What was so bad about DMing 3x?

[Dragonblade]

This comment about presentation is highly relevant. As I mentioned in an earlier post, 3e has suffered from a lack of clear indication that the RAW are open to abuse and reinterpretation as the DM sees fit. Sure, there's Rule 0, but you need more than that. A lack of solid DMing advice until late in the edition's lifespan was a real problem, imho.

(And yeah, a CR=APL critter is expected to last about three rounds in a knockdown fight - an oft-overlooked fact.)

The problem with 3e (and prior editions) is that if you do handwave something like monster stats and diverge from the rules there is no guidance provided as to what your boundaries should be. This is where 4e will be superior, IMO.

Furthermore, CR is ok, if you use it for its intended purpose which is attrition based encounter design. But I don't want attrition based encounter design. I want every fight to be meaningful and memorable. Now you can use CR as a guideline to make a tough set-piece battle, but the system as a whole isn't designed for that nor supports it. That leads to wonkiness like the 15 minute adventuring day.

 

[Set]

I ran Death in Freeport Tuesday. They didn't quite finish, they've got two more combat encounters to go, otherwise they breezed through the first three combats (well, they'd hardly agree with 'breezed' we had multiple people at 0 hit points at various times!), and the assorted roleplaying / information gathering / traipsing around town in-between. I spent 2 hours one night re-writing each of the combat encounters, and the NPC, because I didn't care for their stats, class choices or feat choices (or equipment). 8 1st Fighters, 1 1st Archivist, 4 1st Fighters, 1 1st Battle Sorcerer, 1 2nd Urban Ranger (duel-wielding MW Throwing Axes), 8 1st Barbarian Serpent Men, 2 1st Clerics, 8 Skeletons (enhanced by desecrate), 1 3rd Cleric / 1st Sorcerer. Easy enough. I also reworked the Serpent Folk to be LA +0, since LA races, like NPC classes, bug me and ahm agin' em. I also did some weird and useless stuff, like give the Sorcerer a few ranks in Craft (scrimshaw) and change his 'loot' to stuff he'd crafted himself out of whale ivory and gave him a Flying Lizard familiar that scoped out the party before the ambush (they blew the Spot check to notice that). I like giving the 'name' NPCs little hooks like that.

I'll be running the end of Death in Freeport and either an intermediary story or the beginning of Terror in Freeport next Tuesday, and it took me 3.5 hours to convert all of the NPCs and Monsters from that adventure. I got slowed down because I changed 10 cultists into Cleric 1 / Rogue 1 and the skills took awhile to type, since I don't have a standardized form (note to self, make standardized template!!!). Plus I was watching the Sarah Conner Chronicles at the time, and kept looking at the evil machine to see if Riverator was gonna take her clothes off again this ep.

I read about how incredibly time-consuming writing characters is, and I wonder how that is. One of the players last Tuesday didn't have books and *had never played 3.x* (he had played 2nd edition), so it took him, all by himself, 10 whole minutes to write up his character (one of the other players expressed annoyance, as he wanted to play on his computer while waiting, and didn't have time to get his game loaded).

I also read about how incredibly hard it is to run combats in this game, and yet the combats were all over lightning fast. Initiative, go, go, go. Next round, go, go, go. I use dice instead of figures, so I just wrote down which number took which amount of hit points. Number three takes eight. Number six takes 17 and drops, Fighter cleaves and misses. Wizard goes. Druid and psycho riding Dog from hell go. Dog gets a Trip attack, ooh, there's an added die roll, which takes an extra second or two if the die doesn't roll off of the table. End of round, mook eight fails to stabilize and is dead. Fighter goes again.

I deliberately slow it down with descriptive stuff about scimitars bouncing off of shields and axe-blows so hard they numb your arm, but it still plays fast.

GURPS and Vampire require a lot more book-flipping, in my experience. d20 is pretty darn fast. As a GM, you can generally keep all of the rules you need in your head, unless you have no actual plans for the evening and are whipping up an adventure off of the top of your head, or by doing the old 'open the MM and point at a random page, that's what your fighting' technique. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, the random dungeon generator from the 1st edition DMG was indeed a hoot at times.)


If I had to pick something in 3.X D&D that slows the game way the hell down it's people who use Summon Monster (or Summon Nature's Ally) and haven't got the beasties pre-written out in advance (adjusted for Celestial or Fiendish, Augment Summons and / or Augment Elemental). That and Evard's Black Tentacles. I just house-rule that to make it faster. Pain in the butt spell, but not really enough to warrant a new edition, IMO.

 

[helium3]

Yeah, your perfect player is busy being the problem player in someone else's group, ime. Not to say that there is a perfect group for every "problem player" but these days I do tend to think more in terms of bad fits than bad players.

It's tough though. You actually have to force yourself to not look down on everyone that isn't exactly like you. It's a tall order, I know . . . .

 

[Dausuul]

Most of these responses are helpful. I think the disconnect I'm seeing is that I like building characters (it's safer to let me build npcs right and left than risk me playing and wanting to change characters everytime I get a new idea ) and I am fine with a philosophy of rules parity between PCs and npcs. I can see the complaint of high level breakdown, but I feel that way as a player too, so it didn't figure into my assessment of the "fun to play, sucks to DM" comments.

*shrug* Building NPCs can often be fun, I agree. And it's still an option in 4E. The difference is, now we don't have to build the NPCs that aren't fun enough to justify the effort.

 

[Mark Hope]

The problem with 3e (and prior editions) is that if you do handwave something like monster stats and diverge from the rules there is no guidance provided as to what your boundaries should be. This is where 4e will be superior, IMO.

There is no explicit guidance, no, and this is yet again a failing of presentation. But there is plenty of implicit guidance. Where monsters are concerned, there are 5 Monster Manuals (plus numerous other WotC and 3rd-party books) that give examples of what sort of stats a monster of a given CR could have. With these examples it is no big deal to eyeball your own. Who cares if the maths is off? The play's the thing in the final analysis. When we were putting together Dark Sun 3e, one of the unwritten rules we used was that the best way to do new good design is to look at old good design. The same applies to DMing: steal from those who went before you and don't sweat the details.

Furthermore, CR is ok, if you use it for its intended purpose which is attrition based encounter design. But I don't want attrition based encounter design. I want every fight to be meaningful and memorable. Now you can use CR as a guideline to make a tough set-piece battle, but the system as a whole isn't designed for that nor supports it. That leads to wonkiness like the 15 minute adventuring day.

It can, yes. But I found that a sound knowledge of the PCs in your game was a great supplement (or even replacement) for the CR system. I have run plenty of battles stretching over several (well into double figures) rounds, with up to 30 opponents for the PCs, without the game slowing down or being a static slugfest. To firmly don my geek-hat and paraphrase Spock: the CR system is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.

 

[Warbringer]

NPC design. Skills..meh... working out the magic items that would give the NPC a fighting change and not causing a massive windfall for the party!!!

Seriously, NPC design, especially spellcasters

 

[Lord Zardoz]

folks keep cheering the "npcs/monster and PC use different rules" philosophy on the basis that it's lack made 3x "fun to play but horrible to DM". I don't get it. I love to DM, and I am as happy to DM 3x as any other system. The only reasons I don't currently DM are practical. I would rather DM than play any day of the week. (in fact, I skip gamedays when there isn't a slot left for me to run a game in, because I've found that they aren't worth the travel effort if I "only" play.)

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.

There are two problems which seem to come into play for higher level games, and they interact with one another in such a way to make things cumbersome.

1) Fully fleshing out a high level character is a lot of work. You have a potentially large number of feats to consider, as well as spells. On top of that, the system expects characters of a particular level to have certain kinds of magical items.

2) The game has a huge number of interlocking variables to keep track of.

Take a look at a 'naturally played' character of level 15 or higher, and take a look at his saving throws, AC, attack bonus, and damage bonus. How many different modifiers are there on each? How many of those change if someone walks into an anti magic zone? What if he gets disarmed and has to use a secondary weapon? What happens to those numbers of he receives the benefit of a Bard Song and an Enlarge spell? What happens if he then takes some Dex or Con damage from a poison? Now what is that guys AC vs a touch attack?

When you are playing as a player, you can mitigate these things by making shorthand notes for the conditions or combinatons that typically come into play. But as a DM, your probably going to manage to forget key information and end up running sub par opponents as a result.

The problems from the players side of things are different.

1) Unless you multi-classed a few times, the difference between your good saves and your bad saves means that you are probably going to get savaged if your attacked on the weak saves.

2) If an opponent has a high enough AC that the fighter is not going to hit very often on his primary attack, then everyone else is just going to miss every time.

2a) The alternative is an AC that the fighter is going to hit with all but his last iterative attack every time, making monsters too weak.

3) Because AC and Saves do not scale at the same rate as Bab, players tend to be screwed against CR appropriate opponents unless the player is outfitted with a very specific set of items (Necklace of Natural Armour, Ring of Protection, and Cloak of Resistance is the most frequent combo). While some players are happy with this, others would prefer to have more interesting items.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Mark Hope]

... snip great post...

Yes. My experiences exactly. Especially:

I also read about how incredibly hard it is to run combats in this game, and yet the combats were all over lightning fast

this

I deliberately slow it down with descriptive stuff about scimitars bouncing off of shields and axe-blows so hard they numb your arm, but it still plays fast.

and this

GURPS and Vampire require a lot more book-flipping, in my experience.

and this. WoD combat RAW. Don't. Get. Me. Started.

If I had to pick something in 3.X D&D that slows the game way the hell down it's people who use Summon Monster (or Summon Nature's Ally) and haven't got the beasties pre-written out in advance...

My god, and this!

Cool post.

 

[helium3]

that really sums up my main gripe with DMing in 3.5 ... freakin' cross references and convoluted ability / spell descriptions galore!

Yeah. Cross-referencing is a royal PITA, but nothing is going to fix that except (a) a VASTLY pared down rule-set or some sort of computer program.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I read about how incredibly time-consuming writing characters is, and I wonder how that is.

I also read about how incredibly hard it is to run combats in this game, and yet the combats were all over lightning fast.

There are several factors:

1) Level. High level means more feats, magic items, classes/PrCs, skills and spells to choose in char gen. In combat there are more options, more attacks and way more buffs to keep track of. Dispel on a highly buffed char is particularly time consuming.

2) The number of splats you own. More choice = more time.

3) Number of players.

4) Number of combatants.