What was so bad about DMing 3x?

[Ipissimus]

-chuckles- Yeah, but I have 33 ranks in Disable Device.

Cloistered Cleric of Wee Jas 3/Wizard 3/Mystic Theurge 10/Dread Necromancer 14 avoids most of the pitfalls. Just gotta take the -3 spellcasting levels on the chin to accept being useful all day 'round. (Was it Dread Necromancer or True Necromancer? Damn, it's been too long since I played. The one that's like Mystic Theurge, only for Necromancers...)

One thing I'm gonna love about 4E: Playing a Wizard who never runs out of spells. Or, rather than using that needlessly complex build, taking a Cleric Training feat.

 

[Steely Dan]

Pure Barbarian

I felt that the barbarian and the rogue were the best designed core classes of 3.5, well, except for that crap 20th rogue level.

 

[Ipissimus]

Ranger is, or was, surprisingly overlooked. Amazing what you can do when you actually have enough skill points to do something with. Also good multiclass with Rogue.

 

[Li Shenron]

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.

For me, DMing in 3.0 has been lovable.

But with two caveats:

- first, I basically gave up running campaigns at very high level
- second, having stopped at 3.0 there is not much problem of power creep and too many books

 

[Moggthegob]

Something interesting ive discovered is that most of the proponents of 3.5 ive met are the Living Greyhawk type. Living Greyhawk is inherently the most balanced system of 3.5 out there that bans use of a lot of the obviously broken things, but still leaves plenty of options and actually has an answer for the "these magic items are boring" problem. If you want anything other than a +1 to your weapon or armor you have to gain access. Thats the other thing it does to solve problems, you sell all of our loot and take cash.

They have higher level adventures which even the most experienced players have a hell of a time with. They roll out environmental or visibility rules. They do something with interesting environments and terrain rules. And they bust out some cheesy or unexpected combos and expect you to roll with the punches. My Diviner6/Divine oracle 2/Loremaster 8(yes I played a diviner) who was my first character, as incredibly useful at all levels simply for his ability to figure out hat the heck these things we were fighting were.

But that said, at all levels, the fighters really got to shine. A lot of the time the most useful things our casters could do was get the fighter into position. That says alot. Thats without the Book o' Nine Cheeses. Including my favorite guy:
fighter4/Knight3/Exotic Weapon Master 3/Knight Protector 3
He had all kinds of tricks up his sleeves: Trip, Disarm, Grapple(thank you Red Hand of Doom), Combat reflexes( while enlarged he made the 20 feet around him unpassable without get smacked a lot. I fought from on back of horse which made the chain fighting even cooler looking. Of course he had the classics: Power Attack, Cleave, Great Cleave, Supreme Cleave(thank you Knight protector). And finally melee evasion which is NICE( the ability to negate an attack by rolling a higher attack roll.) Also, the standard fare of fighter types: Weapon focus, Weapon Specialization, and melee weapon mastery and the ability to bull rush at the end of a attack is the feat im picking up at 15th. I will miss LG, it was the only way iveever made it to high level play.

 

[Dausuul]

This is part of a joke, but:

Trap picture

Eh, not really. It's just not as horridly broken as high-level casters. Mystic Theurge stacks up pretty well with non-caster classes.

 

[fnwc]

Eh, not really. It's just not as horridly broken as high-level casters. Mystic Theurge stacks up pretty well with non-caster classes.

It's all relative. Your view is valid, as is the view that non-casters are not powerful enough.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Well of course that's true. I like to allow the characters in my game to use most (but not all) of the splats from WotC, so I really wish that would be better balanced. There are so many spells at this point that I simply don't have time to go through all of the books and ban them, so I allow what I think are decent books. I simply should have gotten off of the splat merry-go-round before it stopped. The last few books really didn't get the attention of playtesting that they really deserved so you have things that vary greatly in power.

For me, rather than ban things (or swing the banhammer too much after something proves to be useful, which is kind of the point of having a complex character) I just have the bad guys use the same powers. I've told them that they will very often see characters with the tactics they use. Wings of Cover, for instance, is an AWESOME defense for a level 2 spell, especially for a BBEG. The latest game I'm running (Shackled City) has had them going into the Temple of Wee Jas five times. They're really starting loathe some of my cleric builds, and, to be honest, they're far from being truly optimized.

...but that sort of campaign is, in the end, very unsatisfying for me: it takes a fun story based campaign and turns it into a vicious game of one-upmanship.

And that's why I'm looking forward to 4E: at least for a little while, there will be some normalcy, and then I can take a much more stringent look at all of the stuff I allow into the game.

--Steve

I'm also keeping my fingers crossed that this time around we might see a more structured design effort that helps to keep things balanced against earlier supplements so there is less danger for DMs to allow new books at their table without first going through with a fine toothed comb for exploits and errors.

 

[frankthedm]

<off topic>
I run a lot of published modules, and I prefer to run them unmodified if possible, since I don't have a lot of time to do modifications. The thing is though, if I knew that my party would walk all over an encounter because they were packing a metric tonne of magic missiles, I'd just go in, edit out a 1st level spell, and edit in Shield for the sake of making it a challenge for them. Unless, of course, they were barely hanging on throughout the rest of the adventure. Sometimes handing over an important enemy to the players is something that you have to do in order to make them feel effective. But either way, the goal is to make sure that things are challenging, but not too challenging...challenging enough to be fun, but not frustrating.
</off topic>

Not off topic. It's once more a DM falling victim to thinking he is obligated to following the text. Other than for specialists, that is a must have spell.