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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8459956" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Have read through all of these and they didn't include the passage I thought they did about 3e being kind of a compromise the designers arrived at after going at it hammer and tongs. Hope I can find it eventually. All in all, I'm not sure that there was much in the way of intent or general theory behind much of any of it. Excepting of course that they wanted to make a new edition, wanted to streamline a bunch of the accreted dross that never got cleaned up with 2e, and were willing to kill some sacred cows like racial level limits, class restrictions, lower AC better than higher, and so forth. Interestingly, upon reflection, most of the different components for the most part make sense in isolation. Giving up attacks of opportunity when drawing weapons, getting back up, running away, trying to attack someone with a longer-reached weapon, and so forth makes plenty of sense, and even seems to be part of the late 2e stuff that people really liked. Getting rid of automatic spell loss if you got hit, complex initiative models, spells which never land at high levels, and few if any ways to cast in armor* also made all sorts of sense, since many of those were the most-often house-ruled-out parts of AD&D. It's just when you combine the two together (and don't make any adjustments based on the results) that you run into trouble. Same with WBL/magic item allotment -- rules for balanced starting above L1 or introducing new characters into an existing game make all the sense in the world, and people had been clamoring for consistent magic item cost and crafting rules for a long time. *barring elven chain --supposedly rarest of the rare, and maybe drawing a target on your chest if you're known to have it.This I think speaks to a question more fundamental even than a specific edition. D&D on a whole seems really reticent to answer basic questions about whether a non-magical-enhanced fighter is supposed to be mostly historical knight (a competent one, but not the best that has ever been), the best that's ever been, a action movie star who does nothing specifically supernatural but violates the laws of probability twelve times before breakfast, or mythic figures like Achilles or Ajax or Arthur who still don't cast spells, but clearly do more than a real mortal human ever could. Obviously there are specifics in jump distances and lifting limits, but that's where most of the dissonance shows up, since otherwise it tries not to solidly answer. I think this is part and parcel of D&D not wanting to answer it it is a general pre-modern fantasy system or a specific implied setting.</blockquote>

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