Why do we have such different experiences?

[Hussar]

Oh crap. I thought it was you Rel. Now I'm going to have to go track down who said that and attribute it properly. My bad. And it wasn't that long ago. Sigh.

 

[el-remmen]

The AoE spell thing was probably me.

At least in my games, caster choose the target box and then roll d4 to see which of the corners is the center of the spell, meaning it can never be perfectly placed.

What I like about this (an idea I got from Monte Cook) is that the difference is small enough to often not matter, but when it does matter it can change the whole encounter.

Also, I allow a feat ("Accurate Caster") which allows the caster to choose instead of rolling randomly.

 

[Hussar]

Aha! Rel - el-remmen - you're all just trying to confuse and confluster me with your on screen names.

Heh. Thanks for coming to the rescue el-remmen.

 

[Lacyon]

The AoE spell thing was probably me.

At least in my games, caster choose the target box and then roll d4 to see which of the corners is the center of the spell, meaning it can never be perfectly placed.

What I like about this (an idea I got from Monte Cook) is that the difference is small enough to often not matter, but when it does matter it can change the whole encounter.

Also, I allow a feat ("Accurate Caster") which allows the caster to choose instead of rolling randomly.

That's... AWESOME! You know what would be even better? An Accurate Caster feat lets you roll the die one extra time and pick between the corners rolled. And can be taken more than once. There's always room for more accuracy.

 

[Rel]

Simple rule of thumb:

If you see a post about an intricate house rule, that's probably el-remmen.

If you see a post that says, "If there's any girls there, I wanna do em!", that's probably me.

 

[Garnfellow]

I think, depending on how hard people were "testing" the system, they got very different results. Here are a few examples.

1. Organized Play vs. Home Games. I haven't belonged to the RPGA in a l-o-o-o-n-g time, but based on the accounts I've read, it sounds like RPGA games play *very* differently from any home game I've ever run or played in. I'd liken the RPGA sessions to extreme off-road stress-tests of the system, while my games were more like leisurely weekend drives. Did I have min-maxers in my groups? Sure. Did we do a lot of combat? Sure. But we just never saw 95% of the crazy problems that apparently popped up with great frequency in RPGA games.
2. Frequency of Sessions. I really enjoy reading MerricB's accounts of his games because, while we seem to have generally similar tastes, we seem to have almost entirely different experiences at the table. Supplements or adventures he hated, I tended to love. Books that he loved often left me cold at best. I was a little puzzled by this until I realized, even though I was playing a lot, he was playing a ton more than I was. I think at one point he had two, maybe THREE weekly games. At the most I had a regular biweekly and a regular monthly game. So in a given month I may have run maybe 12-16 hours of 3e; meanwhile it looked like he was running something like 32-40 hours. Maybe we spent similar amounts of time each week on D&D, but I had a lot more time for prep and things like dinking around with statting up NPCs. Accordingly, we were looking for radically different products at the game store. Also, he was running into problems with the system on a much more regular basis. It's not that I never had any problems with 3e; I just never had many problems pop up on a regular enough basis that they became a serious issue. I'm sure if I had played more, the problems would have been a much bigger deal. (And if I had played less, they would have been less of a problem.)
3. High Level Play. There's general consensus that 3e really starts to break down at higher levels. The only debate, really, is what constitutes high level. I never ran any of the adventure paths, and never had much interest in running games much above 15th level. For me, above that point the only really interesting monsters are dragons, fiends, or classed humanoids; PC abilities are such that they can too bypass or overcome common plotlines. So I stuck to the lower levels more, with a wider variety of opponents and challenges. And frankly, if I've DM'd a group from 1st to 15th level, we've already spent YEARS on that campaign, and all of us are ready for a change. Consequently, I never ran very many games at high level, but I saw enough to know that the complaints are legit. But since I was never much inclined to run games at that level, these problems didn't affect me. On the other hand, it seems like the people who really grew to HATE 3e were the people who ran high level games (often as part on an AP), and were permanently traumatized by the experience. I'm sure if I had done the same thing, I would have had a similar reaction.

So, I suspect that for most people who played 3e casually or generally stuck to low or mid-level play, the system seemed perfectly fine. But I suspect that many of the people who really pushed the system hard, and subsequently saw all the corner cases and breaking points, were the one who had a bad experience.

 

[el-remmen]

Simple rule of thumb:

If you see a post about an intricate house rule, that's probably el-remmen.

If you see a post that says, "If there's any girls there, I wanna do em!", that's probably me.

And if it is an intricate house rule about doing girls then it is probably. . . someone who needs to be moderated.

 

[The Ghost]

In addition to what has been said, and I agree with a lot of it, I would like to add...

The game table you play on. Do you play on a square or hex mat or neither? Do your games occur primarily in two dimensions or three? I have found that when I was using just a battle-mat or dungeon tiles to play on resulted in completely different feel during combat than when we would use our Warhammer table and terrain. In the case of the former rules adjudication was pretty much by the book whereas in the latter's case there was much more negotiation about how things work.

 

[amysrevenge]

Organized Play vs. Home Games. I haven't belonged to the RPGA in a l-o-o-o-n-g time, but based on the accounts I've read, it sounds like RPGA games play *very* differently from any home game I've ever run or played in. I'd liken the RPGA sessions to extreme off-road stress-tests of the system, while my games were more like leisurely weekend drives. Did I have min-maxers in my groups? Sure. Did we do a lot of combat? Sure. But we just never saw 95% of the crazy problems that apparently popped up with great frequency in RPGA games.

I'm a bigtime RPGA guy. The analogy that I've developed to describe it is this.

While she was a veterinary student, my wife worked as a meat inspector at a chicken plant. She saw over 100 chickens a minute zooming by, and would see about 150,000 a week - over the course of the summer she saw well over 2 million chickens. Think about that. Now, most of us have seen a chicken or two, if not in real life then at least on TV. How many chickens have you seen that had 4 legs, or 3 wings? Probably not very many. My wife saw about one a week.

If the ridiculous, broken stuff in D&D can be likened to a chicken with 4 legs, then a dedicated RPGA player/DM can be likened to a meat inspector, while a "home game only" player can be likened to the man on the street.

I would guess that over the course of the 8 years of 3.x RPGA games, I saw something on the order of 1000 different PCs in play. It would take a fairly strange home game setup for someone to approach even a tenth of that...

 

[Garnfellow]

I'm a bigtime RPGA guy. The analogy that I've developed to describe it is this.

That's a great freaking analogy.