What was so bad about DMing 3x?

[Midknightsun]

When you are really creative than you would have no problem with creating interesting plots without breaking the rules...

And enough people have reported here that when you know what you are doing combat and NPC creation doesn't have to take a long time. So it looks like teh DM and players are also responsible for this, not only the system...

Soooo . . . .those of us who have voiced our difficulties with the system, a fair deal so far, are just not creative? Nice

Followed by a response of "its not the system, its the user, mantra."

I could get really good at driving nails with a screwdriver if I practiced long enough, but I'd really rather have a hammer.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

Well, the main way I can the detailed version being useful is if a PC wants to do a targeted dispell to disrupt the monster's climbing attempt. Does it do anything? If you know why a monster has certain abilities, then changing the circumstances those abilities are used in (anti magic, dex or str reduction, etc) is straightforward. If you only have the total, it's fiat alone (and as a DM, I don't always enjoy too much fiat - I feel bound by whether my decision will help or hurt a PC right then more than the abstract judgement call I could make if I chose before it became an issue.)

It's like if a monster stat block only listed the end AC total and not what it came from. If I don't know how much of it is armor, I don't know what the effect on his AC is if a PC gets in a good rusting grasp spell, do I? The more building blocks I have of a monster, the more easily I can respond to a strategy that chips at those blocks rather than jsut wacking the end result - and I like block chipping combats.

Sorry, this is way back from page 2, Kahuna's response to something I wrote.

My response would be that I don't need a spell that removes a target's sacred bonuses to AC, or something like that, because it's a level of granularity I can live without. I'd be perfectly happy to accept "The target takes a -4 penalty to AC" and simply move on. If you don't start with that level of granularity (e.g., many varied bonuses stacking to create an AC) you don't need that granularity in the end either (having spells that target specific bonuses).

However, I don't think it's going to be that simple. If a monster/NPC gets some of its AC from items, I would expect that to be listed in the monster statblock, preferrably written out. Something like this:

Armor: The goober has +8 bonus to his AC from armor. Half of this bonus is magical.

Or something like that. I don't want it mucking up the actual statblock, but if it's relevant it should be a clear part of the monster entry and, if I feel the need, I can accept or ignore that level of complexity. Which, admittedly, is not all that complex. However, some people are going to find that information important, and if part of 4e's goals include clarity of the rules design, than this information should be available.

 

[Nebulous]

Everyone is level 17th. Tell me how long you take to plan it all out.

Well, there's my beef. D&D is broken at high level. Cut it off at 12th and save yourself the trouble. That's what i want 4e to fix, a smoother curve before the game gets ridiculously overcomplicated.

 

[HeinorNY]

way too much information....

Agreed.
Please, continue!

 

[theskyfullofdust]

My chief bugbear about DMing 3.x is the encounter building. With experience I've been able to manage it better, but the whole idea of 1 monster vs. 4 PCs was always a misplaced notion; much more fun to have multiple critters & when designing adventures I try to do this as much as possible anyhow, but 4th ed. looks to help with this, which is nice.

But, overall, I like DMing.

 

[AZRogue]

way too much information....

Don't pretend like I'm the only one!

 

[nerfherder]

Don't pretend like I'm the only one!

No - I can fit into your girlfriend's underwear, too

 

[Doug McCrae]

I can squeeze into my girlfriend's underwear, too, but I don't do it all the time. A little room to move and breath is often considered a good thing.

Thread winner.

 

[AZRogue]

No - I can fit into your girlfriend's underwear, too

That's what I like to see.*













*I meant: taking it one step further ... not seeing you in my girlfriend's underwear.

 

[JediSoth]

My main problem with DMing D&D 3.X was the power-creep that occurred with each new book.

We're casual gamers. We attempt to game every other weekend, but that doesn't always happen because 75% of us have families and all of us have other things that crop up from time to time. Up until last year, I was going to school part time while working full time, so I usually adapted pre-written adventures to fit my own metaplot. Usually adaptation meant changing places and names, but leaving the encounters as-is.

All of us are friends and we game for fun, so I usually would let them try out options and new classes from the newest WotC book that came out (because for a LONG time, I was the only person in the group that understood that third-party stuff was for D&D, too). The problem is (and I ran into this A LOT with World's Largest Dungeon), most adventures don't take into account the latest and greatest feats, spells, and racial & class abilities, so the PCs got more and more powerful for their level and the monsters didn't because we didn't know they'd be so underpowered until after the fact.

When you game as infrequently as we do, you don't want to make a blanket statement like "OK, ONLY PHB classes and races for this whole campaign. Period." If I'd done that with the last two campaigns I ran, that would mean using only the PHB for about 80% of the time between the publication of 3.5 and the announcement of 4E.

You could that with the fact that even though I owned most of the books the players wanted to use, I simply did not have the time nor the capacity to memorize and analyze (and still don't) every new option and spell (especially the spells, there are just too many for me to be intimately familiar with all of them). So, then I get blindsided when the PCs encounter a couple of vrock that should provide them with a challenge and the PCs wipe the floor with these demons inside of three rounds. It was frustrating as a DM.

So frustrating, in fact, I got burned out and hung up the DM's hat.

But I did get over my psychosis about limited the player resources though, and I'm ready to DM again and limit the number of books beyond the core they can access without my express permission (in fact, I would really like my next campaign to be Arcana Evolved only). So it was frustrating, but also educational.