D&D anyone here (still) play it?

[Imperial Overlord]

3.5 makes some amateurish mistakes in translation from 3, and it also totally slaughters the DR system (I still don't really understand 3.5s DR set up).

It's pretty simple. They attempted to move away from the "plus of the magic weapon" DR to a system where it was actually advantageous to have silver versus werewolves or cold iron versus demons instead of everyone just using magic weapons and making that DR meaningless. They just went too far in that direction.

[Agent Sorchus]

Seeing into the future helps a wizard from being useless true, but the real problem is if your players have detailed information from the core books that they shouldn't. Toss your average player into a pit with almost any monster in the monster manual, guess what, they already know what it's weakness' are and the best way to defeat it.

Divination magics biggest advantage comes once again from OoC info. Players never have to do trial and error to get weaknesses right because they already know.

So you scry to set up for the next day and your DM gives you visual descriptions of the monsters in the cave. Good, but should you simply from a visual description (which is all most divination spells give you) know what the monsters weaknesses are?

Only if you have either fought one before or have read the Monster manual and already have matched description to stats.

And yes a fighter with the wrong equipment is as screwed as a wizard with the wrong spells, but that is fixed the same way: gold. Buy some new spells or a new bow or sword. Being a fighter vs spell casters your best friend is a spell-storing weapon with dispell Magic.

The fighter can't see the future on his own, and even if he could, he either has to swap out with another character, have the right magical equipment, or ask the spellcaster to get him ready for it.

And what is wrong with a little team work? Yes a fighter is going to have a tougher time versus something that has good DR versus him but that is part of the many ways DR is ineffective as is in the rules. And yes Ethereal creatures are a bitch to fight, but it is hard for everyone because of the ability to attack through the walls. And if speed is such a problem why does it not help the monk, but only helps monsters? And I know what you are talking about with fliers, but that is usually solved in meta game by having most adventures underground

And really fighters have the ability in one or two rounds to change their combat focus simple by changing weapons.

[Agent Sorchus]

It's pretty simple. They attempted to move away from the "plus of the magic weapon" DR to a system where it was actually advantageous to have silver versus werewolves or cold iron versus demons instead of everyone just using magic weapons and making that DR meaningless. They just went too far in that direction.

Yes I can understand why they wanted to get away from the +1 system, but can not stand the way it works out for a fighter. In 3e with the max enchantment bonus of +10 the fighter has to balance ability to defeat greater DR's or having greater number of abilities on the weapon total. Not true in 3.5 where it benefits the fighter to stuff his weapon with more abilities over having to go for the +5 to fight the tough monsters with.

It is something that doesn't seem to work right either way though, so I still prefer the older simpler system.

[Imperial Overlord]

Seeing into the future helps a wizard from being useless true, but the real problem is if your players have detailed information from the core books that they shouldn't. Toss your average player into a pit with almost any monster in the monster manual, guess what, they already know what it's weakness' are and the best way to defeat it.

Divination magics biggest advantage comes once again from OoC info. Players never have to do trial and error to get weaknesses right because they already know.

So you scry to set up for the next day and your DM gives you visual descriptions of the monsters in the cave. Good, but should you simply from a visual description (which is all most divination spells give you) know what the monsters weaknesses are?

Only if you have either fought one before or have read the Monster manual and already have matched description to stats.

The game encourages it. Low level wizards have few spells and D&D monsters abound with resistances and immunities. Despite all the talk about high level spell this or that being broken, few campaigns get much passed 10th level. The benefit to a wizard for memorizing as much of a monster manual as possible is simply too high. Add in how old and conservative the game is and yes, monster strengths and weaknesses will be widely known.

To be fair, 4th edition did move away from that direction, which does give it some points in my book. Too bad most of the rest of the game is a grinding hack and slash fest.

[Formless]

The problem is that in 3.5, a Wizard could pick what role to specialise in every single day, while other classes had to choose it based on their build (and most couldn't have nearly that many actual choices). This isn't anywhere near balanced.

Aside from the fact that it was balanced on other criteria that others have already covered, I really have to ask: what is with this obsession with balance anyway? Its an RPG, not a video game. Balance matters more to games with a competitive element, whereas DnD is a social game about teamwork and storytelling. Just because a wizard can probably frag his fighter colleges in a one-on-one doesn't mean he doesn't still need the guy for protection when he inevitably runs out of ammunition. Its a completely different mindset with completely different goals in mind.

Furthermore, why the fuck shouldn't a wizard be able to switch focuses at a whim? I do not see your reasoning here. Fluff-wise, the same magic system and mechanics are being used no matter what the end result of the spell. This is another example of roleplaying being curbed to accommodate arbitrary, abstract game balance issues that only rollplayers would care about.

And as much as you complain about 4th edition splitting everyone into four roles, two of those roles didn't really exist in 3.5. Unless you were in a tiny hallway or something, it was impossible to really force enemies to engage anyone in particular, so no defender role, and except for the Crusader, I'm not aware of any classes that could heal without spending their entire turn doing so, so there goes a lot of the appeal of the Leader except for one controversial late-edition book.

1) forcing people to engage you is as simple as taking the initiative and engaging them. The attack of opportunity rules are there to force opponents to battle you or take hits.

2) to heal without spending a turn, use the quicken spell feat. And even if this weren't the case, I don't see how the appeal of the leadership role is dependent on healing at a moments notice.

[Erik von Nein]

Balance is important when you've got people with characters who are wildly imbalanced. My horror game I'm running currently has/had four characters in it. One was a Aasimar paladin (with planar banishment instead of turn undead), a monk/bard/druid hybrid character who had an earth elemental companion, a wizard who had a +1 level adjusted template that had negatives to intelligence and dexterity, and a power-gaming druid. The other characters are varied and interest and it's pretty easy to think up challenges for them. The power-gamer druid is nearly impossible to think up challenges without severely destroying the rest of the party.

Unfortunately, I kind of did just that. The party ended up dying because what I had to challenge the imbalanced party was too great for the rest of the characters.

You could mention that social interactions kill the power-gamer, and they did. It doesn't help that his attitude toward gaming is ... not very serious, making horror even more difficult than it is. But there needs to be some combat after a while, and that kind of did them in.

I can see why balancing classes was something people desired.

[Formless]

Balance is important when you've got people with characters who are wildly imbalanced. My horror game I'm running currently has/had four characters in it. One was a Aasimar paladin (with planar banishment instead of turn undead), a monk/bard/druid hybrid character who had an earth elemental companion, a wizard who had a +1 level adjusted template that had negatives to intelligence and dexterity, and a power-gaming druid. The other characters are varied and interest and it's pretty easy to think up challenges for them. The power-gamer druid is nearly impossible to think up challenges without severely destroying the rest of the party.

Unfortunately, I kind of did just that. The party ended up dying because what I had to challenge the imbalanced party was too great for the rest of the characters.

You could mention that social interactions kill the power-gamer, and they did. It doesn't help that his attitude toward gaming is ... not very serious, making horror even more difficult than it is. But there needs to be some combat after a while, and that kind of did them in.

I can see why balancing classes was something people desired.

Well, granted, I have been on the short end of the power spectrum before, usually due to the party leveling asymmetrically. It wasn't exactly fun, but it was more due to the fact that the DM at the time was a moron and was giving an inordinate amount of attention to one player he favored than a problem with the game. But maybe you have a point there.

[Civil War Man]

To add to the balance part, you can see the problems in balancing if you just look at how classes scale.

I imagine many of the people in this thread have gone through the standard level 1 kobold and/or goblin hackfest. If you did one of these, and the wizard or sorcerer never had to be babysat through fights by the sturdier classes, raise your hand.

On the flip side, if you've been in a high-level fight where the fighter or barbarian was actually necessary in a combat situation that did not involve things with magic resistance or anti-magic, raise your hand.

And for a third example, there's the whole idea that you can pretty much replace every class with cleric or druid builds and achieve the same, if not better, results. To bring in a WoW analogy, it's perfectly feasible to run a 25-man raid where every slot is filled by a druid. However, while it is possible, the homogeneity means that the raid is going to be missing a lot of useful (even some critical) buffs that are only provided by other classes. So you can run a WoW raid with all druids, but you'll have an easier time if you mix up the class population a bit. With D&D, there is no downside to having all-cleric or all-druid parties, to the point where having all clerics and druids can be advantageous.

I've talked about how base D&D (without ECLs and DRs and all that crap) is useful for teaching new players the ins and outs of RPGs, but it is a bloated and unbalanced system. It's true that a good DM will compensate for the weaknesses of a system (having encounters that accentuate the skills of the characters, reward creative solutions, etc), but the fact that the DM must be able to compensate to keep certain class choices from being superfluous or, even worse, a liability, does not speak well for the balance of the system.

[Utsanomiko]

Wiping the slate clean is a tactic that works if you are willing to replace the things you took out. Otherwise you are left with an incomplete game. Going back to basics assumes you want to go back to playing a basic game. I don't.

Lots of people who are now getting into D&D do. I don't have any problems exploring a character or making choices without the bloat. I still haven't heard a rule subset mentioned that I'd feel I'm missing, unless it was just some personal quirky favorite (weapon speeds always sounded nice to me).

*Yawn* Come back when you have a complaint that actually applies to anyone here. Otherwise, see Kuja's post. That was pretty much my reaction as well, especially as pertains the way the classes are set up.

Kuja hasn't even posted in this thread, you were responding to the responses I made to Satori. If there's some specific detail or rules component from 3rd that could have been valuable in 4th, you haven't made it clear in your point-by-point against me.

I never liked the way classes tend to define a character. In this edition its more true than ever-- and its a stated design goal! Just considering combat for a moment, it used to be that a wizard could choose to focus on nuking the field (playing the "controller"), save or die spells (playing the "striker"), buffing (the supporting leader-ish role), or subterfuge (for avoiding combat entirely) depending on what spells you chose. That's almost all of the current "roles" right there. That gave you the freedom to chose what made sense for your character, both in the way you wanted to fight and in the way you wanted to roleplay. No such luck with $ed; a wizard is a controller, and your imagination does not figure into it.

This is only a problem if you're developing a character and you start with his class. If I say "I want to be a halfling that's a traveling priest or a holy man", that would at least pick his power source; Divine. If I wanted to be a healer and directly assist and boost my allies, that's describing a leader; Clerics are a Divine leader class. I could focus entirely on ranged prayers or I could pick melee powers and pick appropriate weaponry (hide armor or chainmail; both are equally defensive with the right abilities, especially a Halfling in light armor). If I wanted to be better armed and armored than that, there's the Paladin. No armor and more zealous than protective? Avenger. Just want to use summons and prayers? Invoker. And that's without a Divine Power book to double the class feature options yet. The variety is there, people just expect them to be in the same form. Why would I start with a class and then figure out what he does?

Never mind a Wizard was never that good at that many roles, especially not early on. Meanwhile a 4e Wizard does not have a problem emphasizing striking depending on his choice of spells and class features. But the bottom line it's up to the player to define his character beyond his class.

You guys have become so ingrained in using classes, even when you denounce their rigidity and fight tooth and nail to break down their defining lines, you're still relying on the mechanics of 'Wizard' to define a wizard. They're combat classes, they represent how you perform in combat as a member of a party. That's why there's no Noble or Rat-catcher classes (in Warhammer RP, they're professions).

Now, tell me why making D20 more universal is a bad thing? Just because 3ed did a poor job of it doesn't mean that they were wrong to try.

That's exactly why it was the wrong thing to do. Because it was terrible at it. Why even bother using the system for a different style of game if it wasn't good at it? They did it for the money, it encouraged publishers to make compatible material for their products and strengthen its markethold. Same reason they made third edition, replaced all of it three years later with a glorified published errata, then went to work on developing 4th the following year. You're acting like it's such a wonderful addition to the library of roleplaying games it was a noble endeavor to encourage a whole decade of players to think every RPG needs combat classes and a level progression.

What is enjoyable to you is not what is enjoyable to me.

You've also been calling 4e a horrible, unplayable, money-grubbing plot just because you don't like it. '$e'? You really think that's impressing anybody?

You don't like 3ed. We get it already. No one said it was the pinnacle of perfection for roleplaying games, only that it was better than $ed. Any one of those things you mentioned could have simply been fixed rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What's your point?

That you're so apologetic of 3rd you'll think of its bathwater as your baby. Eight years ago this would have been about THAC0; now it's multiclassing and At-will powers.

Did it ever occur to you that not everyone necessarily plays the same way you seem to think the game should be played? For example, my friends and I often play games where we have a less than ideal team structure, because it is often more fun roleplay wise. No cleric? That's fine! Makes injuries more dramatic! No fighter? Better use our wits rather than rush into fights! That kind of stuff. And that's not mentioning horror games: fair fights? No such thing!

And I have found 4th Edition facilitates those kinds of styles even better. It is more flexible without all that weight. I've designed challenging combat for one fighter and a wizard just as easily as large fights for 5 players. I could build an encounter for 5 wizards if I wanted to. Being 'less than ideal' doesn't even come up as a problem because the system's stable enough to handle keeping them fighting at the skin of their teeth.

No, but playing as if the game is just a vehicle for getting you from fight A to fight B isn't a far cry from one either. To me, combat is fun, but its a means to an end not the end unto itself. The end of course is fun, but if combat is the only fun thing in a game I might as well use my money on video games rather than dicking around with dice.

If that's how you're playing D&D, that's your problem. I didn't get the impression from the DMG I should be glossing over every other kind of situation, but some DMs are lazy. The Dungeon Delve adventures are mostly just combat, for sure, but they're written so you have a framework to make a full adventure on short notice, and are supposed to fill out with additional fluff tailored to fit in your campaign.

To me, role is something I define according to the story at hand, not something you can spoonfeed as part of the system. This is exactly the attitude I was talking about that I don't want to see instilled in new players, because it tends to turn them into insufferable powergamers. Which is exactly what you say you don't like about 3ed.

I didn't say I disliked powergamers (they're valid players, they just need direction and a bit of a leash), only that it facilitated them. My beef is people who still think an ill-defined gamist/simulationist class system and an untidy, convoluted skill system is some kind of essential tool to developing varied adventurer backgrounds, and should be preserved atop a pedestal alongside a whole mess of inconsequential combat crunch and status modifiers in order to preserve character motivation. That how you and your allies' attacks and defenses work in the big picture is some kind of inscrutable puzzle or abstract art that can be mixed and matched for equal results, and how dare the designers label and analyze its inner workings for the sake of building encounters, pulling the immersion curtain down for the DM!

If the glove fits... you should listen to yourself sometime. All you keep talking about is the marvelous streamlined combat options the characters have, and how all the non-combat stuff of the previous editions were bloat and unnecessary to the game.

Actually I said the combat was overbloated; it wasn't easy to predict or read the results of your actions, especially when criticals can totally mess up one side or the other and most 'bosses' can't effectively solo a party without severe lethality. The problem with skills was they were mixed in with combat feats, and individually they weren't very deep or often useful. I still don't see what skills are missing from the pressing matter of negotiations, exploration, and investigations that come up in a fantasy adventure. It's not blacksmithing is it? I do rather enjoy the thought of blacksmithing, I'll admit.

I don't give a fuck about what other games you like are, when it comes to DnD the only thing you seem to care about is how many wonderful combat powers you can get off to. The only reason D20 sucks at things that aren't combat is because the idiots at WotC happen to have a similar attitude to the game as you do. Otherwise, there is no reason $ed couldn't have expanded on what 3ed started with making the game more universal.

I'm expressing my satisfaction that it made combat interesting, and my exasperation that so many here dislike it because it's either 'not 3e' or 'still D&D'. The later reason I do think has merit, though. Fourth still needs some work in the non-combat part; they're tinkering around with skill challenges like the notion of a multiple-roll check is new, but they've got the right idea that skills should regularly assist in any type of conflict and be meaty enough that a full challenge can be built around just searching a city or escaping a sinking ship. Challenges don't need to be as transparent as prescribed, but it's a step up from 'I roll diplomacy' of previous editions. Ability Scores and a few other trappings of older editions could also use trimming, come to think of it.

D20 'sucks so bad at non-combat' because they didn't strip down combat to its essentials to match. You can't have the two halves of roleplay adventures be equal when one is so much more complex and detailed than the other. That's why it's less important to me that my other games don't have equality in combat roles or a yardstick for difficulty ratings; the percentage and dice pool stats allow for much less disparity and more leeway in combat abilities, and their skills systems stand independently strong from combat that PCs can be built around either or both and still have things to do in and out of combat. It's a division of roles that D&D can't afford to replicate as long as it relies on its wargaming origins at all.

Those people happen to be my friends, so fuck you asshole. 3ed DnD happens to be the game they want to play, and they would rather get their monies worth out of it than learn something new. I can try to change their minds, but I can't force them to change games because I want to. Or did you miss the part where roleplaying was a social activity?

My friends are easy-going and willing to try new things. They also don't like things that suck, but that's just a bonus. We play different games for their different strengths and styles. The 3e crowd I've seen around here is obnoxious and anti-social. I wish I could find exceptions to them, but all they see is 3e Revision 2 and loudly bemoan how it fails at that benchmark, and I didn't even like being at the same table as they cheat at rolling or assist in tasks 'in the most difficult way possible'. Fortunately they went elsewhere for gaming. I've got my own complaints about 4th (it's flawed, the awkwardly contemporary artwork is where it really borrows from WarCraft, but the game itself has proven to be a fun step forward and I find it even more impressive than Mutants and Masterminds' efforts), and I listen to what people list as its shortcomings, but really, what was so good about 3rd as a system beyond the nostalgia? I'd rather play any other edition for nostalgia's sake.

Again, the need to houserule something is what makes a game worse, not better. Its more work that I have to do that the designers were too lazy to do themselves.

[/quote]

My whole point is that D&D doesn't need that junk. It doesn't facilitate roleplaying; if anything it's just more numbers for more 'rollplaying'. Third Edition has a boatload of rules and feats that really could stand to be ignored or gutted to get it running smoothly. It doesn't give you a lot of tools to adjust for those changes either. You're not going to throw anything out of whack by handing out a couple extra skills to each player (in fact that's what backgrounds are for), and writing up a ritual for Wish would probably take all of three minutes. Players used to boast about how much they houseruled their games before they had to defend it from the new crowd.

[Stark]

I'm enjoying the quality burn laid out by Uts. I just wish I knew more about post 2e DnD to join in - but the attitudes of conservatism and hypocrisy used to defend 'whatever system I am used to playing' against 'any system I don't know' are very, very close to my experience.

[Stofsk]

I'm enjoying the quality burn laid out by Uts. I just wish I knew more about post 2e DnD to join in - but the attitudes of conservatism and hypocrisy used to defend 'whatever system I am used to playing' against 'any system I don't know' are very, very close to my experience.

Slightly off-topic, but the latest version of Traveller has been getting the CT diehards (of which, I could probably count less than half a dozen) up in arms. These are guys who think there is nothing better than a game that came out over 30 years ago. My experience mirrors yours exactly.

[Formless]

Lots of people who are now getting into D&D do. I don't have any problems exploring a character or making choices without the bloat. I still haven't heard a rule subset mentioned that I'd feel I'm missing, unless it was just some personal quirky favorite (weapon speeds always sounded nice to me).

Perhaps, but the kind of players they seem to be roping in don't sound like my kind of crowd. I know that may seem harsh, but to fall back on that horribly flawed threefold model for a moment, it seems like they are trying to attract a gameist crowd when I'm more simulationist/narrativist. That play style to me feels hollow. Really, that's our impasse in a nutshell.

Kuja hasn't even posted in this thread, you were responding to the responses I made to Satori. If there's some specific detail or rules component from 3rd that could have been valuable in 4th, you haven't made it clear in your point-by-point against me.

Ah damnit, I meant Eleas. Sorry. That's what I get for posting at 3 A.M.

This is only a problem if you're developing a character and you start with his class. If I say "I want to be a halfling that's a traveling priest or a holy man", that would at least pick his power source; Divine. If I wanted to be a healer and directly assist and boost my allies, that's describing a leader; Clerics are a Divine leader class. I could focus entirely on ranged prayers or I could pick melee powers and pick appropriate weaponry (hide armor or chainmail; both are equally defensive with the right abilities, especially a Halfling in light armor). If I wanted to be better armed and armored than that, there's the Paladin. No armor and more zealous than protective? Avenger. Just want to use summons and prayers? Invoker. And that's without a Divine Power book to double the class feature options yet. The variety is there, people just expect them to be in the same form. Why would I start with a class and then figure out what he does?

Right, but you are still limited to the classes available to you. Many characters just don't fit the classes in any satisfying way. Multiclassing can mitigate it somewhat, but multiclassing has drawbacks that make it hard to play such characters.

Never mind a Wizard was never that good at that many roles, especially not early on. Meanwhile a 4e Wizard does not have a problem emphasizing striking depending on his choice of spells and class features. But the bottom line it's up to the player to define his character beyond his class.

He could be if you owned the Spell Compendium. Of course, this is also why our group likes to start at third level or so. First level is just broken.

You guys have become so ingrained in using classes, even when you denounce their rigidity and fight tooth and nail to break down their defining lines, you're still relying on the mechanics of 'Wizard' to define a wizard. They're combat classes, they represent how you perform in combat as a member of a party. That's why there's no Noble or Rat-catcher classes (in Warhammer RP, they're professions).

I never said I defended classes. But I would contend that the classes in 3ed are more flexible in doing what I need them to do.

That's exactly why it was the wrong thing to do. Because it was terrible at it. Why even bother using the system for a different style of game if it wasn't good at it? They did it for the money, it encouraged publishers to make compatible material for their products and strengthen its markethold. Same reason they made third edition, replaced all of it three years later with a glorified published errata, then went to work on developing 4th the following year. You're acting like it's such a wonderful addition to the library of roleplaying games it was a noble endeavor to encourage a whole decade of players to think every RPG needs combat classes and a level progression.

On the other hand, it made the game more accessible and meant that there are more players familiar with the game, and RPGing in general. It meant that you didn't have to learn half a dozen rulesets for every playstyle or setting you wanted to try out.

"It sucked therefor it was hopeless" is a self fulfilling prophecy, and doesn't address the point that they could have fixed the game rather than rebooting it as I have been saying this whole time.

You've also been calling 4e a horrible, unplayable, money-grubbing plot just because you don't like it. '$e'? You really think that's impressing anybody?

You ought to look at the terms of the Gaming System License sometime. It just screams "monopolistic business practices" if you're a third party publisher (which I'm not, but as a customer I enjoy their products). Of course, I suppose after all the whining you have done about "bloat" you probably don't really care about third party material, so why I should justify this with a response is beyond me.

That you're so apologetic of 3rd you'll think of its bathwater as your baby. Eight years ago this would have been about THAC0; now it's multiclassing and At-will powers.

Uh, no, its about making an already piginholing system worse. I already said I wasn't satisfied with 3ed, but very few of the things I didn't like were actually addressed by the game. I mean, they gave us a better warlock, but its little consolation.

And I have found 4th Edition facilitates those kinds of styles even better. It is more flexible without all that weight. I've designed challenging combat for one fighter and a wizard just as easily as large fights for 5 players. I could build an encounter for 5 wizards if I wanted to. Being 'less than ideal' doesn't even come up as a problem because the system's stable enough to handle keeping them fighting at the skin of their teeth.

Perhaps, but it seems like most people just want your stereotypical "fighter, wizard, cleric, rouge" setup. I guess you aren't one of those people after all.

If that's how you're playing D&D, that's your problem. I didn't get the impression from the DMG I should be glossing over every other kind of situation, but some DMs are lazy. The Dungeon Delve adventures are mostly just combat, for sure, but they're written so you have a framework to make a full adventure on short notice, and are supposed to fill out with additional fluff tailored to fit in your campaign.

Its implicit in the design that hack and slash level grinding is what they want to encourage. Again, I find that play style hollow. Fun maybe once in a great while, but still hollow.

I didn't say I disliked powergamers (they're valid players, they just need direction and a bit of a leash), only that it facilitated them. My beef is people who still think an ill-defined gamist/simulationist class system and an untidy, convoluted skill system is some kind of essential tool to developing varied adventurer backgrounds, and should be preserved atop a pedestal alongside a whole mess of inconsequential combat crunch and status modifiers in order to preserve character motivation. That how you and your allies' attacks and defenses work in the big picture is some kind of inscrutable puzzle or abstract art that can be mixed and matched for equal results, and how dare the designers label and analyze its inner workings for the sake of building encounters, pulling the immersion curtain down for the DM!

Well, I do. After you play with a couple for any serious amount of time, it gets grating on the nerves. Part of this is actually because they need their hands held; when I mentioned how I once ended up in a game where one player leveled faster than the rest of us, part of the reason he got all that attention was because the DM felt he needed to baby him to curb his munchkinitis. THAT worked well.

And BTW, nobody here has been putting 3ed on a pedestal. The only person who seems to think we are is you. You, who can't seem to comprehend that yes, it is possible to fix 3ed problems without wiping the slate clean. You, who kept complaining about players who make optimized builds and overly familiarize themselves with the game/rules (i.e. powergamers) but now are insisting that you don't mind powergamers. You, who honestly can't see how a game focused on combat and grinding will lead to more powergaming. You, who seem incapable of handling the fact that your precious $ed isn't liked by every loser on the 'net, and DAMN US FOR HAVING AN OPINION!1!!1

You don't have to like the playstyle of 3ed, but that doesn't make our complaints invalid.

Actually I said the combat was overbloated; it wasn't easy to predict or read the results of your actions, especially when criticals can totally mess up one side or the other and most 'bosses' can't effectively solo a party without severe lethality.

I would argue that to a certain degree that uncertainty was a bonus. There is something satisfying about getting a well timed critical with a x4 weapon on the boss that has been otherwise beating the shit out of you and your party... Of course, removing it does add a more gritty feel to the game. If that's what you like, I guess.

The problem with skills was they were mixed in with combat feats, and individually they weren't very deep or often useful. I still don't see what skills are missing from the pressing matter of negotiations, exploration, and investigations that come up in a fantasy adventure. It's not blacksmithing is it? I do rather enjoy the thought of blacksmithing, I'll admit.

Eh, I'd say the problem with skills was simply that they were uninteresting to use, and led to lazy 'roll this, hit this target number, rinse lather repeat' gameplay. It really didn't help that the target number often peaked long before the characters bonus did.

I'm expressing my satisfaction that it made combat interesting, and my exasperation that so many here dislike it because it's either 'not 3e' or 'still D&D'. The later reason I do think has merit, though. Fourth still needs some work in the non-combat part; they're tinkering around with skill challenges like the notion of a multiple-roll check is new, but they've got the right idea that skills should regularly assist in any type of conflict and be meaty enough that a full challenge can be built around just searching a city or escaping a sinking ship. Challenges don't need to be as transparent as prescribed, but it's a step up from 'I roll diplomacy' of previous editions. Ability Scores and a few other trappings of older editions could also use trimming, come to think of it.

I have been trying to tell you that no one here has complained that its "not 3ed", but I'll accept the concession for what it is. Its not only "still DnD" but it seems as if it went backward on what little progress it was making in that regard. Even if the simulationism of 3ed was just a pretense, it was a pretense that I liked and wanted to see more of.

Oh BTW, the multi-roll skill check thing isn't as new as you think. IIRC there is a variant in Unearthed Arcana (a compendium of official 3ed rules variants FYI) that sounds a lot like that. I don't know how well it works, though, I never tried it. It looked too... clunky, at least for my games.

D20 'sucks so bad at non-combat' because they didn't strip down combat to its essentials to match. You can't have the two halves of roleplay adventures be equal when one is so much more complex and detailed than the other. That's why it's less important to me that my other games don't have equality in combat roles or a yardstick for difficulty ratings; the percentage and dice pool stats allow for much less disparity and more leeway in combat abilities, and their skills systems stand independently strong from combat that PCs can be built around either or both and still have things to do in and out of combat. It's a division of roles that D&D can't afford to replicate as long as it relies on its wargaming origins at all.

Which system are you talking about? Storyteller?

My friends are easy-going and willing to try new things. They also don't like things that suck, but that's just a bonus. We play different games for their different strengths and styles.

Keep in mind that my group doesn't have the ability to get together every week. Our games tend to drag out over fairly long periods of time, making it harder to justify buying new games.

The 3e crowd I've seen around here is obnoxious and anti-social. I wish I could find exceptions to them, but all they see is 3e Revision 2 and loudly bemoan how it fails at that benchmark, and I didn't even like being at the same table as they cheat at rolling or assist in tasks 'in the most difficult way possible'. [...]

So... you've been projecting over what a few munchkin assholes were like in your area? I mean, that's the kind of person I visualize when I think of a powergamer, but not all 3ed fans are powergamers. I don't know how I can convince you of that, other than point out how small your sample size is.

[...] Fortunately they went elsewhere for gaming. I've got my own complaints about 4th (it's flawed, the awkwardly contemporary artwork is where it really borrows from WarCraft, but the game itself has proven to be a fun step forward and I find it even more impressive than Mutants and Masterminds' efforts), and I listen to what people list as its shortcomings, but really, what was so good about 3rd as a system beyond the nostalgia? I'd rather play any other edition for nostalgia's sake.

I like the character system. Yeah, the power of the classes is uneven, classes by nature lead to narrower options... but they have their charms. The sheer selection of spells and feats (especially with the supplementary material) made it so that you never had to play the same character twice, mechanically speaking. And, speaking of supplementary/third party material, there is some seriously good stuff in there. Heroes of Horror, the Dragonlance: War of the Lance campaign setting, and Unearthed Arcana alone are worth it even if just for the reading, ideas, and general advice on roleplaying.

My whole point is that D&D doesn't need that junk. It doesn't facilitate roleplaying; if anything it's just more numbers for more 'rollplaying'. Third Edition has a boatload of rules and feats that really could stand to be ignored or gutted to get it running smoothly. It doesn't give you a lot of tools to adjust for those changes either. You're not going to throw anything out of whack by handing out a couple extra skills to each player (in fact that's what backgrounds are for), and writing up a ritual for Wish would probably take all of three minutes.

And I see no reason to think it needed a total nuke from orbit treatment to accomplish what amounted to spring cleaning in my book. Seriously, as much as the game needed fixing, very little of what they did actually appreciably dealt with the issues I wanted to see fixed, while many of the things I liked got flushed.

Players used to boast about how much they houseruled their games before they had to defend it from the new crowd.

Mostly because it was a way to show off their creativity, not because they were trying to apologize for the games failings. There is a difference.

[Shadowtraveler]

Speaking as someone who's played a bit of 4e, I like what little I've managed to play of it. To be fair, I used to play a Fighter in 3.5, so I'm a bit biased because of how nifty the 4e one is.

[Satori]

Shadow has a point. People who played fighters in 3.5 like 4e fighter, because they now work more like the 3.5 e warblade, which was a vastly more competent class.

People who play wizards in 3.5 are annoyed, because you can't play a wizard in 4e. The 4e wizard is pretty much a 3.5 Warlock, and a relatively weak one at that.

I think 4e is a great system. It was named something other than D&D 4e and maybe flavored differently, I wouldn't have complaints about it. But they intend it to replace 3.5e, and while 4e has its good points, it is FAR too inadequate in scope and flexibility to replace 3.5e. 3.5e just let you do much more than 4e's more limited system does.

It's like replacing a Carrier Task Force with a single advanced stealth destroyer. There are advantages to using the destroyer, but you just won't have the same range of options or capabilities.

I've no reason to bash 4e. I can see why some people might like/prefer it. But I think the people who insist that it is automatically better than 3.5e need their heads checked. 4e is only half of the game 3.5e is in terms of scope. It may be a better half (i don't think so, but YMMV), but it's still only half. There so much you can run using the 3.5 system that you either can't run with 4th, or may as well be running free form.

[Shadowtraveler]

Out of curiosity, what is the half you think they got rid of?

[Utsanomiko]

Out of curiosity, what is the half you think they got rid of?

This I would find very interesting to hear, for the sake of constructive criticism; specific examples of 3e lacking 4e counterparts.

[Satori]

There's no longer even any pretense of out of combat skill use, as far as I can tell. Which is lame. Gather Information was my best buddy in 3.5.

Same goes for most of the Divination spells, which never made the transition. No more spying on enemies or whatnot. No more spy-vs-psy-vs-ninja games of lies and counter espionage. Sure, I understand that scry-and-die was a problem, but not one a competent DM can't fix. I fixed it with just one damn spell: hallucinatory terrain.

The roles in 4e aren't as open. In 4e everyone deals damage. Leaders have to hit enemies to help their allies, which means you can't play some character concepts. No more "pacifist" builds that are competent in combat without actually hurting things. My "cross between Mother Teresa and Quasimodo" character can't be made in 4e. For that matter, people in 3.5 sometimes deliberately sacked their own stats for RP value. No can do in 4th - If you don't have at least a 16 in your "can hit things stat" you can't function in combat because doing anything requires scoring hits. In 4e, buffing your party no longer seems to be viable or even possible - what little you can do barely seems to qualify as buffing. In 4e, you have to mehanicistically "shift" people around, in the controller function. You can no longer cover your party's retreat with a single cleverly though out illusion. No more actual, lasting environmental effects which pose a continuing hazard to both sides rather than locking down a single target. No more building mazes of spell effects. In 4e tanking means "marking" foes and trying to get them to hit you. Which is actually kinda nice, and an improvement over *core* 3.5 (as a note, I HATE people who think core-only 3.5 games starting from ECL 1 are a good idea) but I do miss being able to countercharge enemies, or trade AoO's for mobility so I can get out of the way of a charge or intercept an enemy trying to get past me to the squishy wizard.

4e no longer even has rules for property damage. All powers have "target: 1 creature" tags, so you can't even circumvent obstacles by clerverly applying divination spells and hacking through a few walls. One 4e game I saw a DM try to have Goblins swim over and put a hole in the boat the PC's were on, to force them to head for shore. They ended up "killing" the boat in 1 round, when the DM adhoc'd it by letting them attack the boat as if it were a creature.

PvP in 4e isn't even potentially functional. Shifting works on moster,s but against other PCs? In 3.5, I saw PvP games where terrain (real or illusionary) was manipulated to win battles. There's no mechanic for doing anything like it in 4e. I saw an attempt to PvP in 4e. The rogue on team 1 and the cleric on team 2 met in a corridor while seperated from their respective parties. Aftter a few rounds of ineffectually beating on each other, they sad down and did math. The rogue concluded "Unless i get a bunch of natural 20's in a row, I can't win this." The cleric announced "Unless i get a bunch of natural 20's in a row, i will win this.... sometime tommorrow." The rogue' player then announced "I run away"... a beat, and then, "nevermind, I walk away slowly." Now this isn't a failing of 4e. It wasn't meant for PvP. But it is something you can do, and have fun with in 3.5 and earlier editions (Remember the head of vecna, anyone?), that you can't in 4th.

[Alan Bolte]

Recently my DM presented us with a puzzle. I'm curious how this puzzle compares to others' experiences.

Background:
While chasing a MacGuffin we found ourselves in a demiplane where the walls are made of ivory laced with platinum. Upon entry we were confronted with a pair of brutish constructs and a dozen of what I can only think to describe as the 'options' from Gradius: floating incorporeal balls of light that cast magic missile at anything the brutes hit, but are otherwise harmless. After a fight which went surprisingly well, we walked through the doors into an empty room which connected three identical hallways. We randomly chose the left hallway.

The puzzle:
The hallway was three squares wide and had no floor; looking down we could see distant storm clouds. I'm not sure about a ceiling. The walls proved to be electrified. if any of us stood adjacent to a square of the hallway, that square was filled by a tile which flew quickly out of the clouds below. If no one stood adjacent to a tile, it would disappear. Tests with sling stones suggested that there really was no floor. It would be simple enough to simply walk down the hallway, with tiles appearing in front of us and disappearing behind us, but as you might expect some of the tiles were trapped.

The traps:
Wall of flame: Attack vs reflex. If you dodge the attack, you must choose another square to move to, forward or back. The wall covers all three squares in a row, blocking the passage of anyone behind you who doesn't like taking fire damage. The wall persists as long as the tiles below it are present, so if you keep moving forward, the wall of flame will disappear with the tiles below it.
Spinning tile: Attack vs will. You don't take damage, but you are dazed and confused. Save ends.
Blood trap door: Attack vs fortitude. The tile below you and one in front, behind, and to each side ( a cross) each turn into a pit of blood. If the attack misses, you can choose to move to a different tile. If the attack hits, you take no damage, but find yourself at the beginning of the hallway. A bit creepy. I guess he got it from a bad horror movie.
"Doom" trap: None of us tripped this one, but he mentioned it later when explaining the puzzle. Petrification, save ends. I think there might have been more to it, I can't remember.

The solution:
As you might expect, there is a pattern to the traps which would allow you to walk through the hallway unharmed. Every fifth tile which appears is a trap. So if you walk down the middle, the first row of three is not trapped, but the middle tile of the second row is a trap, and so on. If you walk down the side, the first two rows of two are safe, but one of the next two tiles is a trap, you just have to watch which tile appears first. It gets more complicated when you have four people walking down the hallway and occasionally falling through blood trap doors, or backtracking to let a wall of flame disappear. There is also a pattern to which trap appears, but I don't remember, and it doesn't seem important.

[Utsanomiko]

There's no longer even any pretense of out of combat skill use, as far as I can tell. Which is lame. Gather Information was my best buddy in 3.5.

That would fall under Streetwise now, with various knowledge skills potentially aiding via relevant information. Like I said about skill challenges, despite their clunkiness as-written in the DMG, the intent is that PCs should be able to check their choice of skills regularly in various situations, especially non-combat situations that have visible challenge and complexity.

A good example of a skill challenge I've seen is the party conducting investigations and actions in a 'dangerous' city run by evil wizards and patrolled by hobgoblin mercenaries. Basically it was written as a list of skills associated with possible methods of moving through the city in between the major encounters with (dealing with contacts, fighting/disabling guards to get into a particular building, etc). It covered sneaking, moving over rooftops, bribing guards, studying patrols, spotting good hiding places, garnering useful gossip about the district, and so on. DCs varied depending on district and time of day, with consequences of failure noted (authorities alerted, increased patrols, districts locked down, more suspicious locals). Thus every time the players need to traverse the city they are faced with a range of challenges that require everybody's skills. It is easy to run in a very fluid manner, *especially* without a lot of preparation and guesswork.

By merging a lot of the skills together, it makes it easier (on both players and DMs) to devise relevant skills for a situation, expect at least somebody to have one of them, and focus on roleplaying their actions rather than picking the right ones on the master list.

Is it really harder to roleplay a distinct character without both Balance and Tumble? Spot, Listen, and Search? Climb and Use Rope? Knowledge (nature) and Wilderness Lore? Is there even much visible difference in some of those beyond the mechanical level? Fifty some skills of this nature might work fine if they defined the majority of your character in lieu of class features and feats, you had a lot more points to work with and broaden out, and could level them up at more than 19 junctures.

On the other hand, the greater range of social interaction skills are still covered by Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate. I always thought this was rather narrow, but it's nice to see the 'roleplaying' still has 3e's impression of depth.

Really, the only substantial 3e skills that aren't covered in trainable 4e skills fall under Craft, Perform, and Profession. The most complicated ones could either be covered in an utterly simple to write as feats (Blacksmithing could be done as one. Alchemy does this, for a current example. Ritual Casting covers tons of non-combat spells that Powers don't.), and the simple ones could be conveyed by, you know, putting down the damn modifiers and ROLEplaying your character. You don't need dice and a chunk of the points you use for everything to say you can juggle or bake pies.

Same goes for most of the Divination spells, which never made the transition. No more spying on enemies or whatnot. No more spy-vs-psy-vs-ninja games of lies and counter espionage. Sure, I understand that scry-and-die was a problem, but not one a competent DM can't fix. I fixed it with just one damn spell: hallucinatory terrain.

There's plenty of divination spells (and more get added with additional books and articles), they're just not as low-level or 'instant win'. They shouldn't include spells that forces every DM to remove or fix himself to maintain stability. It's not just bad design, it's bad Zen; I mean, if a book includes a spell, and nobody uses it, is it even there?

The roles in 4e aren't as open. In 4e everyone deals damage. Leaders have to hit enemies to help their allies, which means you can't play some character concepts. No more "pacifist" builds that are competent in combat without actually hurting things. My "cross between Mother Teresa and Quasimodo" character can't be made in 4e. For that matter, people in 3.5 sometimes deliberately sacked their own stats for RP value. No can do in 4th - If you don't have at least a 16 in your "can hit things stat" you can't function in combat because doing anything requires scoring hits. In 4e, buffing your party no longer seems to be viable or even possible - what little you can do barely seems to qualify as buffing. In 4e, you have to mehanicistically "shift" people around, in the controller function.

A substantial amount of powers have Effects, which succeed even if the attack part misses. It's also not uncommon for Leader and Controller's powers to give temporary boosts to attack rolls, damage, AC, defenses, initiative, saving throws, and temporary HP in the +4-5 range, at level 1. Daze, Blind, Prone, Slow, Weaken, Immobilized, these are all common effects characters can impose.

I've never been impressed by non-combat builds in 3rd Edition. The skill system is just to ancillary and thinly-spread to make up a substantial part of the character beyond what is gained each level for being a martial warrior or living arcane artillery in the end. Too much cost for little gain, as the core of the system will always be combat without gutting its old-school implementations of class and level. People are probably used to non-Clerics/Wizards/Druids being one trick ponies in the first place, and not missing out on much if they dump all ranks into knowledge over the occasional power attack.

(as a note, I HATE people who think core-only 3.5 games starting from ECL 1 are a good idea)

Why shouldn't a core game at level 1 be a good idea? Why is it even there if that's the case?

but I do miss being able to countercharge enemies, or trade AoO's for mobility so I can get out of the way of a charge or intercept an enemy trying to get past me to the squishy wizard.

I see characters charge and make full moves to get closer to specific allies or enemies, even with consequences of marks and AoOs, all the time. I saw both occur in just the last 2-player game I ran. Hell, I would have thought the specific details and complications of maneuvering in battle would be happening more often in 4th, especially since it sounds like nobody ever used a grid to keep track until this fiendish edition forced them to. What's stopping your players from doing it?

4e no longer even has rules for property damage. All powers have "target: 1 creature" tags, so you can't even circumvent obstacles by clerverly applying divination spells and hacking through a few walls. One 4e game I saw a DM try to have Goblins swim over and put a hole in the boat the PC's were on, to force them to head for shore. They ended up "killing" the boat in 1 round, when the DM adhoc'd it by letting them attack the boat as if it were a creature.

The Creature/Enemy tags are chiefly there to differentiate between attacks that effect everything or are 'smart' enough to just impede those against you. There's way more things that sound sloppy about that DM than a lenient use of targeting spells (a boat is a 200-400hp object for one thing, and it's his judgment call on how quickly it sinks).

Too many complaints I hear about 4e depend upon the DM being so insipidly obstinate and unable to resolve any action without multi-paragraph rules on how to grab somebody or how a goddamn door hinge works. And yet so much praise of 3rd depict great narrative DMs who layer mysteries and court intrigue by creating his own DCs on the fly, revamping the XP and treasure allotments, and writing out dozens of options that nobody smart would have taken anyway.

[Anguirus]

There's no longer even any pretense of out of combat skill use, as far as I can tell. Which is lame.

This is simply nonsense.

In my personal experience (take that for what its worth) my 4E games have used skills much more often and much more creatively. The 3E system was a little too simulationist IMO...it wound up punishing players for unusual skill choices. You had to invest in three different skills to be good at finding things, and two different skills to be good at sneaking around.

Not to say that we didn't have some great skill-based encounters in 3E, but a lot of players (including me sometimes) would get sick and tired of assigning every last skill point. It was also tiresome how some classes had uselessly small numbers of skill points or class skills.

I also like that one can now be good in any skill by taking one feat. It was completely impossible to be a fighter who just happened to be an expert lockpick in 3E. You had to either suck at lockpicking or take a level of rogue, which made you a worse fighter.

[Formless]

Jeebus, are we still talking about this? Utsanomiko, you are one pretentious fanboy twat. "I can't keep track of all these skills! So lets combine them because obviously spot and listen are the same skill, and anyone who can tie a knot can obviously climb terrain! After all, all parties must be able to pull out any skill for every situation, just so they never have to face the reality that they might not be able to do something [even though this is highly convenient for roleplaying purposes]. And never mind Craft, Profession, and Perform; if you want them, you can always just do what the game designers should have done and homebrew your own rules for them!" * "No one uses [nor should have the ability to use] low level scrying spells BECAUSE I SAY SO!" "Non-combat builds suck, and always will BECAUSE I SAY SO!! [BTW, I have apparently never heard of the rouge class because I seem to think that all non-spellcasters were one trick ponies]" "Ohs noes, 3ed is complicated and has rules for EVERYTHING! " "Whine, whine, whine, whine, WHIIIINNNE!!!"

Grow up. Not everyone plays the game with the same expectations as you do, and your attempts throughout this thread to hide the fact that this is your assumption are starting to look pathetic.

* I will concede that Knowledge: Nature and Wilderness Lore were never distinct enough to warrant being separate skills, though. That was a pretty bad bit of redundancy. But still, of all the things that needed fixing about the skill system, you want to complain about the variety of skills present? How... stupid.

[Utsanomiko]

Jeebus, are we still talking about this? Utsanomiko, you are one pretentious fanboy twat.

I'm sorry, I was responding to Satori, having posted again since the last time I was here, who has taken this notably less personal and bitchy. Which begs the question why you keep sniping at me specifically about it. Evidently I am ruining somebody's shit through my criticism of a game's supposed strengths or design focus.

* I will concede that Knowledge: Nature and Wilderness Lore were never distinct enough to warrant being separate skills, though. That was a pretty bad bit of redundancy. But still, of all the things that needed fixing about the skill system, you want to complain about the variety of skills present? How... stupid.

Except that there wasn't a wider variety of skills covered by 3rd's list, it was just spread thinner through superficial distinction. Again, the options are there, you're just used to being told them in obtuse terms.

The attitude cultivated by that edition was this kind of discordant functionality was 'realism', and valuable in of itself. That characters required minute mechanical differences in order to roleplay them differently, and there didn't need to be focused direction or a solid, flexible challenge/resolution system when there was a specific rule for 'everything' (that they wanted you to think about), with a DC plucked out of thin air. The problem with all this has been that d20 at its core is a very simple, unrealistic, and ultimately gamist system, and piling on clunky simulationism to cover little superficial distinctions (that the DM and players should be handling through narration) doesn't address the underlying issue, whether it's through 3.5 or 3.75. Mutants & Masterminds stepped away from the restrictions by gutting the classical D&D tropes and compartmentalized powers and abilities into a manageable form (thus resembling an entirely different sort of game), while D&D 4th streamlined the mechanics in the assumption that most people could elaborate how they wanted to use their arcane knowledge or athletic prowess contextually or can devise a background that defines a PC more broadly than their class without tacking on chunks of other classes *during* play.

Maybe this would be going in less circles if you actually elaborated what specifically is your group's particular format of fantasy adventuring, and what's missing from 4th that fails to provide a proper roleplaying foundation (or why a system actually designed for 'everything' or competent at simulation wouldn't be better).

[The Yosemite Bear]

I want to play a swashbuckling swordsman (Pirate), whose trying to find a "cure" for the family "Disease/curse"*. No I don't want to go crazy and just swim out into the sea like my father did, and his father before him. So with that in mind what kits should I use?

*fans of HPL should know what he's got, why he can't find a cure, those who don't know, the people of his small Piratical island, which is very inbred, have made a deal with something best left unmentioned, as middle age approches knowledge and the gaes of the dark pact begins to effect the person, eventually they will head out to the sea, and cast off the last vestiges of their humanity. Yes the children are made to take part in the rituals that re-affirm the pact with every generation.

[Formless]

I'm sorry, I was responding to Satori, having posted again since the last time I was here, who has taken this notably less personal and bitchy. Which begs the question why you keep sniping at me specifically about it. Evidently I am ruining somebody's shit through my criticism of a game's supposed strengths or design focus.

Personal? No, you just irritate me more and more with every post. Its your attitude of putting this new edition on some kind of fucking pedestal, whining about things that yes, some of us do in fact like (why you find this so hard to believe is beyond me). But then, all 3ed fans in your mind seem to qualify as "Boorish, inflexible, unpleasant grognards who only know how to play a character by slavishly following outlined rules, want each class to have 10 different build options even if 6 are useless and 1 is visibly better than the rest (and they'll yell at anyone taking the former and boast when theirs is the later), and think 4th should have been another rules revision to a game that's barely budged since 1979." And those are your own words, from your first fucking post. Go ahead and look. Hell, the paragraph right after that has you accusing the internet of poisoning the well against the new game without so much as considering why those complaints have been lodged in the first place; your bias was clear from right off the bat.

Feel singled out? Well, no one else here is acting like a fanboy douche, so that kinda narrows the range of targets. So no, I'm not here to snipe. I'm here to mock you, asshat. Deal with it.

Except that there wasn't a wider variety of skills covered by 3rd's list, it was just spread thinner through superficial distinction. Again, the options are there, you're just used to being told them in obtuse terms.

Gee, I wonder who here has been really down on obtuseness in an RPG?

[...] Third Edition was only fun for the people who really scrutinized the system and pulled the best options out of the depths; everyone else struggled and got frustrated by its obtuseness.

Hypocrite.

The attitude cultivated by that edition was this kind of discordant functionality was 'realism', and valuable in of itself. That characters required minute mechanical differences in order to roleplay them differently, and there didn't need to be focused direction or a solid, flexible challenge/resolution system when there was a specific rule for 'everything' (that they wanted you to think about), with a DC plucked out of thin air.

Anti-simulationist much? Look, realism isn't that damn hard, but the new game doesn't even try. For instance, IO already nailed how the economics system makes amateur mistakes. 3ed may be disjointed in its implementation, but that implementation can be fixed. That was what I had hoped the game would deliver when the new edition came out. Boy was I every barking up the wrong tree.

The problem with all this has been that d20 at its core is a very simple, unrealistic, and ultimately gamist system, and piling on clunky simulationism to cover little superficial distinctions (that the DM and players should be handling through narration) doesn't address the underlying issue, whether it's through 3.5 or 3.75. Mutants & Masterminds stepped away from the restrictions by gutting the classical D&D tropes and compartmentalized powers and abilities into a manageable form (thus resembling an entirely different sort of game), while D&D 4th streamlined the mechanics in the assumption that most people could elaborate how they wanted to use their arcane knowledge or athletic prowess contextually or can devise a background that defines a PC more broadly than their class without tacking on chunks of other classes *during* play.

Do you not see the contradiction of saying that D20 is essentially a gamist system when you also bring up an example of a simulationist D20 game? Its a false dichotomy to say that somehow D&D can't be D&D AND simulationist without jettisoning its essential tropes and qualities. I'm also getting tired of this implied appeal to tradition that you ironically hold so dear ("D&D has always been mostly gamist, and should always remain gamist!").

Maybe this would be going in less circles if you actually elaborated what specifically is your group's particular format of fantasy adventuring, and what's missing from 4th that fails to provide a proper roleplaying foundation (or why a system actually designed for 'everything' or competent at simulation wouldn't be better).

That is actually a bit in the air at the moment. FYI, Agent Sorchus is taking over as DM of our gaming group pretty soon. Our last DM was pretty heavily focused on story driven type stuff, but was rather... heavy handed, shall we say. Not to mention he was the guy facilitating the powergamer in the group without meaning to. We've done short couple-session-or-less stuff with AS before, he likes to really customize the setting to the point where he can improvise whole adventures because he has so many different elements prepared (NPC's, locals, governments, etc.). He's especially good with NPC's, which is part of the reason he brought up class customization earlier in this thread.

[Utsanomiko]

Personal? No, you just irritate me more and more with every post. Its your attitude of putting this new edition on some kind of fucking pedestal, whining about things that yes, some of us do in fact like (why you find this so hard to believe is beyond me). But then, all 3ed fans in your mind seem to qualify as "Boorish, inflexible, unpleasant grognards who only know how to play a character by slavishly following outlined rules, want each class to have 10 different build options even if 6 are useless and 1 is visibly better than the rest (and they'll yell at anyone taking the former and boast when theirs is the later), and think 4th should have been another rules revision to a game that's barely budged since 1979." And those are your own words, from your first fucking post. Go ahead and look. Hell, the paragraph right after that has you accusing the internet of poisoning the well against the new game without so much as considering why those complaints have been lodged in the first place; your bias was clear from right off the bat.

As opposed to your cries of '$e' and calling the whole game a terrible piece of shit for not catering to your adventuring style, whatever exactly that is.

My opinion is based on eight years of the OGL's hackneyed maiden RPG marketed as a universal engine, followed by virtually every 3e proponent refusing to look at a new Edition in different terms with a different vocabulary of rules, as opposed to another decimal-pointed published errata. I'd like it to be demonstrated that there are exceptions and specific complaints, as opposed to just bawling at me with RPGnet/Enworld soundbytes and calling me bitchy.

I'm trying to defend 4th Edition as an enjoyable RPG that's easy to pick up and run with plenty of flexibility and room to roleplay with, outside the rose-tinted view that some further iteration of 3.something would be the zenith of character exploration and realistic choices/limitations. Outside the perspective that every RPG is d20, 3rd Edition is not a very good system. This is common perception regardless of how 4th works. Storyteller, Warhammer RP, Earthdawn, d6, Burning Wheel, these are all games that do the roleplay thing with more substance and believable choice. 3e can be used to a wider range of playstyle, but it is an uphill battle with the very rules in place to provide a pretense of distinctions. TSR/WotC's strategy for the past 10-15 years has been to either pretend it's the only RPG out there or that it can cover every style of roleplaying, and the result is a complacent/apologetic fanbase that won't find another system to do another job.

But apparently I am having wrongbadfun for having non-combat encounters, using investigation, improvised actions, defining my character beyond his class, handing out rewards in a believable manner, and all those other things we know $e is incapable of doing.

Except that there wasn't a wider variety of skills covered by 3rd's list, it was just spread thinner through superficial distinction. Again, the options are there, you're just used to being told them in obtuse terms.

Gee, I wonder who here has been really down on obtuseness in an RPG?

[...] Third Edition was only fun for the people who really scrutinized the system and pulled the best options out of the depths; everyone else struggled and got frustrated by its obtuseness.

Hypocrite.

Yes, I think of third Edition as a very obtuse, opaque system that, without ignoring much of the rules, punished players for not planning ahead ten levels and learning the difference between the apparent usefulness of many feats and skills and their actual effectiveness. This is exactly why some of those 40+ skills are so much broader and more relevant than others; under the surface, skills are of equal cost by unequal value. This is bad game design and counter-productive simulation. Did something get misread between those two posts or do you have some other insinuation?

Anti-simulationist much? Look, realism isn't that damn hard, but the new game doesn't even try. For instance, IO already nailed how the economics system makes amateur mistakes. 3ed may be disjointed in its implementation, but that implementation can be fixed. That was what I had hoped the game would deliver when the new edition came out. Boy was I every barking up the wrong tree.

A functional magic economy simulation is a false dilemma because it assumes magic items and adventurers exist in enough quantity to create functional economy in every setting. By the time a party can accumulate enough treasure in a 3-4 session adventure to buy their own expedition over the ocean, they're not only using magic artifacts so rare and powerful they're worth as much as a three-masted ship, they have access to realms and planes full of people of power and notoriety. I don't think the people of Sigil care much about mounds of silver or mundane swords.

No, what 4th's item price/sale chart and parcel system seems to doing is providing a guideline for measuring value of items, and eliminating gaps where the players have more money than things to spend it on or they can just churn out +1 armor for all the profit they need. It's up to the DM whether his setting then deviates from this foundation by having magic shops in every town to take this stuff of their hands, or if almost nobody can even identify and price a Cloak of Resistance. The rulebook is not a bible.

I like the explorationist aspects of simulation, but hard realism rarely facilitates entertaining adventures. More often it limits entertaining choices because a real economy favors certain conditions and doesn't reflect actual values. A game doesn't have to be realistic to be simulationist; Star Wars d6 was a simulation of fast movie action-adventure, for example. I do enough realistic economic strategy with my banker.

Do you not see the contradiction of saying that D20 is essentially a gamist system when you also bring up an example of a simulationist D20 game?

Yes. D&D is a gamist system, that's why it has combat classes, level progression, hit points, combat xp, and only Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate for social skills. Third just encourages people to think it's simulationist with some tacked-on rules and crunch. To truly 'fix' it, beyond the 3.x mindset, is to either ditch the old restrictions and become a compartmentalized d20+modifier simulation game or return to its gamist roots. For a very long time I felt it needed to do the former, as my view was that skill-based systems were inherently 'better' just for the style of play they facilitated. I am now finding that the later is also fun and gives plenty of room for roleplay.

Maybe this would be going in less circles if you actually elaborated what specifically is your group's particular format of fantasy adventuring, and what's missing from 4th that fails to provide a proper roleplaying foundation (or why a system actually designed for 'everything' or competent at simulation wouldn't be better).

That is actually a bit in the air at the moment. FYI, Agent Sorchus is taking over as DM of our gaming group pretty soon. Our last DM was pretty heavily focused on story driven type stuff, but was rather... heavy handed, shall we say. Not to mention he was the guy facilitating the powergamer in the group without meaning to. We've done short couple-session-or-less stuff with AS before, he likes to really customize the setting to the point where he can improvise whole adventures because he has so many different elements prepared (NPC's, locals, governments, etc.). He's especially good with NPC's, which is part of the reason he brought up class customization earlier in this thread.

I see.