It’s bugging me also. The original AD&D system had warts and bugs, yeah – but we identified those and played around them. Same with 3E. My group has identified some of the problems (i.e., the brokenness of the Ranger class, the overpowered Haste/Heal/Harm spells, et cetera) and we’ve made house rules to get around them. No harm, no foul. It chapped my hide, though, that a game system was released that had so many problems that it already requires an overhaul after three years on the market. To me, that says that the product wasn’t adequately playtested or designed when it was released.
My hostility stemmed from WotC’s apparent attitude when they’d announced 3.5. The attitude I perceived towards the players who’d previously purchased the system was, “Well, sorry, you’ll have to buy the new system if you want the upgrades; if you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy it.” I’m pleasantly surprised to see that they are indeed supporting those of us who own the books (with the SRP). That shows that WotC has heard the demands of their market.
Man, you need to hie ye on over to the EN Boards, the best place on the Internet to talk about D&D. There you’ll find out that druids in wildshape are quite powerful (I play a druid and constantly have to watch out to make sure I don’t overshadow the rest of the group). Poisoning isn’t particularly useful in 3E, but I do believe a wildshaped druid (wild formed? Where do you get that from?) can poison.
And gnomes don’t get any bonuses? What about +2 hit points per level compared to an elf (+2 con vs an elf’s -2 con)? What about +1 to AC and to hit (the to-hit bonus makes gnomes almost as good at melee and ranged combat as elves, except that they take a -1 on damage)? Those are nice advantages indeed, and I’ve played gnome characters to good effect. They make the very best druids of any core class, BTW: once they wildshape, they lose their two primary disadvantages (slow speed and poor strength), while keeping their nice CON bonus. I think you dismiss gnomes too quickly.
Folks who compare 2E’s 10-year lifespan to 3E’s 3-year lifespan should not conclude that 3E suffers from a lack of playtesting. Quite the contrary: 2E was so poorly designed, and so poorly supported, that it lost a huge amount of market share in that time period, allowing games like Vampire and Call of Cthulhu to enter what had been a market essentially monopolized by AD&D.
3E, on the contrary, was playtested more than any other roleplaying system in history, and its exquisitely-balanced rules system has proven to be its downfall: the designers placed such an emphasis on balance that a large number of players decided they could depend on the rules to be balanced in a way that they’d not depending on systems before, and when the inevitable problems emerged (haste’s AC bonuses, Harm’s uberness, the one-level-of-ranger problem, the keen-improved-critical vorpal dual-wielded scimitars in a whirlwind attack vs. archangels, etc.), people got upset that the rules had failed them. 3.5E is being issued to a lot of praise (and inescapable criticism) amongst the hardcore fan community.
Again, for folks saying they feel cheated: don’t buy the new books! It’ll all be available for free online!
Honestly. If WOTC sent you free ice cream cones, would you complain about the lack of sprinkles? In case you missed it, THEY’RE RELEASING ALL THE MATERIAL FOR FREE.
I cannot think of another game company that has been this absurdly generous with their product. I don’t like many of WOTC’s releases, sure, but I cannot fault them for stinginess.
My problem with E3.5 is this: I don’t think that the actual rules are secondary to the stablilty of the rules. What matters is that they are invisible: in a good campaign, the mechanics of play should be seamless, there should be a minimum of stopping to look things up, to remember what you are supposed to do next.
This isn’t to say the rules should never be overhauled: it’s a good idea to do so periodically, as gaming takes different trends over time and as house rules get more and more diffuse. And whenever the rules get over hauled, there is going to be a learning curve while the rules are learned, digested, made invisible.
In other words, 3E is, without a doubt, a vastly superior system to 2E. The multi-class system alone justified the swap. That said, the first few times we played 3E, the quality of our gaming experience declined. Combats took whole nights as we puzzled out attacks of opportunity and duel-weapon rules; charecter creation took an entire session, until we figured out that the secret is to put a big “fuck this chart” post-it note on the chart on page 22 of the PHB. Hell, everyone of us wasted time until we figured out that all the spells were alphabetized together: a brilliant, time-saving imrovement, but it takes a momment to figure out, and in 2E we could just flip to whatever page we wanted almost without thinking.
It was a pain in the ass to learn, and even though we got the basics down in a few nights, it took much longer than that for the rules to reach the automatic statge: hell, they still aren’t quite there. Even great systems have learning curves. We accepted the cost of this because we figured it was an investment that would pay off in the years to come. It’s not something that I am willing to go through every three years or so: once a decade is plenty.
So I don’t think we will be messing around with 3.5E. Not because I am some sort of fiend-Folio clutching Ludite who thinks all change is bad, but because what I want most out a rule system is to have it do it’s job and not get in the way.
Actually I don’t think it is bad DMing. The way Prestige classes work most player characters end up mapping out their character progress from day one. They know that they’ll take a level in Ranger, then move on to Cleric or something else in order to qualify for a particular PrC. Most of 'em aren’t all that shy about letting the DM know their plans.
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I’d argue that the spirit of the rules encourage this sort of class switching. Part of me likes it because I like players having as many options as possible.
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I don’t, I’m pretty firm once I’ve made a decision.
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I don’t, which is why I don’t want to go through the pain in the ass of telling them they can’t get a level in Ranger.
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That doesn’t make it any less annoying when the PC says “I’ll help the friendly barmaid find her missing cat” instead of breaking into the treasury like he’s suppose to!
I hate to repeat other posters, but if you don’t like the rules, play around them. I had intricate house rules for 2e (My group stills plays 2e. Hey, we like it.).
WotC is a good company, and are doing their best to support the people who make them who they are. The Players.
I’ve been a role player for more than twenty years, and it’s been two years since I’ve played in a game. I just don’t care anymore.
I got a group together to play 3rd edition, and we were all excited. For the first few hours. By the second session, people were getting annoyed; it was just too much to learn all at once, for five people, while trying to actually play. Before the third session, I considered just having a class in the D&D rules; I’d spent seven weeks at that point, reading over the rules, and I still didn’t understand how combat was supposed to flow.
For the first time in my DMing career, the game sputtered out halfway through, and we all went off to watch a movie. Nobody cared.
What kills me is that it seems like it’s a great system. It’s appropriately realistic, it’s detailed, it has great ideas. But DMing it, for me, when I’d never played it, was freaking impossible. I’ve tried downloading programs to help with the game mechanics during play. I’ve developed accounting databases for the medical field that have simpler interfaces, and a gentler learning curve. I’ve read the books. I’ve played Neverwinter Nights, watching the computer make all the rolls. And that’s when it dawned on me…
It’s not designed to be played by humans. It’s designed to be easily adaptable to computer games. At least, I can’t see a way that I, as a DM, can keep all the details that the game requires in mind and still have the same level of creativity and interactivity that I was known for back in the days of 2nd edition.
So, I could go back. I know that. But the idea that there’s a better system out there is stopping me. But the better system is completely un-fun for me, and for my players, a notoriously lazy group. I feel like I’m trying to give an introductory rocket science lesson to a group of people who just want to watch the rockets take off.
So, I’m stuck. Broken. I don’t want to put the effort into learning this whole new system of doing the same old things. I don’t want to retreat back to the old way, because now the flaws are glaringly obvious.
I have huge maps and countries and detailed political structures and villages and cities all populated and mapped out, I have hundreds of miniatures, painstakingly painted, I have hundreds of dollars in mapping software and a custom encounter and NPC generator that I built myself, and I don’t want to use any of them.
I miss playing. I miss DMing. But I just can’t seem to bring myself to go forward or back. And it sucks. A lot.
Of course I meant wildshape, but I don’t have my manuals up in the office. You knew what I meant. And poison doesn’t work. Wildshape works just like Polymorph Self, and the spell description states that any part of the changed person which leaves the body reverts to original form. Also note that the description of the much higher-level Shapechange specifies that, unlike polymorph, poison is useable.
But I’m still not sure what Wildshape can do that’s so great. Your physical stats and damage improve, but you’re still less than a fighter of the same level in combat. You can hide better, and you can fly, but only in relatively small forms which are no good for combat. Your hit points do not increase (again, see Polymorph Self. Yeah, it’s nice, but it’s nowhere near as good as it used to be, and it doesn’t seem to me that it’s as good as other classes, either.
There’s only so much time I care to devote to tweaking the rules. I tend to just accept a system as it is and if I find decent overall I just stick with it. Maybe some minor tweaks here and there.
When I started running D&D I had a real hard time with 5 ft. steps, what was a partial action, what was a move equivalent action, and how does this attack of opportunity thing really work? After about 4 sessions the games started to run a bit more smoothly. I’m still not as well versed in 3E as I was in 2E but then I had more then 10 years experience with 2E. Did you use a battlemat and miniatures? I find that 3E is more difficult to play if you don’t have miniatures and a battlemat.
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There’s always GURPs, Palladium Fantasy, the Lord of the Rings RPG, or Exalted. Unless you have the same problem as me and your players are simply unwilling to give any other game a try.
Marc
I don’t mind WotC–I’m not too fond of the d20 system in general, but it’s not as if my hat of d02 know no limit. D&D3rd is a fun game with a good group.
But it saddens me how much attention it takes away from other products. There’s a <i>ton</i> of great rpgs of all genres from lesser-known companies and true indies, coming out all the time. Find players willing to play them, and take the plunge yourself.
<i>The Riddle of Steel</i> is one of the best things to happen to fantasy rpgs in a long time, IMO. <i>Unknown Armies</i> is astonishing for modern-day occult horror with a surreal bite; <i>Sorcerer</i> is its more strictly Narrativist (to use www.indie-rpgs.com parlance) cousin. <i>Godlike</i> is a unique twist on the superhero genre, and the list goes on. Hearing of people giving up on gaming because WotC’s output isn’t their cuppa is just depressing. There’s so much else to game for! Don’t jump!
First, my fault on correcting the “wildformed” biz. You’d said, “Shapechanged druid (excuse me, wild formed druid)”, and I managed to read that as “wildshaped druid (excuse me, wild formed druid)”. Brain fart on my part.
Second, and this is why the EN Boards are a great resource, WOTC realized about a year ago that the rules for wildshaping were sucky and awful, so they revised them. You can see the revised rules here – WOTC made them available for free on their website. There’s been extensive discussion of these rules on the EN Boards; there’s no discussion of poison in these rules, suggesting that the ability to poison, like all other extraordinary abilities, is retained by a wildshaping druid.
A fun discussion of why druids don’t stink is going on over at the ENBoards now. Again, in terms of how a druid can fight effectively in wildshaped form, the ability to perform an improved grab utterly rocks.
The druid, however, shouldn’t fight better than the fighter. That’s all the fighter can do. The druid is a very flexible class; wildshape gives significant fighting abilities, but it shouldn’t be the most effective combat technique in the game.
Even so, match a druid in grizzly-bear or tiger shape up against an equal-level fighter, and I’ll put my money on the druid: a single successful grab on the druid’s part will invalidate most of the fighter’s attacks.
MandaJo, you’re a gamer? I never woulda guessed!
For those of you who had trouble learning 3E, I sympathize: the designers were very mathematically minded, and they did as much as they could to make the game balanced. Compare this to a game like Mage, which puts virtually no emphasis on balance and which relies very heavily on the GM to keep the players happy. Both games are fun in their own way. But 3E requires a lot of work to learn the rules, whereas Mage requires excellent judgement and self-restraint on the part of GMs and players. Different styles.
When we were learning 3E, we did a couple of stupid hackenslashen dungeon crawls in which we did very little roleplaying, in which our primary goal was to learn the rules. We would stop the game as often as we needed to to figure stuff out (Okay, I’m hiding behind a stalagmite, does that make me harder to hit? The kobolds are up on a ledge, do they get a bonus on ranged attacks? I cast an illusion of an ogre running down the tunnel, does it make any noise? etc.) It was good clean beer-n-pretzels fun, and when we returned to our normal, intrigue-and-angst style of play, the rules were much less of an issue for us.
3.5 should probably be much less of an adjustment. It sounds like the main things we’ll need to learn are:
Changes to spells. Most of the changes I’ve heard about, I really like.
Changes to classes. I don’t know enough about these to know whether we’ll adopt them.
Changes to combat labels. WIth the elimination of partial actions, I think combat will actually become much easier to resolve – but it sounds like the changes here are mostly changes in nomenclature.
I’m looking forward to seeing the new material, although I haven’t decided whether I’ll adopt little, lots, or all of it.
Depending on where you are it can be nigh impossible to find anyone willing to try something other then d20. I tried multiple times to get people in my area to play Legend of the Five Rings but I couldn’t find anyone interested. I finally had to settle on Ravenloft. That campaign is over and now I’m starting a Blue Planet campaign. We’ll see how that goes.
What I do is offer to rotate DMing in an existing campaign. One session of Paranoia after a month of D&D is usually enough to get people interested in trying one-shots. Then possibly alternating games if you want to keep it going.
Well, 3.5re is out now and, unless my boss was mistaken on Monday morning, the world hasn’t ended yet.
The 3.5 SRD is up here if you’d like to check it out.
To MrVisible and others who are interested in a different system it might be a good time to also check out Guardians of Order who are giving away their Tri-Stat system (the foundation for the Big Eyes, Small Mouth and Silver Age Sentinels games) free in PDF form here.
Well, my VERY QUICK perusal at a friends house left me unimpressed. To be fair, I mostly looked at the new classes and skills, though, so take all of this with a grain of salt.
They seemed to have made a fundamentally bad choice in terms of ‘re-balancing’ classes. Instead of toning down the clear favorites, (fighter and rouge) they’ve boosted up everybody. Standard procedure, really. Power levels in games ALWAYS go up as supplements come out, anyway, and WotC hasn’t been exactly restrained in that regard.
Ranger particularly seems to now be like unto a gawd. 6 skill points a level, a free feat every level, ala monk, and some of their old skills have been combined into single skills. And they dropped down to only D8 hp.
The thing is, they now seem even BETTER from a front-loading standpoint. Sure, you don’t get the two free duel wielding Feats, but who cares; they’ve been combined into one feat anyway. <mildly sarcastic>Yeah, ah, nobody was using dual wielding as it was, obviously it wasn’t good enough</mildly sarcastic> Inherently dual-wielding rangers were a stupid idea from the get-go. You DO get 8 more skill points, though.
Wouldn’t it have made more sense to drop Rouges down to six skill points a level rather than raise everyone else up to six? Especially if you combined some of the traditional ‘thief’ skills . . .
Likewise, instead of toning down elves a bit, (four free weapon proficiencies?) looks like they boosted everyone else.
Oh, and they brought back Double Specialization. Fighters weren’t kicking enough ass, apparently.
The new Prestige Classes seem even worse designed than the old ones. Prestige classes are such a good idea, it’s a pity they were done so badly. And why the hell isn’t Paladin a prestige class?
They did not change the goofy-as-hell weapons, either. What 12 year old Image fan designed them? I guess we should be grateful they didn’t include that ‘shield-axe’ from Dark Sun . . .
Ah, well. You could do it all better in Hero, anyway.
Also, Rangers are now proficient with only Light Armor. By the way, it is probably going to look like I’m being very critical of your post; I’m honestly not trying to be, just commenting with my own impressions.
You don’t pick up the first “combat technique” until 2nd level in the class now; at 1st level you pick up a Favored Enemy and Wild Empathy. Strictly speaking, (and here I’m relying on people who I’ve read on ENWorld and Wizards own message boards) Two-Weapon fighting is a sub-optimal build for damage dealing in core 3.0. I’d be more concerned about the addition of all the archery feats to the core Ranger build.
Fighters 2, Clerics 2, Paladins 2, Sorcerors 2, Wizards 2, Barbaraians 4, Druids 4, Monks 4. The only classes with 6 are the Ranger and Bard; which fits for both IMHO. The new gimmick with the Ranger is a skilled huntsman rather than a wilderness warrior.
You have clearly had a very different play experience than I have. Toning Elves down? What about Halflings and Humans? I regret to say that Half-Orcs are still pretty weak.
Again, very different experiences. Fighters, in my experience, are versatile, but hardly the most damaging combatants. The additional Weapon Specialization feats add only another +1 to hit and +2 damage; which doesn’t seem overbalancing to me.
I like the Horizon Walker, and can understand the motivation behind the Eldritch Knight and Mystic Theurge. I’ve never fully understood the thinking behind wanting Paladin and Ranger to be prestige classes though.
And don’t get me started on the Guyver-Armor and Riding Dogs. Art choices questionable. I do like the Elven Chain picture from the DMG though.
Lies! I’ve played HERO for years (3rd) and while it is possible that you could, there’s no way anyone ever would. The D&D spellbook alone would break the brain of even the most devoted HERO GM.
Cards on the table, I hated 3rd Edition when it was released, because I was a big 2nd Edition fan. I only kinda dislike 3.5re, possibly because although I’ve gotten used to some of the d20 quirks via Spycraft, Mutants & Masterminds and d20 Modern, I haven’t grown accustomed to any of the things that they are changing. (In point of fact, I agree with a number of the unpopular changes and when people complain about them I find myself thinking “Damn, that would have been the first thing to go in my game!”) The only reason I’m making any effort at “defending” 3.5re is that the arguments people are making against it remind me of my own complaints about 3.0, and I was being a whiny, reactionary ass at the time. I’m better now; I’ve been told I’m only a reactionary ass now.
MrV… Your experience is exactly the opposite of mine. I find 3e/d20 in general to be easier to run - the rules - particularly in CoC d20, d20 Modern, and D&D 3.5 are much better presented, so learning the rules are easier, IME, than in earlier (A)D&D editions. And, having a more harmonious, unified, and simplified system, it’s a LOT easier to fake it convincingly if I forget an actual rule in the midst of the game.
(Rules lawyers are my bane…if you know the rules better than me, fine, but don’t argue the fine points of AoO in the midst of a combat that’s already going slower than it should.)
I have been stuck with D&D 2.0, since my playing group is too cheap to buy any new books. Since no one else wanted to DM, and they thought that “fun” was BSing about anything else rather than role-playing and frequent rules arguments, I stopped my game and have been waiting (for the better part of a year) for someone else to start a game. No one has, and I’m sure that my playing group is no more.
I’ve been playing Neverwinter Nights and learning 3rd ed. through that.
Does anyone have a game within 3-4 hours of Pittsburgh that I could join? Can anyone help an old campaigner who started with the First edition, down on his luck?
I’ve played HERO for years (3rd) and while it is possible that you could, there’s no way anyone ever would. The D&D spellbook alone would break the brain of even the most devoted HERO GM.