If you were going to play a WOTC Edition, which one would it be?
For me, it would either be 3.0 or 5.0 Without Feats or Prestige Classes. 3.5 was just a rewrite of 3.0 with more pages to read. Neither was perfect.
What kind of game do you want to play with it? I found 4e combat to be fine, but out of combat it was garbage.Both 3e and 3.5e were flexible and detailed but had trap options and suffered from too many supplements bloating the lines. Beyond that, spellcasters vastly overshadowed non-casters. And 5e is basically the compromise version of D&D. It's not the best at anything, but it's (generally) not thr worst st anything either.
I played the absolute shit out of 3e/3.5, and there's some great memories there. It came out at the perfect time, when I was old enough to have a steady stream of disposable income, and young enough to be carelessly stupid with it. 3.5 was the better version, addressing some balance issues and ironing out some of the rough edges. Some things, like Grappling, still sucked ass, and the content bloat got ridiculous.
Core 5e is fine, but the system is starting to suffer from the same thing that killed 3e: useless bloat and power creep. If I had to pick between the two, I'd probably go with core 5e (with a few things pulled from Xanathar's and Mordenkainen's). It's just more streamlined and the subclasses offer players a nice variety of options (though I'd probably rewrite a few of them to better balance the classes). I would also ban Feats.
Easy, WotC Basic 5e. Everything simplified, robust, flexible for GM adjustment and adjudication, and most important... evergreen free.
Everything else is a pale shadow of utility. For playable content for Basic 5e just go third party products, pick & choose used 5e books (slim pickings), or port over better older TSR D&D content.
Edit: Oh, I would include the Basic 5e MtG setting conversion guidelines. They are not robust enough to fix MtG settings into something with tight canon, and that is for the best as it leaves things flexible. If you are a big MtG lore nerd you can go crazy because you already know the stories. If you just like the art and cards and wanna spin out your imagination from there with a few special rules, the Basic 5e setting conversions are so threadbare that your personalized planes and canon is easily placeable upon the card set lists and barebones rule suggestions.
5e D&D is my main game, I just try to avoid the later Crawfordian stuff. I occasionally still play 4e D&D, but it's really hard to maintain a campaign, and it's very narrow in what it can do - I like sandboxing, and 4e REALLY hates sandboxing. I don't do 3e any more, the only version I really like is the 1e Pathfinder Beginner Box, which is level 1-5 only. An E6 3e game could also work well I guess.
Easily 5E (core only) + the first two Kobold Press monster collections. I have Xanathar's and would use it occasionally, but not any of the player stuff. Many of the options turned on to make the whole thing grittier than the defaults.
That's what I was running as my go to game until WotC made me so sick of them I couldn't even do that any more. I don't want to be the one encouraging another 30 plus people to buy the Players Handbook. When the current jerks running the company are all out on their asses or the D&D license passes to someone else, I might run it again someday. Maybe. 6 books don't take up all that much room on the shelf.
For me, it's 3.5 D&D. It's got everything we want. I know it gets bloated with supplements and accessories, and third-party stuff. But that's only if you let it. We stick to mainly the PHB and maybe a handful (a couple of the Complete books, that's about it) of supplemental books, and that's the way we roll. My table likes the flow of combat, multiclassing (believe it or not), skill point allocation, and most of my players like how the races and classes are built.
We like 5e, also. But we have problems with the "sameyness," - to us, the classes start feeling the same after a while. The core mechanic is great, really. But the bloat...Jesus. I mean, we have the same choice as we do in 3.5 (ignoring what we don't want to use) but the group just prefers 3.5 more. Well, it's about 50/50, really, so we can't lose either way.
Yeah, It'd be core 5e for me as well.
I embraced 3.0 when it came out but stuck with it too long. I ended up hating the supplement mill, endless prestige classes, feats etc. I will say that the OGL gave rise to some good stuff.
4e was a joke for me. Just wasn't D&D.
But I liked 5 when it came out. But WotC had to wokify a good thing. Ah well. I'm glad I have the OSR.
For me it's 5th edition.
3.0 and 3.5 made me run away from D&D with it's overcomplication and the fact I truly believe the designers wanted to turn D&D back into Wargame.
4th edition was D&D the MMORPG which I could already plan on my computer with out dice, character sheets or other people.
So yes, 5th edition. Though something could be said about the original red box edition.
I guess I'm going to say core 3.0 but really, I just dislike WotC's design ethos, graphic design ethos, and general philosophy. The best D&D of the WotC era is OSRIC.
My preference would be for 3.5. That's not to say that it was perfect, but 3.0 did a lot of things right, and 3.5 incrementally improved on most of them. While content bloat was certainly an issue, 3.5 had more options than 3.0. Through low- to mid-levels, it played well and issues regarding caster power disparity didn't matter as much as they did at higher levels.
The main issues with 3.5 RAW tended to be around a reduction in the play space because of rules bloat, especially feats. In 2nd edition, you could describe trying to run along the back of a charging war mammoth to shoot arrows into its neck, but as soon as 'monster mounter' comes out as a feat a lot of GMs would say 'you can't do that without the feat'. That's not strictly a problem with the rules but more a way that it was implemented.
In 3.0, things like feats were brand-new, and it makes sense that they were extremely cautious with how many players got. Since so many feats provide just a minor benefit and they become a major way of defining different character archetypes, they should have given more in 3.5 (like 1/level).
Finally, 3.5 should have allowed attacks during movement (ie, a full attack should be allowed with a move, and your attacks should have been allowed before, during, and after the move). While that wouldn't solve caster supremacy issues, it would have allowed for more dynamism for martial characters and help keep the game functioning for a couple more levels.
But warts and all, it was a fun game and brought a lot of people into/back into the hobby. I personally got more enjoyment out of it than any other edition.
I'm torn between 3e and 5e. They each have their pros and cons, and they both SUCK for different (and sometimes overlapping) reasons, just like every edition of D&D. Both are too bloated (overlap), but in different ways. 3e can be way too crunchy sometimes and feat implementation SUCKS, but it has a more "D&D" feel to me, like a modernized version of it that still has vestiges of the old, like Attack Bonuses (replacing THAC0), Saving Throw progression, etc. Classes feel more distinct and there are somewhat more customization options, with Skills and Feats being more central than in 5e, but unfortunately the implementation sucks and they're a pain to work with in retrospect. I would have to revamp both of them if I were to touch 3e again, but I like the idea of them and won't play a game without them.
5e is way more streamlined at its core, but makes up for it by piling up fifty tons of class related bloat on top of that slimmed down core. The upside is that the core is so simple, and a lot of the class bloat is stretched out across levels, making it more simple to just pick up and go (specially as a player). I've been getting the urge to tinker with it, since I've played it recently, but I would probably change less of it than I would for 3e, making it the stronger contender.
With either one, I would probably trim down classes to just a core three or so (Warrior, Specialist and Mystic) given the chance*, then treat all specialized class stuff as either "subclasses" or feats (or a combination of both). I'm not a fan of prestige classes, so I would drop those as well, but I do like the 5e concept of subclasses. I just think that they could have implemented them better by trimming down the core classes, then treating all specialties as subclasses, making things more streamlined and manageable, while retaining a lot of the specialized options.
5e also has some cool options when it comes to handling spells that I'm starting to like better than earlier editions, like the option of using up higher level spell slots to strengthen lower level spells. Having all spells be unaffected by caster level was weird at first, but I like the fact that characters don't have to rely on their level for spells to be effective, which makes multiclassed and secondary casters a more viable alternative. But dedicated casters can still shine by having greater access to higher level spell slots, giving them more options and power.
Unlike many here I can't fathom a world without Feats (or their equivalent in other games), or what issue anyone could possibly have with them, other than crappy implementation. So if anything I would drop Ability Increases as a default and hand out Feats instead, then turn Ability Increases into a feat, and adjust all feats to match a +2 bonus to a score in terms of power.
*I actually started doing this for 3e a while back, along with a skill and feat revamp, but never finished. Though, it's near completion so I could just pick up where I left off if I ever went back to 3e. But I'd probably focus more on 5e for now, since it's the more viable option for finding players or if I want to publish it later on.
4e. 3e is just a volatile concoction nearly impossible to balance and implodes at higher levels. 5e is garbage that people project whatever they want on because it hits in the nostalgic fee-fees.
4e with its flaws is the best at what it sets out to be (and unlike 5e the goal isn't nostalgia bait).
5e including Xanathar's and excluding Tasha's. They hit a sweet spot when they published Xanathar's, there were many options for players, lots of options for the DM (i would iot exclude any of the monster books), and the writing was still good. I have fulfilling games with my group and we use 5e, I just wish the bloated piece of crap that was Tasha's wasn't casting it's dadk shadow over our games.
I'll also note that 4e was easy to run, while 3e and 3.5e could quickly become a monstrous pain in the ass for the DM. 5e is, again, a compromise but closer to the ease of 4e (IMO).
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on August 10, 2022, 10:44:06 AM5e is garbage that people project whatever they want on because it hits in the nostalgic fee-fees.
Disagree with this part. People play 5e due to its sheer market dominance, plus the fact that the core is so easy to use it's hard to go back to the pain that were the earlier editions for handling almost anything. But the system itself feels so different from earlier editions, outside of ability score, race and class names, I can't see how anyone can get feels of nostalgia from it. It's basically a different game with a few overlapping concepts.
Never got around playing 4e, so can't say much about it.
Quote from: VisionStorm on August 10, 2022, 11:45:41 AMIt's basically a different game with a few overlapping concepts.
Its a mishmash of old and new mechanics with no thought given to how or why any of them worked in separation. Its design iteration was based on 'feeling' like D&D rather then working well. Lots of mechanics are 4e style things, just laid out like 3e/2e but that gets a pass from the grognards and celebrated as a retro success.
As for ease of use. I would compare it to a old clunky car that is now on cement blocks instead of tires, and a IOU not in place of an engine. Its sure much easier to manage cement blocks instead of tires, but I don't give it credit for that.
And I don't even think 4e is great. I only bring it up in a design sense.
Stock 3.0 is the best edition.
I mean, "best" is subjective, right? Stock 3.0's upsides:
1- Clearly worded spells and effects
2- Everything stacks correctly, once you get the rules behind everything it all makes total sense. DMG formula extrapolate smoothly from PHB stuff.
3- Action economy is easy to understand with the "partial action"
4- Extremely powerful effects available starting at mid levels
5- If you build encounters correctly every encounter is fast and medium or high risk
6- The best DMG. The 3.5 DMG stripped away tons of a younger Monte Cook's actual great points.
The downsides, which got all this fun nerfed, are things like "the martial classes don't compete at all past the mid levels" and "this and that and the other thing are optimal and too good". Also "the splatbooks were OP". Well, stock 3.0 doesn't have splatbooks, and you'll just have to get over the fact that haste is super good and the team that maintains it more throughout the fight will probably win. Play high magic item options to make martial classes good for a couple more levels, but ultimately you have to buff your martial guys and strip buffs and actively debuff enemies to win, and you either like that or you dislike it.
3.5 took away all the uniqueness of the edition in exchange for some class balance and better templates for splatbooks. It removed a lot of the great wording of the rules which were pretty important, changed how things scaled or stacked to be unfun and crappy, and basically knocked a bunch of holes in the side that they then spent years slowly patching up with splatbooks, badly. Was it worth it? 3.5 was the most successful edition by far to that date, grabbing basically the entire TTRPG community, but it also had a lot more time and was open source. But I don't think it was worth it. Stock 3.0 had everything you needed to make literally anything, and it was immediately obvious how it was supposed to work. When people look back at 3.5 they don't think "oh man, it was so BALANCED and there was no martial/caster disparity!". Every problem 3.0 had, 3.5 still has, maybe mitigated a little bit, but a lot of things 3.0 had just got deleted.
Now obviously as popular as 3.0 was, 3.5 exceeded it, and 5ed is almost not even the same thing, because the mass market and multimedia blitz got so many new players that it isn't even remotely comparable to older versions, which were mostly fighting over the same core TTRPG crew that goes back to the dawn of the hobby. But if you come at 3.0 with the assumptions from prior versions plus really read that 3.0 DMG, I think you'll see the incredibly blank slate that it gives you, with just so damned many tools.
3.0 or 3.5 by a mile (there isn't much difference between the two, but I think the tuning up they did of some of the weaker classes was worth it). I would restrict it to player's handbook classes, and strictly enforce the multiclassing limitations. Unfortunately you can't really take out feats without a total redesign of the fighter and wizard classes.
5e is more streamlined on paper, but I find in practice the action economy is more complicated, and I actually kinda hate both bounded accuracy and the proficiency system. 3.x's skill system needed some tuning, but afaic, they threw the baby out with the bathwater. And I still think the fort/ref/will save system is the best in any edition of D&d.
Honestly though, Pathfinder 1e almost makes 3.5 obsolete, since it's basically the same game with the rules a little further cleaned up.
As an addendum to what I just said, and echoing a lot of other people, a lot of the best stuff in third edition is in the third party material. You can look for the d20 Conan for a great low fantasy game, or Radiance for a high fantasy one.
Quote from: VisionStorm on August 10, 2022, 10:37:33 AM
Unlike many here I can't fathom a world without Feats (or their equivalent in other games), or what issue anyone could possibly have with them, other than crappy implementation. So if anything I would drop Ability Increases as a default and hand out Feats instead, then turn Ability Increases into a feat, and adjust all feats to match a +2 bonus to a score in terms of power.
For me, it's because the crappy implementation is only part of the problem (because that's the way WotC rolls). The other parts get into questions of design that I don't particularly care to argue, but at the crux is my belief that feats are trying to occupy a space that simply doesn't properly exist in the WotC systems. Note, I'm not saying that feats couldn't work. Only that to really make them work well would require a ground up rebuild of the whole system so that they fit into the design seamlessly. WotC designs and uses them like a junk drawer where everything goes that didn't fit anywhere else.
5e, definitely.
- Good caster/fighter balance.
- Less fiddly than 3e, similar amount of options.
- Numbers are less bloated than 3e and 4e (e.g., +12 attack bonus at level 18 or something).
- Grids and minis are a lot less important.
- Fewer skills than 3e.
5e has also the weakest weapon list and a few issues of its own. But I'd take it over 3e and 4e without a second thought.
I'm talking about the core books only, not sure about all the splats; also, not counting good hacks such as Fantasy craft and so on. Just the core books as written.
(If I were to nitpick, I'm counting the PHB only. The 3e monster manual looks horrible but it's quite funcional, and I can't really compare the DMGs since I don't remember the details).
BTW, here are a couple of 3e x 4e x 5e posts:
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2017/03/does-d-require-miniatures-3e-versus-4e.html
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2017/02/tripping-oozes-in-d-3e-versus-4e-versus.html
And an old one from 2015 saying 5e brought balance to the forge. I mean, force.
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2015/11/d-5th-edition-bringing-balance-to-forge.html
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 10, 2022, 12:59:37 PM
Honestly though, Pathfinder 1e almost makes 3.5 obsolete, since it's basically the same game with the rules a little further cleaned up.
For a real campaign I ran a hybrid version where I brought in the Pathfinder classes and (1st party) feats but used 3.5 for everything else. Because the Pathfinder classes and feats are legally available on the web, and the feats are a bit better balanced than the later 3.5 stuff, it worked well. It also avoided a lot of the terrible Pathfinder spells, which were in many cases given totally garbage tier wording as an attempt at a nerf, leaving the spells either literally nonfunctional or simply incoherent.
Here's a good example:
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/forcecage.htm
The 3.5 forcecage is a very powerful spell. You can use it to instantly imprison someone who fits in it, because you target the area around them and create a force cage. There's no physical way out of the cage. Makes sense, right? Generally, players and NPCs at high levels work out some way around a forcecage should one be cast around them. Martial whiners influenced the Pathfinder developers, however, and we get this:
(pop up warning, this site is a bit too grabby of your attention): https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/f/forcecage/
This is the same spell. You'll notice that they tried to make it so that you can use a Reflex save to "negate". This text does literally no thing at all by the rules, because the forcecage doesn't actually effect you in any way. That's how the rules work.
But the obvious intention is that if it's cast around you, you get a reflex save. Do you move outside of it? Does it cancel the spell? Does every thing inside it get a save? Does a virus? Unlike the extremely exacting language of 3.X, we get a total garbage spell and we begin the idea of asking developers for ruling on SJW forums or shitpile social media. It's a total embarrassment and regression.
That being said, the same whiners influenced the Pathfinder developers to do a really amazing job with the martial classes, and Pathfinder in general has way better things to plug into the base classes. It also breaks one of the terrible issues that 3.5 had the moment you get away from stock, and that is prestige class stacking. Generally in Pathfinder you single class or you have a sensible multiclass, you don't end up with Fighter 3/Rogue 1/Assless Moon Ninja 3/Cleric Of The True Faith 1/Cleric That Gets Their Power From Atheism 5 or whatever shit, complete with some Munchkin on the order of the stick forum telling you to KEEP CRUNCH AND FLUFF SEPARATE and making a case that his munchkin optimized cancer cell is somehow good for the game. Pathfinder just shut all those people up forever, and I'll always be grateful for that.
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 10, 2022, 01:10:17 PM
As an addendum to what I just said, and echoing a lot of other people, a lot of the best stuff in third edition is in the third party material. You can look for the d20 Conan for a great low fantasy game, or Radiance for a high fantasy one.
I'll pick the fight here- while I agree with the idea, you seem to conflate d20 with third edition. Many times these things simply printed tons of things differently, left out the XP chart (the original WotC idea was that if you copyright the XP chart, no one can copy that or something?), and then copied over weapon tables or something. These games often had none of the third edition classes or spells, or had entirely unique takes on serious other things.
I dispute calling these third edition at all, because they aren't Dungeons and Dragons.
I agree that there was a lot of cool creative products of that type. I'll also throw Iron Heroes into that mix as something that tried to allow for a low magic setting to actually function while still scaling like games that had magic.
Quote from: Venka on August 10, 2022, 03:39:43 PM
Quote from: ForgottenF on August 10, 2022, 12:59:37 PM
Honestly though, Pathfinder 1e almost makes 3.5 obsolete, since it's basically the same game with the rules a little further cleaned up.
For a real campaign I ran a hybrid version where I brought in the Pathfinder classes and (1st party) feats but used 3.5 for everything else. Because the Pathfinder classes and feats are legally available on the web, and the feats are a bit better balanced than the later 3.5 stuff, it worked well. It also avoided a lot of the terrible Pathfinder spells, which were in many cases given totally garbage tier wording as an attempt at a nerf, leaving the spells either literally nonfunctional or simply incoherent.
Here's a good example:
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/forcecage.htm
The 3.5 forcecage is a very powerful spell. You can use it to instantly imprison someone who fits in it, because you target the area around them and create a force cage. There's no physical way out of the cage. Makes sense, right? Generally, players and NPCs at high levels work out some way around a forcecage should one be cast around them. Martial whiners influenced the Pathfinder developers, however, and we get this:
(pop up warning, this site is a bit too grabby of your attention): https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/f/forcecage/
This is the same spell. You'll notice that they tried to make it so that you can use a Reflex save to "negate". This text does literally no thing at all by the rules, because the forcecage doesn't actually effect you in any way. That's how the rules work.
But the obvious intention is that if it's cast around you, you get a reflex save. Do you move outside of it? Does it cancel the spell? Does every thing inside it get a save? Does a virus? Unlike the extremely exacting language of 3.X, we get a total garbage spell and we begin the idea of asking developers for ruling on SJW forums or shitpile social media. It's a total embarrassment and regression.
That being said, the same whiners influenced the Pathfinder developers to do a really amazing job with the martial classes, and Pathfinder in general has way better things to plug into the base classes. It also breaks one of the terrible issues that 3.5 had the moment you get away from stock, and that is prestige class stacking. Generally in Pathfinder you single class or you have a sensible multiclass, you don't end up with Fighter 3/Rogue 1/Assless Moon Ninja 3/Cleric Of The True Faith 1/Cleric That Gets Their Power From Atheism 5 or whatever shit, complete with some Munchkin on the order of the stick forum telling you to KEEP CRUNCH AND FLUFF SEPARATE and making a case that his munchkin optimized cancer cell is somehow good for the game. Pathfinder just shut all those people up forever, and I'll always be grateful for that.
Uhhh, I don't know who you played PF with, but I played PS games for years, and the highly optimized, multiclass builds were the norm for most folks that play in the Society. PF did almost nothing to stop the min-maxing... it certainly didn't "shut them up forever"...
Greetings!
Well, as for the best WOTC D&D, I would say D&D 5E is the best. I greatly enjoyed 3E for many years, though I think that 5E embraces most--though not all--of what made 3E good, while managing to be a more streamlined system that doesn't drown the player--or more importantly, the DM, with tidal waves of rules, crunch, and endless addendums scattered over 15 different hardcover books.
Thus, I think 5E is the best WOTC D&D.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
5e. Its dirt simple to get into and the general rules are surprisingly few. Its the situational rules where things can get iffy. But the game is surprisingly flexible and theres lots of options.
I also appreciate they they dod not go class stupid like prior editions have and instead present new class paths.
Oh its got problems. But some were just printing gaffes and others were addressed in later print runs.
3e I just do not like. Its not a bad system but its stupidly power creep happy to the nth degree. Its a powergamers dream like few other RPGs before or since. Gets the job done. I am just not a fan of how it gets the job done. I am also not to thrilled with the types of gamers 3e bred and encouraged. I can at least appreciate just how much they smoothed transition. If you are familliar with 2e D&D then easing into 3e is not a huge leap initially. Its the late game that the system has its myriad pitfalls.
4e is a board game pretending to be an RPG. Its not D&D in any way shape or form. 4e D&D Gamma World though presents 4e in a more RPG sense. Still a mess. But its a mess of a different sort.
Honestly its a matter of taste.
Quote from: Jam The MF on August 09, 2022, 11:53:42 PM
If you were going to play a WOTC Edition, which one would it be?
For me, it would either be 3.0 or 5.0 Without Feats or Prestige Classes. 3.5 was just a rewrite of 3.0 with more pages to read. Neither was perfect.
I'd say 3.0, not because it was the best of rulesets, but because it launched an incredible number of independent (and quite honestly, better) game settings and extras for a fantasy RPG.
3.0, because it introduced the OGL (which opened the door for TSR D&D compatible materials by third parties, even if this wasn't what was originally intended).
Well, the OC asked "If you were going to play a WOTC Edition, which one would it be?", so I am thinking OGL and derivative games do not count, which si why I chose 5e.
Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 11, 2022, 10:13:32 AM
Well, the OC asked "If you were going to play a WOTC Edition, which one would it be?", so I am thinking OGL and derivative games do not count...
Good point. In that case, I'd probably choose 3.0 for a D&D-ish game, but I'd house-rule it to change or eliminate feats and probably some other misc. stuff. Or maybe 5e with a bunch of exclusions and house rules. Either way I'd be house ruling a lot.
If D&D-ish wasn't a concern I might choose 4e. It's not at all the game I'd run when I want D&D, but if considered as its own separate thing it's a solid game system.
Quote from: Jam The MF on August 09, 2022, 11:53:42 PM
If you were going to play a WOTC Edition, which one would it be?
I wouldn't. They're all shit.
Although I'd have given a Saga Edition five minutes.
5e, probably.
It's dead simple. Hell, I can run an AD&D character in a 5e game without changing a single thing.
Quote from: Leonidas on August 11, 2022, 01:40:58 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on August 09, 2022, 11:53:42 PM
If you were going to play a WOTC Edition, which one would it be?
I wouldn't. They're all shit.
Although I'd have given a Saga Edition five minutes.
I still think about converting Saga Edition to a fantasy game (I know a few people tried, but I wasn't impressed). If 4e would have been a copy of Saga, I might be still playing it. I am still playing Saga, so there ya go...
If I had to choose a specific edition of WOTC D&D to run a game with, I'd choose 5E.
However, this is a pretty poor endorsement. The only reason why most people here & elsewhere prefer 5E is because it simply has the fewest rules. When I run a game I can build off of the basic skeleton in a way that suits me more easily than I can with 3E or 4E.
Yeah, D20 Modern or Star Wars Saga Edition are only ones that I even own. I never bothered with any of their D&D shit.
Quote from: Lord Dynel on August 14, 2022, 07:10:20 PM
I still think about converting Saga Edition to a fantasy game (I know a few people tried, but I wasn't impressed). If 4e would have been a copy of Saga, I might be still playing it. I am still playing Saga, so there ya go...
Lord Dynel,
I know there's Fantasy Concepts Campaign Resource, but I don't own it.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/3066/Samardan-Press/subcategory/5350_5358/Fantasy-Concepts
I've also seen fan versions, but they weren't that great. The problem is that the Jedi does not convert well into a magic user (way too powerful) and they tried to make the Scoundrel a pirate (I guess because they both have ships?)
Saga is solid but it has the opposite issue of Rocket tag at higher levels.
I'm not a fan of any of them, but core 5E I guess.
5E free basic rules PDF. Everything else is bloated nonsense.
I just download the Basic Rules from their website for use in my 5E compatible games like Beowulf, Adventures in Middle-Earth and Ruins of Symbaroum.
Quote from: BytomMan on August 23, 2022, 12:05:43 AM
I just download the Basic Rules from their website for use in my 5E compatible games like Beowulf, Adventures in Middle-Earth and Ruins of Symbaroum.
If you want a nice hardcopy: https://www.lulu.com/shop/mike-mearls/dd-5e-basic-set-combined-edition/paperback/product-15gke8w9.html?page=1&pageSize=4
I think 3.5 is the one I'm most familiar with, it's probably my favorite. I also like variations people have made to it, like E6, where characters get to "epic level" at level 6, and stop gaining Hit Dice and their power growth slows down after level 6.
5E followed by 3.5.
Much as we rag on WotC, I do think 5e was actually a good game when it was in the first couple years. The errata and terrible new publications make it worse, but you can still find the older prints I'm pdf form. So 5e is probably their best edition.
3.5 was good, but I found it was not particularly smooth to use.
Finally, 4e is a good game. I stand by that. It is, however, not a good D&D game. If it had been marketed as a spinoff and 3.5 support continued, there probably would not have been the implosion we saw. Granted, it's probably a good thing that D&D as a brand collapsed for a while as it spawned pathfinder and allowed other games to get. Foothold in the market.
Quote from: Banjo Destructo on August 23, 2022, 11:27:29 AM
I think 3.5 is the one I'm most familiar with, it's probably my favorite. I also like variations people have made to it, like E6, where characters get to "epic level" at level 6, and stop gaining Hit Dice and their power growth slows down after level 6.
I Have to admit, I played 3.5 and wasn't impressed. Seemed a bit overcomplicated and we spent more time looking up rules than playing. With such limited time, I want to spend that time playing, any time I spend looking up rules is wasted time. I like 5e because the rules don't get in the way, that and I think 3.0/3.5 were WOTC attempt at turning D&D back into a wargame.
So I stopped playing D&D until 5th edition where it was more accessible.
But that's my two cents.
Quote from: GhostNinja on August 24, 2022, 09:34:49 AM
Quote from: Banjo Destructo on August 23, 2022, 11:27:29 AM
I think 3.5 is the one I'm most familiar with, it's probably my favorite. I also like variations people have made to it, like E6, where characters get to "epic level" at level 6, and stop gaining Hit Dice and their power growth slows down after level 6.
I Have to admit, I played 3.5 and wasn't impressed. Seemed a bit overcomplicated and we spent more time looking up rules than playing. With such limited time, I want to spend that time playing, any time I spend looking up rules is wasted time. I like 5e because the rules don't get in the way, that and I think 3.0/3.5 were WOTC attempt at turning D&D back into a wargame.
So I stopped playing D&D until 5th edition where it was more accessible.
But that's my two cents.
That's fair. 3.5 did feel very power gamey, I liked E6 because it limited the power gamey ness. 5e at its core is pretty good, but I think there's way too many classes and too many class branches, which are basically built in prestige classes. I also don't like the "Proficiency" making everyone have the same attack bonus in combat.
There are lots of things I would tweak about 3.5 and 5e.
Quote from: Banjo Destructo on August 24, 2022, 11:33:39 AM
That's fair. 3.5 did feel very power gamey, I liked E6 because it limited the power gamey ness. 5e at its core is pretty good, but I think there's way too many classes and too many class branches, which are basically built in prestige classes. I also don't like the "Proficiency" making everyone have the same attack bonus in combat.
There are lots of things I would tweak about 3.5 and 5e.
The power gamey part, definitely was a problem for me. Plus it felt like 3.5 was really hard to play via Theater of the Mind, it felt like you really couldn't do combat without having miniatures out. I don't mind Mini's and use them when needed, but 3.5 felt like you couldn't play without them which was annoying to me. YMMV.
4E brought me back to D&D after 20 years. It needs a lot of care to avoid powergaming and nascent woke, but the elegant and transparent system are the easiest system by far for a dungeon master to run. Keeps the players honest, heh.
Why? I love the equality of magic-users (whatever the class) and fighters (whatever the class). As a corollary, I am a fan of superhuman martial heroes like Gilgalad, Wuxia heroes and Greek demigods.
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 03:25:26 PM
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
What you describe sounds interesting, but i would insist on ASI's only. I'd avoid Feats, altogether.
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 02, 2022, 04:52:10 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 03:25:26 PM
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
What you describe sounds interesting, but i would insist on ASI's only. I'd avoid Feats, altogether.
I'm fine with the flavor feats (like the ones tied to Greyhawk regions in one of the Dragon issues). But nothing that mechanically achieves what you can just try to do with DM approval (all of those you need this feat to try and do an Errol Flynn combat thing, for example).
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 02, 2022, 04:52:10 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 03:25:26 PM
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
What you describe sounds interesting, but i would insist on ASI's only. I'd avoid Feats, altogether.
You really can't strip the feats out of 3.0 or 3.5, at least not unless you're willing to totally redesign the Fighter (and to a lesser extent the Wizard). Bonus feats are literally their only class feature.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 07:16:41 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 02, 2022, 04:52:10 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 03:25:26 PM
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
What you describe sounds interesting, but i would insist on ASI's only. I'd avoid Feats, altogether.
I'm fine with the flavor feats (like the ones tied to Greyhawk regions in one of the Dragon issues). But nothing that mechanically achieves what you can just try to do with DM approval (all of those you need this feat to try and do an Errol Flynn combat thing, for example).
My memory of 3.x is that that was never an issue with feats. Looking through the PHB feat list now, they're virtually all either flat stat bonuses, or things that alter the action economy/exempt you from certain rules (such as quick draw, attacking mid-move, not needing spell components, etc.)
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 02, 2022, 07:45:41 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 07:16:41 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 02, 2022, 04:52:10 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 03:25:26 PM
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
What you describe sounds interesting, but i would insist on ASI's only. I'd avoid Feats, altogether.
I'm fine with the flavor feats (like the ones tied to Greyhawk regions in one of the Dragon issues). But nothing that mechanically achieves what you can just try to do with DM approval (all of those you need this feat to try and do an Errol Flynn combat thing, for example).
My memory of 3.x is that that was never an issue with feats. Looking through the PHB feat list now, they're virtually all either flat stat bonuses, or things that alter the action economy/exempt you from certain rules (such as quick draw, attacking mid-move, not needing spell components, etc.)
That's just it though - altering the action economy is a big problem that all d20 games share.
I'd much prefer a "tick" system tied to an encumbrance-based initiative. Those who can act quicker can do more in a round - for example, a seasoned veteran swashbuckler (light encumbrance, init 20) could leap over a table (4 ticks) and run through the evil king's guards with his rapier (4 ticks each, finishing on init 8) before they even fully realize what's happening (medium encumbrance, init 10) and try to draw their swords (2 ticks).
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 02, 2022, 07:37:38 PM
You really can't strip the feats out of 3.0 or 3.5, at least not unless you're willing to totally redesign the Fighter (and to a lesser extent the Wizard). Bonus feats are literally their only class feature.
You have identified the problem. The answer is not in feats, at least not entirely.
The real problem with WotC feats in general is that, like multi-classing, it is designed to be multiple things at once. Feats can't be all those things and do all of them well. This is one of the reasons that the problem gets worse as the supplements arrive. An issue arises in design. There are several questions that should be asked. Should we even address it? If so, how it is best addressed? What are the repercussions of addressing it that way? Are the repercussions severe enough that maybe we should reconsider about addressing it at all? And so on. Instead, what WotC does is something like, "Make it a feat" or "Let multi-classing handle it" or lately, "Give advantage or disadvantage". Those are not automatically wrong answers for any given question, merely because they are reflexive and simple. Yet, for every problem there is a simple, obvious, wrong answer--and sometimes it is one of those answers.
Feats that were designed to be narrow and kept that way could work fairly well. For example, "Let characters do explicitly martial things, better than before." You give fighters lots of them, other "martial" classes a fair chunk, and then maybe a few for characters that sit on the edge (depending on what multi-classing and other systems are supposed to be for). By definition, such a system should be pretty much complete on launch of the design. Therefore, it would be the last place to just chunk something later that came up.
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 02, 2022, 07:37:38 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 02, 2022, 04:52:10 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 03:25:26 PM
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
What you describe sounds interesting, but i would insist on ASI's only. I'd avoid Feats, altogether.
You really can't strip the feats out of 3.0 or 3.5, at least not unless you're willing to totally redesign the Fighter (and to a lesser extent the Wizard). Bonus feats are literally their only class feature.
Give the Fighter extra attacks earlier, better weapon damage, a magic weapon; and watch them enjoy plowing through their enemies, and chasing the barmaids at the local tavern, as bards sing about their exploits.
Stars/Worlds without Numbers handled feats pretty well, and is a well regarded OSR game.
I strongly recommend against pruning the feats out of 3.X. "ASI" is not even a 3.X term. You could make the case that base stats don't go up enough in 3.X (you have to spend every up on your mainstat, for instance- you could probably offer more bonuses to lower stats at other levels in addition), but there's no argument against feats in general.
Feats do need to be maintained. If you look at 3.0 or 3.5 or Pathfinder feats and think "there's too much stuff I don't want", then you should set about pruning and adding to customize it for your game. Even if you just say 'core only' or whatever. But honestly, that work will definitely help make combat the way you want it for your table. Dropping feats entirely loses a bunch of customization and will likely result in many classes being dropped by the wayside. If you look at 3.X and want to drop feats, you should be looking at porting skills into OSR instead.
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 03, 2022, 10:27:55 AM
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 02, 2022, 07:37:38 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 02, 2022, 04:52:10 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 03:25:26 PM
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
What you describe sounds interesting, but i would insist on ASI's only. I'd avoid Feats, altogether.
You really can't strip the feats out of 3.0 or 3.5, at least not unless you're willing to totally redesign the Fighter (and to a lesser extent the Wizard). Bonus feats are literally their only class feature.
Give the Fighter extra attacks earlier, better weapon damage, a magic weapon; and watch them enjoy plowing through their enemies, and chasing the barmaids at the local tavern, as bards sing about their exploits.
Could not disagree more. The third edition fighter really doesn't need to be any more of an "I hit it with my sword" class. What I would do, if I was stripping out feats, is fold together the fighter and the ranger (a famously underwhelming class in 3e) I'd give them the ranger's skill ranks, fighting style etc, but let animal companions just be a druid thing. Hell, I might even roll some of the barbarian features in and just have a warrior class. You would almost have to, in order to have a class that can remotely compete with CODzilla.
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 03, 2022, 02:23:56 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 03, 2022, 10:27:55 AM
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 02, 2022, 07:37:38 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 02, 2022, 04:52:10 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 03:25:26 PM
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
What you describe sounds interesting, but i would insist on ASI's only. I'd avoid Feats, altogether.
You really can't strip the feats out of 3.0 or 3.5, at least not unless you're willing to totally redesign the Fighter (and to a lesser extent the Wizard). Bonus feats are literally their only class feature.
Give the Fighter extra attacks earlier, better weapon damage, a magic weapon; and watch them enjoy plowing through their enemies, and chasing the barmaids at the local tavern, as bards sing about their exploits.
Could not disagree more. The third edition fighter really doesn't need to be any more of an "I hit it with my sword" class. What I would do, if I was stripping out feats, is fold together the fighter and the ranger (a famously underwhelming class in 3e) I'd give them the ranger's skill ranks, fighting style etc, but let animal companions just be a druid thing. Hell, I might even roll some of the barbarian features in and just have a warrior class. You would almost have to, in order to have a class that can remotely compete with CODzilla.
The Fighter archetype, isn't the problem.
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 03, 2022, 03:49:29 PM
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 03, 2022, 02:23:56 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 03, 2022, 10:27:55 AM
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 02, 2022, 07:37:38 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 02, 2022, 04:52:10 PM
Give the Fighter extra attacks earlier, better weapon damage, a magic weapon; and watch them enjoy plowing through their enemies, and chasing the barmaids at the local tavern, as bards sing about their exploits.
Could not disagree more. The third edition fighter really doesn't need to be any more of an "I hit it with my sword" class. What I would do, if I was stripping out feats, is fold together the fighter and the ranger (a famously underwhelming class in 3e) I'd give them the ranger's skill ranks, fighting style etc, but let animal companions just be a druid thing. Hell, I might even roll some of the barbarian features in and just have a warrior class. You would almost have to, in order to have a class that can remotely compete with CODzilla.
The Fighter archetype, isn't the problem.
That really depends on the context, and what we think the Fighter archetype is. If the fighter is "the guy who is good at hitting things, and bad at everything else", that's a problem in anything other than the most basic style of dungeon crawling. If (as I think it should be) the Fighter is the class you choose if you want to play a classic swords & sorcery hero like Conan or the Grey Mouser, then the problem is that they let the other classes steal all of his features. Fighters should be able to climb, track, hide, avoid traps, etc., because those are the core skills of an adventurer.
If I had my druthers, D&D would have two classes: "Swordsman" and "Sorcerer". Thief, Ranger, Barbarian, Paladin, and Assassin would all be subclasses or customization options for the "Swordsman". Wizard, Priest, Druid, and Bard would all be subclasses or customization options for "Sorcerer".
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 03, 2022, 10:27:55 AM
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 02, 2022, 07:37:38 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 02, 2022, 04:52:10 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 02, 2022, 03:25:26 PM
I'm kinda partial to 3.0 with the core splatbooks. One PHB with the equivalent of the old brown-cover 2e splatbooks. Either Greyhawk (pick any flavor) or Kalamar. The 3.0 FRCS is nice, but then it leads to wanting all of the FR supplements which drives into 3.5 territory.
I'm not as much of a fan of 3.5 because it "cleaned things up" but made ìt soulless in the process. That, and the 3.5 supplements just became masturbatory material.
3.0 with a smaller list of prestige classes and feats.
What you describe sounds interesting, but i would insist on ASI's only. I'd avoid Feats, altogether.
You really can't strip the feats out of 3.0 or 3.5, at least not unless you're willing to totally redesign the Fighter (and to a lesser extent the Wizard). Bonus feats are literally their only class feature.
Give the Fighter extra attacks earlier, better weapon damage, a magic weapon; and watch them enjoy plowing through their enemies, and chasing the barmaids at the local tavern, as bards sing about their exploits.
Extra attacks don't help when the system doesn't allow you to both move and use more than one in a turn and the iterative attacks are made at significant penalties.
Better weapon damage would need to be massive (as in "make every hit a critical" level) to begin to be anything that would be meaningful.
The 3e fighter is, quite frankly, the second most badly designed class in terms of working with the system mechanics in 3.x (the king of fail is the Monk... whose own abilities fail to synergize with each other on top of a ridiculous level of multi-attribute dependency; you need Strength to hit, Dex and Wisdom for AC, Reflex saves and Con to have enough hit points to not be a joke when your AC is still lower than a fighter's despite maxed out Dex and Wisdom).
You would need to rework the action economy and saving throw math from the ground up to keep the fighter out of garbage tier classes. Hell, there is an NPC class (the Adept) that scores above it in nearly every tier list of 3.x classes.
The best fix for the fighter (and monk and paladin... another underperformed) is drop them entirely and replace them with the Warblade and other classes from "The Tome of Battle" where WotC actually made the effort to fix them with a ground up rebuild. It was late in 3.5e's run when most of the known issues were understood and dealt with.
One of the MOST annoying things about 3e is the people who think the problem is with all the splats and if they go "core only" they'll fix things when, in truth, the opposite is true. The most broken classes (op and weak sauce) and most problematic spells are found in the core 3.5e PHB. The later material where they'd figured out the problems was actually built to much more consistent standards and mainly looked down upon for being weak relative to the god-tier (wizard, cleric and druid) and demigod-tier (sorcerer, psion) classes.
If you want an incredibly solid game of 3.5e go look up one of the class tier lists and just limit player classes to tiers 3 and 4... good at one thing and capable of doing other things while not being able to break the game over their knees or proving utterly useless in the late game. You'll find a excellent and thematic classes in that range.
The biggest problem I have with 3.X isn't that one class is stronger than another. That's expected, and frankly it isn't a problem if the DM understands the relative strengths and has the DM-skill to to make every player feel like they're contributing to the game.
I'd argue the problem with 3.X is that it's hard to understand the core system math & assumptions in a way that you can improvise as a DM without consulting rulebooks and getting caught up in minutiae. Even pre-published adventures feel unpredictable. Something as simple as getting ambushed by a CR-appropriate flying enemy can reasonably turn into a TPK if your party doesn't have anyone with ranged attacks and your Wizard doesn't have the right spells/enough spells to blast them. This isn't even considering the stuff like DR/Magic-Silver-Adamantium, Regeneration, Undead, Ethereal, Grappling, SaveOrDie, etc that every party generally has to have to deal with.
I think Chris24601 basically nailed it, and I disagree with Zelen.
The rules and math aren't hard. A CR-appropriate foe can be Party Level -4 to Party Level +4, but I think the general assumption is that an appropriate challenge is CR = Party Level. Generally, a CR 4 monster is more powerful than a PC of 4th level; they represent a good challenge for a group, and yes, that means that if you're always facing enemies with a CR equal to your level (especially Dragons) you're in for a very difficult fight and risking a TPK.
1st edition had enemies that couldn't be damaged except with a +3 or better weapon, and they show up on the random encounter charts. 3.x was BETTER in that while an enemy might have significant DR, you could still beat them to death with a basic club if you were strong enough.
One person being weaker then another can be fine.....To a point.
If another player can do more then you, and your own niche better then you, you start to feel like a chearleader.
Just for completion's sake, here's the actual tier 3 and 4 lists for 3.5e with an explanation of what the tier represents;
Tier 3
Capable of doing one thing quite well, while still being useful when that one thing is inappropriate, or capable of doing all things, but not as well as classes that specialize in that area. Occasionally has a mechanical ability that can solve an encounter, but this is relatively rare and easy to deal with. Can be game breaking only with specific intent to do so. Challenging such a character takes some thought from the DM, but isn't too difficult. Will outshine any Tier 5s in the party much of the time.
Examples: Bard, beguiler, binder, crusader, dread necromancer, duskblade, factotum, psychic warrior, ranger (wild shape variant), swordsage, warblade
Tier 4
Capable of doing one thing quite well, but often useless when encounters require other areas of expertise, or capable of doing many things to a reasonable degree of competence without truly shining. Rarely has any abilities that can outright handle an encounter unless that encounter plays directly to the class's main strength. DMs may sometimes need to work to make sure Tier 4s can contribute to an encounter, as their abilities may sometimes leave them useless. Won't outshine anyone except Tier 6s except in specific circumstances that play to their strengths. Cannot compete effectively with Tier 1s that are played well.
Examples: Adept, barbarian, hexblade, marshal, ranger, rogue, scout, spellthief, warlock, warmage
As you can see, there's a pretty decent range of class concepts in there to work with for a campaign.
Of the majority of the PHB classes not found within this range;
- wizards, clerics and druids are considered tier 1 (Capable of doing absolutely everything, often better than classes that specialize in that thing. Often capable of solving encounters with a single mechanical ability and little thought from the player. Has world changing powers at high levels. These guys, if played with skill, can easily break a campaign and can be very hard to challenge without extreme DM fiat or plenty of house rules, especially if Tier 3s and below are in the party)
- sorcerers are considered tier 2 (Has as much raw power as the Tier 1 classes, but can't pull off nearly as many tricks, and while the class itself is capable of anything, no one build can actually do nearly as much as the Tier 1 classes).
- fighters, monks and paladins are considered tier 5 (Capable of doing only one thing, and not necessarily all that well, or so unfocused that they have trouble mastering anything, and in many types of encounters the character cannot contribute. In some cases, can do one thing very well, but that one thing is very often not needed. Has trouble shining in any encounter unless the encounter matches their strengths. DMs may have to work to avoid the player feeling that their character is worthless unless the entire party is Tier 4 and below. Characters in this tier will often feel like one trick ponies if they do well, or just feel like they have no tricks at all if they build the class poorly).
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 04, 2022, 12:19:27 PM
Just for completion's sake, here's the actual tier 3 and 4 lists for 3.5e with an explanation of what the tier represents;
Tier 3
Capable of doing one thing quite well, while still being useful when that one thing is inappropriate, or capable of doing all things, but not as well as classes that specialize in that area. Occasionally has a mechanical ability that can solve an encounter, but this is relatively rare and easy to deal with. Can be game breaking only with specific intent to do so. Challenging such a character takes some thought from the DM, but isn't too difficult. Will outshine any Tier 5s in the party much of the time.
Examples: Bard, beguiler, binder, crusader, dread necromancer, duskblade, factotum, psychic warrior, ranger (wild shape variant), swordsage, warblade
Tier 4
Capable of doing one thing quite well, but often useless when encounters require other areas of expertise, or capable of doing many things to a reasonable degree of competence without truly shining. Rarely has any abilities that can outright handle an encounter unless that encounter plays directly to the class's main strength. DMs may sometimes need to work to make sure Tier 4s can contribute to an encounter, as their abilities may sometimes leave them useless. Won't outshine anyone except Tier 6s except in specific circumstances that play to their strengths. Cannot compete effectively with Tier 1s that are played well.
Examples: Adept, barbarian, hexblade, marshal, ranger, rogue, scout, spellthief, warlock, warmage
As you can see, there's a pretty decent range of class concepts in there to work with for a campaign.
Of the majority of the PHB classes not found within this range;
- wizards, clerics and druids are considered tier 1 (Capable of doing absolutely everything, often better than classes that specialize in that thing. Often capable of solving encounters with a single mechanical ability and little thought from the player. Has world changing powers at high levels. These guys, if played with skill, can easily break a campaign and can be very hard to challenge without extreme DM fiat or plenty of house rules, especially if Tier 3s and below are in the party)
- sorcerers are considered tier 2 (Has as much raw power as the Tier 1 classes, but can't pull off nearly as many tricks, and while the class itself is capable of anything, no one build can actually do nearly as much as the Tier 1 classes).
- fighters, monks and paladins are considered tier 5 (Capable of doing only one thing, and not necessarily all that well, or so unfocused that they have trouble mastering anything, and in many types of encounters the character cannot contribute. In some cases, can do one thing very well, but that one thing is very often not needed. Has trouble shining in any encounter unless the encounter matches their strengths. DMs may have to work to avoid the player feeling that their character is worthless unless the entire party is Tier 4 and below. Characters in this tier will often feel like one trick ponies if they do well, or just feel like they have no tricks at all if they build the class poorly).
One of my most abiding memories of 3.5 is from a friend of mine's ill-fated attempt to run a 15th level campaign. I rolled a druid, and accidentally bypassed his entire campaign by using the "tree walk" spell (or whatever it was called) to cross an entire continent in seconds. As I recall, every high level campaign we tried to do collapsed within one session, and it was usually a druid's fault.
I have to say though, every version of D&D that I've played, including OSR games, falls apart at higher levels for one reason or another.
And these responses are all the reasons why 3.5+ are terrible design goals.
The classes *shouldn't* have equal power. The PCs *should* have the possibility of encountering something else only response is to run away. I don't want a game on rails with training wheels.
There are *so many* things wrong with the progression from 3.0 onward in trying to make everything equal and fair. Bring back save or die spells. Bring back save or helpless spells. Get rid of feat and ability stacking (whether it's a competence bonus to AC or a deflection bonus to AC, you only get one of them).
I didn't mind 3.0 so much since it was mostly a cleanup of late-era 2e with cleaner math.
5e, hands down.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 03:51:22 PM
And these responses are all the reasons why 3.5+ are terrible design goals.
The classes *shouldn't* have equal power. The PCs *should* have the possibility of encountering something else only response is to run away. I don't want a game on rails with training wheels.
I'm on board with games where stuff dramatic stuff can happen on the whim of the dice, where the hard edges haven't been filed off. I'd say I'm more willing to accept that when the game is quick and light. IMO 3.X is rules-heavy enough that campaign-breaking events should be rare, not common.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 03:51:22 PM
And these responses are all the reasons why 3.5+ are terrible design goals.
The classes *shouldn't* have equal power. The PCs *should* have the possibility of encountering something else only response is to run away. I don't want a game on rails with training wheels.
There are *so many* things wrong with the progression from 3.0 onward in trying to make everything equal and fair. Bring back save or die spells. Bring back save or helpless spells. Get rid of feat and ability stacking (whether it's a competence bonus to AC or a deflection bonus to AC, you only get one of them).
I didn't mind 3.0 so much since it was mostly a cleanup of late-era 2e with cleaner math.
My take on 3.0 and 3.5 D&D; is that 3.0 was a very cool game, but it wasn't perfect. Then just 3 years later they released larger more complex versions of all 3 core rulebooks, to supposedly fix 3.0; but they didn't fix it, they just changed it. Extra money spent on the same books all over again, with more complexity introduced. Rules, and rules, and more rules; to play the same game. Between those two, give me 3.0
Quote from: Zelen on September 04, 2022, 05:39:23 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 03:51:22 PM
And these responses are all the reasons why 3.5+ are terrible design goals.
The classes *shouldn't* have equal power. The PCs *should* have the possibility of encountering something else only response is to run away. I don't want a game on rails with training wheels.
I'm on board with games where stuff dramatic stuff can happen on the whim of the dice, where the hard edges haven't been filed off. I'd say I'm more willing to accept that when the game is quick and light. IMO 3.X is rules-heavy enough that campaign-breaking events should be rare, not common.
All other things being equal, sure. But stupid choices like "hey, we're 3rd level, we can take that warband of a dozen hill giants. The DM wouldn't have them out here to encounter if they were too tough." or "We don't need to check for traps - we're 20th level" deserve deadly consequences - whether it's being beaten into goo by a mob of giants armed with clubs or being incapacitated as a "mister soon to be living the rest of his short-ass life in agonizing pain" by a deadly demonic spider poison trap.
It doesn't matter how tough they are, there is always someone tougher - if they're demigods, they can still always piss off a greater god, or an archdevil or an elder evil...
I'm not suggesting a "pink-eye" campaign where everyone dies of tetanus three minutes into the first session, but 3.x+ seemed to promote a style of gameplay where bad things *shouldn't* happen to the players. Try running a young(er) group of players through the Slavers modules and see how much they whine when they're captured at the end of A3 and thrown into the grinder at the beginning of A4... I've done it several times and there was always some variation of "THAT'S NOT FAIR! WE'RE SUPPOSED TO WIN!!!" It seemed to be the case starting when they revised 3.0 to 3.5 and carries through to 5e.
Quote from: Zelen on September 04, 2022, 05:39:23 PM
I'm on board with games where stuff dramatic stuff can happen on the whim of the dice, where the hard edges haven't been filed off. I'd say I'm more willing to accept that when the game is quick and light. IMO 3.X is rules-heavy enough that campaign-breaking events should be rare, not common.
This is where I end up mushy middle again. I don't much like "bit by snake, save or die". It's a little too much. But I also don't like the "after multiple screw ups to get to this stage, you still get at least 3 rounds of death saves to magic your way out of it," either. There's an awful lot of design space between the two extremes. Probably not an accident that I want a game more complicated than B/X but less complicated than WotC versions, given that preference.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 09:18:50 PM
All other things being equal, sure. But stupid choices like "hey, we're 3rd level, we can take that warband of a dozen hill giants. The DM wouldn't have them out here to encounter if they were too tough." or "We don't need to check for traps - we're 20th level" deserve deadly consequences - whether it's being beaten into goo by a mob of giants armed with clubs or being incapacitated as a "mister soon to be living the rest of his short-ass life in agonizing pain" by a deadly demonic spider poison trap.
What you're talking about is a a cultural shift and change in expectations-of-play that occurred (in a large way) as a result of players growing up on computer games. Seems unfair to pin that on 3E.
I guess there's some argument to be made that the more developed the system is, the more your unconscious expectation is that engaging with the system itself is the right move. i.e If 90% of your character sheet talks about things you can do in a fight, the other ways of engaging with the fictional world are less prominent inherently.
Quote from: Zelen on September 04, 2022, 09:56:33 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 09:18:50 PM
All other things being equal, sure. But stupid choices like "hey, we're 3rd level, we can take that warband of a dozen hill giants. The DM wouldn't have them out here to encounter if they were too tough." or "We don't need to check for traps - we're 20th level" deserve deadly consequences - whether it's being beaten into goo by a mob of giants armed with clubs or being incapacitated as a "mister soon to be living the rest of his short-ass life in agonizing pain" by a deadly demonic spider poison trap.
What you're talking about is a a cultural shift and change in expectations-of-play that occurred (in a large way) as a result of players growing up on computer games. Seems unfair to pin that on 3E.
I guess there's some argument to be made that the more developed the system is, the more your unconscious expectation is that engaging with the system itself is the right move. i.e If 90% of your character sheet talks about things you can do in a fight, the other ways of engaging with the fictional world are less prominent inherently.
I don't think we can definitely say that's the case - CRPGs had been around for at least 20 years when 3e came out. I would argue that there were still some save or die spells in 3e, for example, but they were much higher level that most players would never actually encounter routinely. Compare that to hold person. In older editions, it was kinda save or die since if you didn't make the save, you were vulnerable to anyone who decided to slit your throat as you stood there paralyzed. You could even hold more than one person. The limitation on those affected was about a dozen different species (mostly demihumans,) In 3e, the difference were you could only try and hold one person, but the list of affected species was any humanoid, and you got a chance every 6 seconds to break free. That's certainly not a CRPG thing where being held/paralyzed/etc. was always a frustrating thing that didn't give you the opportunity to break free from it.
I would make the claim that it was more a function of the participation trophy syndrome that became more prevalent in the 1990s where everyone was told they were special and were sheltered from bad things.
It's not pinning it on 3e - 3e is merely a symptom of it, but it has continued to get worse with each new edition to the point that some games (others moreso than D&D in some cases) codify what it means to be "fun" gameplay.
If I want to make throwaway characters with a focus on randomness and punishing diffulty Il play rougelike videogames.
Save or suck can go shove it as a waste of time.
If live wasps where included with oldschool D&D box sets there would people today saying that a hospital visit is critical to the experience.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 03, 2022, 06:12:43 PMThe best fix for the fighter (and monk and paladin... another underperformed) is drop them entirely and replace them with the Warblade and other classes from "The Tome of Battle" where WotC actually made the effort to fix them with a ground up rebuild. It was late in 3.5e's run when most of the known issues were understood and dealt with.
Chris,
I've never seen ToB. It is OGL content? It sounds like you are suggesting:
Replace Fighter with Warblade?
Replace Paladin with Crusader?
Replace Monk with Swordsage?
Quote from: Aglondir on September 05, 2022, 03:31:36 AM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 03, 2022, 06:12:43 PMThe best fix for the fighter (and monk and paladin... another underperformed) is drop them entirely and replace them with the Warblade and other classes from "The Tome of Battle" where WotC actually made the effort to fix them with a ground up rebuild. It was late in 3.5e's run when most of the known issues were understood and dealt with.
Chris,
I've never seen ToB. It is OGL content? It sounds like you are suggesting:
Replace Fighter with Warblade?
Replace Paladin with Crusader?
Replace Monk with Swordsage?
It's not OGL, but yes; it's the WotC supplement Tome of Battle, one of later books for 3.5e (shortly before announcing 4E). As noted on the tier list post above it took classes that weren't even great at what they were supposed to do (tier 5) and presented versions that were quite robust and able to contribute in and out of combat.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 03:51:22 PM
And these responses are all the reasons why 3.5+ are terrible design goals.
The classes *shouldn't* have equal power. The PCs *should* have the possibility of encountering something else only response is to run away. I don't want a game on rails with training wheels.
There's a difference between the range of power in the tier 3-4 range and one where a fighter can do maybe 5% of a monster's hit points if they do well while the wizard has a 95% chance of killing every monster they come across with a single spell.
3.x didn't get the nickname "Casters & Caddies" for no reason. Limiting the range of difference between the upper and lower extremes to more "Knights & Knaves" range doesn't mean there's no range... just that one PC isn't reordering the cosmos while the other needs the GM's permission to do anything fancier than hitting things with a weapon for trivial damage.
QuoteThere are *so many* things wrong with the progression from 3.0 onward in trying to make everything equal and fair. Bring back save or die spells. Bring back save or helpless spells. Get rid of feat and ability stacking (whether it's a competence bonus to AC or a deflection bonus to AC, you only get one of them).
What's really funny is that Save or Die spells plus borked save math where it was nearly impossible to actually save against them are what made 3.x the rocket-taggy mess it became and one of the main reasons fighters became useless (they went from having amazing saves in TSR to just about the worst saves in WotC... and the ability of monsters to save was similarly borked such that the wizard just needed to know which of your save modifers was lowest and could then drop a Save or Die targeting it to basically make all the hit points the fighter was supposed to chew through with weapon attacks irrelevant).
There is a solid robust game in 3.x; but it actually needs what you want to pull out and suffers for the things you want to keep in or increase to the point it sounds like you aren't doing anything more than throwing out platitudes without bothering to look at the underlying system mechanics to see if what you suggest would even produce the effects you desire.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 09:07:11 AM
Quote from: Aglondir on September 05, 2022, 03:31:36 AM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 03, 2022, 06:12:43 PMThe best fix for the fighter (and monk and paladin... another underperformed) is drop them entirely and replace them with the Warblade and other classes from "The Tome of Battle" where WotC actually made the effort to fix them with a ground up rebuild. It was late in 3.5e's run when most of the known issues were understood and dealt with.
Chris,
I've never seen ToB. It is OGL content? It sounds like you are suggesting:
Replace Fighter with Warblade?
Replace Paladin with Crusader?
Replace Monk with Swordsage?
It's not OGL, but yes; it's the WotC supplement Tome of Battle, one of later books for 3.5e (shortly before announcing 4E). As noted on the tier list post above it took classes that weren't even great at what they were supposed to do (tier 5) and presented versions that were quite robust and able to contribute in and out of combat.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 04, 2022, 03:51:22 PM
And these responses are all the reasons why 3.5+ are terrible design goals.
The classes *shouldn't* have equal power. The PCs *should* have the possibility of encountering something else only response is to run away. I don't want a game on rails with training wheels.
There's a difference between the range of power in the tier 3-4 range and one where a fighter can do maybe 5% of a monster's hit points if they do well while the wizard has a 95% chance of killing every monster they come across with a single spell.
3.x didn't get the nickname "Casters & Caddies" for no reason. Limiting the range of difference between the upper and lower extremes to more "Knights & Knaves" range doesn't mean there's no range... just that one PC isn't reordering the cosmos while the other needs the GM's permission to do anything fancier than hitting things with a weapon for trivial damage.
QuoteThere are *so many* things wrong with the progression from 3.0 onward in trying to make everything equal and fair. Bring back save or die spells. Bring back save or helpless spells. Get rid of feat and ability stacking (whether it's a competence bonus to AC or a deflection bonus to AC, you only get one of them).
What's really funny is that Save or Die spells plus borked save math where it was nearly impossible to actually save against them are what made 3.x the rocket-taggy mess it became and one of the main reasons fighters became useless (they went from having amazing saves in TSR to just about the worst saves in WotC... and the ability of monsters to save was similarly borked such that the wizard just needed to know which of your save modifers was lowest and could then drop a Save or Die targeting it to basically make all the hit points the fighter was supposed to chew through with weapon attacks irrelevant).
There is a solid robust game in 3.x; but it actually needs what you want to pull out and suffers for the things you want to keep in or increase to the point it sounds like you aren't doing anything more than throwing out platitudes without bothering to look at the underlying system mechanics to see if what you suggest would even produce the effects you desire.
There really is nothing wrong with the idea that fighters grow up to become kings - powerful though they may be, that shouldn't be reordering the cosmos while hedge wizards grow up to manipulate the very essence of reality. That's how pre-3e did it and that's how vanilla 3e does it. When they started trying to make the martial classes on par with casters as to the scale of their influence, which was somewhere towards the tail end of the 3.0 supplements is when it became a problem.
But then again, I also think that D&D of all flavors could use the idea that only a certain percentage of casters have full abilities with access to the most powerful of magics (stealing the idea from many other RPGs or of the way they do for Paladins, Rangers, etc).
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 09:29:03 AM
There really is nothing wrong with the idea that fighters grow up to become kings - powerful though they may be, that shouldn't be reordering the cosmos while hedge wizards grow up to manipulate the very essence of reality.
Why would the wizard let the fighter be a king? Manipulation of all reality also includes the kingdom. So the fighter, even a king would be a puppet figurehead fir the wizard who for some reason made the fighter a king instead of some construct the wizard could make better and stronger.
This isn't Batman and Superman. This is Superman and a goldfish.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 05, 2022, 10:32:16 AM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 09:29:03 AM
There really is nothing wrong with the idea that fighters grow up to become kings - powerful though they may be, that shouldn't be reordering the cosmos while hedge wizards grow up to manipulate the very essence of reality.
Why would the wizard let the fighter be a king? Manipulation of all reality also includes the kingdom. So the fighter, even a king would be a puppet figurehead fir the wizard who for some reason made the fighter a king instead of some construct the wizard could make better and stronger.
This isn't Batman and Superman. This is Superman and a goldfish.
For that matter... the fighter isn't skilled enough to be a king. 2 skill points per level with no social class skill except intimidation and only climb, jump, swim, ride, craft and profession as the other class skills.
The only thing the 3.x fighter is competent to do is hit things that the wizard doesn't feel are worth burning a spell slot on.
The rogue or bard or even the freaking Barbarian has more capacity for being able to lead than a 3.x fighter. They're second only to the monk in the "worst core class design" competition.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 10:44:28 AM
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 05, 2022, 10:32:16 AM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 09:29:03 AM
There really is nothing wrong with the idea that fighters grow up to become kings - powerful though they may be, that shouldn't be reordering the cosmos while hedge wizards grow up to manipulate the very essence of reality.
Why would the wizard let the fighter be a king? Manipulation of all reality also includes the kingdom. So the fighter, even a king would be a puppet figurehead fir the wizard who for some reason made the fighter a king instead of some construct the wizard could make better and stronger.
This isn't Batman and Superman. This is Superman and a goldfish.
For that matter... the fighter isn't skilled enough to be a king. 2 skill points per level with no social class skill except intimidation and only climb, jump, swim, ride, craft and profession as the other class skills.
The only thing the 3.x fighter is competent to do is hit things that the wizard doesn't feel are worth burning a spell slot on.
The rogue or bard or even the freaking Barbarian has more capacity for being able to lead than a 3.x fighter. They're second only to the monk in the "worst core class design" competition.
I don't think anyone is arguing that the design of 3e - 5e classes was ideal. It was done that way to try and balance things, to horrible effect. Absolutely a fighter should have the same skill points as every other class. The skill points per level need to be based on intelligence score rather than class. But, casters need to be extremely rare (everyone is either a fighter or a rogue as the default) where they can only gain access to full practice of magic as a function of both training or divine intervention and luck. This is a tradition in the real world stories and legends that had never been implemented to this effect in D&D and none of the WotC editions had tried to do it
Basing game systems on tradition and legend is a terrible idea unless you wanna have a storygame writing jam.
The argument is: spend tons of dpace on wizard powers and then don't use them because they are broken.
Oh, and for the record, my favorite WotC edition is Post-Essentials Only 4E. It's Monster Vault and Threats of the Nentir Vale are some of the best monsters books ever and they had largely worked out the kinks of early material player side.
It had simple classes (Knight, Slayer, Thief, Scout, Hunter and Elementalist) for those who wanted them (along with more advanced classes), a concise and more focused Feat list (took the more than a thousand pre-Essentials feats and distilled it down to about a hundred in well defined categories), and while many from early 4E complained about how none of the spells were as good as before... this was largely because they'd realized how broken their stun condition was if it could be employed regularly for long durations against multiple foes and so used it primarily for higher level single target/short duration spells instead of having it everywhere (which turned many fights into punching helpless bags of hit points).
Essentials was also where they really started looking at non-combat features to help distinguish the classes.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 05, 2022, 11:07:24 AM
Basing game systems on tradition and legend is a terrible idea unless you wanna have a storygame writing jam.
The argument is: spend tons of dpace on wizard powers and then don't use them because they are broken.
My argument is that players should play the classes for what they are instead of trying to make them all able to do more than their role. If you are using a traditional definition of a wizard, it'd be a bit of a recluse who is the power behind the throne. The wizard is able to influence major events in between spending time congregating with powerful otherworldly beings. They're not supposed to be the mayor of a town. There supposed to be rare. Don't cripple them, just make them less accessible to begin with. Going with an Asian flavored wu jen or a native American medicine man? Just as rare and mysterious.
If you are using the traditional definition of "fighter" they're all cannon-fodder who sometimes rise above to become a king. There's a lot more of them than there are wizards because the every criteria is so low - can you carry a spear?
But that's the role of them in any culture - the king/chief/jarl/shiekh is usually the most violent one of the tribe who rules until he shows weakness. The spiritual leader/witch doctor/magician is usually the shrewdest or most intelligent of the tribe. One provides for earthly concerns and orher for spiritual. It also so happens that the kingly types are also scared of the wizardly types because they just don't know what they're capable of.
None of the WotC D&D games achieved this, but by use of prestige classes that don't overlap, early 3e is the closest to ideal.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
My argument is that players should play the classes for what they are instead of trying to make them all able to do more than their role.
Your making massive, massive, assumptions on players, worldbuilding and assuming mythology is all the same across the world.
Edit: your assumptions are that D&D should have upper-est tier mythological wizards in the same place as leftover single soldier simulator characters from a wargame. Which isn't accurate to myth at all anyway outside of D&D 3e
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
My argument is that players should play the classes for what they are instead of trying to make them all able to do more than their role. If you are using a traditional definition of a wizard, it'd be a bit of a recluse who is the power behind the throne. The wizard is able to influence major events in between spending time congregating with powerful otherworldly beings. They're not supposed to be the mayor of a town. There supposed to be rare. Don't cripple them, just make them less accessible to begin with. Going with an Asian flavored wu jen or a native American medicine man? Just as rare and mysterious.
If you are using the traditional definition of "fighter" they're all cannon-fodder who sometimes rise above to become a king. There's a lot more of them than there are wizards because the every criteria is so low - can you carry a spear?
The fighter doesn't just represent the random rabble though. They're represented by the 0-level NPCs in older games, and by the NPC classes in 3rd edition. Going all the way back to Chainmail, a leveled PC fighter is supposed to represent an exceptional warrior, adventurer and leader. That's why they can go on fantasy adventures, and its why they had strongholds and followers built into their class progression.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
But that's the role of them in any culture - the king/chief/jarl/shiekh is usually the most violent one of the tribe who rules until he shows weakness.
That's just not true. It's not even entirely true of apes, but in human societies, physical strength has never been the sole source of leadership. Charisma, intelligence and (perceived) virtue are every bit as important. Just being the most violent person in a society is likely to get you branded a criminal. Even the worst tyrants usually get into their positions either through accidents of heredity, or by a combination of wit, strength and charisma. And even then, they tend to have short reigns and come to sticky ends.
To paraphrase how a friend put it regarding playing the myths... "I wanna play Rothgar the warrior who can lift mountains. You can play Vanis the wizard who sees the future and gives advice. That seems like a fun game."
The idea that wizards should be anything more than seers or cute decorations for the end of warriors' spears is a rather modernist take on magic. Meanwhile myth and legend is full of fantastic feats of strength, agility and endurance performed by warriors that Superman would get an inferiority complex if you shoved them into a single class the way all the wizard spells from across multiple cultures' stories have been shoved into the wizard class.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee link=topic=45114.msg1229238#msg1229238
Why would the wizard let the fighter be a king? Manipulation of all reality also includes the kingdom. So the fighter, even a king would be a puppet figurehead fir the wizard who for some reason made the fighter a king instead of some construct the wizard could make better and stronger.
Same reason characters might wear plate armor or use swords. Because the game is intended to evoke European mythological/heroic tropes. A warrior king who inspires his men by leading them in battle is good. A wizard manipulating a kingdom with puppets is almost always bad.
RAW might support what you're suggesting, but who cares. Rule0 & shared vision win.
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 05, 2022, 01:13:38 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
My argument is that players should play the classes for what they are instead of trying to make them all able to do more than their role. If you are using a traditional definition of a wizard, it'd be a bit of a recluse who is the power behind the throne. The wizard is able to influence major events in between spending time congregating with powerful otherworldly beings. They're not supposed to be the mayor of a town. There supposed to be rare. Don't cripple them, just make them less accessible to begin with. Going with an Asian flavored wu jen or a native American medicine man? Just as rare and mysterious.
If you are using the traditional definition of "fighter" they're all cannon-fodder who sometimes rise above to become a king. There's a lot more of them than there are wizards because the every criteria is so low - can you carry a spear?
The fighter doesn't just represent the random rabble though. They're represented by the 0-level NPCs in older games, and by the NPC classes in 3rd edition. Going all the way back to Chainmail, a leveled PC fighter is supposed to represent an exceptional warrior, adventurer and leader. That's why they can go on fantasy adventures, and its why they had strongholds and followers built into their class progression.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
But that's the role of them in any culture - the king/chief/jarl/shiekh is usually the most violent one of the tribe who rules until he shows weakness.
That's just not true. It's not even entirely true of apes, but in human societies, physical strength has never been the sole source of leadership. Charisma, intelligence and (perceived) virtue are every bit as important. Just being the most violent person in a society is likely to get you branded a criminal. Even the worst tyrants usually get into their positions either through accidents of heredity, or by a combination of wit, strength and charisma. And even then, they tend to have short reigns and come to sticky ends.
Yes, 0-level scum exists. The fighter is one step above - possibly coming from that rabble if he wasn't born into nobility. It's a warrior caste - whether rising up in the ranks from a simple shield-bearer or being raised in the saddle from birth. Medieval foot soldier, Mongolian horseman, or a member of the Jun Horde.
As to ruling through strength - we're not talking about merely physical strength. It's the ability to lead men - through intimidation, charisma, or because you're always giving them the best spoils of war. Ancient kings typically ascend the throne as a result of killing or subjugating opponents. But they don't stay in power when they don't bring peace and prosperity to the commoners. If the harvest is disastrous leading to starvation, the king very likely will be deposed by someone else. That's where the wizard comes in - claiming the gods need a sacrifice to quell the rabble or telling the king the drought is due to black magic from the neighboring kingdom.
None of the WotC editions has any mechanical aspects to play out this type of scenario. 3.0 with 3PP supplements, in my opinion, fills this void the best.
There are other aspects as well. 3.0 Magic of Faerun, IIRC, had rules for spell duels. I don't think anything after that markedly improves this unless it's a wholesale magic system replacement.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 02:21:42 PM
Quote from: ForgottenF on September 05, 2022, 01:13:38 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
My argument is that players should play the classes for what they are instead of trying to make them all able to do more than their role. If you are using a traditional definition of a wizard, it'd be a bit of a recluse who is the power behind the throne. The wizard is able to influence major events in between spending time congregating with powerful otherworldly beings. They're not supposed to be the mayor of a town. There supposed to be rare. Don't cripple them, just make them less accessible to begin with. Going with an Asian flavored wu jen or a native American medicine man? Just as rare and mysterious.
If you are using the traditional definition of "fighter" they're all cannon-fodder who sometimes rise above to become a king. There's a lot more of them than there are wizards because the every criteria is so low - can you carry a spear?
The fighter doesn't just represent the random rabble though. They're represented by the 0-level NPCs in older games, and by the NPC classes in 3rd edition. Going all the way back to Chainmail, a leveled PC fighter is supposed to represent an exceptional warrior, adventurer and leader. That's why they can go on fantasy adventures, and its why they had strongholds and followers built into their class progression.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 12:16:14 PM
But that's the role of them in any culture - the king/chief/jarl/shiekh is usually the most violent one of the tribe who rules until he shows weakness.
That's just not true. It's not even entirely true of apes, but in human societies, physical strength has never been the sole source of leadership. Charisma, intelligence and (perceived) virtue are every bit as important. Just being the most violent person in a society is likely to get you branded a criminal. Even the worst tyrants usually get into their positions either through accidents of heredity, or by a combination of wit, strength and charisma. And even then, they tend to have short reigns and come to sticky ends.
Yes, 0-level scum exists. The fighter is one step above - possibly coming from that rabble if he wasn't born into nobility. It's a warrior caste - whether rising up in the ranks from a simple shield-bearer or being raised in the saddle from birth. Medieval foot soldier, Mongolian horseman, or a member of the Jun Horde.
As to ruling through strength - we're not talking about merely physical strength. It's the ability to lead men - through intimidation, charisma, or because you're always giving them the best spoils of war. Ancient kings typically ascend the throne as a result of killing or subjugating opponents. But they don't stay in power when they don't bring peace and prosperity to the commoners. If the harvest is disastrous leading to starvation, the king very likely will be deposed by someone else. That's where the wizard comes in - claiming the gods need a sacrifice to quell the rabble or telling the king the drought is due to black magic from the neighboring kingdom.
None of the WotC editions has any mechanical aspects to play out this type of scenario. 3.0 with 3PP supplements, in my opinion, fills this void the best.
There are other aspects as well. 3.0 Magic of Faerun, IIRC, had rules for spell duels. I don't think anything after that markedly improves this unless it's a wholesale magic system replacement.
At this point I'm not even sure we're in the same conversation or if this is two different threads crossing streams. You seem to be discussing a very specific campaign setting with its own batch of house rules that has nothing to do with which WotC edition is actually the best.
To which, again, for me the answer is post-Essentials Only 4E for making fighers more than I hit it with my sword and making spellcasters more specialized vs. masters of all while also having some of the most evocative and easy to use ib play monster stat blocks of any edition and transparent math that let me set up in under an hour what would have been 5-6 hours prep in prior editions.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 02:41:52 PM
At this point I'm not even sure we're in the same conversation or if this is two different threads crossing streams. You seem to be discussing a very specific campaign setting with its own batch of house rules that has nothing to do with which WotC edition is actually the best.
To which, again, for me the answer is post-Essentials Only 4E for making fighers more than I hit it with my sword and making spellcasters more specialized vs. masters of all while also having some of the most evocative and easy to use ib play monster stat blocks of any edition and transparent math that let me set up in under an hour what would have been 5-6 hours prep in prior editions.
Ahhh, I see the disconnect. As someone who recently played a 4e campaign for about a year now, I think you missed a part of the question. If the question had been for the best RPG produced by WotC, then I think you would have a pretty good case. But the question was about the best WotC version
of D&D. And 4e, regardless of its strengths, is about as far from actual Dungeons & Dragons as you can get...
Quote from: Eirikrautha on September 05, 2022, 03:32:19 PMAnd 4e, regardless of its strengths, is about as far from actual Dungeons & Dragons as you can get...
Id say 3e was far away from the OSR style vision already. While 4e was a more complete and understood vision of what it wanted to be. 5e is just gobblygook and OSR fans like it because it just looks vaugely like OD&D while cribbing tons of mechanics from 3e and 4e.
Quote from: Eirikrautha on September 05, 2022, 03:32:19 PM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 02:41:52 PM
At this point I'm not even sure we're in the same conversation or if this is two different threads crossing streams. You seem to be discussing a very specific campaign setting with its own batch of house rules that has nothing to do with which WotC edition is actually the best.
To which, again, for me the answer is post-Essentials Only 4E for making fighers more than I hit it with my sword and making spellcasters more specialized vs. masters of all while also having some of the most evocative and easy to use ib play monster stat blocks of any edition and transparent math that let me set up in under an hour what would have been 5-6 hours prep in prior editions.
Ahhh, I see the disconnect. As someone who recently played a 4e campaign for about a year now, I think you missed a part of the question. If the question had been for the best RPG produced by WotC, then I think you would have a pretty good case. But the question was about the best WotC version of D&D. And 4e, regardless of its strengths, is about as far from actual Dungeons & Dragons as you can get...
Yeah, I should have been clearer - 4e is it's own form of insanity that isn't D&D.
I just think that 3e was a pure attempt to clean up AD&D and both 3.5 and 5e (and PF) tried to fix things that weren't broken other than in the minds of people who just couldn't accept that there were moments of gameplay that weren't equitable. You *don't* have to balance everything with everything else, the PCs aren't special insofar as there are other events, other NPCs, other schemes that continue to progress even without their involvement, and time waits for no man...
Do away with stacking of bonuses fixes 99% of the parts of 3e that becomes a problem. Like - no stacking at all, just pick the highest bonus. There was never a need for 3.5 or 5e - 3e is already nearly perfect.
Quote from: Eirikrautha on September 05, 2022, 03:32:19 PM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 02:41:52 PM
At this point I'm not even sure we're in the same conversation or if this is two different threads crossing streams. You seem to be discussing a very specific campaign setting with its own batch of house rules that has nothing to do with which WotC edition is actually the best.
To which, again, for me the answer is post-Essentials Only 4E for making fighers more than I hit it with my sword and making spellcasters more specialized vs. masters of all while also having some of the most evocative and easy to use ib play monster stat blocks of any edition and transparent math that let me set up in under an hour what would have been 5-6 hours prep in prior editions.
Ahhh, I see the disconnect. As someone who recently played a 4e campaign for about a year now, I think you missed a part of the question. If the question had been for the best RPG produced by WotC, then I think you would have a pretty good case. But the question was about the best WotC version of D&D. And 4e, regardless of its strengths, is about as far from actual Dungeons & Dragons as you can get...
::Looks at 4E books::
Yup, they say D&D on them.
::Looks at 4E campaign notes::
Yup, played pretty much like every other version of D&D at our table. Essentials even felt more old school than anything 3e tried to be.
So forgive me for being dense, but where is this great evidence that 4E isn't D&D? And no, I don't consider "I don't like it so it doesn't count" to be a valid answer. Show me where mechanically it significantly deviates from late 3.5e or early 5e in terms of what it can and cannot actually do at the table.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 05:34:54 PM
Quote from: Eirikrautha on September 05, 2022, 03:32:19 PM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 02:41:52 PM
At this point I'm not even sure we're in the same conversation or if this is two different threads crossing streams. You seem to be discussing a very specific campaign setting with its own batch of house rules that has nothing to do with which WotC edition is actually the best.
To which, again, for me the answer is post-Essentials Only 4E for making fighers more than I hit it with my sword and making spellcasters more specialized vs. masters of all while also having some of the most evocative and easy to use ib play monster stat blocks of any edition and transparent math that let me set up in under an hour what would have been 5-6 hours prep in prior editions.
Ahhh, I see the disconnect. As someone who recently played a 4e campaign for about a year now, I think you missed a part of the question. If the question had been for the best RPG produced by WotC, then I think you would have a pretty good case. But the question was about the best WotC version of D&D. And 4e, regardless of its strengths, is about as far from actual Dungeons & Dragons as you can get...
::Looks at 4E books::
Yup, they say D&D on them.
::Looks at 4E campaign notes::
Yup, played pretty much like every other version of D&D at our table. Essentials even felt more old school than anything 3e tried to be.
So forgive me for being dense, but where is this great evidence that 4E isn't D&D? And no, I don't consider "I don't like it so it doesn't count" to be a valid answer. Show me where mechanically it significantly deviates from late 3.5e or early 5e in terms of what it can and cannot actually do at the table.
Just because it says D&D doesn't make it D&D. 4e was so focused on every class doing stuff in tactical combat, that it was actually closer to Chainmail then D&D. I didn't not like 4e for what it was, but there was really no significant out of combat stuff. Even BECMI or 1e had done modicum of exploration. For example, Isle of Dread was a textbook case of how to do a hexcrawl...
I would simply say that trying to improve on 3e just led to more problems. 3.5 tried to fix 3e but just added bloat . 4e tried to make 3.5e cleaner and give everyone something to do, but left it soulless. 5e tried to revive 1e's feel but was a pale imitation because it was mechanically cleaner than 1e.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 05, 2022, 08:11:38 PM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 05:34:54 PM
Quote from: Eirikrautha on September 05, 2022, 03:32:19 PM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 05, 2022, 02:41:52 PM
At this point I'm not even sure we're in the same conversation or if this is two different threads crossing streams. You seem to be discussing a very specific campaign setting with its own batch of house rules that has nothing to do with which WotC edition is actually the best.
To which, again, for me the answer is post-Essentials Only 4E for making fighers more than I hit it with my sword and making spellcasters more specialized vs. masters of all while also having some of the most evocative and easy to use ib play monster stat blocks of any edition and transparent math that let me set up in under an hour what would have been 5-6 hours prep in prior editions.
Ahhh, I see the disconnect. As someone who recently played a 4e campaign for about a year now, I think you missed a part of the question. If the question had been for the best RPG produced by WotC, then I think you would have a pretty good case. But the question was about the best WotC version of D&D. And 4e, regardless of its strengths, is about as far from actual Dungeons & Dragons as you can get...
::Looks at 4E books::
Yup, they say D&D on them.
::Looks at 4E campaign notes::
Yup, played pretty much like every other version of D&D at our table. Essentials even felt more old school than anything 3e tried to be.
So forgive me for being dense, but where is this great evidence that 4E isn't D&D? And no, I don't consider "I don't like it so it doesn't count" to be a valid answer. Show me where mechanically it significantly deviates from late 3.5e or early 5e in terms of what it can and cannot actually do at the table.
Just because it says D&D doesn't make it D&D. 4e was so focused on every class doing stuff in tactical combat, that it was actually closer to Chainmail then D&D. I didn't not like 4e for what it was, but there was really no significant out of combat stuff. Even BECMI or 1e had done modicum of exploration. For example, Isle of Dread was a textbook case of how to do a hexcrawl...
Just a question; how many mechanics do you actually need for outside of combat?
Do you want every conversation outcome handled by dice rolls? Or should those things largely be left to players and DMs doing actual roleplaying? Do you need much more than a reaction table and an engaged DM?
How many tables do you need for climbing, jumping, swimming, opening locks and noticing traps? How many pages did AD&D devote to such things?
Every edition of D&D has a disproportionate amount of its rules devoted to combat. The stakes are high enough that many players would be dissatisfied with leaving the outcome to a single random roll. But you know this. You just want to only level the criticism at 4E.
3e's phb combat chapter was 26 pages (not counting the spellcasting combat chapter). It's adventuring chapter just 6 pages.
2e's phb combat chapter was 24 pages (not counting spellcasting). It's equivalent exploraration chapters were 10 pages.
4E's phb has 32 pages for its combat chapter (including spellcasting combat rules) and 8 for its adventuring chapter.
Essentials has 10 pages for combat and about 6 pages for each race and class discussing how to roleplay them in their PHB equivalents (most of the adventuring rules from baseline 4E got moved into the skills and equipment chapters so making a fair comparison isn't nearly as easy).
Tell me again... how is 4E significantly different from the other editions when it comes to balance of combat vs. non-combat rules?
As to "soulless"; that's entirely subjective. I found myself far more engaged with the lore of the 4E default setting than any of the (to me) ridiculous Great Wheel settings. It had real mythological elements to it complete with a Titanomacy (the Dawn War) that explains the cultural phenomenon of adventuring parties as acceptable parts of society (the gods in the setting are the prototypical adventuring party; members who teamed up to face the much stronger primordials) and an Eschatology (the Dusk War). It actually made giants into a central part of the mythos and created much more evocative to story Otherworlds (the feywild and shadowfell) that could be reached just by stepping through the wrong crop of stones or visiting the wrong crypt on a moonless night... much more in line with actual folklore than godly realms only accessible to high level spellcasters.
In short, it actually had a more cohesive and, more importantly, more useable setting than any prior D&D setting I've encountered. It also finally delivered mechanically on all those "you play heroes" settings of AD&D that the older mechanics of "run a bunch of randomly-rolled dirt farmers through death traps while grubbing for gold until one finally survives long enough for you to bother naming" ever allowed.
Soulless to me was early D&D's gotcha monsters and insta-ganks where there was no point in even placing any investment into a PC until they'd lucked their way through enough adventures to not be at obvious risk of death any time hungry rats or a few goblins showed up. That felt like soulless wargaming to me.
I'm not saying you have to like 4th Edition (I certainly have no love for any of the TSR-era D&D's), but saying "it's not D&D" comes off as petty and judging with a double standard that convinces no one not already a fellow traveler of your position.
ETA: follow-up on "soulles." These are books, not people or even animals. That means in terms of "soul" you mostly find what you put into them; whether it's O, B, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5e. I've seen entirely soulless games of AD&D because no one was engaged with them material. I've seen people utterly engaged with atrocious systems because the GM was putting their heart and soul into them. None of these systems have souls. The people engaging with them are responsible for easily 90% of a game's feel.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 06, 2022, 08:17:17 AM
Just a question; how many mechanics do you actually need for outside of combat?
You have Players, and you have Characters. The Characters have
abilities that the players may not (likewise, I'm sure most of my players have skills that their characters lack, like computer use and Algebra). When characters have abilities that players lack, it's almost a requirement that you let dice step in and determine whether the CHARACTER can succeed.
If the player wants to give an epic speech before a battle, maybe he channels some
Henry V or
Braveheart, or maybe he doesn't. If the player flubs his epic speech, I don't necessarily want to penalize the CHARACTER and detract from the perception that he is supposed to be an inspiring leader. Playing an RPG can be a bit of escapist fantasy, and it's neither NECESSARY nor RECOMMENABLE to highlight a player's shortcomings when they're not able to do do things 'in real life' that their character is supposed to do.
So the answer to the question is 'you need enough mechanics to support the character abilities that you have in your game'. If that includes social abilities, you need social mechanics. If that includes crafting objects, you need crafting mechanics. If that includes leadership/attracting followers, you need leadership mechanics. When a player and a GM both know what a character OUGHT to be able to do, it's easier to support those things. If there are no rules about followers, you CAN trust to roleplay, but that may not be fair and may result in issues of balance/less enjoyable play.
This all assumes that you have GOOD MECHANICS. Bad Mechanics are almost ALWAYS worse than NO MECHANICS - a competent GM can probably make things work, but very few GMs started as good as they are now. Mechanics help new GMs become good GMs - it gives them a guide until they develop an instinctual understanding of what works, and what doesn't and WHY.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 05, 2022, 10:32:16 AM
Why would the wizard let the fighter be a king?
Per the common literary trope, one of the laws of wizardry might be "don't interfere with politics," enforced by a conclave of the most powerful wizards.
Quote from: deadDMwalking on September 06, 2022, 09:54:14 AM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 06, 2022, 08:17:17 AM
Just a question; how many mechanics do you actually need for outside of combat?
You have Players, and you have Characters. The Characters have abilities that the players may not (likewise, I'm sure most of my players have skills that their characters lack, like computer use and Algebra). When characters have abilities that players lack, it's almost a requirement that you let dice step in and determine whether the CHARACTER can succeed.
If the player wants to give an epic speech before a battle, maybe he channels some Henry V or Braveheart, or maybe he doesn't. If the player flubs his epic speech, I don't necessarily want to penalize the CHARACTER and detract from the perception that he is supposed to be an inspiring leader. Playing an RPG can be a bit of escapist fantasy, and it's neither NECESSARY nor RECOMMENABLE to highlight a player's shortcomings when they're not able to do do things 'in real life' that their character is supposed to do.
So the answer to the question is 'you need enough mechanics to support the character abilities that you have in your game'. If that includes social abilities, you need social mechanics. If that includes crafting objects, you need crafting mechanics. If that includes leadership/attracting followers, you need leadership mechanics. When a player and a GM both know what a character OUGHT to be able to do, it's easier to support those things. If there are no rules about followers, you CAN trust to roleplay, but that may not be fair and may result in issues of balance/less enjoyable play.
This all assumes that you have GOOD MECHANICS. Bad Mechanics are almost ALWAYS worse than NO MECHANICS - a competent GM can probably make things work, but very few GMs started as good as they are now. Mechanics help new GMs become good GMs - it gives them a guide until they develop an instinctual understanding of what works, and what doesn't and WHY.
Okay, now show me where other editions covered any of this more extensively than 4E did and maybe you'll have a point that is relevant to 4E not being D&D. 4E devotes more proportional space to adventuring than 3e did (8 of 40 pages in 4E vs. 6 of 32 pages in 3e), but it's decried as having nothing outside of combat.
I can get more detailed on breakdowns of material between editions if you want. Should we count pages devoted to skills/non-weapon proficiencies? I left the spellcasting chapter out of the combat page count in 3e even though everything spellcasting related was included in the 4E page count.
Again, if you don't like 4th Edition, that's fine. It's the declaring it "not D&D" that I find to be childish; akin to a kid claiming to their friends that their unpopular brother was adopted lest they feel tainted by mere association.
Quote from: Zalman on September 06, 2022, 10:07:35 AMPer the common literary trope,
Based on what? What literary trope is so common it would mean a 3e wizard wouldn't have reason to rule everything.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 06, 2022, 10:25:24 AM
Quote from: deadDMwalking on September 06, 2022, 09:54:14 AM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 06, 2022, 08:17:17 AM
Just a question; how many mechanics do you actually need for outside of combat?
You have Players, and you have Characters. The Characters have abilities that the players may not (likewise, I'm sure most of my players have skills that their characters lack, like computer use and Algebra). When characters have abilities that players lack, it's almost a requirement that you let dice step in and determine whether the CHARACTER can succeed.
If the player wants to give an epic speech before a battle, maybe he channels some Henry V or Braveheart, or maybe he doesn't. If the player flubs his epic speech, I don't necessarily want to penalize the CHARACTER and detract from the perception that he is supposed to be an inspiring leader. Playing an RPG can be a bit of escapist fantasy, and it's neither NECESSARY nor RECOMMENABLE to highlight a player's shortcomings when they're not able to do do things 'in real life' that their character is supposed to do.
So the answer to the question is 'you need enough mechanics to support the character abilities that you have in your game'. If that includes social abilities, you need social mechanics. If that includes crafting objects, you need crafting mechanics. If that includes leadership/attracting followers, you need leadership mechanics. When a player and a GM both know what a character OUGHT to be able to do, it's easier to support those things. If there are no rules about followers, you CAN trust to roleplay, but that may not be fair and may result in issues of balance/less enjoyable play.
This all assumes that you have GOOD MECHANICS. Bad Mechanics are almost ALWAYS worse than NO MECHANICS - a competent GM can probably make things work, but very few GMs started as good as they are now. Mechanics help new GMs become good GMs - it gives them a guide until they develop an instinctual understanding of what works, and what doesn't and WHY.
Okay, now show me where other editions covered any of this more extensively than 4E did and maybe you'll have a point that is relevant to 4E not being D&D. 4E devotes more proportional space to adventuring than 3e did (8 of 40 pages in 4E vs. 6 of 32 pages in 3e), but it's decried as having nothing outside of combat.
I can get more detailed on breakdowns of material between editions if you want. Should we count pages devoted to skills/non-weapon proficiencies? I left the spellcasting chapter out of the combat page count in 3e even though everything spellcasting related was included in the 4E page count.
Again, if you don't like 4th Edition, that's fine. It's the declaring it "not D&D" that I find to be childish; akin to a kid claiming to their friends that their unpopular brother was adopted lest they feel tainted by mere association.
I'd ask the following: is there a A Magical Medieval Society Western Europe for 4e? What about downtime rules like PF or 5e?
It's "not D&D" because the feel during play is vastly different - you could just as easily be playing a card game with the applicable daily, per encounter, and at will powers listed. Everything revolves around combat effectiveness and balance while non-combat activities are cinematic at best. Is that closer to 1e? Sure, but we're talking about best WotC versions.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 06, 2022, 01:07:41 PM
I'd ask the following: is there a A Magical Medieval Society Western Europe for 4e? What about downtime rules like PF or 5e?
I mean the amount of purist magical medieval Europes is absolutely miniscule in the scale of D&D before WOTC and the downtime rules in D&D have always been small snd vestigial. 5e and 3e especially so.
Pfs downtime rules also blow.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 06, 2022, 02:35:31 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 06, 2022, 01:07:41 PM
I'd ask the following: is there a A Magical Medieval Society Western Europe for 4e? What about downtime rules like PF or 5e?
I mean the amount of purist magical medieval Europes is absolutely miniscule in the scale of D&D before WOTC and the downtime rules in D&D have always been small snd vestigial. 5e and 3e especially so.
Pfs downtime rules also blow.
I was referring to the fact that MMSWE contains rules that allow you to mechanically buy/sell/trade all of that loot to the point of starting your own wagon train or trade routes. The downtime rules do the same for things like running a business or doing magical research.
4e doesn't have these types of things - and for those who are used to the extreme focus on having battlemaps because of how tactical 4e combat is, expecting cinematic theater of the mind noncombat activities is a big let down - to the point that many DMs or players just hand-wave it.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 06, 2022, 06:42:34 PM
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 06, 2022, 02:35:31 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 06, 2022, 01:07:41 PM
I'd ask the following: is there a A Magical Medieval Society Western Europe for 4e? What about downtime rules like PF or 5e?
I mean the amount of purist magical medieval Europes is absolutely miniscule in the scale of D&D before WOTC and the downtime rules in D&D have always been small snd vestigial. 5e and 3e especially so.
Pfs downtime rules also blow.
I was referring to the fact that MMSWE contains rules that allow you to mechanically buy/sell/trade all of that loot to the point of starting your own wagon train or trade routes. The downtime rules do the same for things like running a business or doing magical research.
4e doesn't have these types of things - and for those who are used to the extreme focus on having battlemaps because of how tactical 4e combat is, expecting cinematic theater of the mind noncombat activities is a big let down - to the point that many DMs or players just hand-wave it.
3e doesn't have those things either. At least not in core... wait, I forgot, you could make a profession check once a week to earn some silver pieces. That's it. How immersive.
Remember 3.x was billed as the "back to the dungeon" edition that stripped out all the stronghold and follower features from the classes and walled any followers or A henchmen behind a feat that was only allowed by GM permission. It's expectation from the adventure modules released for it was you'd go all the way to level 20 (and potentially beyond) as a murder hobo who used all your wealth by level gold pieces on items from the local magic mart not on some castle they didn't even have any rules for beyond a completely generic one in 3.5e and only covered in 3e in a rather thin softcover splatbook.
Regarding theatre of the mind, my table for years ran 4E entirely in theater of the mind; it's not hard at all... certainly no harder than for 3e despite 3e also insisting that you only play it using minis and maps (preferably D&D brand random box minis and battlemaps).
Yeah, sorry... selectively applying conditions to disqualify 4E as D&D that other editions also fail to meet isn't any sort of convincing argument.
Again, I'm not asking you to like 4E. I frankly consider most of TSR D&D to be a collection of awful gaming experiences I'd rather leave buried (the only OSR I'm interested in is 1e Palladium Fantasy), but I don't go around saying it's not real D&D because I didn't happen to like it.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 06, 2022, 06:42:34 PMI was referring to the fact that MMSWE contains rules that allow you to mechanically buy/sell/trade all of that loot to the point of starting your own wagon train or trade routes. The downtime rules do the same for things like running a business or doing magical research.
So is the core of the D&D experience trading and mercentile operations?
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 06, 2022, 06:42:34 PM
I was referring to the fact that MMSWE contains rules that allow you to mechanically buy/sell/trade all of that loot to the point of starting your own wagon train or trade routes. The downtime rules do the same for things like running a business or doing magical research.
Flag on the play. I didn't realize what you were talking about at first, but MMSWE is a third party (non-WotC) product.
So, in essence you've just admitted that actual 3.x D&D never had these things in them, so 4E also not having them in its core either isn't a mark against it. It's just par for the course.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 06, 2022, 08:06:07 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 06, 2022, 06:42:34 PM
I was referring to the fact that MMSWE contains rules that allow you to mechanically buy/sell/trade all of that loot to the point of starting your own wagon train or trade routes. The downtime rules do the same for things like running a business or doing magical research.
Flag on the play. I didn't realize what you were talking about at first, but MMSWE is a third party (non-WotC) product.
So, in essence you've just admitted that actual 3.x D&D never had these things in them, so 4E also not having them in its core either isn't a mark against it. It's just par for the course.
Imma use my coach's challenge. 3pp OGL = compatible with 3.x and permitted by WotC to be marketed as such. Same with 5e. 4e *could* have but it chose to take its GSL ball home...
I would argue that since people were willing to generate 3.x 3pp to such a large extent (even if alot of it was terrible) it should be considered the best edition.
To be clear there can be arguments made as to why 4e was the most radical departure from 0-2e. But I have heard only very poor arguments for that by people thst don't actually read the system.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 06, 2022, 09:13:53 PM
To be clear there can be arguments made as to why 4e was the most radical departure from 0-2e. But I have heard only very poor arguments for that by people thst don't actually read the system.
I would argue that of the three games WotC has produced under the brand, 4E is the most
overt departure from TSR D&D. Whether it differs in actual play more than 3E or 5E is another question, but it certainly
looks the most different at first glance.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 06, 2022, 08:39:46 PM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 06, 2022, 08:06:07 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 06, 2022, 06:42:34 PM
I was referring to the fact that MMSWE contains rules that allow you to mechanically buy/sell/trade all of that loot to the point of starting your own wagon train or trade routes. The downtime rules do the same for things like running a business or doing magical research.
Flag on the play. I didn't realize what you were talking about at first, but MMSWE is a third party (non-WotC) product.
So, in essence you've just admitted that actual 3.x D&D never had these things in them, so 4E also not having them in its core either isn't a mark against it. It's just par for the course.
Imma use my coach's challenge. 3pp OGL = compatible with 3.x and permitted by WotC to be marketed as such. Same with 5e. 4e *could* have but it chose to take its GSL ball home...
I would argue that since people were willing to generate 3.x 3pp to such a large extent (even if alot of it was terrible) it should be considered the best edition.
First, again, I am not arguing 4th Edition is best because that's going to be entirely subjective to the individual. I am merely arguing that 4th Edition is actually D&D whether you like that it is or not.
I would further argue that the nature of the OGL had far more to do with its wide adoption (including by people who had no business getting into the industry, but thought churning out a book they no longer needed to develop their own mechanics for would make them rich, only to be bankrupt in a year) than any particular love of 3rd Edition D&D. Of particular note is how few DM's would actually allow any third party material at their tables (vs. official WotC material which they at least presumed had a degree of balance with the rest of the official material).
But, if you think referencing every 3rd party supplement is a fair standard, then by all means let's compare it with the full body of 4E and it's 3rd party support (there was some; a particularly notable one being FourthCore that produced classic dungeon crawls with old school lethality and Hard Boiled Armies which adds mass combat rules). The most notable of these would be Dragon Magazine which was published in house during 4E and all its content made it into their character builders.
So that means 4E has castle/estate building rules, hirelings and henchmen, tournaments, themes and backgrounds (non-combat traits added to the characters), gladiatorial sports, organization rules (guilds/merchant houses) and so forth all in its official material. It also has "martial practices" for a variety on non-combat non-magical actions that can be learned outside the leveling system to further refine characters.
4E is also the first edition of D&D where you can establish a completely non-magical setting and run it without needing house rules to get around the lack of magical healing or adjusting the minorly magical classes so you aren't limited to all fighters and thieves (5e kinda can with its full heal ups and hit dice, but not nearly as smoothly)... so in terms of emulating a Robin Hood or other "real" Medieval European setting it's easily the one that needs the least futz (you have fighters, rangers, rogues, warlords, knights, slayers, scouts, hunters and at least some builds of the executioner, berserker and skald).
Add any of 4E's non-magical themes, castles, henchmen/hirelings, tourneys, guilds and mass combat onto it and you've a great high adventure non-magic Medieval Europe to play in with no house-ruling needed. That's one more definite plus for 4E in my book.
Eta: removed some unnecessary snark.
For what it's worth, when I responded to your question about how many non-combat systems you need, it was not intended to imply that 4th edition is not D&D. I know that conversation was happening, and I agree with you that 4th is D&D (that's what it says on the tin) and I don't think that there's any special ingredient that defines D&D versus non-D&D. I didn't play 4th but looked at it enough to be sure that I didn't see it as an improvement over 3rd edition, but that's not the same as saying it wasn't D&D.
IMO, 4e and 5e are "D&D" in name only. This isn't to say that either game/"edition" doesn't have its merits, or that I wouldn't prefer the way that they handle some things, but rather that they're a radical departure from earlier "editions" of D&D in ways that almost no edition of other TTRPGs differ from their earlier editions, PF2 being the only exception I know about. They bear only superficial similarities to earlier games, such as having the same six ability scores, sharing many classes with equal names (that work completely different, except for HD types) and also being class & level games. But many of the core mechanics are completely different, other than ability score modifiers being figured the same way as 3e, and they do away with core elements that had been around since the OG game's inception, such as THATC0/Attack Bonuses and Saving Throw progressions, handling everything under a universal level-based modifier that applies to all rolls.
3e also made significant changes as well, almost teetering at the edge of being a different game. But many of those changes were cleaning up and streamlining many of the core elements of earlier editions. Attack Bonuses, for example, were basically an inverted THAC0, but mathematically were almost identical, just more intuitive to use. Saving Throws were mostly restructured into more simplified and intuitive groupings of "Special Defenses/Resistances" rather being based around a bunch of specific attack types or conditions, like Breath Weapons or Petrification. But the spirit of what they intended to represent, as well as a level-based progression was still there. Other stuff, like Skills and Feats, were mostly additions that gave more customization options, though, that is where the game begins to change compared to earlier games.
The case could be made that 3e is also D&D in name only, but there is enough overlap between it and earlier editions for it to be a weaker case. But with 4e and 5e if you changed the stat names and called the game something else you wouldn't know it was D&D. If you did the same to 3e, it would at least be recognizable as a splinter of D&D.
Quote from: VisionStorm on September 07, 2022, 10:34:27 AM
The case could be made that 3e is also D&D in name only, but there is enough overlap between it and earlier editions for it to be a weaker case. But with 4e and 5e if you changed the stat names and called the game something else you wouldn't know it was D&D. If you did the same to 3e, it would at least be recognizable as a splinter of D&D.
But this becomes a bit of a No True Scotsman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman) argument. If you define D&D as 'everything that says D&D published before 1998', then obviously 3rd, 4th and 5th edition wouldn't count. I think a more inclusive definition is good - telling someone that they're NOT playing D&D because they're playing 5th edition is probably insulting. I think it's fair to say what you think are 'sacred cows' for D&D and which editions you think are better/best because they meet those definitions, but it isn't fair to say that other people that value different aspects aren't playing D&D.
D&D is a brand, like Coca-Cola is a brand. Coke and Diet Coke are both versions of Coke - it's okay that they're basically NOTHING ALIKE. They both say Coke on the bottle and as long as you know what you're getting, that's fine.
Vision Storm,
You can only make that argument stick for 3E if you only consider 2E as the source material. Because 3E is not a streamlined, cleaned up D&D in general, it is a (somewhat) cleaned up, (somewhat) streamlined version of 2E (including late 2E supplements). Like all cleaned up, streamlined efforts done by people that don't fully appreciate what they are touching, it falls short in some new ways.
5E is far closer to BEMCI/RC than 3E could ever hope to be, and that's only on a cursory examination. If you did deep into the way the rules actually work, you'll find little pieces of BEMCI/RC stuck into 5E in strange places. Of course, what makes it not so obvious is that 5E is doing that same lifting from 1E, 2E, 3E, 4E, and probably a bunch of their cousins as well. It's the orbital pull of 4E mechanics and attitude that gives the other impression. You could set all the defaults in 5E to be, say, 1E matching, and then make the corresponding optional rules for any of the 4E stuff, and you'ld get a very different impression.
But really, the whole argument of what is and isn't D&D is silly. Because it's more about how you run it at the table, than what the rules actually say, and what D&D is at the table varies, a lot. When I ran 4E, it was D&D. Doesn't matter that other people found that they couldn't run it as D&D. At my table, it was clearly D&D. The only real meaning in the phrase "not D&D" is more clearly, "more trouble than I want to put up with in order to run D&D at my table". Which is a much narrower, subjective comment.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 06, 2022, 09:13:53 PM
To be clear there can be arguments made as to why 4e was the most radical departure from 0-2e. But I have heard only very poor arguments for that by people thst don't actually read the system.
Yep, starting with overly narrow and found new ways to be bloated. The whole way that powers were written should have been considered a prototype that was thrown out, instead of releasing the game a year early when it wasn't ready.
Of course, it didn't help that WotC completely screwed up the marketing and pitch for 4E out of the gate, not least because half the people working on it thought it was something different than what it was. So we can't entirely blame people for taking them at their word.
Quote from: Jam The MF on August 09, 2022, 11:53:42 PM
If you were going to play a WOTC Edition, which one would it be?
For me, it would either be 3.0 or 5.0 Without Feats or Prestige Classes. 3.5 was just a rewrite of 3.0 with more pages to read. Neither was perfect.
Probably going to need to don the fire suit, but Type IV. I've run two campaigns in it plus played in two. I had a blast all four times.
Fact is the last campaign broke up because a player died and his widow, another player, moved home to family. At the same time a third player returned to Germany (she was an exchange student). With 60% of my players gone in 4 weeks it collapsed.
The reason I liked it is I finally said, "Okay, this isn't D&D in terms of the expectations I've had since I bought Holmes. Let's see what it is." Once I did that I found a fun tactical game with some RPG elements.
If I want to play D&D as I expect I'd go to one of the B/X clones, either ones that add AD&D stuff to create the game I played circa 80-85 that I can "Intermediate D&D" or ACKs.
Every now and then I look at my 3.x books (including PF), but figure if I want that kind of customization I'll just play GURPS Dungeon Fantasy or Hero Fantasy.
So, yeah, of WotC: 4th Edition.
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on September 07, 2022, 10:58:14 AM
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 06, 2022, 09:13:53 PM
To be clear there can be arguments made as to why 4e was the most radical departure from 0-2e. But I have heard only very poor arguments for that by people thst don't actually read the system.
Yep, starting with overly narrow and found new ways to be bloated. The whole way that powers were written should have been considered a prototype that was thrown out, instead of releasing the game a year early when it wasn't ready.
Of course, it didn't help that WotC completely screwed up the marketing and pitch for 4E out of the gate, not least because half the people working on it thought it was something different than what it was. So we can't entirely blame people for taking them at their word.
To be a little fair to WotC at the time, they were under the gun from Hasbro to release when they did ready or not.
Even as a fan of 4E, I agree it needed another year of polish (ex. by the release of the PHB2 9 months later they'd largely ironed out the controller role and gotten mechanics/fluff worked out for all the 3e base classes and races. By two years in they'd fixed the monster math/relative threat/solo monster issues, but too many had jumped ship by then).
Further, the market readiness for a new edition had only really reached the start of the Early Adopter range in 2008... another year of late 3.5e material and it probably would have reached General Adopter phase of product life cycles and, with all the expected races/classes available, would have probably gotten a lot less pushback.
The biggest self-inflicted wound though was, again, Hasbro, who thought they could maximize profits by bringing Dragon and Dungeon magazine in house and dropping the OGL for the GSL. Pathfinder was originally going to be Paizo's official 4E setting for the magazines and their adventure paths until Hasbro chopped them off at the knees and created their biggest competition with a built-in audience of all the non-early adopters (plus late adopters) not ready to make the switch.
The digital vaporware was just another nail in the coffin (the claim is the lead developer scrambled all the files and backups before he committed suicide a month before launch, but its easily as likely the development team never had a viable product and, when the lead committed suicide, him taking all the data with him was just a convenient excuse for their failure to deliver).
Throw in a financial collapse and recession in the fall of 2007 into 2008 just as the $150 package of three books released and you essentially have a perfect storm of events that, frankly, makes it rather amazing that 4E did as well as it did... particularly when Hasbro/WotC fired 90% of the design team who actually understood the system in their annual Christmas layoffs... leading to a massive shift in direction for the line that didn't please what fans it did have, while being too little too late to bring in or retain older fans.
4E is basically a master class in how NOT to release an RPG and that factors beyond the raw system materials can play as big a role in failure as the product itself.
Quote from: deadDMwalking on September 07, 2022, 10:45:17 AM
Quote from: VisionStorm on September 07, 2022, 10:34:27 AM
The case could be made that 3e is also D&D in name only, but there is enough overlap between it and earlier editions for it to be a weaker case. But with 4e and 5e if you changed the stat names and called the game something else you wouldn't know it was D&D. If you did the same to 3e, it would at least be recognizable as a splinter of D&D.
But this becomes a bit of a No True Scotsman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman) argument. If you define D&D as 'everything that says D&D published before 1998', then obviously 3rd, 4th and 5th edition wouldn't count. I think a more inclusive definition is good - telling someone that they're NOT playing D&D because they're playing 5th edition is probably insulting. I think it's fair to say what you think are 'sacred cows' for D&D and which editions you think are better/best because they meet those definitions, but it isn't fair to say that other people that value different aspects aren't playing D&D.
D&D is a brand, like Coca-Cola is a brand. Coke and Diet Coke are both versions of Coke - it's okay that they're basically NOTHING ALIKE. They both say Coke on the bottle and as long as you know what you're getting, that's fine.
Except that I'm not defining D&D as anything published before 1998, but anything that closely resembles those game engines, the same way that basically every single other TTRPG other than PF2 does when comparing it to earlier editions. Which as close as an objective measure as we can get. People's feelings don't figure into it. This is about whether the system resembles earlier editions or not.
Declaring that something is a thing because it says so on the label is like saying that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is democratic, a republic and cares what it's people think because it says so in the name. And Diet Coke is different from regular Coke, that's why it's called DIET Coke, rather than selling it to me and telling me that it's just "Coke", then crying to me about all the people who like Diet when I point out it isn't the same thing.
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on September 07, 2022, 10:53:35 AM
Vision Storm,
You can only make that argument stick for 3E if you only consider 2E as the source material. Because 3E is not a streamlined, cleaned up D&D in general, it is a (somewhat) cleaned up, (somewhat) streamlined version of 2E (including late 2E supplements). Like all cleaned up, streamlined efforts done by people that don't fully appreciate what they are touching, it falls short in some new ways.
5E is far closer to BEMCI/RC than 3E could ever hope to be, and that's only on a cursory examination. If you did deep into the way the rules actually work, you'll find little pieces of BEMCI/RC stuck into 5E in strange places. Of course, what makes it not so obvious is that 5E is doing that same lifting from 1E, 2E, 3E, 4E, and probably a bunch of their cousins as well. It's the orbital pull of 4E mechanics and attitude that gives the other impression. You could set all the defaults in 5E to be, say, 1E matching, and then make the corresponding optional rules for any of the 4E stuff, and you'ld get a very different impression.
But really, the whole argument of what is and isn't D&D is silly. Because it's more about how you run it at the table, than what the rules actually say, and what D&D is at the table varies, a lot. When I ran 4E, it was D&D. Doesn't matter that other people found that they couldn't run it as D&D. At my table, it was clearly D&D. The only real meaning in the phrase "not D&D" is more clearly, "more trouble than I want to put up with in order to run D&D at my table". Which is a much narrower, subjective comment.
Maybe, but at least 3e resembles late stage 2e, which itself resembles 1e, which in turn resembles 0e. So there's a clear progression from one edition to the other. But by 4e all that goes out the window, and I'm not sure how 5e resembles earlier editions, aside from the specific (superficial) details I pointed out.
I also don't think that how people run the game really matters that much when it comes to judging whether the published material actually resembles earlier material. How people run the game is a matter of taste, not a defining attribute of the system.
Quote from: VisionStorm on September 07, 2022, 12:17:21 PM
Quote from: deadDMwalking on September 07, 2022, 10:45:17 AM
Quote from: VisionStorm on September 07, 2022, 10:34:27 AM
The case could be made that 3e is also D&D in name only, but there is enough overlap between it and earlier editions for it to be a weaker case. But with 4e and 5e if you changed the stat names and called the game something else you wouldn't know it was D&D. If you did the same to 3e, it would at least be recognizable as a splinter of D&D.
But this becomes a bit of a No True Scotsman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman) argument. If you define D&D as 'everything that says D&D published before 1998', then obviously 3rd, 4th and 5th edition wouldn't count. I think a more inclusive definition is good - telling someone that they're NOT playing D&D because they're playing 5th edition is probably insulting. I think it's fair to say what you think are 'sacred cows' for D&D and which editions you think are better/best because they meet those definitions, but it isn't fair to say that other people that value different aspects aren't playing D&D.
D&D is a brand, like Coca-Cola is a brand. Coke and Diet Coke are both versions of Coke - it's okay that they're basically NOTHING ALIKE. They both say Coke on the bottle and as long as you know what you're getting, that's fine.
Except that I'm not defining D&D as anything published before 1998, but anything that closely resembles those game engines, the same way that basically every single other TTRPG other than PF2 does when comparing it to earlier editions. Which as close as an objective measure as we can get. People's feelings don't figure into it. This is about whether the system resembles earlier editions or not.
Declaring that something is a thing because it says so on the label is like saying that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is democratic, a republic and cares what it's people think because it says so in the name. And Diet Coke is different from regular Coke, that's why it's called DIET Coke, rather than selling it to me and telling me that it's just "Coke", then crying to me about all the people who like Diet when I point out it isn't the same thing.
Okay, but where exactly are these vast differences? The attributes are the same as 3e. It made Point Buy the standard, but 3e had point buy too (insisted on it for tournament/living campaign play) and 4E also included the roll 4d6 drop lowest as an option. It used the same modifiers to attributes (score -10 divided by two, round down). It used AC, Fortitude, Reflex and Will, it just flipped who rolled for the non-AC defenses (but was still a d20 check).
It used the same d20+mod vs. DC system and separate damage roll for task resolution, included attribute based skills and had feats just like 3e had.
You built your PC by combining a race with a class just like every edition of D&D and bought starting equipment with an allotment of gold.
It used the same Standard, Move and Minor action economy for actions, humans moved the default 30' (6 squares) and could do double by spending their Standard action just like 3e. It had opportunity attacks just like 3e.
Since 3cat insists on focusing on more than just the core books, it included all the strongholds, hirelings, henchmen/companions, mass combat, and non-combat abilities one would expect of a fully fleshed out edition of D&D.
So either all of the WotC editions aren't "true" D&D or they all are... because you can easily see the connective tissue between late 3.5e (Tome of Battle, Reserve Feats, etc.) and early 4E and from late 4E into early 5e. Its NOT actually a radical departure, its just a step in a continuum.
But apparently the only thing that makes something D&D is some nebulous "feel"... making sure the books have lots of earth tones and old-parchment with plenty of Gygaxian prose interwoven with the actual mechanics needed to play. The proof in the pudding for me is how the OSR crowd swoons all over Stars/Worlds Without Number which has overall very modern design (including feats) and doesn't even use a d20 for task resolution and uses 4E's best of two stats for its Physical (Fort), Evasion (Reflex) and Mental (Will) saves. Its psychic powers effort system is basically at-will, encounter and daily powers just like 4E... but S/WWN gets a pass because it has some nebulous "feel" that makes it somehow OSR.
There's no objective standard behind excluding 4E from the "is D&D" list. Just people who are still outraged a decade later that it dared to actually try to improve things compared to 3e in a way they didn't approve of. The game has been out of print for a literal decade now (the last 4E book with any mechanics in it shipped in September of 2012) and people (some of whom never actually even played it) still can't stop hating on it.
I swear a friend of mine is right; if the OD&D and B/X boxes had shipped with live hornets in them, a non-trivial segment of the OSR crowd would insist that if you weren't going to the ER for anaphylactic shock after your first session then you weren't playing D&D right.
D&D is linear fighters and quadratic wizards. 4E moved away from that.
Quote from: VisionStorm on September 07, 2022, 12:28:14 PM
Maybe, but at least 3e resembles late stage 2e, which itself resembles 1e, which in turn resembles 0e. So there's a clear progression from one edition to the other. But by 4e all that goes out the window, and I'm not sure how 5e resembles earlier editions, aside from the specific (superficial) details I pointed out.
I also don't think that how people run the game really matters that much when it comes to judging whether the published material actually resembles earlier material. How people run the game is a matter of taste, not a defining attribute of the system.
Well, how you run it matters when judging whether playing it the way it is written replicates the experience. In order to know that, a person has to have also played the thing being compared against. To wit, 5E doesn't
read like BEMCI/RC, at all. When you play low-level 5E with certain options turned on to make it a little more deadly, the net effect at the table is very similar. Heck, there's even the prototype of the 5E exhaustion rules right there in the RC as an option, for example.
Now, I'd guess that it would also be similar to 2E in that respect, but I never ran it straight as it was described in the 2E rules. So it is only a guess. I did play 1E straight, or at least as straight as I could based on my then understanding of the rules, and I do see some similarities there. Also, it's not a level match. First level 5E characters played with those options feel more like third level B/X characters.
It's not an exact match. You have to dial the options pretty severely in 5E to get the same kind of PC death dynamic. There's only so far you can go with little save or die and no real level drain (though drifted exhaustion can help). But 5E is a heck of a lot closer match to that play experience than 3E every dreamed off, with the possible exception of low-level 3E out of the gate, with certain monsters (e.g. orcs, dragons, owlbears). About every couple of levels of advancement, 3E changes, and every time it changes, it becomes less like 1E and BEMCI/RC by leaps and bounds. But it's not an open or shut case on it, either. In some ways, at low levels, I even preferred its take on things.
Bah, I'm wasting too much time defending WotC products. The company sucks. They suck bad enough in enough ways that there's no point in nailing them for things that won't hold up to real experience with the products and the comparing products.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 07, 2022, 12:57:40 PM
Okay, but where exactly are these vast differences?
Principally, three:
1. The use of essentially the same powers system for all class abilities. You can argue it is an extension of the trend started in 3e with all classes having feats and a universal skill system, but the principle subsystems of magic and combat remained very distinct. Once every class had the same assembly of powers with a few mechanical differences around what physical focus (if any) was required and just picked from different power lists you have a significantly different game that will not meet the expectations of prior editions.
2. As I said above, I had a lot of fun with 4e but the first time I played I built my typical human fighter. This was a mistake because I tended to like to play front-line damage dealers, which fighters from 0e to 3.x could do. In fact, the feat system allowed me to do that more in 3e than AD&D thus fulfilling my expectations.
In 4e, a fighter is a defender, that is he stands in front and soaks up damage. I had more powers related to keeping others from being hurt than dealing damage. I would have been better suited as a melee ranger. In isolation that is fine, but when the system is set up so someone who always did $FOO in prior editions with method $LA winds up picking $LA and getting $FEE as their role, you've created a vast difference.
3. The combination of #1 and #2 makes avoiding #2 harder because the ability to analyze characters for roles taught by the prior condition breaks down.
Those factors do not make any statement about the quality of the different games but should lead one to suspect that players of the first game will come to the second with a certain set of expectations and be disappointed.
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on September 07, 2022, 02:15:26 PM
Quote from: VisionStorm on September 07, 2022, 12:28:14 PM
Maybe, but at least 3e resembles late stage 2e, which itself resembles 1e, which in turn resembles 0e. So there's a clear progression from one edition to the other. But by 4e all that goes out the window, and I'm not sure how 5e resembles earlier editions, aside from the specific (superficial) details I pointed out.
I also don't think that how people run the game really matters that much when it comes to judging whether the published material actually resembles earlier material. How people run the game is a matter of taste, not a defining attribute of the system.
Well, how you run it matters when judging whether playing it the way it is written replicates the experience. In order to know that, a person has to have also played the thing being compared against. To wit, 5E doesn't read like BEMCI/RC, at all. When you play low-level 5E with certain options turned on to make it a little more deadly, the net effect at the table is very similar. Heck, there's even the prototype of the 5E exhaustion rules right there in the RC as an option, for example.
Now, I'd guess that it would also be similar to 2E in that respect, but I never ran it straight as it was described in the 2E rules. So it is only a guess. I did play 1E straight, or at least as straight as I could based on my then understanding of the rules, and I do see some similarities there. Also, it's not a level match. First level 5E characters played with those options feel more like third level B/X characters.
It's not an exact match. You have to dial the options pretty severely in 5E to get the same kind of PC death dynamic. There's only so far you can go with little save or die and no real level drain (though drifted exhaustion can help). But 5E is a heck of a lot closer match to that play experience than 3E every dreamed off, with the possible exception of low-level 3E out of the gate, with certain monsters (e.g. orcs, dragons, owlbears). About every couple of levels of advancement, 3E changes, and every time it changes, it becomes less like 1E and BEMCI/RC by leaps and bounds. But it's not an open or shut case on it, either. In some ways, at low levels, I even preferred its take on things.
Bah, I'm wasting too much time defending WotC products. The company sucks. They suck bad enough in enough ways that there's no point in nailing them for things that won't hold up to real experience with the products and the comparing products.
Fair enough...
My favorite D&D rules are the RC hard cover. The various OD&D through 5e adventure modules can be mined for ideas or back-ported to RC.
The challenge is separating the plot stuff from undesired reconned lore from the mechanics. In that regard, 3e did a decent job of adhering to established lore for both GH and FR. 4e was quite the shitshow when it came to Forgotten Realms lore. 5e has so far done a shit job on lore because of wokeness (in their quest to be all-inclusive, they've continued to step on their own dicks again and again). For these reasons, I still rate 3e the best WotC Edition.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 07, 2022, 04:02:30 PM
Fair enough...
My favorite D&D rules are the RC hard cover. The various OD&D through 5e adventure modules can be mined for ideas or back-ported to RC.
The challenge is separating the plot stuff from undesired reconned lore from the mechanics. In that regard, 3e did a decent job of adhering to established lore for both GH and FR. 4e was quite the shitshow when it came to Forgotten Realms lore. 5e has so far done a shit job on lore because of wokeness (in their quest to be all-inclusive, they've continued to step on their own dicks again and again). For these reasons, I still rate 3e the best WotC Edition.
Well, with the possible exception of 2E specialty priests, and maybe a few niche things, I'd say every edition of the FR material is worse than the last. Which is why if I were to run FR today, in
any edition, I'd do it with some of the 1E stuff only. That said, I agree with the Chris that, on balance, I prefer the more mythological basis of the 4E implied setting. The conceits of that don't really fit FR. So of course the ham-handed attempt to make them fit didn't go well. If ever there was an edition that really needed to leave FR alone and do its own things, 4E was it. They couldn't do that, because of the "branding" thing.
This is part of what I mean when I've said elsewhere that a big problem with all WotC editions is that they don't have the courage to follow through with where the game is clearly going. Even with the woke stuff now, they are still trying to have it both ways. Changed, yet not changed. Different, yet compatible. Same experience that you always got, but "better". That's a strategy devised by a mob.
I'm not really a 2E fan, of either its approach to the rules or most of the settings, but I will give its designers credit for not falling into that same trap. They clearly set out with the goal of clarifying the rules while leaving them mostly untouched, and that the place to explore was different ways to use those rules, largely expressed in the settings. And then they did their best to run with those ideas.
I also prefer BEMCI/RC.
Quote from: PulpHerb on September 07, 2022, 03:48:31 PM
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 07, 2022, 12:57:40 PM
Okay, but where exactly are these vast differences?
Principally, three:
1. The use of essentially the same powers system for all class abilities. You can argue it is an extension of the trend started in 3e with all classes having feats and a universal skill system, but the principle subsystems of magic and combat remained very distinct. Once every class had the same assembly of powers with a few mechanical differences around what physical focus (if any) was required and just picked from different power lists you have a significantly different game that will not meet the expectations of prior editions.
2. As I said above, I had a lot of fun with 4e but the first time I played I built my typical human fighter. This was a mistake because I tended to like to play front-line damage dealers, which fighters from 0e to 3.x could do. In fact, the feat system allowed me to do that more in 3e than AD&D thus fulfilling my expectations.
In 4e, a fighter is a defender, that is he stands in front and soaks up damage. I had more powers related to keeping others from being hurt than dealing damage. I would have been better suited as a melee ranger. In isolation that is fine, but when the system is set up so someone who always did $FOO in prior editions with method $LA winds up picking $LA and getting $FEE as their role, you've created a vast difference.
3. The combination of #1 and #2 makes avoiding #2 harder because the ability to analyze characters for roles taught by the prior condition breaks down.
Those factors do not make any statement about the quality of the different games but should lead one to suspect that players of the first game will come to the second with a certain set of expectations and be disappointed.
There's a reason I highly recommend post-Essentials only for 4E... there are two versions of the Fighter class; the Knight (Defender) and the Slayer (Striker) so if you wanted to do be the melee damage beast, you pick the Slayer version of the Fighter.
Essentially also added different mechanical schemes to the mix.
- Fighters were built around at-will stances and a "power strike" encounter power for extra damage with no daily powers at all.
- Thieves were built around at-will move action tricks and an encounter-power backstab requiring combat advantage and no daily powers at all.
- Assassins got a single-use per encounter death strike rather than multiple-use encounter powers and daily use poisons (of which they could craft any that they knew and each had an out-of-combat use).
- Rangers got a number of bonus utility powers, used mostly at-will powers with a couple of encounter power buffs. No dailies.
- Wizards had a spellbook that could hold two (three with a feat) spells per level and each day they could prepare X number of encounter and X number of daily spells from it.
- Skalds got to use any daily power they knew in their daily slots (rather than once each) and they were mostly encounter long ally buffs. Their healing ability actually ran off of other player's minor actions instead of their own with many of their encounter abilities being minor actions, interrupts or "on-hit" buffs meaning their primary attacks were basic ones with a weapon encounter abilities triggered by other actions.
- Berserkers went from being defenders to strikers the first time they used a daily power during a battle.
- Druids didn't get daily powers, but got summoning and they could summon the same critter each time if they wished.
- Monks used full-stance powers that combined a move and attack action into a single power.
- Elementalist Sorcerers were a simple spellcasting class that used a basic at-will attack that they augmented into extra damage and AoE attacks with a X/encounter boost and had no daily powers.
- Psions didn't get encounter powers at all, but instead got power points to boost their at-will powers.
- Paladins in Essentials got smites in place of encounter powers.
- Only Clerics and Warlocks retained the majority of the early 4E AEDU power structure.
As stated previously, the game got released a year early due to Hasbro demanding it and that meant a bunch of things were unfinished. Essentials launched within two years and was 100% backward compatible with the prior material (not just mostly compatible like 3-3.5) but opened up a whole slew of different options.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 07, 2022, 12:57:40 PM
Quote from: VisionStorm on September 07, 2022, 12:17:21 PM
Quote from: deadDMwalking on September 07, 2022, 10:45:17 AM
Quote from: VisionStorm on September 07, 2022, 10:34:27 AM
The case could be made that 3e is also D&D in name only, but there is enough overlap between it and earlier editions for it to be a weaker case. But with 4e and 5e if you changed the stat names and called the game something else you wouldn't know it was D&D. If you did the same to 3e, it would at least be recognizable as a splinter of D&D.
But this becomes a bit of a No True Scotsman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman) argument. If you define D&D as 'everything that says D&D published before 1998', then obviously 3rd, 4th and 5th edition wouldn't count. I think a more inclusive definition is good - telling someone that they're NOT playing D&D because they're playing 5th edition is probably insulting. I think it's fair to say what you think are 'sacred cows' for D&D and which editions you think are better/best because they meet those definitions, but it isn't fair to say that other people that value different aspects aren't playing D&D.
D&D is a brand, like Coca-Cola is a brand. Coke and Diet Coke are both versions of Coke - it's okay that they're basically NOTHING ALIKE. They both say Coke on the bottle and as long as you know what you're getting, that's fine.
Except that I'm not defining D&D as anything published before 1998, but anything that closely resembles those game engines, the same way that basically every single other TTRPG other than PF2 does when comparing it to earlier editions. Which as close as an objective measure as we can get. People's feelings don't figure into it. This is about whether the system resembles earlier editions or not.
Declaring that something is a thing because it says so on the label is like saying that the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is democratic, a republic and cares what it's people think because it says so in the name. And Diet Coke is different from regular Coke, that's why it's called DIET Coke, rather than selling it to me and telling me that it's just "Coke", then crying to me about all the people who like Diet when I point out it isn't the same thing.
Okay, but where exactly are these vast differences? The attributes are the same as 3e. It made Point Buy the standard, but 3e had point buy too (insisted on it for tournament/living campaign play) and 4E also included the roll 4d6 drop lowest as an option. It used the same modifiers to attributes (score -10 divided by two, round down). It used AC, Fortitude, Reflex and Will, it just flipped who rolled for the non-AC defenses (but was still a d20 check).
It used the same d20+mod vs. DC system and separate damage roll for task resolution, included attribute based skills and had feats just like 3e had.
You built your PC by combining a race with a class just like every edition of D&D and bought starting equipment with an allotment of gold.
It used the same Standard, Move and Minor action economy for actions, humans moved the default 30' (6 squares) and could do double by spending their Standard action just like 3e. It had opportunity attacks just like 3e.
Since 3cat insists on focusing on more than just the core books, it included all the strongholds, hirelings, henchmen/companions, mass combat, and non-combat abilities one would expect of a fully fleshed out edition of D&D.
So either all of the WotC editions aren't "true" D&D or they all are... because you can easily see the connective tissue between late 3.5e (Tome of Battle, Reserve Feats, etc.) and early 4E and from late 4E into early 5e. Its NOT actually a radical departure, its just a step in a continuum.
But apparently the only thing that makes something D&D is some nebulous "feel"... making sure the books have lots of earth tones and old-parchment with plenty of Gygaxian prose interwoven with the actual mechanics needed to play. The proof in the pudding for me is how the OSR crowd swoons all over Stars/Worlds Without Number which has overall very modern design (including feats) and doesn't even use a d20 for task resolution and uses 4E's best of two stats for its Physical (Fort), Evasion (Reflex) and Mental (Will) saves. Its psychic powers effort system is basically at-will, encounter and daily powers just like 4E... but S/WWN gets a pass because it has some nebulous "feel" that makes it somehow OSR.
There's no objective standard behind excluding 4E from the "is D&D" list. Just people who are still outraged a decade later that it dared to actually try to improve things compared to 3e in a way they didn't approve of. The game has been out of print for a literal decade now (the last 4E book with any mechanics in it shipped in September of 2012) and people (some of whom never actually even played it) still can't stop hating on it.
I swear a friend of mine is right; if the OD&D and B/X boxes had shipped with live hornets in them, a non-trivial segment of the OSR crowd would insist that if you weren't going to the ER for anaphylactic shock after your first session then you weren't playing D&D right.
I already covered much of this in my prior post (and you haven't addressed any of it, by the way). Attributes being mostly the same (4e does make some changes on which attribute modifiers apply to which rolls or saves, so they're not exactly the same) is largely superficial. Attributes are a tiny component of the game that just provides a modifier. They're just 3-18 range scores that grant a +1 bonus per 2 points above 10, or a -1 penalty per 2 points below 10. That's all it takes to describe them mechanically!
Plenty of games other than D&D also have some sort of Roll+Modifier vs Target Number mechanic, and use some variation of Standard, Move and Minor actions as well, and most class-based system also use Race+Class combinations. So all of that's superficial too (and utterly so in the case race+class).
The class structure and all related stats, like "To Hit"/THAC0/Attack Bonus, Saving Throw progression and Spell Casting, and what abilities they provide, are far more complex components that have a greater impact on how things actually work in the game, and they're all significantly different. 4e and 5e don't even make a distinction on different classes "To Hit" component, while different classes having different chances "To Hit" in combat was a defining characteristic in earlier editions FOR DECADES. Now mages have the same base chance to hit as warriors. The only difference is attribute modifiers, and mages often get to add their casting modifier to their attack rolls, meaning they probably get the same "to hit" chance as a warrior regardless.
And as PulpHerb pointed out, 4e made class powers that worked mostly the same a key defining feature of the system. With stuff like "at Will", "Encounter" or "Daily" powers that didn't exist in any other "edition" of the game, prior or after. They even got rid of the spellasting system and turned spells into powers. None of this stuff works like other editions of the game.
I'm also not sure why you're throwing snipes at me implying adulation of old D&D when I've gotten into multiple flame wars here for crapping on old D&D and the OSR. I was fairly specific on my reasoning in my post, and none of it included OD&D worship. All of it was about edition comparisons, and pointing out that no other systems that I'm aware of, other than PF2, change as much between editions. Editions from other games are nearly identical with minor adjustments and additions. It's only in D&D--and only WotC era at that--where we get drastically different games but are expected to regard them as the same thing.
D&D 3.0 tried to be a brand new edition, without taking a dump on everything that came before it.
3.5 was a rewrite of 3.0 and added a bunch more rules and splat books.
4.0 took D&D in a brand new direction, and pissed all over the existing lore of D&D.
5.0 tried to cash in, on peoples' yearning for the D&D of old. It also caught a big break, with the product placement of generic D&D in the media.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 07, 2022, 05:13:36 PM
There's a reason I highly recommend post-Essentials only for 4E... there are two versions of the Fighter class; the Knight (Defender) and the Slayer (Striker) so if you wanted to do be the melee damage beast, you pick the Slayer version of the Fighter.
Essentially also added different mechanical schemes to the mix.
I'll address the key issue I have with Essentials character books below, but while you addressed #2, #1 remains and that alone is sufficient to qualify as a significant difference, one great enough to mean 4e failed the "this is what I expect from D&D" that the rest of the family tree met sufficiently for people think of them as "D&D" as opposed to "not D&D".
Think of it as inviting people to play
Mage: the Ascession and running
Mage: the Awakening. I love both, but they are very different games, and selling one as the other will frustrate players. This is ironic given all M:tAs characters were Awakened by definition while M:tAw characters were much more likely to Ascend.
As I said, this is sad because it blinded people to a very fun game.
Quote
As stated previously, the game got released a year early due to Hasbro demanding it and that meant a bunch of things were unfinished. Essentials launched within two years and was 100% backward compatible with the prior material (not just mostly compatible like 3-3.5) but opened up a whole slew of different options.
This I'll agree with. What I'll disagree with is essentials was a poor fix. Essentials characters offer fewer options than the PHB ones and the two groups don't mix and match well. They're balanced, but Essentials players will get annoyed they can't mix in the more varied options of the PHB books. If Essentials had lived long enough to provide everything we'd seen in the PHB and the power source books it might have been better.
Quote from: VisionStorm on September 07, 2022, 06:44:30 PM
All of it was about edition comparisons, and pointing out that no other systems that I'm aware of, other than PF2, change as much between editions. Editions from other games are nearly identical with minor adjustments and additions. It's only in D&D--and only WotC era at that--where we get drastically different games but are expected to regard them as the same thing.
The PF2 point is a big one.
I consider PF a member of the Dungeons & Dragons family* as I do a lot of games from the late 70s/early 80s like
The Complete Warlock or
Palladium Fantasy 1st Edition (only). This makes sense as 3.x is part, although about as far as you can go without leaving the family.
PF2 is changed enough I no longer consider it part of the family.
* No, it isn't branded D&D, but Linux. Coherent, Minix, and *BSDs aren't Unix either, but everyone will tell you they are part of the Unix family, branded or not. AIX, HPUX, etc are even stranger cases of licensed, but not branded Unixes probably closer to PF than the earlier named ones.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 07, 2022, 12:57:40 PM
...
But apparently the only thing that makes something D&D is some nebulous "feel"... making sure the books have lots of earth tones and old-parchment with plenty of Gygaxian prose interwoven with the actual mechanics needed to play. The proof in the pudding for me is how the OSR crowd swoons all over Stars/Worlds Without Number which has overall very modern design (including feats) and doesn't even use a d20 for task resolution and uses 4E's best of two stats for its Physical (Fort), Evasion (Reflex) and Mental (Will) saves. Its psychic powers effort system is basically at-will, encounter and daily powers just like 4E... but S/WWN gets a pass because it has some nebulous "feel" that makes it somehow OSR.
In bold: Yes, and Yes.
4e apologists need to suck it up and accept the fact that 4e split the fanbase because a whole lot of people didn't like it.
Other posters have given mechanical reasons why 4e bounced off of so many, but there is a reality that one needs to accept to truly understand why 4e screwed the pooch.
The D&D fanbase likes their D&D the way they like it. So don't touch anything. Yeah, maybe some things could use a fix; but don't change anything! Just make it like it was before; only better.
And 4e fucked it up:
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 07, 2022, 12:57:40 PM
There's no objective standard behind excluding 4E from the "is D&D" list. Just people who are still outraged a decade later that it dared to actually try to improve things compared to 3e in a way they didn't approve of. The game has been out of print for a literal decade now (the last 4E book with any mechanics in it shipped in September of 2012) and people (some of whom never actually even played it) still can't stop hating on it.
...
Again in bold: Yes, and Yes. Because the second bolded line in your quote is the only thing that really matters in this discussion at all.
And it was not just a handful of rando's on internet forums.
Half the paying D&D fanbase jumped ship for a fucking clone of the previous edition rather than play 4e.
Jumped. Ship. For. A. Clone.
And many others just stopped playing official D&D.
Whether or not 4e was objectively good
as a game Doesn't Matter.
Because
as an edition of D&D: 4e
Fucking Sucked.
It sucked
so hard that WotC killed an active edition that was probably still making them money to pivot to something that wouldn't hemorrhage market share to the past editions clone.
D&D is the 800lb. gorilla of the hobby not because it sells a little bit more than it's nearest competitor. It is the 800lb. gorilla of the hobby because it sells
orders of magnitude more than its nearest competitor.
And 4e didn't do that. In fact it started to get outsold by the clone a little bit...
For D&D that's a Fucking Unacceptable Situation.
So WotC killed that hot trash faster than a Rino can cuck on his constituents.
Then correctly chased after the fan bases approval with D&DNext.
And yeah - people are gonna continue to hate on 4e. The D&D fanbase is hateful that way...
Get over it.
:) So, Jam the MF, as you can see from the continuance of this topic the objectively correct answer is still 5e. ;) It doesn't come with all this whinging and bickering, which alone already puts it leagues ahead of WotC's first few forays.
Happy travels! 8)
Oh 5e is the worst. I take its support from the OSR crowd as evidence thst they only care about superficial layout.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 08, 2022, 08:41:28 AM
Oh 5e is the worst. I take its support from the OSR crowd as evidence thst they only care about superficial layout.
Agreed. Boring as heck.
Every meaningful mechanical choice for your character is done by level 3 unless you're a spellcaster and, even then, their system of leveling up the spells by using higher level slots and very few upper tier slots means you'll have most of the spells you'll actually want to use on a regular basis by the time you hit level 7.
In combat even the spellcasters are reduced largely to "I hit with my cantrip" that only do damage (not even interesting riders like 4E had). Advantage/Disadvantage is nice for reducing complexity (and easier to apply if you forgot about it until after the action was done) but allowing them to completely cancel each other rather than just counting relative value (i.e. one positive and two negatives still being disadvantage).
And it's still got the massive hit point bloat without even the restraint of 4E's healing surges (which unlike the extra healing of 5e's HD was actually a hard limit on daily healing in 4E).
5e is exactly what you'd expect of an edition designed by a committee of marketing analysts.
I mean I get it in part. If you go at the angle that "combat should be a tax, not a desired outcome", then 4es combat focus isn't your thing. If you liked vance things for worldbuilding, then 4es abstracted power system can also be a turn off.
But 5e has all the things grognards theoretically hate: forgiving combat (requiring quad taps to be put down),at-will, encounter and daily powers, innate healing, still has a combat focus, alternate maths, and while it lacks 4es power stuff, has 3es munchkiny multiclassing nonsense. Which theoretically 0D&D fans hate.
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 08, 2022, 10:57:01 AM
I mean I get it in part. If you go at the angle that "combat should be a tax, not a desired outcome", then 4es combat focus isn't your thing. If you liked vance things for worldbuilding, then 4es abstracted power system can also be a turn off.
But 5e has all the things grognards theoretically hate: forgiving combat (requiring quad taps to be put down),at-will, encounter and daily powers, innate healing, still has a combat focus, alternate maths, and while it lacks 4es power stuff, has 3es munchkiny multiclassing nonsense. Which theoretically 0D&D fans hate.
If you like what 3E and/or 4E is doing, it does it pretty well. If you dislike what they are doing, they are (relatively) hard to change. 5E's defaults suck, but it is much easier to change into something playable for a given style--even easier than the early editions in some ways.
Now, I can't say about how the supplements might have botched things, because I got off that train early. But the initial 5E didn't have a lot of multi-classing nonsense, because in practice it gets used very little. If anything, multi-classing messes with the munchkins for the most part. Feats are easy to ignore. Heck, I grudgingly allowed then in one campaign, and had a total of 2 feats taken over about 30+ opportunities. Toss in some DMG options to make combat deadlier and then use the Kobold Press monster books instead, and you get something deadly enough for some of us. As deadly as 3E was out of the box, maybe a little more so with exhaustion. (Bit easier to lose a character in early 3E, a bit easier to have a TPK in early 5E with the options turned on.)
Now, in practice, what I want on deadliness is somewhere between a dialed in 5E and the early stuff. Not everyone that enjoyed early D&D thought that characters dropping like flies was always its best feature. (Great in some games, something to work around in others.) I've incorporated some BEMCI/RC features and some 5E features (dialed way back) to get a balance I actually like better in my own design. So I'd say what you are missing is that not all of us that generally prefer old school liked every single detail of old school design and implementation. Sure, there are people here that like that, too, but not all of us.
There is a dichotomy there that comes up a lot in design, I think, and not just limited to game design: If you want to appeal to a diverse group, it's about how well you widget does what it sets out to do, how many people want to do that, but also how easy it is to repurpose the widget for something nearby. Early D&D being fairly to repurpose in many ways, how it got played varied accordingly.
I think that it's an easy putt to see that 3e was a clean up of 2e with pieces from the players options codified, combined with "doing the math in reverse" so that people who can't add and subtract negative numbers could play. Prestige classes = kits in disguise. Had they formalized that you can't take more then one prestige class and made it so that multiclassing worked more like dual classing to prevent dipping a toe for a level to get stackables, it'd be darn near perfect.
4e is such a leap away by making everything a power and making everything fit into a mold of at will, per encounter, and x times/day that it could have been a competitor to MtG as a CCG. It became point-and-click roleplaying.
I was initially excited for 5e. The problem(s) I have with it are that it plays boring and there seems to be a schizophrenia surrounding product releases. There's no risk/reward. Attempts to make it equitable and fair mean every race and class is essentially the same, and there isn't even an academic challenge in the combat math - at least in 3e the numbers behind added and subtracted required you to think a tiny bit. 5e? As long as you fog the glass, it's all good.
As to product releases? Well, if I'm new, why do I have to hit "Load More" multiple times to scroll back almost 10 years to see the PHB on the WotC website? It's either "newest" or "alphabetical." I shouldn't have to guess to click on "Where to Start" rather than "Tabletop" to get to it quickly. How do I know if a product is for the players or the DM or both without reading about it? How do I know if it is for a particular campaign setting? If I tryba search on "Forgotten Realms" on their webpage, I get 2 products come up. I shouldn't have to know to go to DMs Guild to find all of their products (and know to sort by publisher). As a new DM I shouldn't have to figure out how the DDAL adventures relate to the hardcover adventures.
Despite the problems with 3e, it was well organized. You knew what was product was (core, supplement, adventure, etc.) And you knew where to look to find it. I don't care how great a product line is - if you're customers can't find it, why bother.
Maybe that's a complaint about WotC, but I think who is running things there goes hand in hand with the content of the product.
3catcircus, I think you are forgetting just how bad the 3E "splats" were as a whole. Sure, had some good content, but signal to noise was rather low, with lots of drivel and a few completely broken things in there too, to liven things up.
When it comes to making things useful for the GM and players, WotC has been screwing up since day 1, and nothing has changed on that front other than the particular things they decide to screw up today will be different than yesterday and tomorrow.
I was thinking earlier in this back and forth that one of WotC's problems is that they find it very difficult to get something exactly right. When the design is good, the development/implementation is slap dash. Then they'll do pretty darn good development on something that is designed poorly, making something sort of adequate out of a bad situation. They can't explain well how their own systems work or are intended to work, and can't even be consistent within the same book on such topics. Under those conditions, it is amazing that their marketing isn't even worse, because how the heck is the person doing the marketing supposed to understand it? And how I hate the term, but their "Vision" is even screwed up--often bipolar and suffering from multiple personalities.
It wouldn't surprise me if they try to make the 6E woke edition and fail at that.
Quote from: Opaopajr on September 08, 2022, 07:19:20 AM
:) So, Jam the MF, as you can see from the continuance of this topic the objectively correct answer is still 5e. ;) It doesn't come with all this whinging and bickering, which alone already puts it leagues ahead of WotC's first few forays.
Happy travels! 8)
I think the answer is either the original release of 3.0, or the original release of 5.0
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 08, 2022, 09:55:30 AM
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 08, 2022, 08:41:28 AM
Oh 5e is the worst. I take its support from the OSR crowd as evidence thst they only care about superficial layout.
Agreed. Boring as heck.
Every meaningful mechanical choice for your character is done by level 3 unless you're a spellcaster and, even then, their system of leveling up the spells by using higher level slots and very few upper tier slots means you'll have most of the spells you'll actually want to use on a regular basis by the time you hit level 7.
In combat even the spellcasters are reduced largely to "I hit with my cantrip" that only do damage (not even interesting riders like 4E had). Advantage/Disadvantage is nice for reducing complexity (and easier to apply if you forgot about it until after the action was done) but allowing them to completely cancel each other rather than just counting relative value (i.e. one positive and two negatives still being disadvantage).
And it's still got the massive hit point bloat without even the restraint of 4E's healing surges (which unlike the extra healing of 5e's HD was actually a hard limit on daily healing in 4E).
5e is exactly what you'd expect of an edition designed by a committee of marketing analysts.
You mention level 3 and level 7. That level range is probably at the heart of most gaming sessions. Perhaps, that design is intentional?
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on September 08, 2022, 02:41:00 PM
3catcircus, I think you are forgetting just how bad the 3E "splats" were as a whole. Sure, had some good content, but signal to noise was rather low, with lots of drivel and a few completely broken things in there too, to liven things up.
When it comes to making things useful for the GM and players, WotC has been screwing up since day 1, and nothing has changed on that front other than the particular things they decide to screw up today will be different than yesterday and tomorrow.
I was thinking earlier in this back and forth that one of WotC's problems is that they find it very difficult to get something exactly right. When the design is good, the development/implementation is slap dash. Then they'll do pretty darn good development on something that is designed poorly, making something sort of adequate out of a bad situation. They can't explain well how their own systems work or are intended to work, and can't even be consistent within the same book on such topics. Under those conditions, it is amazing that their marketing isn't even worse, because how the heck is the person doing the marketing supposed to understand it? And how I hate the term, but their "Vision" is even screwed up--often bipolar and suffering from multiple personalities.
It wouldn't surprise me if they try to make the 6E woke edition and fail at that.
I'm not forgetting it. I think that 3.0 with the base splat books works fine. Or 3.0 with campaign specific supplements. Or 3.0 with BoVD and BoED in a very specific campaign style. Or 3.0 without letting players access what should be DM supplements. (e.g. Savage Species). It's when you combine all of them that it's a problem because there is insufficient playtesting to really see how badly things break - with too many DMs not being willing to say no to ridiculous combinations of feats and prestige classes and races. We had (and continue to have) players selecting a race, a class level, feats - not because it is cool - but for a mechanical bonus "take this race for the +x bonus to that so when you take this feat, it..."
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 08, 2022, 04:37:00 PM
You mention level 3 and level 7. That level range is probably at the heart of most gaming sessions. Perhaps, that design is intentional?
Not intentional so much as that is the way the "sweet spot" works out for the system math + Spell progression
And it has more or less been that way since the beginning...
From another thread: Does the Armor Class system produce HP Bloat?
Quote from: estar on August 12, 2022, 12:38:47 PM
Regarding Hit Points
In miniature wargaming with dozen if not hundreds of figures you don't want to be messing around the details of individual figures. So combat was abstracted to 1 hit = 1 kill. When Gygax introduced fantasy elements to Chainmail along with heroes and superheroes, once way he beefed them up was to require 4 hits in order to kill a Hero and 8 hits to kill a Super-Hero.
Dave Arneson started running Braunsteins and later Blackmoor. This was found hit to kill too harsh for when the campaign was starting out. So one 1 hit to kill became 1d6 hit points. And one hit became 1d6 damage.
...
Hit Point Bloat
With OD&D everybody rolled 1d6 for hit points. Fighters got +1 to the die roll at first level and in general, got to roll an additional 1d6 hit points every level. Other classes rolled 1d6 hit points infrequently. Fighers had an average of 8 hit points at 2nd, 15 HP at 4th, 23 HP at 6th, and a whopping average of 39 HP at 10th level.
Later editions had varying reasons for inflating the hit points of the characters (and monsters). But in 5e we know that the reason was to allow more combat options despite both 5e and OD&D having the same rough power curve as characters level. By inflating hit points rather than muck around with bonuses, higher-level characters are distinguished by being able to do more damage in more ways than lower-level characters.
BY now there are options and combos that break 5e, but if you stick to the core rules I found that the outcome of various 5e encounters track the same as the outcome various OD&D encounters. It's just in 5e, you have more explicit mechanics for how that is played out.
...
From 4 to 8 hits being the scale for hero to superhero. The E6 mod for 3.x D&D. To virtually every edition running into mechanical scaling issues around level 10 or so...
The reality is that with the escalating HP Bloat model that D&D embraces, the mathematical sweet spot has virtually been a constant despite various designers wishful thinking that they had cracked the math to make high level HP bloat work.
The complete inability to acknowledge or even recognize that you are just inviting systematic scaling issues into the game if you keep adding HP after more than 6-8 or so levels for PC's shows that after almost 50 years becoming a so-called "professional" game designers is more about persistence and desire, rather than having any real affinity for good game design.
Quote from: Jaeger on September 08, 2022, 08:50:05 PM
Quote from: Jam The MF on September 08, 2022, 04:37:00 PM
You mention level 3 and level 7. That level range is probably at the heart of most gaming sessions. Perhaps, that design is intentional?
Not intentional so much as that is the way the "sweet spot" works out for the system math + Spell progression
And it has more or less been that way since the beginning...
From another thread: Does the Armor Class system produce HP Bloat?
Quote from: estar on August 12, 2022, 12:38:47 PM
Regarding Hit Points
In miniature wargaming with dozen if not hundreds of figures you don't want to be messing around the details of individual figures. So combat was abstracted to 1 hit = 1 kill. When Gygax introduced fantasy elements to Chainmail along with heroes and superheroes, once way he beefed them up was to require 4 hits in order to kill a Hero and 8 hits to kill a Super-Hero.
Dave Arneson started running Braunsteins and later Blackmoor. This was found hit to kill too harsh for when the campaign was starting out. So one 1 hit to kill became 1d6 hit points. And one hit became 1d6 damage.
...
Hit Point Bloat
With OD&D everybody rolled 1d6 for hit points. Fighters got +1 to the die roll at first level and in general, got to roll an additional 1d6 hit points every level. Other classes rolled 1d6 hit points infrequently. Fighers had an average of 8 hit points at 2nd, 15 HP at 4th, 23 HP at 6th, and a whopping average of 39 HP at 10th level.
Later editions had varying reasons for inflating the hit points of the characters (and monsters). But in 5e we know that the reason was to allow more combat options despite both 5e and OD&D having the same rough power curve as characters level. By inflating hit points rather than muck around with bonuses, higher-level characters are distinguished by being able to do more damage in more ways than lower-level characters.
BY now there are options and combos that break 5e, but if you stick to the core rules I found that the outcome of various 5e encounters track the same as the outcome various OD&D encounters. It's just in 5e, you have more explicit mechanics for how that is played out.
...
From 4 to 8 hits being the scale for hero to superhero. The E6 mod for 3.x D&D. To virtually every edition running into mechanical scaling issues around level 10 or so...
The reality is that with the escalating HP Bloat model that D&D embraces, the mathematical sweet spot has virtually been a constant despite various designers wishful thinking that they had cracked the math to make high level HP bloat work.
The complete inability to acknowledge or even recognize that you are just inviting systematic scaling issues into the game if you keep adding HP after more than 6-8 or so levels for PC's shows that after almost 50 years becoming a so-called "professional" game designers is more about persistence and desire, rather than having any real affinity for good game design.
It's not even affinity for "good game design." It's a lack of creativity in how to address a particular mechanical issue. In previous editions prior to 3e there was essentially a natural washout of AC because there were only so many creatures with really good AC below -2. Three typical range was between 2 and 9 for the monsters. The hit points were also similarly scaled. With 3e, because of stackable bonuses allowing ACs and BABs to continuously improve, the arms race means that hit points need to be inflated.
Looking at a hill giant, in 2e it has AC 5 (3 with armor) and 12 HD +1-2 hp. So - that's a +5 natural armor bonus and in 3e+ terms, it's be AC 15. It's THAC0 was 9, so (if I recall correctly), that works out to a +11 to hit. So - already it's hp was inflated from 1e where it had 8 HD. But it only has 1 attack.
In 3e, they kept the same HD but adding in the bonuses for CON gives 12HD+48 hp. But it gets almost 2x the natural armor bonus it had in 2e with an AC of 20. It has 2 attacks each round.
In 5e, they only reduce HD a bit, but it's actually a higher average hp than 3e because they use d12 instead of d8. AC is back on par with 2e at AC 13. Attack bonus is lower than 3e but damage is about the same - and abourv the same damage as in 2e.
It's really not that much of a difference between 3e, 5e, and PF for most of the "normal" monsters, but 3e felt "fresh" while 4e, PF, and 5e don't really add anything.
One more reason I'll continue believing 3e is the best WotC edition.
The question concerned "WOTC era D&D", and so, even if it's the Tom Hagen of D&D, 4e should be included in the list. It is also my favorite of the (so far) 3 & 1/2 editions, since it's the only one I've played on the table. Also, the Nentir Vale is awesome.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 08, 2022, 09:33:13 PM
It's not even affinity for "good game design." It's a lack of creativity in how to address a particular mechanical issue. In previous editions prior to 3e there was essentially a natural washout of AC because there were only so many creatures with really good AC below -2. Three typical range was between 2 and 9 for the monsters. The hit points were also similarly scaled. With 3e, because of stackable bonuses allowing ACs and BABs to continuously improve, the arms race means that hit points need to be inflated.
I'll quibble and say that no creativity is needed to address the issue of HP Bloat: Just stop HP progression past level 6 to 8.
You do not need to get mechanically creative because the fix is perfectly straightforward.
Post AD&D1e game designers inability to recognize the root cause of HP scaling issues, and then implement the straightforward solution speaks to a complete lack of understanding why D&D has always had scaling issues.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 08, 2022, 09:33:13 PM
In 3e, they kept the same HD but adding in the bonuses for CON gives 12HD+48 hp. But it gets almost 2x the natural armor bonus it had in 2e with an AC of 20. It has 2 attacks each round.
In 5e, they only reduce HD a bit, but it's actually a higher average hp than 3e because they use d12 instead of d8. AC is back on par with 2e at AC 13. Attack bonus is lower than 3e but damage is about the same - and abourv the same damage as in 2e.
...
Another example of so-called professional game designers changing things without understanding their wider effects on the system. Both B/X and AD&D1e had a standard die type for monster and npc HD for a reason. Using different types of dice to represent different HD for different monsters shows that they never understood why it was done that way, and then they wonder why their precious CR rating never really work...
The more I study the rules for past editions of D&D: (I have Holmes, Moldvay and Mentzer B/X, AD&D, 3.0, 4e and 5e.) The more I realize that all the WotC D&D design teams simply did not understand why certain rules were in the older editions of D&D before they began to change them.
Quote from: Jaeger on September 09, 2022, 04:15:32 PM
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 08, 2022, 09:33:13 PM
It's not even affinity for "good game design." It's a lack of creativity in how to address a particular mechanical issue. In previous editions prior to 3e there was essentially a natural washout of AC because there were only so many creatures with really good AC below -2. Three typical range was between 2 and 9 for the monsters. The hit points were also similarly scaled. With 3e, because of stackable bonuses allowing ACs and BABs to continuously improve, the arms race means that hit points need to be inflated.
I'll quibble and say that no creativity is needed to address the issue of HP Bloat: Just stop HP progression past level 6 to 8.
You do not need to get mechanically creative because the fix is perfectly straightforward.
Post AD&D1e game designers inability to recognize the root cause of HP scaling issues, and then implement the straightforward solution speaks to a complete lack of understanding why D&D has always had scaling issues.
Quote from: 3catcircus on September 08, 2022, 09:33:13 PM
In 3e, they kept the same HD but adding in the bonuses for CON gives 12HD+48 hp. But it gets almost 2x the natural armor bonus it had in 2e with an AC of 20. It has 2 attacks each round.
In 5e, they only reduce HD a bit, but it's actually a higher average hp than 3e because they use d12 instead of d8. AC is back on par with 2e at AC 13. Attack bonus is lower than 3e but damage is about the same - and abourv the same damage as in 2e.
...
Another example of so-called professional game designers changing things without understanding their wider effects on the system. Both B/X and AD&D1e had a standard die type for monster and npc HD for a reason. Using different types of dice to represent different HD for different monsters shows that they never understood why it was done that way, and then they wonder why their precious CR rating never really work...
The more I study the rules for past editions of D&D: (I have Holmes, Moldvay and Mentzer B/X, AD&D, 3.0, 4e and 5e.) The more I realize that all the WotC D&D design teams simply did not understand why certain rules were in the older editions of D&D before they began to change them.
But that's just it - it's "monkey see, monkey do." To be fair, there probably weren't a library of notes from the earlt data detailing why Gygax, et. al did what they did. You have to glean that from interviews and conversations they'd had over the years.
Reminds me of a joke in my industry: a team of young engineers was struggling with a problem on a missile system and they finally throw up their hands and ask management to haul the designer out of retirement. He agrees to do so for a $1M consulting fee, walks in, looks at the missile, takes a piece of chalk, and puts an 'x' on a certain spot and says check in there, a component is failed. Management says, "we aren't paying you your fee - anyone could mark an x with chalk.". He responds, "oh, you will give me my fee because you're not paying me to make an x with chalk; you're paying me because I know *where* to put the x mark with chalk."
*That's* the key when you ask people to take someone else's work and create from it - they know how to create, but not why. At least 3e was *closer* because some of the people who worked on it worked on 2.5e first. 4e and 5e? Not so much.
Maybe, but most of 3e's biggest problems can boiled to a failure to understand how they were changing the rules would change the way the game was played.
If you ran the core classes using the same assumptions and spellcasting choices as you'd make in 2e the classes in general would be much more balanced with each other.
In AD&D the way the saves scaled made save or dies a very risky proposition... far better given the generally 2 digit hit point totals was a fireball or similar save for half damage spell... because 17 damage (half of 10d6) removed a significant chunk of hit points for certain while the save or die might fail with no effect 75% of the time. Similarly, that damage would come off the same pool the fighter was diminishing so they each contributing to the same solution.
But by setting save difficulty off both spell level and the caster's ability score in 3e while enabling the targeting of different defenses where there were often numbers much lower than the others while simultaneously ballooning hit points into the triple digits made save or dies which completely bypassed hit points and could often succeed by targeting weak saves the optimal solution that largely rendered any class without such abilities suboptimal... particularly when a failed save vs. a save or die rendered any work the fighter had been doing irrelevant to ending the fight.
3e completely lost the plot when it came to emulating the prior experience of D&D and the AOL and similar message boards of the day were awash with the same vitriol from 2e fans against 3e (only 3e was Diablo instead of 4E being World of Warcraft) and refused to convert and fractured the base.
The main difference was the 2e players didn't have mass social media be whining little bitches on and so just continued playing the edition they preferred without needing some 3rd party to affirm their choice with a currently supported clone to keep selling them products.
4E was just a natural evolution from the tail end of the edition that had already fundamentally broken from the previous editions of D&D.
Frankly, all of D&D is pretty mediocre... benefiting mostly from the benefit of being first and then from Hasbro marketing money. Palladium Fantasy 1e is better than any edition (TSR or WotC) of D&D.
Quote from: Chris24601 on September 09, 2022, 08:42:00 PM
Maybe, but most of 3e's biggest problems can boiled to a failure to understand how they were changing the rules would change the way the game was played.
If you ran the core classes using the same assumptions and spellcasting choices as you'd make in 2e the classes in general would be much more balanced with each other.
In AD&D the way the saves scaled made save or dies a very risky proposition... far better given the generally 2 digit hit point totals was a fireball or similar save for half damage spell... because 17 damage (half of 10d6) removed a significant chunk of hit points for certain while the save or die might fail with no effect 75% of the time. Similarly, that damage would come off the same pool the fighter was diminishing so they each contributing to the same solution.
But by setting save difficulty off both spell level and the caster's ability score in 3e while enabling the targeting of different defenses where there were often numbers much lower than the others while simultaneously ballooning hit points into the triple digits made save or dies which completely bypassed hit points and could often succeed by targeting weak saves the optimal solution that largely rendered any class without such abilities suboptimal... particularly when a failed save vs. a save or die rendered any work the fighter had been doing irrelevant to ending the fight.
3e completely lost the plot when it came to emulating the prior experience of D&D and the AOL and similar message boards of the day were awash with the same vitriol from 2e fans against 3e (only 3e was Diablo instead of 4E being World of Warcraft) and refused to convert and fractured the base.
The main difference was the 2e players didn't have mass social media be whining little bitches on and so just continued playing the edition they preferred without needing some 3rd party to affirm their choice with a currently supported clone to keep selling them products.
4E was just a natural evolution from the tail end of the edition that had already fundamentally broken from the previous editions of D&D.
Frankly, all of D&D is pretty mediocre... benefiting mostly from the benefit of being first and then from Hasbro marketing money. Palladium Fantasy 1e is better than any edition (TSR or WotC) of D&D.
This is true. My preferred fantasy RPGs are RC/BECMI (one D&D rulebook for everything), 1e (for nostalgia) and HARP (Rolemaster without as much Roll-master) with 3e following a distant 4th.