What was so bad about DMing 3x?

[Tewligan]

I don't like how 3e codifies EVERYTHING, and the excruciating detail given to monsters and NPC's to make sure they follow all the same rules as the PC's is the icing on that particular cake for me. I prefer the older editions because they give the DM more permission to handwave and eyeball things, and not think he's doing it wrong. NPC-only classes were just fine, and every magical doo-dad or effect didn't have to be explained in terms of how the PC's could do the same thing. 4e may be going back in the right direction in that regard, even if it's not what I want in other ways. Of course, I'm sticking with DMing 1e, so I guess it doesn't matter all that much to me...

 

[Midknightsun]

To each their own, I guess, but for me issues have been:

--Extensive time building NPCs and choosing equipment (unequipped NPCs go down so fast its pathetic)

--As a corrollary to the above, making NPCs who have the gear to challenge PCs, without dumping outrageous amounts/ overpowered magical loot in their laps.

--High level combat is sloooow. Hey, I got my stuff together, but it only takes one person who doesn't quite get it to slow things down significantly. Spellcasters at high levels start to compound this problem due to the vast number of options available.

--Constant Rules Challenges/Questions: Often games are interrupted for a rules interpretation wherein someone, either the DM or a player is uncertain about an action and whether or not it can be done by the rules. With the glut of combat rules and complexity in 3e, its nearly impossible to know all the rules, and so constant stops make combat, and even general encounters, even slower.

--Easier and easier to create broken combos, and the challenges thereof: Don't get me wrong, options are great, but the glut of abusable options make for a DM that has to be ever vigilant about what material is allowed in, and then deal with the possibility that a player will complain that I am "house ruling" by not letting every WotC book out there into play, so I spend quite a bit of time evaluating material to see if its gonna cause a problem, since WotC apparently didn't do a good job monitoring this stuff themselves.

--DM creativity squelched: When 3e came out, I welcomed the more concrete and specific rule set. I have come to realize, that the rules that clarify can often bind and beat my creative juices with the hearty player cry of "you can't do that!" or "you cheated!" or a number of other things. . . often coming from players who like a predictable pattern/ rule set that they can learn to exploit. Again, the system seems to discourage creativity and encourage constant rules referencing by the sheer mass and specificity of its rules.

I have a few more, but i'm short on time now. Some may not find these to be problems. more power to you, but I've been told i am a good DM. Heck, i have players I used to play with Begging me to come back and run games for them, but i just can't because of the almost bureucratic density of the 3.5 ruleset and all the loopholes and stopgaps that the system seems filled with. Its really no wonder that 3.5 is the game few want to DM anymore. In truth, I still like 3.5, i just think I would enjoy D&D more if the rules were streamlined and made easier to use without constant game slowing/ stopping.

 

[nerfherder]

What is so bad about DMing 3x, and do you enjoy DMing other systems but not that one? Help me out, because 4e to me is introducing a system I don't like to fix a "problem" I'd never heard of.

Prep time - which I reduce by stealing stat blocks from anywhere I can find them.

Tying to make monsters effective in combat at high level - I just can't remember what all the abilities, spells and powers do for all the monsters I'm running, so I either ignore half of them, flip books during combat, or write out the powers ahed of the game (but see "prep time" above).

I enjoy DMing D&D and a bunch of other games, but I'd enjoy D&D more without those two issues.

I'm used to NPC/monsters being created identically to PCs (RuneQuest was always like that), and I looked forward to 3e partly for this reason. I thought it would add versimilitude. For me, however, the extra effort outweighed this in practice.

 

[HeinorNY]

I only DM D&D. The bad things about DMing 3.x were:
-Spells the break the plot. I never like how teleportation worked. Travelling was always the fun part of my games. Some divinations and resurection spells too
-How CR works. I like big encounters. I never liked running a series of small randomic encounters. It was hard to put many low CR monsters in an encouter because os the encounter would be too easy, with a well placed area spell, or too long and tedious.
-Magic Items. I like magic items be a special thing in the game, but when characters need to have them or the game doesn't work, they become predictable and boring, and the game looks silly.
-Characters that need to stop. It was a pain in the back to arrange the adventure always having to expect when the character were in need resting to regain powers. When the characters enter the dungeon, they should leave it only when they finished it.
-NPC creation. I never ever, in the last 8 years, created NPCs using the rules that were provided. Actually, I always created NPCs using what I think will be the 4E philosophy. Make up what you need when ou need it, using guidelines to make it balanced. The guidelines were always in my head. I prefer to have a DMG that helps me improve my style of Dming than having a DMG that give me rules I'll never use.
-Low level play too dangerous, if I tried to put a little more threat, there was a big chance of TPK. It was like walking on eggs. High level game too slow.

Those are the first that came to my mind, threre are other minor issues of course. 4E seems to be fixing all of these, so I'm thankful.

 

[helium3]

Okay, try this. Create an evil NPC party that can stand up to a Codzilla, Batman wizard, a poucing Barbarian, and <insert most broken skill monkey here>. Use at least one prestige per NPC and have at least one of them be a CR 3+ Monster with class levels. If possible, give one of them an animal companion to ride and use the combat riding feats. Have another one fly around a lot. Everyone is level 17th. Tell me how long you take to plan it all out.

Fair enough. Putting together THAT strawman of an example would take quite a lot of time. Course, we've also adopted the one prestige class at a time rule so that's at least one reason why I find that NPC prep isn't as tough in general.

That being said I don't think what you're suggesting is going to be any easier in 4E than it is in the current edition. The reason what you're talking about is so difficult to do is because of the complexity involved in the what you're trying to do.

If you think 4E is going to give you all the above options AND be less complex, I think you're going to be disappointed. I should start keeping a list of the various posters that are complaining right now about how 3E is "too complicated" and "too hard to prep for." It'd be interesting to cross-reference that list with a second list generated in two years time of the people that are complaining that 4E is "too simplistic" and "doesn't have enough options."

 

[Mallus]

I don't like how 3e codifies EVERYTHING, and the excruciating detail given to monsters and NPC's to make sure they follow all the same rules as the PC's...

What's makes it particularly excruciating is all that attention to detail didn't make the game any more balanced and playable at higher levels --largely, as others have pointed out, because the real problems were in the underlying math. So what we're left with is a system that piles accumulates unnecessary details, which in theory relate to game balance, but in actuality don't fix any of the serious issues.

That said, I run a hybrid of 3.5/AE at 12th (soon to be 13th) level, and it's a blast. But the reason it is has everything to do with the great people I game with and significantly less to do with the rules we use.

 

[FireLance]

Well, one issue is the level of detail that some DMs feel obliged by the system to provide to their monsters and NPCs because, well, that's the way it's done in the Monster Manual, the modules and the other official products (to be frank, I'm one of them). So, whenever I create an NPC or monster, I'll spend time:

- Allocating skill points
- Selecting feats, including ensuring that the prerequisites for each feat are met
- Selecting equipment (if applicable)
- Selecting spells known and/or spells in spellbook and/or spells prepared (if applicable)
- Selecting classes and prestige classes, including ensuring that the prerequisites for relevant PrCs are met, based on the abilities I want to give the NPC or classed monster
- Calculating all relevant information, e.g. attack bonus, saving throws, skill modifiers, taking into account all the modifiers, including bonuses from ability scores, feats, equipment, class abilities, skill synergies, etc.

It can be especially time-consuming if (like me) you like to go through several rulebooks to pick the right feat/spell/equipment/class/PrC for your creation.

Ultimately, it's an example of the 80/20 rule. You can probably get a servicable, about 80% complete NPC or monster in about 20% of the time you spend to get it 100% right. However, there is an implicit standard that 80% is not good enough, and that the DM should spend much more time on details that seldom have a significant payoff in play.

Now, I happen to enjoy the process of NPC and monster creation, and I take a craftsman's pride in turning out mathematically correct and thematically appropriate creatures, so this hasn't been a major issue for me, apart from the time (and occasional late nights) needed to prepare an adventure. However, to someone who does not enjoy it, I can see why the current system looks like too much work for too little payoff.

 

[Cadfan]

On the off chance that this isn't subtle trolling-

Nobody is saying that DMing 3e makes your skin burst with open sores, or your eyes bleed. Its simply that, for a number of people, the 3e system for NPC and monster creation involved a lot more work than it justified with its results. Statblocks for monsters are very large, and involve a lot of details that honestly aren't that important except that they're part of the construction process and other statistics derive from them. Such at hit dice. There are other rules, like getting a feat every three hit dice, that at high levels mostly bloat your monster or NPC with feats you don't intend to use. And finally skill points can be a nightmare, because there's a lot of them to give out, and they don't necessarily do much for the typical role an enemy might play- combat foe.

A lot of these rules are unnecessary. The hit die rule, for example, exists to help you figure out things like what a reasonable fortitude save is for a particular type of monster at a particular level. But the system that does it involves a lot of awkward reasoning in which you variously increase or decrease hit dice in order to finagle a particular outcome. It would be a lot easier to just have a chart that TELLS you what the hit dice system is trying to create- a chart that says something like "eh, fort save for a level 12 encounter should be about +X for the average melee creature." And then you can adjust as needed.

Now, I know that monster and NPC design in 3e doesn't HAVE to use all these systems. Rather than spending forever working out that your monster is a Large creature, so you have to adjust it in this direction, but that causes its CR to go up, and you'll have to lower its hit dice to bring it back down, but that causes its saves to drop, blah, blah blah, you can just guestimate answers. That is, as an experienced DM, I know that a fortitude save for a level 12 melee monster should be around a +11, so I can skip the whole hit dice process and assign that value. I might also know that I want feats X and Y, but don't need the next 3 feats 12 hit die creature is owed, so I might just skip those feat slots and assume they're used on something not related to combat. That's what many experienced 3e DMs do, and it works just fine.

But 4e supports that style of monster creation straight out of the box, and instead of expecting you to spend a few years learning the game so that you know things like "+12 fort save at level 11 for a fighty monster, +6 for a spellcaster," it just TELLS you that. This saves you from having to retro engineer things like fortitude saves from seed stats like hit dice.

Thus making things easier.

There are a couple of other ways that things ought to get easier. The reduced tendency of in game buffs and debuffs to affect seed statistics reduces paperwork. The movement of magic items away from combat statistic boosts and towards providing new abilities means that a character without them will be less screwed- meaning NPCs won't need them as much, and reducing the time necessary for assigning them. Stuff like that.

 

[zoroaster100]

I really enjoy DMing. But when running a group from first to twentieth level, I found I really enjoyed the first ten levels or so. I still enjoyed levels 10 through 15 or 16 or so, but found it increasingly painful to spend so much time preparing for each session. And the final few levels not only required too much preparation, but were also less fun to run sessions as well, because the battles just dragged on more than it was worth.

 

[Steely Dan]

I only DM D&D. The bad things about DMing 3.x were:
-Spells the break the plot. I never like how teleportation worked. Travelling was always the fun part of my games. Some divinations and resurection spells too
-How CR works. I like big encounters. I never liked running a series of small randomic encounters. It was hard to put many low CR monsters in an encouter because os the encounter would be too easy, with a well placed area spell, or too long and tedious.
-Magic Items. I like magic items be a special thing in the game, but when characters need to have them or the game doesn't work, they become predictable and boring, and the game looks silly.
-Characters that need to stop. It was a pain in the back to arrange the adventure always having to expect when the character were in need resting to regain powers. When the characters enter the dungeon, they should leave it only when they finished it.
-NPC creation. I never ever, in the last 8 years, created NPCs using the rules that were provided. Actually, I always created NPCs using what I think will be the 4E philosophy. Make up what you need when ou need it, using guidelines to make it balanced. The guidelines were always in my head. I prefer to have a DMG that helps me improve my style of Dming than having a DMG that give me rules I'll never use.
-Low level play too dangerous, if I tried to put a little more threat, there was a big chance of TPK. It was like walking on eggs. High level game too slow.

Those are the first that came to my mind, threre are other minor issues of course. 4E seems to be fixing all of these, so I'm thankful.

Really dig your list, especially campaign/fun busting spells.

…I'm looking at you, murderous mist...