatures cannot do enough in a single round to match the output of a 4 person party. The only way to have 1 creature survive against the group is to have the AC/DR and Saves/SR so high as to annoy the best attacker/caster and completely frustrate all others (which ends up being no fun for them).

I like that they are trying to make combat larger, but that they are specifically designing creatures with the mentality that this one combatant needs to be able to handled 4 or 5 opponents at once. This is something I find lacking in 3e and look forward to in 4e.

 

[Noinarap]

Fair enough. I'm actually pretty stoked about this aspect of 4E as well. I am curious though about how much territory each monster role covers. I mean, does a brute of a certain level always do X damage and differences from monster to monster are merely "skins" placed onto the numbers? Or are there a couple of different types of Brutes that have distinct abilities.

The exception-based monster design may be the key to more variety. If there is no worry that PC-monster symmetry must exist, each monster type is free to have different abilities. Constraining things for balance means that monsters can't break as many rules. That seems to be out the window. These new abilities will have to be balanced empirically, through playtests, rather than theoretically, but that was the de facto 3e system anyway. CR was broken, so we all ended up using whatever we experienced or estimated would work. It seems that is the overall intent of monster design in 4e.

This is one area where I am very very skeptical about the claims made and will remain so until I see some concrete examples. I don't see how you can just slap class levels on a monster and call it good if the two systems are entirely separate.

It is indeed hard to say how that will play out. The impression I get is that class powers will be based on overall level, not class level. This means that, say, the ogre chief with warlord levels will have his abilities function pretty well, even with one level in warlord. It won't be necessary to give a high-level monster class levels equal to his hit dice before they become useful. Just an impression though. The paladin smites and other powers they've previewed are largely behind this. If you are basically making an ability check (modified by your level) it doesn't matter how few levels you have in that class.

Think about it like this. If slapping a class level onto a monster were so easy, why would you put races in the PHB at all? Couldn't you just put them all in the MM and say "Play whatever you want!! Just take a monster, slap some levels on it and call it good!!" Doesn't this also imply that we can play a party that consists of a Dragon, a Medusa a Beholder and a Giant that all have the appropriate number of class levels slapped onto them?

Do you see why I'm so skeptical about this claim?

That's sort of a separate issue. Abilities that are fine for a monster (average lifespan = 1 encounter) may be broken in the hands of PCs.

 

[The Little Raven]

My biggest problem is that I often spent more time doing prep (crunching numbers especially) than actually running my games.

 

[Spatula]

What's so bad about DMing 3e?

Nothing but it is easy to make it hard for yourself.

This is very true. I don't know what all the people complaining about all the options available in building 3e (plus splats) NPCs are going to do after years of 4e splats... clamor for 5e, maybe.

I wouldn't say "nothing" is bad about DMing 3e, though. High-level combat is definitely troublesome.