SO I’ve been thinking about getting back into role playing games. Sometime during AD&D me and my friends left the D&D world for Palladium and Heroes and Rifts . (The last D&D Elf I played was an Elf, no class, just race.)More realistic alignments and world geared toward storytelling with a great skill system hooked me big time.
Lately I’ve put some posts on some message boards and asked around at game shops and apparently looking for a Palladium game is like trying to find a bar where they play 8-tracks drink Wallbangers.
So back to D$D by necessity I guess, is everybody on 4th? or should I restart my book collection at 3.5, or even third?
The gaming boards I go to show people still playing 3.x and even earlier. I think it’s a matter of what a group you can gather prefers to play. Check out your FLGS to see what games they advertise, if any. At least, that’s a place to start.
My local group is playing 4th edition. I’ve found it easy to prep and run encounters. But there is a pretty big following for Pathfinder RPG, which is basically Paizo’s edition of D&D 3.5. Either is a respectable option. It depends on what you can get people interested in. Lots of luck getting a Basic D&D group together.
From a player perspective, 4E probably doesn’t look too different from 3E. Sure, there are different rules, and fighters and rogues get spell like abilities with powers, but the game play still depends on the group.
From a DMs perspective, 4E is VASTLY different. I think it’s much easier to prep and it makes prep fun.
What Exit? is the DM of our excellent (but now on summer hiatus) LOTR RPG game here on the boards, and he uses 1st Ed. D&D with some house rules and Tolkienesque tweaks.
I’m playing Pathfinder, the Paizo Publishing outgrowth of D&D 3.5. (Paizo is what became of Dragon Magazine when Wizards of the Coast, who bought TSR, spun it off.)
Not so fond of 4E.
Have the electronic copy as a free PDF. http://paizo.com/store/downloads/free/v5748btpy8253
I built it to support the open beta test, but when the official full edition hits the street in a couple of weeks, I’ll be furiously working on the update. But right now it’s pretty well set for doing games in the Beta version downloadable for free.
As others have said, it depends vastly on the group. I’ve played tremendous games using craptastic game systems (I won’t mention specific systems to avoid a nerdfight), and horrible games using great systems. Find a group, see if they’re any good, and go with the flow.
That said, I’ve played virtually every version of D&D published (not counting Chainmail). Up through 3.0, the rules seemed to me to become more “realistic.” The first version of the game had moronic movement rates: if you did the math, it turned out that your running speed was six feet every five seconds. Normal walking speed was something like one foot every five seconds. 1E had very detailed weapon-versus-armor rules that nobody I ever knew used, but had no rules for doing anything outside of combat–unless you were a wizard, in which case you could do everything anyone else could do, only better. 2E added proficiency rules, which were good, but is disliked by most aficionados (not by me: it was the set I used during jr. high and high school, my golden age of gaming).
3E added what I call object-oriented gaming, and it rationalized and streamlined a bunch of rules systems. At the same time, it added a few insanely complicated dynamics (grappling, shapeshifting, etc.), and I ended up having one character who required three spreadsheets and 20 pages of notes to play. Oy vey.
4E took away a lot of outside-of-combat stuff, and the skill challenges it left behind are according to popular opinion pretty broken (although I’ve heard rumors of an official patch to these rules). At the same time, it gave interesting rules to every character class instead of just to the spellcasters, and it also gave interesting options to a lot of monsters.
It’s a style preference. I really enjoy how combat goes in 4E, and I really enjoy how out-of-combat goes in 3E. I don’t have much use for the earlier editions at this point, but I know they all have their fans, and that’s just fine.
For me the big thing is what the players and DM are used to.
My original group has been running for 30 years using **1st Edition **plus our own Rules Supplement (covering stuff from new classes to how long you can hold your breath underwater).
We also changed the duration of a combat round from one minute to 6 seconds, which made movement more realistic too.
There’s no sign of anyone’s enthusiasm flagging - my characters currently include:
an Ocean Barbarian clearing out an island for a Trading Company (the Company was started by one of my retired characters two decades ago)
a hobbit Sharia researching Genie lore in the land of Al-Qadim
a Paladin hunting for a crafty Illusionist who keeps annoying the party
My own campaign is inspired by Babylon 5 (which I’ve never watched! :eek:), as various powers meet on neutral ground in Freeport.
I also recently had the pleasure of playing a Bard in TPKurilla’s **4th Edition **campaign. It didn’t take long to pick up the game and he assures me it’s straightforward for the DM to prepare combats.
This makes me wonder: is anyone out there still using the original original tiny-paperback-books version of D&D (probably modified all out of recognition by house rules)?
Pathfinder rebalances the base classes (eg, rogues are no longer useless after 10th level, and so on), and fixes a few of the more annoying rules holes, like grappling. Try it!
Well, a bound copy of the playtest rules have been in stores for a few months. I’ve got a copy. Well.
Two copies. It was very cheaply bound on purpose, and there was an incident with a well meaning friend and salsa. (It was like $20, and this is a full sized rulebook, so you can imagine how cheaply bound it was.)
Out of curiosity, what is Pathfinder’s status vis-a-vis copyright? I notice that that there are references to The Game That Cannot Be Named, implying that there are trademark issues at play, but even then I can’t imagine WotC just giving up the 3.5 rule set.
Considering they’re Paizo, who were the publishers of Dragon, I’m pretty sure they have everything completely under control. I’m not sure what the license is, but I’m going to guess they have a special deal with WOTC, because of their shared history.