In first edition D&D I had a well-prepared group consisting of only a druid and ranger defeat an adult white dragon–at 8th level!!
In 2nd Edition–that same elder dragon will require a team of 4 Heirphants and 5 Ranger Lords.
In 3rd Edition–A Diablo-type group that can breeze through Nightmare Level will have a hard time.
capacitor wrote:
Which is nothing compared to the sacrifices 1st Edition AD&D Monks had to make. They had to sacrifice their dexterity adjustment to armor class, fer cryin’ out loud. A first-level monk was easier to hit than a first-level illusionist!
So in 3rd Edition you only need a party of four 13th level characters to beat Diablo 2’s Nightmare Level?
Red Dragon, Mature Adult
CR: 13
(From the 2000 survival kit, in the back of the PHB.)
Lazarus7:
And can you spell poring? If you’re going to be pedantic, get your own house in order first.
Although I largely avoided the 1st Edition/2nd Edition holy wars, I know how passionate gamers can get, and I enter this fray with my eyes wide open.
So, here’s what I think:
Goose wrote:
Yes. Yes. No. See below. Mostly.
capacitor wrote:
They’ve been trying for years to come up with a way to make such things work under the D&D system. I’ve seen a lot of optional rules for martial arts and cinematic fighting go by, and all have failed. These new ones may fail too, but at least they don’t seem nearly as forced.
A similar option was available in 2nd edition.
JDeMobray wrote:
Which doesn’t really make it that dissimilar. Instead of adding another tinker’s dam, they got a brand new pot, because it wasn’t the leaky patches we were all so fond of to begin with.
If I recall correctly, Wizards stipulates that they are intentionally trying to bridge the gap between computer games and traditional RPGs.
The history of D&D includes a lot of official and unofficial attempts to work in such combat maneuvers, which haven’t really worked out. A lot of gamers want them, but the system as it stood didn’t accept them easily without it becoming a headache.
I would have described it as, “better support for dungeon crawling.” Previously, there were a lot of hints that the game could be played on grids with miniatures, but no specifics on how to do so, except in supplements that were usually designed for war gamers rather than straight gamers.
I assume you mean for tactical combat – mass warfare and such – because for party-level combat the miniatures rules are not very different from those in Player’s Option: Combat and Tactics. But there are no tactical combat rules, for war gamer types. Hopefully, they’ll do something for that crowd.
Rules for casting while in armor have been floating around for a while. Only, now, there’s a balanced, codified rule instead of a lot of screwy house rules.
Fighters get a lot of feats that make them powerful in a fight. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but this appears to make the fighter a much more powerful fighter. Of course, you cannot always trust TSR to have crunched the numbers. Remember the psionics system in the Skills and Powers book, in which attacking an opponent psionically would damage the psionicist faster than he could damage his opponent? There’s a whole debate we could have here, but if you consider that the monk is basically a warrior, then I don’t think he’s obliged to be less of one.
Thieves have been eliminated, is more like it. What we have instead is a class of characters who are given extra skill points to become proficient with whatever they want to be proficient in, and are especially good with skills of an aquisitive and information-gathering nature. I don’t think it as being forced to choose between thief skills and other useful skills. I think of it as finally having the option to be the thief you want to be, rather than the narrowly defined thief the old system said you could be. I mean, if you want to be realistic about it, most good thieves are not generalists. They are specialists. But it just wouldn’t work out that way in 1st Edition, and was problematic in 2nd Edition.
If you’re prepared to believe that XP is really about what we mean when we say experience' then you've got a lot more to explain than that. How is it that undead can drain your experience’? The story is that they can touch you with negative plane energy. Fine by me, because that means we have a much better definition of what XP is – it’s positive plane energy, which characters build up, and which allows them to enhance their own abilities. The fact that you can now expend this energy to make magic items makes a lot of sense.
A lot of things that had already existed in 2nd edition have appeared in 3rd Edition with even stupider names than they already had, and new things have been added with stupid names as well.
This is DMG-type material. Let’s see it before we assume it’s not in the 3rd edition.
A lot of people have been pining for these things a long time, and what was not-so-good about them was that they have been poorly implemented. This time, it’s better. The barbarian almost seems unnecessary, except that it appears to be an attempt to deal with the fact that so much of D&D comes out of Conan books, and yet you could not play Conan by D&D rules.
So far, I haven’t seen where they’re bringing back the anti-Paladin.
dogsbody wrote:
I myself was worried that the anti-min/max crowd wouldn’t like it, since every class gets more powerful. But it’s almost impossible to give characters more options without making them more powerful.
Narile wrote:
That’s just the new jive talk.
If they were going to make it multigenre, they should have used the Alternity engine. In any case, I don’t think that’s what they have in mind. And even if it were, it’s nothing new. Remember their first attempt to do a Buck Rogers RPG? It was AD&D with ray guns. They also tried to get Gamma World to fit the mold in one edition.
JDeMobray wrote:
Here’s where the GM should say, “You can’t creat an item that you don’t have enough XP in your current level to create.”
And basically crippled the ambition of most characters to even try to make magic items, and made it seem like those mages who constructed the ones found in dungeons must have been morons. Lose a point of your 7 con to make a +1 sword? No, thanks.
Danielinthewolvesden wrote:
Holy shit, thank God they didn’t. See my comment about the tinker’s dam above.
Backwards compatability was what was keeping the system stagnant to begin with. Considering how clean the system is now, it’s actually fairly amazing how easily you can convert to it.
Anybody that old-fashioned probably has all the materials he needs already. The system needed major revision, and nothing less was going to do. The new edition takes into account years of thinking about roleplaying games. The state of the art had passed D&D by years ago.
Ura-Maru wrote:
Au contraire mon frere. Not only are rogues more powerful than thieves, they are almost appallingly so, if you consider that a rogue with a short sword can do 4d6 damage with a successful sneak attack, whereas the 2nd edition thief could do only 3d6 with that same short sword. Plus, sneak attacks are substantially easier to make than backstabs. In fact, a sneak attack can be made with a ranged weapon.
And as I mentioned above, rogues are not the Hobson’s choice if-you’ve-seen-ones theives were. You can design one for a wide variety of character concepts.
JDeMobray wrote:
Near as I can tell, they’ve done something sincerely screwy with the Greyhawk setting, too. It had a very medieval feel in the old boxed set that I have, and even in the Greyhawk Adventures hardback, things seemed pretty tame. But now some crazy shit has happened. St. Cuthbert, who was once the patron of knowledge, common sense' is now the god of retribution’. What gives? And they’ve trashed the entire language system, which used to be a nifty paralell to our own language groups. And where Ancient Baklunish used to be the language of arcane lore, now it’s Draconic. Obviously, they want to make dragons the source of magic in the world, and possibly the predecessor of all civilization. But I’m inclined to suspect that the language tree concept involved too much thinking for somebody’s tastes, so they simplified it.
In any case, I don’t like it, but I’m not as upset by the changes as I was over the nerfing of the Dark Sun setting.
Ura-Maru wrote:
Since in my game, I treat the spell slots as mana energy of different quantum levels, and let people cast whatever spells they know and have the power for, the sorcerer is useless in my campaign.
JDeMobray wrote:
You seem to be referring to something outside of the Player’s Book. Where are you getting this information?
I’d love to hear more about this, as I mentioned above. What the hell is going on with Greyhawk?
Again, you’re citing information I’m not privvy to. Where is this from?
And surely you don’t think the previous psionics system was better than this?
Ura-Maru wrote:
I polished off nearly every monster in Planescape: Torment with backstabs from The Nameless One and Annah. I’d sneak into the crowd, simultaneously backstab one guy with both characters and quickly run around a corner and hide again. When they rounded the corner looking for us, I’d backstab, and then round the corner again. I had loads of fun doing this for hours.
JDeMobray wrote:
The game has never had better art than Brom’s work in Dark Sun. As for the new art, I like the look in general, but I have specific complaints. The racial portraits are terrible. The men look like women, the women look like men, and everybody looks Gen-X. I also object to the fact that halflings and gnomes have now become miniature elves, probably because they figured nobody in our modern culture would volunteer to play a race with big noses or pot bellies or hairy feet. Phooey.
Most of the other art in the Player’s Book goes well with its overall look, but doesn’t stand up well when looked at closely.
I seem to recall that my first Basic Set had the length of a round estimated at about 6 seconds. The next Basic Set, which is the only one I have left has it as ten, but the 6 second figure has been the standard I’ve been going by for 15 years, and a lot of gamer I know have had that figure rattling around in their heads. I don’t think there’s any revisionist history here. I think this figure has a past.
Danielinthewolvesden wrote:
It makes a big difference in the level of abstraction you are dealing with. Concrete is better, when the mechanics of it are not disruptive. Excusing it an abstract concept struck a lot of people as hand-waving over the illogic of the minute round. Now, a certain amount of double think is necessary in the game anyway, but actions are what create pictures in people’s minds, but disclaimers about how there may be all kinds of dodging and weaving going on and the actuall roll only represents the attack that had the best chance of hitting spoil the visualization. And if you’re not creating powerful pictures in people’s minds, you’re not, in my opinion, roleplaying.
See I have no actual problem with Wizards creating a new gaming system. More power to them. I have a problem with Wizards creating a new gaming system and calling it D&D when it clearly is incompatible with each and every previous edition of the D&D game. Look at what happened to Traveller when they tried that.
Yep, that is also correct. Again, I’m not sold on that being a good thing but I don’t really enjoy computer games as much as some other people.
. . . And the official boards at wizards.com and the rpgplanet boards are full of new house rules to “fix” it again. See, D&D perhaps moreso than any other role playing game that I’m familiar with is filled with house rule fans. Your own take on how magic works (listed later in your post and not quoted in my reply) is a house rule that makes the Sorceror class unneccesary (and good for you, btw :)) People are going to meddle, and the new system they have put in place for armored casting is so incompatible with the way most gamers want armored casting to work that all it has done is add another level of overwritten rules in quite a few campaigns.
Until then, our characters can just wander about half dressed 
That would be the “Blackguard” prestige class from the DMG.
“nerfing?”
The magical weapons were from the “High Level Campaigns” handout from the GENCON game fair. You can read more about them on Eric Noah’s 3rd Edition Site
If you have $6.00 and some time, try to pick up Dragon magazine 274. It should still be around in some bookstores. Included is a 3rd Edition Character Generator CD-Rom, and the Living Greyhawk Players Guide which will catch you up on the Clone Wars . . .I mean campaign setting.
This was from Bruce Cordell’s “Psionics” seminar from GENCON. I think that Eric’s site again has a bunch of this information up, although I’d have to check.
Which one?
Johnny Angel wrote:
The option you’re referring to is, of course, “the character with two classes” (not to be confused with "the multi-classed character), which was available all the way back in AD&D 1st Edition.
But there’s one difference: In 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D, a character who starts out as a fighter and then switches to a magic-user cannot cast spells while wearing armor. In 3rd Edition D&D, it sounds like a fighter who becomes a wizard can cast spells while wearing armor.
JDeMobray wrote:
I don’t see that it’s incompatible. Our 2nd edition campaign has recently made the switch, and the transition was seamless. We changed right in the middle of the dungeon. Not everything converts tit-for-tat, but I told the players to design the characters they wanted based on the new possibilities and to double-think any inconsistencies. What they ended up with is more or less what they started with. Furthermore, I’m running a module designed for 1st edition, and I’m finding that I can eyeball changes to the new system just as I was eyeballing the change to 2nd edition from 1st and from Basic.
I love 'em, personally. More to the point, I’m going to love playing Neverwinter Nights with people who moved away years ago.
Generally, I’m not in favor or elaborate house rules. If it requires a new chart, I don’t like it. I like the fact that most of what I don’t like with the new system can be fixed by applying simple changes. For example, I don’t like that the stat mods on Gnomes have now become about physical stats rather than mental stats. It completely changes the gnome mystique that I had built up in my campaign. So, I simply crossed this bullshit out in the book and wrote in the correct modifiers. I like clean, neat, house rules that fix problems without adding lot of new rules. The less I feel the need to mess with the system, the better.
If someone insisted on playing a Sorcerer, because they just thought it was sooooo cooool to have dragon’s blood, D00d, I’d probably give the class the ability to wear armor, on the premise that the armor restrictions are tied to the needs of `arcane magic’ – which is the new term for the formerly not-so-sharply differentiated method of spell casting that involved scholarly study of arcane lore. It would probably still not be worth playing a sorcerer, but I think some people would do it anyway.
I don’t object to the sorcerer in principle, except that this whole thing about dragon’s blood smells of BiFF the d00D. But I can imagine a player actually making it tollerable.
On a tangent here, I do object to the way class names are set up. First of all, I don’t care for the spurious distinction between the sorcerer' and wizard.’ Next, I don’t think that if you ask a barbarian what he does for a living, he’s ever going to tell you he’s a `barbarian.’ And I doubt a rogue ever thinks of himself as such except jocularly. He thinks of himself instead as a thief, or spy, or scout, or what have you.
I like the name better than anti-Paladin. But I’m not sure I’m going to like `prestige classes’ from what little I know of them. It sounds a lot like kits, only they have stat and level requirements? But I’ll reserve my judgement. I must wash my mind of negative thoughts until the tenth. MMmmmmm, mmmmmm, I’m not thinking about it. Mmmmmm.
This is an apropos term used in EverQuest, and probably other such games, for when an item, ability or character class that is considered too powerful is replaced with a “Nerf” version.
I can’t seem to get this link to work.
tracer wrote:
These are not the first rules for casting in armor that I’ve seen. They’re not even the first I’ve seen in a TSR publication. And in any case, there’s no need to be multiclassed to take advantage of them even now. You can just pick up the armor feat for the given armor type.
Doesn’t sound very seamless to me, but I suppose you could have a more 3rd edition style game than some.
Me neither. Nobody likes house rules. . . . .except for their own
Prestige classes don’t generally have stat requirements, and never have actual level requirements. What they are is a whole new class with a new set of abilities that ‘stacks’ on top of your existing class. Most have skill requirements, and occasionally a casting requirement (For example: 8+ Spellcraft ranks, 3+ Hide, Cast 2 levels of Arcane spells for an Assassin prestige)
**
Oh, then you haven’t heard. The official word has come down - there will be no more Dark Sun supplements, and no conversion of the setting for 3rd edition. (Aside from the assorted conversions available on the web).
The site link should point to GameSpy: PC Games, Reviews, News, Previews, Demos, Mods & Patches I’m not sure why you couldn’t get it to work, the server is usually pretty stable.
JDeMobray wrote:
I’m pretty amenable to rules that require minimal monkey business. And any monkey business must come from me. A character who walks in with a new house rule that involves a reading assignment and a chart is out of luck. I’m trying to tell a story here, for crying out loud.
This is fairly ironic, because the new system seems to have been intentionally set up to absorb Dark Sun better than the old one did. In fact, the halflings in the new Player’s Book are much more like Dark Sun halflings than the Tolkien-esque hobits of old D&D. But if you’ll read my campaign intro, I think you’ll surely agree that Dark Sun was intended from the ground up as an elaborate deconstruction of D&D. The Dark Sun halfling isn’t just un-Tolkien-esque, it’s anti-Tolkien-esque; the lovable Hobbit, being symbolic of Tolkien’s influence in the genre, was twisted into a vicious little savage. Instead of the Bilbo Baggins, Dark Sun gives us the Wolf Child from The Road Warrior. But I think the irony was lost on a lot of people, and many of the ideas that came from Dark Sun have been adopted with no sense of irony at all. That in itself is sad, but humorous.
I am resurrecting (7th-level Cleric spell 
) this thread, because just last night I finally got my hands on the 3rd Edition D&D PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual.
I’m perusing the 3rd Edition PHB today. I’ve actually had to go back to the 2nd Edition AD&D PHB so I can tell which of these things were newly-changed for the 3rd Edition, and which of these things had already been changed in the 2nd Edition but I just didn’t notice 'em before.
New things I’ve seen so far in the 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook:[ul][li]Clerics can use edged and pointed weapons.[/li][li]Armor class now goes up, not down, the harder a creature is to hit.[/li][li]THAC0, which was already much simpler than those God-awful tables in the 1st Edition AD&D DMG, is now replaced by an even simpler system: roll a d20, add all your attack bonuses in (including the attack bonuses you get from your character’s level), and if it’s greater than your opponent’s armor class, you’ve hit 'im.[/li][li]There is finally an official rule for critical hits.[/li][li]Melee rounds now last 6 seconds, not 60.[/li][li]Exceptional Strength is gone – strength 19 is the next higher increment of strength above 18.[/li][li]Warriors no longer get to roll for higher strength if they start out as strength 18.[/li][li]Everybody gets to add extra-high hit-point bonuses to each hit die if they have a super-high constitution score, not just warriors.[/li][li]Every 4 levels, you get to add 1 to any ability score you choose. This is the first time in the game that there has been a non-magical means of raising an ability score from the one you’re born with.[/li][li]Abilities can increase without limit. The tables for strength, dexterity, constitution, etc., no longer run out at 25 or so.[/li][li]The strength modifier for melee to-hit rolls is now equal to the strength modifier for melee damage.[/li][li]Characters with super-low charisma scores no longer have to be assassins. ;)[/li][*]Monks are back, but psionics aren’t.[/ul]
The new psionics book will be out in March, 2001. Hopefully this time it’s well integrated into the system, rather than being the afterthough the old psionics system was.
According to JDeMobray, the psionics system will be modeled on the magic system, and he’s not happy about that. I don’t mind the idea myself, because it suggests a certain consistency in the ontology of the D&D universe.
First of all, when discussing any new edition of D&D, we have to refer to the First Rule of D&D, which states that if you’re a real D&D player, you’ll stick with 1st Edition for all eternity and that any new edition is tantamount to blasphemy. At least, that’s what all the self-styled real players will tell you. To them, the game was perfect back in the days when Dragon Magazine actually published statistics for Satan. (He has 666 hit points in Hell, in case you’re wondering.)
Since I never actually got to know 1st Edition beyond a few stray glimpses, I gave 3E a chance. Once I got to read the 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook, I thought there was no way I’d ever go back to 2nd Edition. Mostly, it achieves game balance without a lot of arbitrary things that made no sense in 2E.
For example: any class in 3E that isn’t proficient in armor has abilities that would be hindered by the wearing of heavy armor, so there’s a reason behind it, and even those classes can wear armor if they really want to.
Clerics aren’t arbitrarily restricted to blunt weapons anymore. Most of the weapons they start out with are blunt, but they can learn to use any weapon they choose.
Any class can learn any weapon if they want to. There’s no longer any idiotic rule that says a wizard can’t even pick up a sword like there used to be.
Multiclassing actually works now. You get all the abilities of all your classes added up now, including hit points and saving throws. Plus, you can multiclass if you’re a human.
The DMG includes special classes for NPCs, such as commoners and experts, so there’s no such thing as “0-level” characters anymore.
Finally, they decided to put kytons into the core Monster Manual! Now THAT ROCKS!
All in all, I think the new edition is much better than anything that came before. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to reading the D&D movie sites at http://www.dndmovie.com and http://www.seednd.com.
ricksummon wrote:
There is a distinct pattern in some of those early materials of taking things so out of context that the historical connection is rendered meaningless. This is an example that survived through 2nd edition. Clerics can’t use blunt weapons because there once was a group called the Knights Templar who justified their warlike activities by claiming that the bible only prohibited shedding blood, not killing itself. They claimed that maces did not cause bloodshed. Outside the historical Christian context, this restriction doesn’t make even the dubious sense it made in the middle ages.
Incidentally, Johnny Angel, this was also why the various Catholic Inquisitions preferred to execute heretics and witches by burning them at the stake rather than decapitate them. “The Church abhors bloodshed” was always the excuse.
ricksummon wrote:
Nuts to that! A true D&D afficionado knows that even the First Edition was a perversion of the original! The First Edition, after all, was not “Dungeons & Dragons.” It was “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.” The true, original Dungeons & Dragons consisted of the D&D Basic rulebook, the D&D Expert rulebook, and the glorious first edition of the World of Greyhawk. D&D and AD&D are different, incompatible game systems.
This new, pipsqueak upstart 3rd edition of “D&D” is actually a 3rd edition of AD&D masquerading as straight (non-A) D&D just to piss us off!
tracer wrote:
You old-school types think you’re so cool just because your game had rules for throwing your sword. Bah. You and your “all elves are fighter/mages” crap. I sneer: sneer
tracer wrote:
You old-school types think you’re so cool just because your game had rules for throwing your sword. Bah. You and your “all elves are fighter/mages” crap. I sneer: sneer
Bah! The original D&D ruleset was printed by mimeograph on white paper. There was no Basic/Expert/whatever.
Oh yeah? Well, we all know that the original mimeographed D&D was itself just a rip-off of Chainmail!