Quote from: Alea Iacta Est on August 20, 2021, 01:05:42 PM
So I have a general idea of how the osr community feels about 5e, which is understandably negative

I don't think you can say anything stronger than "mixed" here - for example, I'm an OSR-leaning DM who started on Holmes right around 1980, and I'm quite happy with 5e. Starting from this sentence is going to colour the responses you get and likely leave you with a similarly unrepresentative view of opinions of 3e; your post would have been stronger without it.

I run a lot of OSR stuff with 5e D&D, works great. Cannot say that about 3e, in either direction. I do run some 3e stuff in 5e (currently running Necromancer's Aberrations from 2003) but it takes much more work. Not nearly as much work as trying to run 3e/PF in the original Klingon, though! I still have nightmares about Queen Ileosa's stat block in my PF Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign.

The beauty of 4e D&D is that it is NOT D&D, it plays nothing like D&D. As long as you treat it as a completely different sort of game, sort of Marvel Superheroes Tactical Fantasy: The RPG, it can be a brilliant play experience. Treating it like it's an edition of D&D is a gateway to a Universe of Pain.

Quote from: Pat on August 20, 2021, 09:15:23 PM
Also, 2nd edition had more settings, and many of the rule weren't intended to work together. How many different castle building systems were there? At least 3? How many times did they try to revise the psionic system?

I'm only aware of the one revision when 2nd edition put out the brown cover Psionics Handbook. Were there others?

Quote from: Shasarak on August 20, 2021, 07:22:42 PM
I was personally played in a high level 3e campaign which got up to level 16.

I didnt notice the system breaking.

I ran 3e to ca 18th level and PF to ca 14th level.

High level 3e, the spellcasters completely dominate. It's D&D Ars Magica, the Fighter PCs were just Grogs to the PC Wizards. I remember at one point ca level 15 all three players at the table had Wizard PCs, they were ambushed by demons. They were going to do the usual thing of teleport away & come back later pre-buffed, but I begged them "Please, just this once, stay and fight - you can beat them, you don't need to buff!". They beat the demons (hezrou & such) easily enough.
Later on, in the final battle of the campaign, I rem a Wizard-18 got off two Horrid Wiltings in the BBEG throne room and had killed off most of the bad guys before the Fighter-18* with the artifact spear & the artifact plate armor (so speed 20') could even get into melee.

*Played by ENW's Tallarn. This was in the good old days, before the Woke Times.

Compared to PF though, 3e was well balanced. The PF Summoner class is the most grotesque abomination I have ever seen in an RPG.

I have played in some amazing 3.0/3.5 games and I am told I ran a pretty decent game. It is not my favorite D&D ever. I much prefer a good retro-clone or an entirely different system to anything post 2e. I am not putting anyone down this is just my preference and opinion. It is worth exactly zero in real money. 5E started out decent I left it when the wokeness appeared again just my preference YMMV.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on August 21, 2021, 06:49:45 AM
I'm only aware of the one revision when 2nd edition put out the brown cover Psionics Handbook. Were there others?

  They put a revised approach into Player's Options: Skills and Powers and the Dark Sun psionics supplement The Will and the Way. Same system in both, so only one revision attempt. But 2E in general catches a lot of flack for not being unified and not teaching people how to play AD&D correctly.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on August 21, 2021, 06:49:45 AM

Quote from: Pat on August 20, 2021, 09:15:23 PM
Also, 2nd edition had more settings, and many of the rule weren't intended to work together. How many different castle building systems were there? At least 3? How many times did they try to revise the psionic system?

I'm only aware of the one revision when 2nd edition put out the brown cover Psionics Handbook. Were there others?

The psionics in The Complete Psionics Handbook, Skills & Powers, and the Illithiad had significant differences.

Hey, what's my opinion on 3.0?
This edition falls into a time in my life when I was between gaming groups. So I didn't get much into 3.0 at  the time it was released.
In hindsight, it's my least favorite edition. Other editions do D&D better, and 4th is more fun in it's own not-quite-D&D-way.
I don't hate it, I have played Pathfinder from time to time, which is often said to be D&D 3.5.
So it's kind of "Meh, I'll play it if people insist, whatever."

Quote from: Shasarak on August 20, 2021, 07:57:38 PM

Quote from: Omega on August 20, 2021, 07:22:57 PM
3e appeals to a certain type of player most. And I have seen alot of overlap between 3e and gurps players. 3e also seemed to cause every char-opper and min/maxer to crawl out from under every rock possible - and then tried to infest 4 and 5e. Hence there is a slight, but deserved, negative aspect to 3e.

Char opping really took off with the Internet.

No one has seriously claimed that it invented min maxing though.  Gary had plenty to say about that in the old ADnD days.

True. But I did not say 3e invented char-opping. Just that it attracts them en-mass. (nor car-shopping either!)

Pretty much every version of D&D has something to recommend it. I'm personally not super interested in getting into newer games with 3E levels of crunch, but I'm familiar enough with 3E that playing it doesn't bother me. Having a GM that's willing to play it more loosely, and personally giving up on some intense char-op that is possible but unnecessary, helps.

Quote from: S'mon on August 21, 2021, 07:01:14 AM

Quote from: Shasarak on August 20, 2021, 07:22:42 PM
I was personally played in a high level 3e campaign which got up to level 16.

I didnt notice the system breaking.

I ran 3e to ca 18th level and PF to ca 14th level.

High level 3e, the spellcasters completely dominate. It's D&D Ars Magica, the Fighter PCs were just Grogs to the PC Wizards. I remember at one point ca level 15 all three players at the table had Wizard PCs, they were ambushed by demons. They were going to do the usual thing of teleport away & come back later pre-buffed, but I begged them "Please, just this once, stay and fight - you can beat them, you don't need to buff!". They beat the demons (hezrou & such) easily enough.
Later on, in the final battle of the campaign, I rem a Wizard-18 got off two Horrid Wiltings in the BBEG throne room and had killed off most of the bad guys before the Fighter-18* with the artifact spear & the artifact plate armor (so speed 20') could even get into melee.

*Played by ENW's Tallarn. This was in the good old days, before the Woke Times.

Compared to PF though, 3e was well balanced. The PF Summoner class is the most grotesque abomination I have ever seen in an RPG.

Yup. During our long-haul PF campaign (Rise of the Runelords) my sorcerer had to bounce back to the Thassilonian library we'd discovered. He was significantly higher level than the first time the party had been there, and thus the frost giants were horribly outmatched.

I got mildly irritated with the GM because after you've turned six or eight frost giants into burning cinders you'd think the rest would opt to either (a) negotiate or (b) run the fuck away.

Instead, it was 'Giant rolls for initiative, loses to me, gets incinerated.' Over and over.

Well, what makes 3.x "better" for some folks makes it "worse" for others.  What I think can be said for 3.x is that it marked a sharp philosophical break with the original ideas of AD&D (and yes, before Shasarak comes in with his fanboying and yells "2e! 2e!", some of the changes did start to creep in during the awful splatbooks for 2e, but 3e codified the change in the base edition). 

The first was related to the concept of the player character.  In AD&D creating a character took about 5 minutes, most of which was spent on buying equipment.  The primary features of the characters (personality, abilities, uniqueness, etc.) were derived from play.  No one I knew developed a 15-page backstory for a character that might not live 10 minutes.  Different characters of the same class were not differentiated mechanically by class feature; the differences were accumulated via adventuring (fighters got magic items, magic users got spells, etc.) and not always pre-planned.  By 3e, characters became pre-planned, with the "build" becoming an important consideration.  The expectation was that PCs were "entitled" to find certain amounts or kinds of magic, and that they would be differentiated by the class features they got from leveling.  This is a big change to the flavor of the game. Some people really like the "game within a game" of character building.  Some hate it.

Secondly, the role of the DM changed.  Where before, if for no reason other than the organizational chaos and occasional incoherence of some of AD&D's rulebooks, the DM often had to make determinations on the fly (hence the "rulings, not rules"), 3e was designed with a much more constrained DM in mind.  The idea that monsters and NPCs should be constructed the same way as PCs not only added a heavy workload to DMs, it also took away some of the flexibility that DMs had to adapt to player "optimizations" (while 3e didn't invent min-maxing, it certainly reduced the DM's ability to adjust to it, when played as written).  The change in DM role also changed the flavor.  DMs who were more freeform tend to dislike 3e, while the highly organized tend to love the certainty it provides.

Thirdly, there was a subtle change in the mechanics of combat.  It was a progressive change across editions, but 3e really was designed around a more rules-heavy, formally tactical combat encounter.  Looking at AD&D, almost all of the "tactics" of combat were either abstracted, or were generalized into "if the DM felt you did something that would qualify for X, you get Y bonus to hit."  Your fighter rolled to hit, then rolled damage.  That was the essence of combat.  Most "tactics" took place outside of the formalized rules (look at backstabbing in AD&D, for example... when can you do it exactly?  It all depends on adjudication).  In 3e, however, the combat became much more formal, with rules for placement, movement, how many attacks you get based on how you moved (the "five-foot step" is an abomination, IMHO), attacks of opportunity, et al.  The combat is much more concerned with a series of rules designed to script out the flow of battle, as opposed to the fluidity of the one minute combat rounds in AD&D.  This appeals to the tactically-minded player, but the more strategic player might not enjoy getting down into the weeds.

The third edition can truly be said to be a major departure from some of the design philosophies of the first editions of the game.  Some changes, like ascending AC and skill lists, are mostly positive.  Many others, like "feats", are more controversial, based on your preferred gaming philosophy.  Honestly, having played all of the editions for many years (with 4e being the exception... I only played it for about 6 months), 3.0/3.5/PF is my least favorite, as its philosophy is radically different from my preferred playstyle.  I don't find 5e as bad, but it definitely is of the lineage of 3e,rather than 1e.  My players who loved 3e still enjoy 5e, and my players who hated 3e still tolerate 5e, so it is a good compromise for us.  But I'd never run 3e again, and I'd be unlikely to play it, either...

Quote from: Eirikrautha on August 22, 2021, 10:19:31 AM
Well, what makes 3.x "better" for some folks makes it "worse" for others.  What I think can be said for 3.x is that it marked a sharp philosophical break with the original ideas of AD&D (and yes, before Shasarak comes in with his fanboying and yells "2e! 2e!", some of the changes did start to creep in during the awful splatbooks for 2e, but 3e codified the change in the base edition). 

Thank you, my God, you ass holes take a long time to get the message through.

Creep in during 2e my hairy ass, what were you asleep for 10 years like some kind of autistic sleeping beauty?

Quote from: S'mon on August 21, 2021, 07:01:14 AM

Quote from: Shasarak on August 20, 2021, 07:22:42 PM
I was personally played in a high level 3e campaign which got up to level 16.

I didnt notice the system breaking.

I ran 3e to ca 18th level and PF to ca 14th level.

High level 3e, the spellcasters completely dominate. It's D&D Ars Magica, the Fighter PCs were just Grogs to the PC Wizards. I remember at one point ca level 15 all three players at the table had Wizard PCs, they were ambushed by demons. They were going to do the usual thing of teleport away & come back later pre-buffed, but I begged them "Please, just this once, stay and fight - you can beat them, you don't need to buff!". They beat the demons (hezrou & such) easily enough.
Later on, in the final battle of the campaign, I rem a Wizard-18 got off two Horrid Wiltings in the BBEG throne room and had killed off most of the bad guys before the Fighter-18* with the artifact spear & the artifact plate armor (so speed 20') could even get into melee.

*Played by ENW's Tallarn. This was in the good old days, before the Woke Times.

Compared to PF though, 3e was well balanced. The PF Summoner class is the most grotesque abomination I have ever seen in an RPG.

Thats great, S'mon.  Love to hear about the successful high level campaigns.

My 3e campaign was the second longest game I ever run, at 4 1/2 years, and probably the one I spent the most time running as we played 3 hours a week pretty much every week. I gave out a reduced amount of XP and in that time my character got to between 10th and 12th level. I never noticed the wizard problem others mentions but I was fairly consistent about controlling the spells the party found. While it's true that various parts of the game didn't work, such as multi-classing between spellcasters and non-spellcasters, solutions to most problems could be found online. I also found that 3e players were much more accepting of house rules than players of other versions of D&D, even old school versions. Maybe it's because the game was so different people weren't really attached to specific mechanics.

The game could probably have been perfected if they stuck with the same basic rules and just cut down on the volume, but that never happened. The one part of the game that I appreciate more now is how monsters used the same rules for character creations as the PCs. I've taking this idea to heart with my own OD&D game and finally have a system where you can take any NPC or monster out of an adventure and use him as a regular Player Character with no conversion.