Quote from: Soylent Green;339191I got to say I find it hard to imagine D&D thieves in the middle ages. Remove trap? What traps did they have in the middle ages?

The character that Mathew Broderick played in LADYHAWKE , Philippe the Mouse, would work quite well as a Basic D&D character.


- Ed C.

Quote from: beejazz;339222I dunno, some things seemed disingenuous, like the reading of blindfight (even before the 50% miss chance, you've got 1/9 odds of picking the right square to attack, assuming there's even anyone there to attack).

I can totally understand that some things just don't click sometimes. For me it's the "mundane extraordinaries" being encounters/dailies in 4e. Hell, Vancian magic has never clicked with me for I'm sure very similar reasons.

And I can think of plenty of things in 3e... but usually once you get into supplements and prestige classes. Nothing irks me more than the overabundance of energy damage. Ooh... the bard might be a good core example. The idea that singing is inherently magical? WTF?


Sure I was nitpicky, but I didn't mean to start a fight or anything. Just saying that my 3.5 games see characters falling great distances and (almost) drowning in a puddle unconscious while the party can barely hold their ground against an undead onslaught upstairs, or cielings caving in on people who are then pinned and swarmed by centipedes. Hardly the realm of "superhuman just 'cause."

yeah i agree with the bard thing. i should have quoted that instead.  Since we don't play prestige classes, I was short of examples at my fingertips, other than the general melding of magic and swordplay i see so often.   I just went ot the feats list and found ones that seems to not make sense like shooting 2 arrows at once, or hitting a few people with the same effectiveness with one swing.

Quote from: Joethelawyer;339216Didn't figure it would get into nitpicky fights.

You do realize where you are posting right?

Quote from: Bookwyrm;339229You do realize where you are posting right?

yeah i know.    i tried to make it as inoffensive and non-judgmental and personal to only me myself and i as possible.  it's admittedly a completely subjective post, yet meant to offend no one.   alas...

Quote from: Joethelawyer;339216To pick apart someone's subjective basis for their tastes is a waste of time.  I figured people would post replies talking about their personal basis for why they like the editions they like best. Didn't figure it would get into nitpicky fights.

Now why would you figure that?

I liked D&D. Looking at it now i see a lot of WTF bits, but in the day i had a lot of fun playing it. I'd pick up the dice right now to play a one-shot or two just for fun. I was always unhappy with Vancian magic and other elements that were only explainable in game mechanics.

When AD&D came out i jumped on it. It expanded the scope of D&D, but that expansion began to strain some of the points i had difficulty with in D&D. More things were explicitly dealt with by the rules and a fair portion of those were explainable only as rules. Hit points for me went from odd abstraction to annoyance. High level characters virtually immune to death by falling or other environmental means that should be unaffected by how great a swordsman they are? Fine until dead? (Addressed in 4E with 'bloodied'. Thank you. But what the fuck are healing surges? A game simulating itself. A rule anchored solely in other rules.) Expansions and setting just added more rules that reference only rules. I played some of the extra rules at other tables, but i never added them to my library.

AD&D2e cleaned up the rules, but it did not simplify them. I largely gave 2e a miss as it was improving the aspects of the game i didn't enjoy.

I tried D&D3e and 3.5. In both cases i found the game had become even more self referential than ever. Powers, traits, and feats that were rule effects first and last. I found all the cool things you could do in the rules restricted the cool things you could do. If your character didn't have the rule, you couldn't be cool.

I've only glanced at 4E. From that glance and from what its advocates say, it sounds as if it has progressed even further down the path of modelling itself.

Yes, i'm a pansy storyteller. I don't like rule gamesmanship to be a significant factor in the cool things my character can do. I like rules that support my decisions quickly, cleanly, and with a minimum of fuss. I frequently got into trouble in 3.0 and 3.5 using tactics that made sense in the real world (or the real world plus fantastic bits) but were woefully suboptimal compared to rule-on-rule tweeks. I happily think in the rules when playing Pente or Carcassonne, but when playing an RPG i want to think in the story.

When measured against my tastes, i have found the default style of play each successive edition of D&D to be more focused on the rules and less on the adventure. The pieces on a chess board move the way they do because that is how pieces on a chess board move. In a roleplaying game, i'm looking for something that will let me resolve decision points in an adventure. To my tastes, each successive edition of D&D has moved towards the game piece and away from the character.

The rules have certainly improved from edition to edition. 4E is a much more sophisticated game than AD&D1e was. But if AD&D1e was purple, 4E has distilled out the red whereas what i liked in AD&D1e was the blue.

I think i had a very similar trajectory to you, Joe, but for different reasons. While you found each edition more fantastic, i found each edition more self-referential. They are not entirely dissimilar complaints. While it sounds like you disliked fantastic elements that referred only to themselves, i disliked any aspect of the rules that referred only to itself.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;339183The idea that earlier editions better model historical reality is unfounded. The cleric is based on 70's exploitation films, and how elves, dwarves and the catoblepas fit into England: 1345 is unclear.

D&D has always owed more to the apocryphal Wild West than anything historical.

Monsters, however, do help portray the world that many people believed they inhabited in the Middle Ages.  D&D pulls the alternate history trick by assuming that there really were monsters in the wilderness and gnomes underground, rather than just disease, coal gas explosions and more humans.

Quote from: beejazz;339205I have exactly the opposite problem. If a character has one ability, you can extrapolate everything else they can do in a game like that. "Hey look, he's climbing a wall... he must also be able to hide in shadows, backstab, and steal stuff."

Unrelated skill sets get linked in silly ways in a one class system. I prefer skill systems myself.

OD&D/Swords & Wizardry deserves a shout-out here.  Using those systems, a fighting man can be anything the player wishes: a warrior, a scout, a burglar, a swashbuckler...

3E, IMO, became too complicated and tiresome in trying to get around the the part-and-parcel nature of classes by using extensive skills.

Quote from: beejazz;339205I have exactly the opposite problem. If a character has one ability, you can extrapolate everything else they can do in a game like that. "Hey look, he's climbing a wall... he must also be able to hide in shadows, backstab, and steal stuff."

Unrelated skill sets get linked in silly ways in a one class system. I prefer skill systems myself.

This is why I started playing and GMing Runequest back in the day. With the RQ skills system, I could have a Wizard who also trained to use a sword. Or A thief with a spell or two. That and the mixed armor system, where you could piece together different armor types.

Pre-3.5 D&D was a lot of good things, but "realistic" wasn't one of them.

That you have character classes at all is the first loopiness in realism terms.

Quote from: Hairfoot;339239OD&D/Swords & Wizardry deserves a shout-out here.  Using those systems, a fighting man can be anything the player wishes: a warrior, a scout, a burglar, a swashbuckler...

I have to agree with this.  The back to basics campaign that I'm working on will eliminate the thief class.  IMO you can just play a fighter who sneaks.  Most thief functions can be roleplayed without requiring specific skills or rules.  Likewise you can rule that anyone attacking somone from behind and unwares with a melee weapon gets the effect of a backstab.  Of course, the fighter in platemail is unlikely to achieve this while the fighter in leather armour who told the DM he is sneaking into position has a good chance of pulling it off.

Quote from: beejazz;339205I have exactly the opposite problem. If a character has one ability, you can extrapolate everything else they can do in a game like that. "Hey look, he's climbing a wall... he must also be able to hide in shadows, backstab, and steal stuff."

Unrelated skill sets get linked in silly ways in a one class system. I prefer skill systems myself.

Unless of course you take levels in more than one class.

I don't recall if you could do that in Red Box or not, but you could in 1e AD&D.

Quote from: The Shaman;339248Unless of course you take levels in more than one class.

I don't recall if you could do that in Red Box or not, but you could in 1e AD&D.

Red Box, no, though a race like elf had both fighter and magic user abilities but then again, if you saw someone with pointy ears you could extrapolate what they could do...

Quote from: Joethelawyer;339195Judging by the responses I've gotten so far, perhaps its just a shittily written article, trying to explain things the way my warped noggin understands them.

I like what you said in the abstract, but I don't agree with your examples.
 
For me, it was WotC's self avowed goal of creating a D&D fantasy style that was distinct from the real life middle ages, whereas IIRC, older D&D games had 40,000 kinds of polearms because if it was good enough for an unabridged dictionary, it's good enough for D&D! And if vorpal blades went snicker snack and chopped off heads of jabberwocks then by golly so would the D&D version. And generaly speaking, I had a sense that even if I didn't know the original source, the 17 kinds of lanterns with their similar but slightly different rates of oil consumption, and resistance to gusts of wind were obviously based off of some kind of real world lanterns.
 
Oh right, my point. Wheras WotC tried to escape those medievalisms by creating a fantasy world. Other pundits have argued that the current D&Dtheme turned out too dungeonpunk, too anime, or too RAWR! but it did succeed in purging the medievalisms that were forever creeping into D&D. Which is great if you don't want to forever argue the mechanical differences between recurved, composite, and oriental bows and debate the merits of using grease pencils v.s. chalk v.s. bits of thread to map dungeons.

Quote from: Joethelawyer;339195Judging by the responses I've gotten so far, perhaps its just a shittily written article, trying to explain things the way my warped noggin understands them.  

to use a metaphor
We see you trying to rake leaves with an ice-chisel, and wonder why you're unwilling to consider a rake, and generally find your explanation that an ice-chisel is simple and gets the job done incredulous.

Many games do 1300's europe far easier, with cleaner rules, and wonder why you are so fixated that Red Box D&D is the only game for you.

Especially since Europe has a group you haven't covered... those who toil. They are not fighters; no kack with weapons. They are not theives; no ability to hide nor sneak. They are surely not wizards; they can't read, write, nor cast. They are not clerics; many accused them of having been forsaken by God for their poverty and squalor. D&D represents them as mere faceless nithings... and prohibits playing them. But they can be fun to play, and further, many good stories don't follow the hero's journey model of D&D character development.

Me, I genuinely don't understand why you feel the way you do, but I certainly grock that it's "good enough for you"... but it's not anywhere close to good enough for me at doing 1300's europe. Nor Conan, unless you ban clerics and wizards. It's its own thing, and that thing is unlike almost every fantasy world that predates it. (A few after do a damned good job of replicating it, tho... The Cups and Sworcery series, for example...)

Quote from: Spinachcat;339187If you are looking to game in 1345, play Warhammer Roleplay.

That's not the gist of Joe's posting as I read it. (Though I'll admit at once that the posting is too elusive to admit it nailing down to one reading.) My impression is that Joe wants UK 1345 in his game at a certain level, with further layers on top. Maybe this metaphor is bullshit, maybe it isn't. Perhaps all he meant is that player characters don't start that remotely from England 1345 (btw why not go for 1234 if you're going to hit 4 consecutive numerals on your keyboard anyhow?) but can outgrow it. (Which is one thing Warhammer characters rarely can - they are stuck in the shit, no?) Is that so remote from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions? Wasn't that a complaint of 4E designers (as per Races & Classes) that prior to 4E's advent, the D&D world was "medieval Europe with a thin layer of magic on top" when it should have been more fantastic to begin with (flying rocks and purple skies)?

My main prob with wanting a game rooted in, but capable of outgrowing 1345, would be that in D&D 3.5 PCs outgrow this 1345 too fast. By level 3 at latest they're doing crazy stuff. However, as for rooting the game more firmly in 1345, I'd suggest going the way of "Heroes are Made, not Born". That's a DungeonCrawlClassic by Goodman Games which has the PCs start out as 1st level NPCs (they take a single level of warrior, adept, or whatsitsname). If they survive the adventure, they can replace that NPC level with a PC level (no change to hit points). That's only a brief delay of "outgrowing 1345" but it's on the right track. Some people are doing something similar to 4E, by "retro-downgrading" 1st level PCs and let them advance thrice before they hit PC level 1 (so players start out with low hp, no special powers, only basic attacks etc.).

Quote from: Joethelawyer;339216To pick apart someone's subjective basis for their tastes is a waste of time.  I figured people would post replies talking about their personal basis for why they like the editions they like best. Didn't figure it would get into nitpicky fights.

Reasonable people have reasonable foundations for their opinions, and by presenting those opinions in public, they accept that those opinions and their foundations will be investigated and critiqued when found wanting by others.

To put it simply: The reasons you like OD&D are not particularly good ones. They rely on a misunderstanding of the origin, development, and rules of the game. The number of exceptions you allow to your premise renders it meaningless as a reason for liking the game. Why Vancian spellcasting wizards are more appropriate for UK 1345 than epic heroes wielding superhuman powers is unclear. Why trap-disarming thieves who belong to guilds are more appropriate than half-demons is also unclear.

Either your understanding of England's state in 1345 is bizarre, or your understanding of D&D's divergence from the historical record is insufficient.

Now, that said, you may be more comfortable with a certain set of tropes due to habitual exposure, but that's not what you said, and it's of little intrinsic interest to anyone else.