Why I don't play D&D anymore

[Hussar]

Instead of talking about cool character concepts, we have people asking about the best possible character "Builds".

Umm, dontcha think there might be a reason for this other than "all 3e players are rollplaying munchkins"?

Could it possibly, and I use possibly in its slimmest sense, be because in earlier editions, there was pretty much nothing you could do with a character mechanically after creation? Could it possibly be that in 3e player can actually further have their characters grow and change beyond what they were at first level? Could it possibly be because after twenty years of D&D, we've finally taken off the handcuffs that character generation handed us?

Naw, not possible I guess.

Originally Posted by wedgeski
To be honest I still don't understand why people think that these design imperatives (wealth per level, encounters per level, encounters per day, etc.) are a *bad* thing. They are absolutely fundamental to designing a decent game. Why do they rub so many people up the wrong way? I just don't get it.

I want to make sure I understand you clearly before I post a response to this.

By decent game do you mean Fantasy RPGs in general?

Or designing a decent game/session/adventure/campaign for D&D 3.5?

I'd actually take it a step further. Regardless of the system you are talking about, wealth by level (assuming the game has some system for levels) and encounters per recharge period (whatever that period is based on the system) and relative power levels of characters to challenges is ALWAYS fundamental to any gaming system.

When games ignore this, we wind up with people taking 5 points in wealth in Vampire and being able to do pretty much anything they want because they have millions to throw at a problem. Need someone killed? Not a worry, hire a hitman. Need a safe house, no problem, buy one. Breaking Vampire takes about 13.1 seconds.

Assuming that players will deliberately handicap themselves out of some sense of "narrativism" is one of the poorest examples of game design there is.

 

[Zimri]

Oh, I wasn't challenging that--I was expressing intrigue that Zimri ran published adventures and rarely had multiple encounters per day.

I guess our group is more paranoid--we don't want to give our enemies time to blink, so we sweep through the dungeon like a tide.

I guess we are all a bit more laid back. Quite likely it's our players and GM bleeding through in to our characters and campaign.

We are two married couples, with kids, and 4 full time jobs involved. When we can get a moment for our recreational hobby of choice we aren't about to make our characters as harried as we are. encounters per day are all over the place occassionally it is four and sometimes more than that. Oftentimes though the players need to stop before that point so the characters find someplace safe to "hole up".

Sure not every character shines every session. I would argue that that isn't necessary MY rogue isn't going to shine vs things that can't be critted or that hit hard, but toss her in against humanoids, or a diplomatic or sneaky encounter and she is the rock star of the moment.

 

[Odhanan]

In my experience, the worst problems appear when you mix in the same party a class who is better in a < 4 enc. day (let's take an extreme, Psion) and a class who is better when there is > 4 enc. day (let's take the other extreme, Fighter).

The problem I see with your example is that it seems to assume that all Encounter Levels = Party Level. This "hard-wired 4 encounter premise" you're talking about isn't so apparent as you claim when you vary ELs.

Of course, 4/day of appropriate CR must be the average, not a constant thing each day. However, when the DM breaks that assumption all around the table must know that they are playing a different game that was not playtested.

1/ Untrue. This was playtested as well.
2/ It was also playtested time and time again by many DMs (including some of us here) running the game for the past 6 years.
3/ The way you point out "playtest" tells me that maybe you're a bit too touchy about a theoretical rules balance. If you relaxed a bit more and wouldn't try to find stuff that would be "unbalanced" by comparing the "character builds" of this or that player when you actually play the game, maybe you wouldn't be that sickened with it.

In other words: Please, for the love of little kittens READ THE DUNGEON MASTERS GUIDE. Indeed.

 

[marune]

Sure not every character shines every session. I would argue that that isn't necessary MY rogue isn't going to shine vs things that can't be critted or that hit hard, but toss her in against humanoids, or a diplomatic or sneaky encounter and she is the rock star of the moment.

There can be some exception (maybe on a short session), but I would strongly hard the opposite : each player/character should got the spot light during the game and that's the DM job to make it possible. (Of course, I suppose here that the characters were created knowning a bit about what the campaign is about)

I'll answer about the RTFM later.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Umm, dontcha think there might be a reason for this other than "all 3e players are rollplaying munchkins"?

Could it possibly, and I use possibly in its slimmest sense, be because in earlier editions, there was pretty much nothing you could do with a character mechanically after creation? Could it possibly be that in 3e player can actually further have their characters grow and change beyond what they were at first level? Could it possibly be because after twenty years of D&D, we've finally taken off the handcuffs that character generation handed us?

Naw, not possible I guess.

I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

[Renshai]

Come on, this is an outlandish comment. Of all the thousands of playtesters that ran 3e through its paces, do you think they were all ordered to run the game at 4/day? Perhaps on occasion, but I would bet that most of the time they were running games that looked exactly like the games everyone else runs today.

In fact, no we weren't ordered to do such a thing. The CR system was added at the very end of the playtesting. Until then, as the rules were being tested, there was no four encounter "tests" or arbitrary limit to the number of encounters that should be encountered everyday. We were given the rules, given the monsters and we were expected to create dungeons and test the rules.

Right up to the end, experience awards were done like 2nd edition.

I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Me too!

 

[bento]

Skeptic,

Read through this article by Wulfgang Baur that appeared a couple of months ago on the WoTC site on building encounters. He gives his recommendation on building well-rounded adventures with a wide variety of encounter types.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ab/20060728a

I think you might find some encouragement to expand your ideas on what kinds of encounters you can deliver with this game.

Otherwise, why not take a chance on another system? I have my own personal issues with 3.5 (AoO, Grappling, fire-and-forget magic, focus on killing things for XP, etc.) and now using Green Ronin's True20 system with great results from my players.

Another thing I've learned is to be confident in delivering a variety of encounters. Some sessions my focus is on providing a mystery to solve, or opposition to spy on, where very little combat occurs. They love it because it helps them roleplay encounters and they get to do something beyond rolling dice all the time.

The game is what you make of it, and if you hate eating pizza everytime, don't plan on calling for pizza delivery when your sessions start.

 

[Li Shenron]

I started with D&D under 2E (+- '93) and I was and I'm still most of the time the DM of my different groups. I switched to 3E and 3.5E as soon as they were released.

At first, I really loved these new editions; I was even aggressive against those "old skool" gamers who didn't want to hear about an elven wizard/paladin.

So, what killed it for me? It turns around the idea of Balance... Of course I want all the classes build with the idea that they should all give the players a way to shine in the party. However what I got is a Balance calculated on the performance in combat of each class in a game where there are 4 encounters / day**.

That doesn't support the kind of campaign* I want to do with the D&D game. Don't think I hate dungeon crawls. I do like them, from times to times, not in every adventure! I also want to run some "mystery solving", some "wilderness trek", some "political diplomacy" or some "overland skirmishes" and I think D&D should support all of them because they are the typical things we imagine adventurers doing.

I'm curious to hear what you'll say about it...

* BTW, I run all my D&D campaigns in FR.
** If you need a proof, add a Psion in a 1 enc. / day campaign.

Mmm... I think it's quite undeniable that D&D 3.0 (and 3.5 possibly even more) is designed not only with the idea of 4 encounter on average per day, but also with the assumption that the average encounter would last a certain number of rounds. Spells and finite-duration abilities for example are given a certain duration depending on whether they are supposed to last one encounter only or more.

But I do think that really encounters can vary a lot without breaking the system. Reducing the number of encounters does not mean that the characters who have a 1/day ultra-powerful ability would dominate, at least if you don't tell them that they're going to have 1 encounter only... and anyway there are not so many cases in the game.
And what if the encounter is designed to last very long, for instance 3-4 times as much as a "traditional" encounter? From the "resource consumption" point of view it would be the same as having 3-4 combats.

You mention dungeon crawls... actually I do not think that dungeon crawls and 4/day goes well together at all!!!! Have you ever seen a movie where the characters explore 2 rooms, then retreat, come back next day, two more rooms, retreat again, etc....? That's a terribly tedious and unrealistic way to run a dungeon crawl.

If I want to run a dungeon crawl, the characters need to be able to start and finish it in the same day, just as would real characters do. Hence it's either gonna have lots of low-EL combats or be quite a scarcely populated dungeon.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Zimri : my problem isn't to come with non-melee-fighting encounters, my problem is about the daily frequency of encounters hard wired in the rules.

This has been an issue in every edition of D&D. Nothing new here. The only difference is its spelled out in case the DM somehow managed to miss that in a 1 fight per day game, the wizard/cleric can cast their best spells every round.

 

[freebfrost]

Come on, this is an outlandish comment. Of all the thousands of playtesters that ran 3e through its paces, do you think they were all ordered to run the game at 4/day? Perhaps on occasion, but I would bet that most of the time they were running games that looked exactly like the games everyone else runs today.

Exactly that.

My 3E group was never given any direction as to how to playtest specific pieces of the rules, and we tried games with few encounters as well as games with many, many encounters. Our direction was to find what worked "best" at various levels, and this was the input they used to correlate relative ECLs and CRs.