Zardnaar
Legend
Stuff I miss from 3E is concepts and FR books like Lord's of Madness.
D&D 3E/3.5 3rd Edition Revisited - Better play with the power of hindsight?
- Thread starter Yora
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Stuff I miss from 3E is concepts and FR books like Lord's of Madness.
CapnZapp
Legend
I miss a lot of things.
A major decision point in your mid levels. 5E really could split subclasses into two choice points: one at start taking you up to (say) 11th level, and then a new choice point taking from 12th to 20th level.
The main benefit would not necessarily be the character customization, but the very existence of a choice point here would put some greatly needed focus on high-level play. People would discuss playing at 14th or 17th level much more, which the game would be much better for.
A major decision point in your mid levels. 5E really could split subclasses into two choice points: one at start taking you up to (say) 11th level, and then a new choice point taking from 12th to 20th level.
The main benefit would not necessarily be the character customization, but the very existence of a choice point here would put some greatly needed focus on high-level play. People would discuss playing at 14th or 17th level much more, which the game would be much better for.
payn
I don't believe in the no-win scenario
I hear that, but PF solved a lot of it for me. The NPC codex was a god send, and I usually only play until level 12, if not E6.
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
3e had a lot of really cool ideas, sadly, they didn't feel like they were intended to coexist with one another- having played in a party with a Binder, a Psion, a Warmage, and a Totemist, I really felt like these concepts weren't very compatible.
But maybe that was just me.
The martial/caster divide is one of those things that's always been present in D&D, but how much it impacts the game, and where the pendulum is currently swinging changes a lot.
In AD&D, for example, Fighters were kings. They had a lot of survivability, they had advantages that were not only immediately useful, but remained useful for a large swatch of campaigns. They had the capability to get very large bonuses in combat, which was a fairly important part of the game, and their tendency to be pretty strong came in handy for exploration. The game didn't really penalize them in any real ways, outside of not being able to take full advantage of magic weapons that came along, since you were incentivized to specialize, but how painful that was was kind of campaign-dependent.
Then given all the constraints on spellcasters, and it wasn't common to find a spellcaster completely dominating the game, and while they had a ton of narrative power from spells, the Fighter also had a reasonable fighting force at their disposal.
3e was two steps forward, one step back for the Fighter. They got a lot of new toys, but losing their fantastic saves, combined with many restrictions being taken off the spellcasters could really upset the balance of power. If you played 3e the same way you did AD&D, you could not even notice the cracks, but quickly a new playstyle evolved and the design team seemed incapable of adjusting to it immediately, and by the time they did, the damage was done.
4e brought with it better balance between the two poles, but suffered from the fact that, in D&D, magic can do anything, and the "Martial Power Source" was unfortunately defined as "can't do anything magic can". So while Fighters, Rangers, and Rogues were perfectly cromulent character options, the could have stiff competition from variants that had access to other power sources, which were basically all magic, so they could do anything. This was countered by the fact that the PHB classes got the most support, so while your Wardens and Swordmages could do some amazing things, they didn't have the same breadth of options as the Fighter (the Paladin got a lot of support, but they went about doing the Defender job differently than the Fighter, so it was hard to say if one was objectively better than the other).
While magic was different in 4e, you no longer had access to every magic option under the sun at a given moment, and the big magic effects were either removed from the game or siloed into "rituals", which were time consuming, expensive, and technically available to everyone.
5e is a strange beast. In some respects, it almost gets us back to 2e levels. The Fighter is once again perfectly cromulent at all levels of play since their thing, consistent damage over the course of an adventuring day is certainly important, but they haven't gotten their saving throws back, nor do the have massive combat bonuses or interesting combat options. I've said that I think they are inferior to the 2e Fighter in most respects, and I stand by it.
Meanwhile, the casters did get nerfs. Less spell slots. Concentration on many spells to prevent combos or stacking (though this does lead to a few unforeseen problems like, great, now we don't have to worry about casters buffing themselves all the time, but Fighters can't really get great buffs either), but this ends up being a wash because many of the powerful spells are back, and casters retained 4e-style at-will magic, the occasional "free" ritual spell, and of course, the fact that new books always come with way more caster options (spells) than anything else. Casters are weaker than their 3e counterparts, but they aren't back to AD&D levels either (ignoring 2e Mythos Priests, which were so super gonzo that 3e is almost a downgrade, lol).
And with the new PHB, we'll see the pendulum shift a little more. Weapon Masteries will give weapon users more options, and hopefully Fighters will remain the king of this sort of thing. Casters will probably stay the same, or improve a bit, but spells will get some rebalancing. Though I can't predict if it will really change the dynamics between classes (and YMMV if they even need to).
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
I think that a lot of this discussion gets unnecessarily bogged down with comparative terms like "better," when a more appropriate term would be "tailored."
I remember the term "toolbox" being thrown around a lot back when 3E came out; it was the idea that the game system was modular, and that you could tweak or swap the parts you needed so that the game played the way you wanted. I recall wondering at the time how a unified game engine (i.e. the d20 System), where most everything was interrelated (i.e. ability score modifiers tended to apply to a lot of the system's "moving parts," and always in the same way; namely, adding their modifier) was supposed to be better for this than the "isolated subsystems" of AD&D. Wouldn't an isolated system be easier to change/delete/replace, since that was less likely to have unintended consequences the way a "unified" game engine might?
Nowadays, I suspect that a lot of people had the same misgivings, because very few people treated the d20 System like a toolbox. Instead, they treated the game engine as if it were an actual engine: a very precise piece of machinery that was also very delicate, prone to failing if you started tinkering with it too much (unless you were extremely careful and precise in how you modified it).
Personally, I think that viewpoint is exaggerated at best; the real issue is less one of the system being delicate than it is one of people not understanding what the tools in the toolbox are used for. If you've never had to use a halligan bar before, you likely won't know what it is and what it's used for if it doesn't come with an instruction manual, and attempting to learn to use it "on the job" means putting it into practice in the course of play, which is likely to involve several misuses before its purpose becomes clear, in which case you (or, more likely, the player(s) involved in utilizing it) will become disdainful of the thing which keeps being a poor fit (not realizing that it's not being used for its intended purpose, since said purpose was never communicated to them to begin with). This lack of an instruction manual for the tools in the box is, it should be noted, what Monte Cook actually meant when he referred to ivory tower design, not that the designers wanted to reward system mastery by building "trap options" into the game. "System mastery" just means "knowing what each tool in the box was designed to do."
To that end, I'm of the opinion that the problem with the d20 System isn't that "the math is too heavy (especially at higher levels)" (I enjoy math, and I like playing at higher levels, so neither of those things are a problem to me). Rather, I think it's that everyone keeps thinking that the system should be used unaltered, out of the metaphorical box, and worse, that the entire game engine will fall apart if they don't. The "discovery" of E6 (or rather, E-anything, since you can set any arbitrary level limit under that paradigm) was insightful because it brought back this idea, albeit mostly in terms of what it disallowed (i.e. higher levels), though it did have some instances of tweaking existing things (mostly in terms of options for people who'd hit the level cap but still wanted to advance; it was here that we saw a precursor to 5E's "epic boons").
I own several thousand d20 System products (mostly digital offerings for PF1), and I get a lot of enjoyment out of using them to tweak the baseline assumptions of what my next homebrew setting will allow for, ranging from the races available to how magic works, and quite a bit more. This is something abetted by how many moving parts (or "fiddly bits," as they're so often pejoratively called) the system has, since the more there are the more I can interact with in order to make a game world that itself has more alternative options which the PCs can in turn substantively (i.e. via the game engine in addition to via role-playing) interact with.
At the same time, the system isn't so tightly wound that it mandates that "balance" (which is a concept worthy of another long rant, to which all I'll say here is that is something I think has been both misunderstood and fetishized by a large segment of the community in a way that has very little to do with the course of play) be placed above options. Quite the contrary, the usual definition of "balance" that I see tends to be predicated on options being restricted in the name of parity (though a lot of people insist that they don't want options restricted, but for all character classes to have as many options available as the one which has the most, traditionally identified as the wizard; this is a laudable goal, but attempts to actualize it have their own trade-offs, largely with regards to what aspects of the play experience are prioritized over others).
All of which is really a plaudit to the OGL, and what it allowed for, which was to let the community poke and prod the system longer and to a far greater degree than any set of designers (or open playtest) ever could. I've noticed that the d20 System engine (and any game system of "complex" design) tends to be a lot like writing a computer operating system in how even the people writing it won't notice issues until years down the road, after a lot of user feedback. For an instance of a "patch" being issued, look at things like how they changed polymorphing late in 3.X's life, or the Battle Blessing feat (which, while put out as a feat, modified paladin spellcasting in a way that was clearly meant to at least somewhat ameliorate how useless it was) in Complete Champion.
To be clear, I think these are benefits, not evidence that the system was somehow never worth investing in. I like complex game engines, the same way I like being able to use a computer, and continued interaction in order to find the "rough patches" and figure out how to fix them are part-and-parcel of that. Moreover, because these patches are different for everyone (which is a key point: you can point at "the math" all you want, but 99.99% of the time, you're going to be talking about personal preference rather than objective analysis), the third-party community essentially acted to create ever more tools for the toolbox, encouraging you to customize what tools you made use of. The only problem was figuring out where those tools were (i.e. what third-party products had what you were looking for) and making sure that they worked as intended.
Unfortunately, the mindset outlined above never really seemed to catch on, which I think is a shame, since there was a lot of potential for customization that was missed in people citing things like "RAW" (i.e. rules as written), the fetishization of "balance" that I mentioned before, and third-party offerings seeming (as I saw it) to be treated with a great deal of suspicion (more so than I think the (overstated) "glut" of low-quality products in the early days of 3.0 warranted).
Fortunately, that makes little difference to me personally, as I can still put everything I have to use as I like, and there are still third-party d20 System creators making things today (mostly, but not completely, for PF1). But it does make it a tad bit frustrating that, when it comes to discussions about the game, we seem to be exactly where we were more than twenty years ago.
I remember the term "toolbox" being thrown around a lot back when 3E came out; it was the idea that the game system was modular, and that you could tweak or swap the parts you needed so that the game played the way you wanted. I recall wondering at the time how a unified game engine (i.e. the d20 System), where most everything was interrelated (i.e. ability score modifiers tended to apply to a lot of the system's "moving parts," and always in the same way; namely, adding their modifier) was supposed to be better for this than the "isolated subsystems" of AD&D. Wouldn't an isolated system be easier to change/delete/replace, since that was less likely to have unintended consequences the way a "unified" game engine might?
Nowadays, I suspect that a lot of people had the same misgivings, because very few people treated the d20 System like a toolbox. Instead, they treated the game engine as if it were an actual engine: a very precise piece of machinery that was also very delicate, prone to failing if you started tinkering with it too much (unless you were extremely careful and precise in how you modified it).
Personally, I think that viewpoint is exaggerated at best; the real issue is less one of the system being delicate than it is one of people not understanding what the tools in the toolbox are used for. If you've never had to use a halligan bar before, you likely won't know what it is and what it's used for if it doesn't come with an instruction manual, and attempting to learn to use it "on the job" means putting it into practice in the course of play, which is likely to involve several misuses before its purpose becomes clear, in which case you (or, more likely, the player(s) involved in utilizing it) will become disdainful of the thing which keeps being a poor fit (not realizing that it's not being used for its intended purpose, since said purpose was never communicated to them to begin with). This lack of an instruction manual for the tools in the box is, it should be noted, what Monte Cook actually meant when he referred to ivory tower design, not that the designers wanted to reward system mastery by building "trap options" into the game. "System mastery" just means "knowing what each tool in the box was designed to do."
To that end, I'm of the opinion that the problem with the d20 System isn't that "the math is too heavy (especially at higher levels)" (I enjoy math, and I like playing at higher levels, so neither of those things are a problem to me). Rather, I think it's that everyone keeps thinking that the system should be used unaltered, out of the metaphorical box, and worse, that the entire game engine will fall apart if they don't. The "discovery" of E6 (or rather, E-anything, since you can set any arbitrary level limit under that paradigm) was insightful because it brought back this idea, albeit mostly in terms of what it disallowed (i.e. higher levels), though it did have some instances of tweaking existing things (mostly in terms of options for people who'd hit the level cap but still wanted to advance; it was here that we saw a precursor to 5E's "epic boons").
I own several thousand d20 System products (mostly digital offerings for PF1), and I get a lot of enjoyment out of using them to tweak the baseline assumptions of what my next homebrew setting will allow for, ranging from the races available to how magic works, and quite a bit more. This is something abetted by how many moving parts (or "fiddly bits," as they're so often pejoratively called) the system has, since the more there are the more I can interact with in order to make a game world that itself has more alternative options which the PCs can in turn substantively (i.e. via the game engine in addition to via role-playing) interact with.
At the same time, the system isn't so tightly wound that it mandates that "balance" (which is a concept worthy of another long rant, to which all I'll say here is that is something I think has been both misunderstood and fetishized by a large segment of the community in a way that has very little to do with the course of play) be placed above options. Quite the contrary, the usual definition of "balance" that I see tends to be predicated on options being restricted in the name of parity (though a lot of people insist that they don't want options restricted, but for all character classes to have as many options available as the one which has the most, traditionally identified as the wizard; this is a laudable goal, but attempts to actualize it have their own trade-offs, largely with regards to what aspects of the play experience are prioritized over others).
All of which is really a plaudit to the OGL, and what it allowed for, which was to let the community poke and prod the system longer and to a far greater degree than any set of designers (or open playtest) ever could. I've noticed that the d20 System engine (and any game system of "complex" design) tends to be a lot like writing a computer operating system in how even the people writing it won't notice issues until years down the road, after a lot of user feedback. For an instance of a "patch" being issued, look at things like how they changed polymorphing late in 3.X's life, or the Battle Blessing feat (which, while put out as a feat, modified paladin spellcasting in a way that was clearly meant to at least somewhat ameliorate how useless it was) in Complete Champion.
To be clear, I think these are benefits, not evidence that the system was somehow never worth investing in. I like complex game engines, the same way I like being able to use a computer, and continued interaction in order to find the "rough patches" and figure out how to fix them are part-and-parcel of that. Moreover, because these patches are different for everyone (which is a key point: you can point at "the math" all you want, but 99.99% of the time, you're going to be talking about personal preference rather than objective analysis), the third-party community essentially acted to create ever more tools for the toolbox, encouraging you to customize what tools you made use of. The only problem was figuring out where those tools were (i.e. what third-party products had what you were looking for) and making sure that they worked as intended.
Unfortunately, the mindset outlined above never really seemed to catch on, which I think is a shame, since there was a lot of potential for customization that was missed in people citing things like "RAW" (i.e. rules as written), the fetishization of "balance" that I mentioned before, and third-party offerings seeming (as I saw it) to be treated with a great deal of suspicion (more so than I think the (overstated) "glut" of low-quality products in the early days of 3.0 warranted).
Fortunately, that makes little difference to me personally, as I can still put everything I have to use as I like, and there are still third-party d20 System creators making things today (mostly, but not completely, for PF1). But it does make it a tad bit frustrating that, when it comes to discussions about the game, we seem to be exactly where we were more than twenty years ago.
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BigZebra
Adventurer
Yeah, that would be pretty awesome. It would be nice having to look forward to a major decision point.
BigZebra
Adventurer
I GM PF1 at the moment. In this regard I'm kind in the camp of a little of column A and a little of column B. The martial-caster divide still exist in PF (IMO). Also the archetypes makes it pretty front-loaded. Further their class design too often revolves around complex subsystems where I have some currency I need to track and use. And it all amount to much about nothing.
So while I like some of the QOL improvements, I would have liked a more simple class design. Don't get me wrong I like it overall.
Voadam
Legend
I played and DM'd 1e for a long time.
I preferred the design in Pathfinder Beta more though where instead of 1e's fiddly tracking of minor things like a sorcerer's 1st level bloodline power being able to be used 3+ charisma modifier times per day for its little effect, you could just do them. So instead of being able to turn your hands into d4 melee weapon claws for 7 rounds a day as a sorcerer and tracking that and resource managing it, you just changed them when you wanted to.
A lot of the expansion classes lean heavily into their class specific points per day mechanic though so it would be a bit of conversion work to go back to that model or to continue the resource management reduction.
Voadam
Legend
For the latter there were a few products designed to help with this.
Foe Factory is one designed for the fairly compatible d20 Modern designed to quickly create NPC stat blocks that can be scaled up or down to provide challenges by including average party level as part of the stat block and then APL figures into things like attack bonuses. It was fine for that purpose but did not really allow for the big magics of the typical D&D NPCs.
A number of products provided a large number of stat blocks to be grabbed and used as desired. I found Creative Conclave's Lazy GM series fairly decent for that purpose for mid level NPC stat blocks.
Pedantic
Legend
It's this fundamental attitude toward what the rules are for that I miss most, and I think is basically gone from modern TTRPGs. It was just expected that you'd want the rules to model whatever idea you had in your head about the setting and situation worked, and if you wanted something to be different, your first step was to go and design for it, or find someone else who'd designed for it. It was a self-perpetuating loop as well, in that you'd see someone had done some cool rules for advanced throwing weapons, and then you'd try to figure out where atlatls could fit into a campaign. It happened on both sides of the table too, in that a lot of player side engagement with the rules was spinning out cool ways they interacted. That was actually the positive side of RAW extrapolation, where you'd have both white room theorizing, and you'd just explore what happened when various bits of the rules worked together, and more practical stuff, like, "hey, adamantine ignores hardness, so we can use this dagger to tunnel through this wall, given enough time!"
There was a certain toy-etic nature to rules in that period that you still see echoes of in 5e, but is largely gone now. You were finding blocks and putting them together in new and interesting ways all the time. Homebrew has obviously not gone anywhere, but it no longer is tied to setting rules for how the game and world work as a norm. You've got DMs making moment by moment, "what does this check do?" decisions, which are tied to immediate, specific situations at the table, and not as an activity separate from play, to create the environment play would then happen inside of.
It's all still doable, but mostly I just miss the norms. If you wanted your setting to be some way, you started with "what rules will I be using, and how will I change them to more directly represent this," or you found some interesting mechanics/interactions that you liked, and started working out what kind of setting they produced. That connection was taken as given.
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