Question in thread title.  Imo, it's the worldbuilding aspects, like fighters getting a keep and low-level trainees.

Quote from: Archangel Fascist;695478Question in thread title.

Neither edition has domain management rules, which have historicly been an important part of D&D. There wasn't much that was "lost" from the game in the transition from 2e to 3e. 3e to 4e is a different beast entirely of course but those issues are well known.

That aside, do you have any idea the shitstorm that you've set in motion, there's basically no way a thread like this here isn't going to devolve into team neckbeard spouting bile and circlejerking.

GP as XP.

The danger of casting spells mid-combat.

Less combat focus.

Less focus on the character sheet, and more focus on what's actually happening 'in the world'.

The biggest thing I see is... how do I put this?  In the Olden Days, there were a lot of assumptions that players might have multiple characters, that you'd have different players drift in and out of the games, and that what character you played and what you did on a particular game day may change.  I think a lot of the rules of older versions of D&D were based on that.

My generation (I'm 41), the original "munchkins", didn't really get that, and played where you'd generally have a single character you played, with your four buddies from school.  I wouldn't have even really understood the older (we'll call it grognard, so we can insult everyone equally) style if I hadn't been able to play with the father of a high school friend, who had kept a gaming going from, I think the late 70s?  Maybe earlier.

I think 3.x and 4e, if they missed anything, missed this, and tried to modify the core of the system towards the more 'modern' style of a set party going through a bunch of stuff, as popularized by the DragonLance modules.  And there's a *ton* of things in the core game that don't work super-well in that scenario.

3.x, specifically, tried to minimize those rough edges, but I think it found that there were a lot of other things that depended on them, and this created a number of unintended side effects.

4e seemed to recognize this, and tried to make a game designed around the 'modern' playstyle, but ended up throwing out a whole lot of babies with the bathwater, and worse, created something that used a lot of the same language, but used it often to mean very different things.

Pacing, specifically in regards to the time necessary for resolution of fights.

Quote from: robiswrong;695483In the Olden Days, there were a lot of assumptions that players might have multiple characters, that you'd have different players drift in and out of the games, and that what character you played and what you did on a particular game day may change.  I think a lot of the rules of older versions of D&D were based on that.

Yes, the original campaign-game context has a lot to do with things such as balance among character types, how figure mortality enters into that, the semi-random element in many aspects, and so on; a heap of things the 3E designers seemed not to understand (and the 4E team at least understood enough to know those things were not what they were after).

Simplicity.

And that's coming from a guy who played MERP/RM for several years.

By comparision, Moldvay/BECMI/1e/2e were, at heart, not very complex.  Yeah, there was THAC0, and there were the boatload of splatbooks that 2e got dumped with, but if you pick up Moldvay/BECMI/1e especially, these books aren't that hard to understand.  The 1e Players Handbook ran 126 or so pages.  Moldvay's Basic book was 64 pages for the entire thing, and Expert was the same size.

(MERP was pretty small too back in the day, but was roughly as complex as 1e.  It was only when RM was used did the complexity really take off.)

I look at these books and think that there's not much more to it than this.  Everything else is pure imagination.

And yes, I do like 3e and Pathfinder, but there's something to be said for simplicity.

Quote from: robiswrong;695483GP as XP.

The danger of casting spells mid-combat.

Less combat focus.

Less focus on the character sheet, and more focus on what's actually happening 'in the world'.

The biggest thing I see is... how do I put this?  In the Olden Days, there were a lot of assumptions that players might have multiple characters, that you'd have different players drift in and out of the games, and that what character you played and what you did on a particular game day may change.  I think a lot of the rules of older versions of D&D were based on that.

All this.

Plus:

a) Of course your referee sucked when you were 14 and made bad calls.  Get over it.

b) You cannot make a bad referee into a good referee with rules.  If you don't trust the referee, don't play with her/him.  Yes, some referees are assholes.  That's because some people are assholes.  Welcome to life.

c) If you play a wargame, you WILL lose some troops.

d) It's a stupid-ass elfgame, not some psychodrama to reinforce your self-validation.

I think changing the progression curve really changed the nature of the game experience. Back in high school when we got in a fairly serious session on an almost weekly basis, I played a character for years who never got past 11th level.

The expectation that every campaign will go from levels 1-20 (or whatever the max level is) in around 1 year of regular play was a big change.

The biggest thing I prefer about the older editions of the game, as compared to 3e, is the way the characters' power changes – that they start out very fragile but as they gain levels they become more capable of surviving individual combats, and adventuring becomes about managing a pool of resources and surviving fights well as opposed to just surviving them (and then refueling each time). You can try to play 3e like this but the greater relative hit points and damage output of the monsters, and the overall rate of power increases, makes it harder. An encounter is more likely to kill you or do nothing to you in 3e. It's sort of the "My Precious Encounters" issue but broader.

The worldbuilding aspects are much much easier to patch in.

Diversity in art

removed all the limitations to spellcasters

neutered undead lethality

reduced lethality in general

Took a "hero to superhero" approach instead of "zero to hero"

Simple characters

complete loss of players creating their own game world

Math became more important than actual game play  (both char op and people stressing that every single class wasn't balanced with another)

Now there is an expectation to do most of your game play at end game levels, like a video game.

Henchmen/hirelings.

Something I love in ACKS is that the PCs can each have their own retinue, and it isn't a complete ball-ache any time they fall into combat.

I don't think it would even be possible to do henchmen in 4e, and even in 13A it's looking a little tricky to include them.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;695499Math became more important than actual game play  (both char op and people stressing that every single class wasn't balanced with another)

Now there is an expectation to do most of your game play at end game levels, like a video game.

These last two are what bother me the most out of your list, Sacro.

I play WoW, and the amount of Theorycrafting that goes on is obnoxious at times.  Throw onto that the issues with class balance, and you've covered everything nicely.

It's all about the min/max-ing, and never about the journey.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;695482That aside, do you have any idea the shitstorm that you've set in motion, there's basically no way a thread like this here isn't going to devolve into team neckbeard spouting bile and circlejerking.

I suspect the poster is well aware of this.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;695503I suspect the poster is well aware of this.

What he said.

inb4 57 page clusterfuck.

But in all seriousness I played some 3e in middle, and from what I remember the pace in general was slower and there was a lot more stopping to roll for this or that. Of course that could have been our fault as much as the game. So pacing yeah, that seems to be it. Also I would agree that the game had much more of a super hero feel, at least when played RAW. Also fuck feats, may the die in a fire.