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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7885716" data-attributes="member: 4937">I wouldn't. I've already outlined what I think the underlying problem with 3.X ended up being. I could get into a lot of nit picks about what actually was wrong with the rules as they evolved into late 3.5, but fundamentally what went wrong with individual rules is less interesting than why the design process went wrong. We agree that it was a very player facing edition.That I don't agree to at all. The rules of 3.X began very incomplete and remained very incomplete even as the rules text continued to bloat. There never was any vision of having a complete rules set and never really any vision to plug the gaps in the rules in any systematic manner, at least not with WotC. Almost all the attempts to plug the games in the 3.X system were undertaken by third parties - to cite one famous example, Admant's 'Hot Pursuit: The Definitive D20 Guide to Chases' is an actual attempt to make the D20 rules more complete and plug a hole in what the D20 rules are able to cover. WotC made almost no attempt to do anything of the sort, because - as I've emphasized before - WotC made the decision that the money of the game was to be made in marketing to players and not to DMs. So rules sets that actually tried to make the game more complete were basically nowhere to be found.In fact, the lack of focus on making the basic processes of play more complete was a big reason we ended up with so much rules bloat.Instead, what we got was an endless array of CharGen options. And since the basic game was so incomplete, way too many things which should have been treated as a specific process play useful for whatever scenarios or conflicts weren't well covered by the base rules, came up as a hodge podge of silo'd character options unique to the class, prestige class, or sometimes feat. The other thing that we got in absence of any unified rules set, was a variety of designs and character options that covered the same conceptual ground as previously printed chargen options, so that there were always 5 or 6 ways to do something, many of which could be stacked by leveraging the front ended nature of the concepts.All that bloat had nothing really to do with providing better or broader process resolution, which is the real meat of "having a rule for everything".  And furthermore, it ended up replicating much of the problem with NWP's as a kludge fix to not having a rule for everything. I don't want to get side tracked on a discussion of railroading and when you should or shouldn't do it.  I will say that while you are right that this is particularly tough for an inexperienced DM, I think as a DM you know when you are unreasonably meta gaming.   "Sense Motive" isn't a class skill for Wizards.  Leaving aside the problems with the implementation of class skills in 3e that I think both Pathfinder and 5e have improved on somewhat, it is I think obvious that it would be metagaming to decide that a Necromancer has invested CharGen resources heavily in "Sense Motive" in response to it being discovered that it would be useful for the NPC to have done so in this situation.   On the other hand, it's not at all unreasonable to think that a Necromancer whose spell list you haven't prepared has common buffs like Arcane Armor and False Life prepared, and would have cast them if he had the opportunity.This isn't a problem particular to 3e IMO, but one which probably every DMG has gotten wrong.   Simply put, the DMG just doesn't do enough to tell you how to be a good DM, and even the 1e DMG - which is in my opinion the best of them - unfortunately has too much of its advice geared to the particular situation that applied to Gygax's own campaigns and isn't very good advice for the typical audience he is writing to.</blockquote>

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