Quote from: mcbobbo;571553Okay, so I haven't seen AD&D since high school, but is this actually in the rules?

Not at all.  The concepts do clash though, which is why D&D has had a hard time with skills.

Quote from: mcbobbo;571548I'm not sure this is RAW.  And if it isn't, why would this level of fiat be any more/less effective than the good old, "don't be a dick, this isn't a character building contest"?

Oh i was more thinking about a way to deal with those players for whome your comment falls on deaf ears(since they were probably far too busy looking up feat chains in their splats at the time to listen to you), obviously we cant kill them all and take their stuff(even if it would make things alot easier) as that would both lose you a couple of players(not all of them due to death) and make a mess at the table

Quote from: mcbobbo;571550So you don't do NWPs in your AD&D?

...if... I was to use "skills" for a D&D-ish game I'd most likely use the skill rules from the original Empire of the Petal Throne (most oldschool D&D system).

But otherwise, as much of a dick DM as I am, we all just assume the PCs know how to ride horses, swim and build campfires, and use a PCs' ability scores, level, background *, the mechanics of the game itself, and experiences in actual play to adjudicate skill situations.

They're generally not needed. Specialist hirelings exist for a reason, hire an engineer to calculate the load weight of your castle walls. Thieves and Reality-Bending Supergeniuses and NPC Scholars all have the capacity to read languages. The reaction roll mechanics and what the players says their character actually does combined with what the DM knows of the particular situation "behind the curtain" can be used to adjudicate "Gather Information" and "Diplomacy".

If a DM is going to be a dick about such a rules light "skill system", well they'll be a dick about non-weapon proficiencies, or they'll be a dick when DMing 3E/4E/5E AND you get to avoid weird skill rules outlier artifacts like ladder climbing comedy and drowning in swimming pools AND players can generate characters even faster not even having to think about skills/NWPs.

* If it's a consideration, don't even think about optimizing/powergaming/munchkinism at my table.

Quote from: mcbobbo;571550So you don't do NWPs in your AD&D?

Hell, no.

Gawd, it was so ham-handed how NWPs were bolted to the weapon proficiency system ...down to using the same level progression as I remember.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;571572Hell, no.

Yeah, I don't really either.

Quote from: mcbobbo;571385At first I wanted to say, "I prefer 3E and am only sometimes an asshole."  But then it occurred to me that this could be why I don't often see eye-to-eye with some of the Paizo crowd...

Hmm...

Anyway, I can get behind the point that min/max'ers are assholes, and that 3E caters to min/max'ers very well, especially when you include metric assloads of splat.

However, in my time on the internet, I have always found the WW gamers to be far less approachable...

My primary games are White Wolf, especially Mage and I think I'm quite approachable.  As for Dnd I prefer 3x (Fantasy Craft and Pathfinder) then 2e and have never been thought of as an asshole when I'm serious but yes 3x does attract a particular subset of player just like any specific edition.

Quote from: Doom;571411I think he was deliberately being wrong this time around, but, yeah, I can see it going either way.

Yes I was being deliberately wrong because you can say anything even remotely applicable to any edition of D&D and make the blanket statement that all people who do it are like that. However, that's stupid. It's a stupid idea. This thread is stupid. The idea that one way of playing imagination land is inherently better than someone else's is stupid. It's also a special kind of arrogant.

Quote from: MGuy;571584The idea that one way of playing imagination land is inherently better than someone else's is stupid. It's also a special kind of arrogant.

You mean like saying others who don't do it your way are playing "Magical Tea Party" and are just "waiting for the GM to pet them on the head", that kind of thing? I agree it's pretty douchey.

Quote from: Bill;571363My girlfriends all leave me because "I am too nice" or "It's me, not you"

I can't pin it on 3E

I hate to break it to you, but...

Quote from: Declan MacManus3rd edition...the people for whom it is the game of choice are assholes.

...chicks dig assholes.

Quote from: daniel_reamThis is why I stopped playing Champions (and DC Heroes, and Mutants & Masterminds).

Point-buy was popular when 3e came out, and I feel like it was intentional that 3e be similar to a point-buy system while retaining its' 2e-isms.

Quote from: Rum CoveClass-based and Skill-based are incompatible.

By the same logic Class-based and Ability Score-based are also incompatible.  If the two key components of what constitutes the character's abilities are race and class, with heavy emphasis on the latter then ability scores are also contradictory.  

It would make a lot more sense to say that "Fighters are strong" and "Wizards are smart" than it is to rely on the player to roll or assign appropriately strong and smart fighters and wizards respectively.

Class and skill only conflict due to de-linking class from the system's metric of competency.  Except ability scores also do this.  

They really add nothing to the game and would make generating characters all that much faster.

Quote from: Benoist;571521These "obvious reasons" aren't so obvious to me. Care to state them?

I'll attempt to clarify. [lame excuse tag] It's late and I'm packing for GenCon so I'll be brief. [/lame excuse]

4E changed the game: there weren't any more V/S/M casting requirements for wizards. So the "problem" with players/GMs ignoring them and "unbalancing" the wizard class WRT fighters became a non-issue. My understanding is that this was a design decision taken because those V/S/M casting requirements had been consistently unpopular in previous editions of D&D.

My own experiences tend to confirm this: throughout my days of playing 1E/2E/3E (and 3.5) I seldom saw anyone use casting requirements; most gamers I played with considered them to be "no fun." A few GMs I ran across enforced them in such a way as to make the wizard class nearly unplayable, which just turned everyone off them that much harder. When I ran 2E, I did it "by the book" and used the casting requirements without making them completely unplayable. After a good deal of bitching and moaning, my players found out the "rules as written" worked just fine... much to everyone's surprise. My personal opinion is that a lot of things in 2E that were unpopular were actually just hard to implement properly.

Quote from: Benoist;571586You mean like saying others who don't do it your way are playing "Magical Tea Party" and are just "waiting for the GM to pet them on the head", that kind of thing? I agree it's pretty douchey.

Consider this. I never said playing Magical Tea Party is an inherently bad thing just that it doesn't make THE ACTUAL RULES OF THE GAME any better. In fact I went as far as to say you can't make rules for everything but when you are talking about whether or not rules are balanced or functional that stating your capacity for playing Magic Tea Party does not forgive the rules in question.

I note that you probably have some lame onetruewayismm response to this but this response is so that other people don't get confused about my actual position on the subject.

Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;571592I'll attempt to clarify. [lame excuse tag] It's late and I'm packing for GenCon so I'll be brief. [/lame excuse]

4E changed the game: there weren't any more V/S/M casting requirements for wizards. So the "problem" with players/GMs ignoring them and "unbalancing" the wizard class WRT fighters became a non-issue. My understanding is that this was a design decision taken because those V/S/M casting requirements had been consistently unpopular in previous editions of D&D.

My own experiences tend to confirm this: throughout my days of playing 1E/2E/3E (and 3.5) I seldom saw anyone use casting requirements; most gamers I played with considered them to be "no fun." A few GMs I ran across enforced them in such a way as to make the wizard class nearly unplayable, which just turned everyone off them that much harder. When I ran 2E, I did it "by the book" and used the casting requirements without making them completely unplayable. After a good deal of bitching and moaning, my players found out the "rules as written" worked just fine... much to everyone's surprise. My personal opinion is that a lot of things in 2E that were unpopular were actually just hard to implement properly.

I think some of it had to do with us being teenagers and just dumping stuff from the game that should have been more carefully considered. I think V/S/M components are not that hard to implement in a game without making it unplayable from the get go. It does require some amount of thinking before hand on the part of the DM. From my own experience, it's the kind of stuff that was more or less found out as the game was played by checking out this or that spell at the table because neither the DMG nor the PH had entirely been read by the DM or players (while assuming they just knew the game), and then acting with surprise going "WTF is this shit?!" and just dumping it in the first few minutes of consideration. Likewise elements like demi-human level limits, Wp v. AC table, weapon speeds, etc.

I don't think it says as much about the game as it says about us being kids.

Quote from: MGuy;571594Consider this.

Fuck you, weasel. Crawl back to your hole and let those who can actually post without deforming the shit out of what each other is saying talk, will you? You will not fuck around and try to slither your way out of your persistent assholery on this board. You have been consistently playing us like we are a bunch of fucking morons, and you're trying it again now. I don't care to play your little game right now. Go fap on some white room scenario somewhere.

He is an expert on a special kind of arrogance as opposed to his "expertise" at 3E spells...