Quote from: estar;414458I thought that was way cool when I first read about that and in the few 3.X campaign I ran my prestige classes were exactly that. Specialized classes reflecting on the various organizations, religions, or cultures of the Majestic Wilderlands.

Then in later 3.X books I went "What the hell happened?".

I've seen players develop a new PrC with the DM for an organization their PC founded, which was my favorite application of the idea.

Lately I've been giving more thought to how (I've been thinking b/x D&D but it's a pretty general idea) to better implement gaining abilities through adventuring more than through leveling. I.E. instead of spending a feat, duel with a master. Or pull off some stunt in the heat of the moment, add a version of it to your repertoire.

Today's dinner was a light risotto with calamari, shrimps and duck liver, plus a local chardonnay. The evening was beautifully clear and warm for November, and some street musicians were playing classical music across the square. Relaxing. ... Oysters? That's very "30s rich people", wonderful for the zeitgeist.

But to business:

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;414313But the one major 1e grognard complaint that I really feel has merit is the whole "magic item economy" thing. Hinging on just one stupid little sentence in the DMG, many came to the conclusion that it's open season for magic items at the local bazaar. Now magic items are part of the character build, and a "standard load out" of magic items came from it.

Bingo. It is a cultural issue, but one that, along with builds, has strongly shaped expectations about the game and how it should be run. It is not in the system, and it did not occur to me as normative on my reading of the 3.0 books. (I allow the purchase and sale of magic items, but my model is "you find this weird thing in this dusty rat-hole, and it will cost you money that's more than your life is worth in these parts, but it may just be something very cool to have it", not fantasy Wal Mart.) The books themselves discuss options and explain fairly well what effects they have on play, and one reading that's very much there but which fell out of favour due to changing culture is a world of status quo encounters, random treasure charts (right there in the book, and prominently) and a whole lot of death.

3e also took an explicit 180 degree turn on some things 2e plain got wrong in the blueprints part; not just demons, devils, random encounters and dungeons, but a whole lot of DMing advice such as:

Quote[Adventure] Structure
Good structure:
- choices
- different sorts of encounters
- exciting events
- encounters that make use of PC abilities
Bad structure:
- leading the PCs by the nose
- PCs as spectators
- deus ex machina
- preempting the players' abilities

Aside from "encounters that make use of PC abilities", which should be "encounters that present an open situation with several possible approaches", this is not just a sound list for creating adventures, but a praise of 1st edition's virtues and a strong criticism of post-1984 TSR practices. The campaign- and world-building advice is not as inspiring as EGG's prose, but it is a functional and well-structured introduction for creating good "adventure fantasy" worlds. And there is even a nod to genre-bending with alternate weapon lists with SMGs, grenade launchers and even lasers. There is a significant consciously pro-1st edition direction to a lot of the game, and especially the DMG, that goes beyond name-dropping (which is the current way), and tries to restore or reflect on classical design ideas to prominence. It is almost like a checklist of the 1e DMG with someone asking, "okay, how do I add that to our overhauled system".

It does not get everything right - for instance, the DMG's remark that "encounters with more than a dozen creatures are difficult to judge" removes the fun of facing dozens of enemies and living to tell about it, and I think the system works better if you remove the upper 50% of the 18-level power scale from active campaigning - but it is good enough for a good old school game experience. Which is what Necromancer Games and later Goodman built their business on, and they were the two most prominent adventure publishers on the scene before Paizo's adventure paths (although IMO Necro was much closer spiritually than GG, who got the trade dress right but often added really meh content).

The question is, where did that part of the scene disappear to? Did they move on to the modern D&D paradigm? Old school systems? Still playing but not posting much? Dead due to 3.0's carcinogenic binding? Hm. That early 3.0 scene is something I am, oddly, nostalgic about.

Quote from: estar;414458I thought that was way cool when I first read about that and in the few 3.X campaign I ran my prestige classes were exactly that. Specialized classes reflecting on the various organizations, religions, or cultures of the Majestic Wilderlands.

Then in later 3.X books I went "What the hell happened?".

Many people started to react that way. I reacted the same way you did. That's when I started to look more towards LA or C&C, which would eventually bring me back to AD&D and OD&D. I know that Monte Cook became keenly aware of the way things went south very early on in that regard, because he tried to address this issue multiple times through his website's reviews and columns. Which was a bit like fighting windmills, since the game was out there, via WotC's ownership and the OGL, for good or for ill.

Quote from: Benoist;4144203e itself doesn't break down the archetype. It tries to strengthen it. Things like level-dipping, multi-classes-PrCs characters were a side-effect of the design. In the core books, PrCs were for instance intended as ways for the characters' mechanics to be tied to the game world. PrCs reflect some groups or organizations, and the characters become part of them, thus opening themselves to the possibility of gaining specific levels in the class.

I am ambiguous about it. The multiclassing system gets around a lot of the problems that AD&D solved with new classes or kits, and if we are brutally honest, we can extend that understanding to paladins (fighter/cleric), rangers (fighter/druid, but it could be a fighter/thief if you want more Robin Hood than Aragorn) and assassins (fighter/thief). If you want to play any character type from "the standard D&D setting", the 3.0 class system can do it except maybe a real 1e-style illusionist. Ironically, it also solves the problem of demihuman level limits, which 3e removed: characters who reach their level cap simply change into another class, horrible hangup lots of people had with D&D solved instantly.

But yes, it easily upsets the archetype system and pushes players in a more "who am I?" direction than 1st edition's "here I am, now what do I do?". (The answer is: "I become an amoral cutthroat because the GP-->XP+training rule and the source literature say so".) It also allows level-dipping, which in our campaign produced Narg the Paladin/Monk/Sorcerer/Fighter/Thief/Ranger, until the character's goddess bitch-slapped him into reason, allowing to convert that abomination into Paladin levels.

With respect to prestige classes, I understood them as an adaptation of the advanced classes from the Wizardry CRPGs (Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Thief --> Samurai, Bishop, Lord, Ranger and Ninja). In a campaign, Benoist's interpretation is the way they really ought to be used (and that's what happened in our games). Basically, a PrC should give a player something unique for in-game accomplishments and perseverance, which in turn reinforces the PC<->campaign connection and makes the particular character more valuable, because by Jove, you earned that special elite status, here are your chevrons and beret. You know, prestige. If the concept is treated as a salad bar of purely mechanically relevant character building options, the entire purpose is subverted into something different, which is what happened in practice.

Quote from: Melan;4144673e also took an explicit 180 degree turn on some things 2e plain got wrong in the blueprints part; not just demons, devils, random encounters and dungeons, but a whole lot of DMing advice such as:
...
Aside from "encounters that make use of PC abilities", which should be "encounters that present an open situation with several possible approaches", this is not just a sound list for creating adventures, but a praise of 1st edition's virtues and a strong criticism of post-1984 TSR practices.

Thanks for linking that thread. Excellent post, both here and in the OP there.

What you write here can be helpfully juxtaposed with Sett's point there:

Quote from: SettembriniI developed a similiar idea on the german blogosphere.
But it´s more centered on the unchangable elements in the games, around which meaning revolves and evolves around.
I called them cores of relevance.

In D&D, Money, XP and Hitpoints are the mechanical cores of relevance. Whereas conceptually, it´s death & power.

All things in D&D relate to death & power, rulings can be made any way, agreements reached, changes made. But they really all must heed death & power.
Because death & power are well defined, the whole world and game can derive meaning and relevance from it.
Changing the fundamental cores of relevance fucks with the game pretty hard. Look at 3.x: the core of relevance has been tempered with only slightly and it changed the way people play to the reactive tactical standard we all know.

What you reference above* is diametrically opposed to what Paizo is doing in their adventure paths (which is what Sett is referring to*), and yet they are the one company who keep the ruleset in print.
(*in the bit I bolded)


How close 3e is to AD&D is thus an unanswerable question, unless it's clear whose take on 3e we refer to. I can think of (at least) four takes:

Stage 1: original 3.0
Stage 2: WotC' take on 3.5 around 2003, still pretty close to Stage 1, but certain lines like "DM decides which rules to use and how strictly to use them" get excised - that's foreboding of things to come
Stage 3: the Paizo take over. Shackled City hits the scene. Really hard. There's an amazing post by Clark Peterson on how it's teaching DMs to see everything "anew". Boy, if only he knew how right he was.
Stage 4: WotC decides to re-enter the module  market late in 3.5's life cycle. Of course they know little better than to imitate their most successful competitor - Paizo. End result: modules are now a pre-arranged string of custom-tailored encounters. Only difference: Paizo interlaces these with cut scenes (which don't make a difference to "the story (TM)") whereas WotC says "scratch this, on to the fun!".

Quote from: Windjammer;414479Stage 3: the Paizo take over. Shackled City hits the scene. Really hard. There's an amazing post by Clark Peterson on how it's teaching DMs to see everything "anew". Boy, if only he knew how right he was.

I remember that! Clark was so enthusiastic. Really, really fired up on the "campaign in a book" idea, although pursuing that will'o'wisp wasn't good for Necro (it compromised their vision), and I think it tied the company down in projects that were very costly timewise. One of them is only being published now under a new imprint.

WRT campaign standards, Settembrini was right about them back in 2007, and from what I know from it, you appear right about stage 4. The openness of play from individual encounters to adventure situations ("scenarios") to campaigns is something I am personally really keen on, and based on the experiences of our campaign, I believe it can be used to build complex, rewarding games in a rather painless way. It is not easy to describe formally, but it is somehow about establishing a good flow that doesn't involve direct DM intervention, just taking PC and world actions to their logical conclusions in a game world (or space) where the result of actions are biased towards generating or escalating conflict (and hopefully an interesting resolution), which is of course the logic of adventure.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;414446Statements like this demonstrates you have no freaking clue what playing 3e was actually like. This is paranoid pre-3e-release mantra all over again.

The reality is I saw far less multi(/dual) classing in 3e than 1e. You no longer had multiclass combo tables, but the change to "levels as a zero sum resource" mades massive multiclassing very inefficient.

I really have to agree. A character who multi-classed that much would be complete crap at everything. Single-class characters in Pathfinder, in my experience, are significantly more potent than the multi-class or prestige class equivalents.

We have two casters in our play group, a mystic theurge (wizard / cleric / theurge) and a straight-up druid. The theurge can cast arcane and divine spells, ok, sure. But the druid has about half again the number of spells and can cast at least one level higher. Plus loads more class abilities. In a fight he'd wipe the floor with the theurge, hands down.

This seemed to be pretty much the case in 3.5, too, but even more so in PF. You could be a wizard / rogue / bard / ninja / superchanger, but there's no reason why you'd want to.

There are some nice things about MTs. I' have to look, but I think you are wrong about the number of spells. The MT should have a few more. Plus, they can carry a lot of the same spell which is awesome for long dungeons.

Being an 8th level character and being able to cast like 8 Dispel Magics, if you do it right, is pretty nice.

Quote from: Cranewings;414485There are some nice things about MTs. I' have to look, but I think you are wrong about the number of spells. The MT should have a few more. Plus, they can carry a lot of the same spell which is awesome for long dungeons.

Being an 8th level character and being able to cast like 8 Dispel Magics, if you do it right, is pretty nice.

Maybe the theurge player just bitches a lot then, because he's always going on about how he doesn't have enough spells.

Not saying the MT is a bad class, I still think the single-class druid is significantly more potent overall.

Quote from: Melan;414482I remember that! Clark was so enthusiastic. Really, really fired up on the "campaign in a book" idea, although pursuing that will'o'wisp wasn't good for Necro (it compromised their vision)

Let's not forget the final nail in the coffin, around March 2008:

QuoteMaybe you will be interested in our 4th Edition Iron Tower Adventure Path,
to be published through Paizo. That's right. Adventure Path. 4E.

It will be a continuation of what you will get a glimpse of in our free 4E
pdf intro adventure "Winter's Tomb."

It will have a setting larger than that from Shackled City. It wont be a
full world. Buy you'll be able to run a campaign in it.

Frozen wastes.
Ancient frost giant ruins.
Demonic gnolls.
Feral elves.
An aquirable stronghold for the PCs.
An epic weapon with a legendary secret.
Descent into the underdark.
Travel to the elemental planes of fire and ice.
And to the very gates of Hell itself.

Sound good?

Oh, and if you dont think we can do old school first edition feel with 4e,
think again. I guarantee it.

I am so geeked to support 4E, I can't even tell you... And just wait till
you see who is going to be helping me with this.
__________________
Clark Peterson
Necromancer Games
//www.necromancergames.com

(From an old Enworld post. Needless to say, retrieved from elsewhere, because Enworld shifts servers... regularly.)

An acquirable stronghold. Madness, I tell you, maaaadness!

... oh, hold on, I'm sure we can shoe horn it into something... manageable.

QuoteSTRONGHOLD
This large building resembles a stronghold.
Huge object. 20 squares x 30 squares
Keywords: Martial, Weapon, Plot
Effect: While within 2 squares of the stronghold, you receive +1 on Intimidiate, and +1 to AC.

Quote from: Windjammer;414491Let's not forget the final nail in the coffin, around March 2008:

I remember being very psyched about a 3.5 version of Tegel Manor coming out - at the time we were periodically playing Tegel in 3.5 with the DM converting more or less on the fly, but I was interested then at how NG would "3.5 it up." Then 4e/GSL issues seemed to finally devour it somewhere on its alreadly slow march to release.

Quote from: Insufficient Metal;414486Maybe the theurge player just bitches a lot then, because he's always going on about how he doesn't have enough spells.

Not saying the MT is a bad class, I still think the single-class druid is significantly more potent overall.

A second level mystic theurge, assuming 16s for his attributes, including his domain spells and bonded object, would have 4 first, 3 second, and three third level arcane spells + 5 first, 4 second, and 3 third level spells, for a total of 22 spells, including 6 third level spells.

An eight level druid with an 18 Wisdom would have and an elemental domain (which is a bad choice over the animal companion in my opinion, but just to compete) would have 6 first level, 5 second level, 5 third level, and 4 fourth level spells, for a total of 20 spells.

You know, I always thought it was a bigger difference than that. I guess the mystic is really getting hosed. 4 Fourth level spells beats the ever living shit out of anything you can do with some extra second and third... like cast Freedom of Movement on the whole party...

Quote from: Cranewings;414510You know, I always thought it was a bigger difference than that. I guess the mystic is really getting hosed. 4 Fourth level spells beats the ever living shit out of anything you can do with some extra second and third... like cast Freedom of Movement on the whole party...

Yeah, not to mention that at 15th level our druid can turn into a huge fire elemental on command.

Holy Guacemole, three years and finally someone read that core of relevance post. Also, wasn't there a fucker-douchebag who said i didn't predict it all in 2007?

Anyhoo, I need to make a longer post on the cores of relevance, because the wording is still confusing.

Explanation by example: (I fear that is old, too): Battletech = Mechs & ultimately, their Factories. All meaning in BattleTech is derived from MechFactories.

In D&D its levelled guys and gold, used to be (AD&D) levelled guys and their armies of monsters and mercenaries.

Oh yeah, and the currency for that core is HPs for D&D and spare parts for BT. Now, with 4e one can say all the fun stuff aka shortcuts have been annihamearlsed.

4e is like BT without crits. "Cocpit hits are no fun, lets remove the hit locations!" "Ammo hits are unfun, lets introduce unexploding ammo!"

Now...waidaminute...