Quote from: StormBringer;377392I dunno, honestly, I don't have the older versions.  I was under the impression that it has a fairly wonky set of rules that, while not as Byzantine as AD&D or Rolemaster, aren't exactly streamlined, either.

I think we might need some new terminology for this stuff.  With apologies to Clash, I think he has a valid question, it may just be one I am not answering.  I think I have a different question in my mind about all this, so perhaps a new thread regarding that would be in order.

Nah; T&T is super-simple. I mean, there's a spell list, but the core rules are teeny. Which is not to say it's a rules-lite game, per se. I think you're right, there are terminology issues.

Quote from: beejazz;377387I don't know what to tell you about the mentality that characters should be uniformly powerful. The old toughness alone should tell you that wasn't the intention of the design. For me and mine, we reserved the term broken for the truly absurd, knew the math well enough to know the designers didn't know shit, and half of us tinkered with the system until it was unrecognizeable.

The problem with 3x in this regard isn't that some characters are more powerful than others, its that some characters are so much more powerful they essentially weren't playing the same game as the weaker characters anymore. It wasn't a problem of nature, but degree. The degree to which overpowered/weak characters could occur was unacceptable, and unacceptable imbalance could occur simply by playing the game as intended.

And yet it's only a "problem" for mindless fucking sheep who buy every piece of shit splatbook Wizards pumps out.

Funny that.

Quote from: J Arcane;377567And yet it's only a "problem" for mindless fucking sheep who buy every piece of shit splatbook Wizards pumps out.

Funny that.

You can break the game in two with a Druid or Wizard with just the PHB.

The only way 3.x doesn't break is if you have a gentleman's agreement in place to not break the game, or for everyone to break the game to an equal degree.

Quote from: Aos;377384At least Ed will get laid.

Never had a problem with that - but thank you for the kind thoughts.

In all the discussion, GURPS seems to have not been declared "old school" or "new school" in its design style.

- Ed C.

You took me off your IL?
That's cheating.

Quote from: Thanlis;377543Nah; T&T is super-simple. I mean, there's a spell list, but the core rules are teeny. Which is not to say it's a rules-lite game, per se. I think you're right, there are terminology issues.

This is why I prefer to use 'vintage games'.  On the one hand, it is distinct from the OSR, so it's already about more than just D&D.  Secondly, I use it to delimit a specific time-frame:  80s and earlier.  Pretty much anything from 1989 or before is a 'vintage game'.  Right on the cusp of 2nd edition AD&D, in that regard, but before White Wolf demonstrated that TSR wasn't the only game in town.

So, for me, that catches most of the stuff I want to discuss (over at the Citadel, for sure).  Part of that is due to enlisting in the Air Force in '89, so there wasn't a lot of time to keep up on the hobby for at least a year through basic and tech school.  By the time I was getting back around to it, the landscape had changed pretty drastically, and the newer games didn't hold much appeal.  Had I been continuously involved, it might have been a different story.

Quote from: Koltar;377579Never had a problem with that - but thank you for the kind thoughts.

In all the discussion, GURPS seems to have not been declared "old school" or "new school" in its design style.

- Ed C.

That is because GURPS is crap and no one likes it.

Quote from: Aos;377582You took me off your IL?
That's cheating.

A person's IL should be unpredictable.

Besides - apparently you and I seem to agree on liking TRAVELLER. (At least in another thread)


- Ed C.

Quote from: Tavis;377334At some point - and it'd be interesting to think about the circumstances that led to this - it became really common for 3.x players to say "this is broken". Balancing challenges and equalizing everyone's awesome was clearly a job for a precision machine. You couldn't trust third party designers to get it right, and they're professionals; why should you expect yourself or your neighborhood DM to do a better job? The BIY mentality was that you had to look to official sources to avoid the dreaded possibility of brokenness.

As someone who has played and designed many homebrew games for years, I never felt comfortable just winging it with 3.5 because it was so it was so tightly integrated.  In fact, if I were to run 3.5 again, I probably wouldn't use anything but the PHB material for classes and that includes not using the rest of the material from WotC.

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;377572You can break the game in two with a Druid or Wizard with just the PHB.

The only way 3.x doesn't break is if you have a gentleman's agreement in place to not break the game, or for everyone to break the game to an equal degree.

That's reasonably common for RPG systems, really. With 4e, elf rangers one-shotted Orcus before the PHB was even released.  Then there's orbizards. Generally speaking, if your players are jerks they will break a system.

Anyway in any design, there's a tradeoff between flexibility and balance, just like there is for playability vs. realism. Also, the more safeguards a system has engineered into it to prevent characters becoming uber, the harder it becomes for NPCs to catch up with a PC who does still manage to get ahead of the power curve.

QuoteGenerally speaking, if your players are jerks they will break a system.

Exactly.  Time was, this was acknowledged as a social problem, and dealt with like one.

Now it's dealt with as a mechanical problem, players whine about how "broken" something is, and demand designers fix it, and the problem is that it's a completely futile task that can only be accomplished by stripping every bit of mechanical differentiation from the system.

Frankly I think the fetish for OD&D's 1d6 weapons even shows shades of this.

Quote from: J Arcane;377567And yet it's only a "problem" for mindless fucking sheep who buy every piece of shit splatbook Wizards pumps out.

Funny that.

I don't think any of us owned the entire supplement line. Just two or three books for each of us. If we went out and bought something, we tried to get something nobody had yet. And we borrowed a bunch. And... y'know... we were discriminating customers who knew the math, read the books ahead of time in the store, and would just skip the absolutely stupid stuff. Or (for those of us that didn't know the math at the time) would just get the stuff we were interested in (UA, and Heroes of Horror for me... wanted to get Lords of Madness but somebody already had it). Or most of us did that anyway.

But really, this can be a problem for anyone who has even just two supplements.

You really think in a bunch of high school kids each has several hundred dollars to drop on this stuff?

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;377612That's reasonably common for RPG systems, really. With 4e, elf rangers one-shotted Orcus before the PHB was even released.  Then there's orbizards. Generally speaking, if your players are jerks they will break a system.

Anyway in any design, there's a tradeoff between flexibility and balance, just like there is for playability vs. realism. Also, the more safeguards a system has engineered into it to prevent characters becoming uber, the harder it becomes for NPCs to catch up with a PC who does still manage to get ahead of the power curve.

Trying to safeguard a system against abuse is not only futile, it gets in the way of everyone, good and bad players alike. S. John Ross told me that back in 2001 or so, and I never forgot it. Design the games for the good players, not for the bad players.

-clash

Quote from: beejazz;377642You really think in a bunch of high school kids each has several hundred dollars to drop on this stuff?

Don't be silly. They DL them for free off a torrent site, just like their music and their movies.

-clash