Quote from: Shasarak on August 22, 2021, 05:44:09 PM
Thats great, S'mon.  Love to hear about the successful high level campaigns.

You might enjoy reading my PF Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign - starts at http://smonscurseofthecrimsonthrone.blogspot.com/2013/

The Summoner & Naglatha the uber-minmaxed Archer Ranger did tend to trivialise the later encounters; I was just telling my 5e group today (in a post-TPK drinking session) about the PF Summoner and his 3 summoned giant octopi with their 24 grapple rolls per round on my poor Gray Maidens. 

Quote from: jeff37923 on August 20, 2021, 04:55:51 PM
DnD 3.0 and PF are a couple of my favorites. They are fun to play, include skills (which I prefer in games), and demonstrated a wellspring of unique and wonderful settings for themselves. Their drawbacks are that it takes some time to create a character (or unique NPC) and there is a lot of crap to wade through to get to the Good Stuff with the remnants of the d20 Glut still out there.

I think DND 3.0 is a better game system than DND 3.5, although the differences between the two systems are subtle. 3.0 is closer to old school DND than 3.5. However, I've played a lot more 3.5 than 3.0.

Quote from: Shasarak on August 20, 2021, 07:22:42 PM

Quote from: Pat on August 20, 2021, 06:56:06 PM

Quote from: S'mon on August 20, 2021, 06:26:23 PM
As for 3e, if you half the XP awards and use 3.5 it's ok for about 8 levels. It really breaks hard later on, or if advancement is too fast, or if PCs get too little(!) magic.

It doesn't break after 8th level, or at least that's not quite the right word. It becomes a lot more of an art to run, and it requires players to be on the same page.

But in general, you can't go wrong with E6.

I was personally played in a high level 3e campaign which got up to level 16.

I didnt notice the system breaking.

My group played in a high-level 3.5 campaign, where we reached level 19. We went through the entire "Shackled City" adventure path, and started at 1st-level, although we only made it to 19th-level....due to skipping one of the dungeons. I didn't notice the system breaking at all, but we were using characters that were only between Tier 2 and Tier 4....and many of these characters were based upon homebrew classes. We had no Wizards, Clerics, or core Druids in the party (Druid variants only), so we might have missed the problems of high-level play that other people experienced. We also had only a limited amount of multi-classing in our 3.x games.

The job of the high-level spellcasters (variant Druids) in our campaign was mostly healing the party, teleporting the party, and protecting the party from energy attacks....with limited use of offensive magic (and no summoning spells). We had a high-level Warmage. His job was blasting enemies with Fireballs, Orbs of Force, and whatnot. The Warmage is weaker than a Wizard, but requires much less pre-planning and is easier to use. We had a high-level Warforged Dungeoncrasher Fighter with limited regeneration. His job was triggering traps, tanking attacks, and smashing through unsuccessfully unlocked doors.

The real issue with DND 3.x is that it's detailed in places that are unnecessary. An example? Technically, it is possible to have two different 12th-level Rogues with identical ability scores, feats, and equipment.......with two different skill point totals. Why? Because one started off with a higher intelligence score, and the other did not. Other things, like skill synergies, bog up the system and need to go. Attacks of opportunity discourage your character from moving around, unless you've specifically maxxed your character out for movement. There's way too much system mastery and unnecessary rules clutter in DND 3.X.

Unfortunately, 5e went in the opposite direction and created "bounded mediocrity", where nothing you do matters or affects your environment in a meaningful way.....and does this while being horribly vague and boring. Oh, and woke now. 5e is now very Satanically woke.

The one major problem with high-level play in DND 3.x is that there's so much rules detail (too much), that it's easy to forget what actual abilities you have. They should have just made cards for every spell, skill, feat, magic item, and more.

I have an emotional attachment to descending armor class from AD&D, but ascending armor class is objectively easier to use for nearly every gamer I've met. That said, I still think DND 3.0 and 3.5 are great games. They're my games of choice now.

If I had my way, I'd make a hybrid game of 3e and 1e. Instead, 5e feels like it gave us some boring and woke hybrid of 2e and 4e.

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.

Our high-level 3.x campaigns never had high-level Wizards, so maybe we missed something vital.

Id day that as long as everyone is on the same page in a 3e/PF session then things are usually going to go alot better than if some are char-opping and some are just wanting to play and the rest are going with the flow.

The system works as long as no one is actively trying to break it or create "I win" buttons. The sessions I played in way back went fairly well and overall it felt like a D&D session.

Something worth noticing is that the difference between 3e, 4e and 5e is not quality, it is mostly philosophical.

For example: can you trip a gelatinous cube?

In 3e, you can't, regardless of the rules.
In 4e, you can, regardless or the wordings.
In 5e, the rules say you can't... but what if they didn't?

Same for miniatures (3e maybe, 4e yes, 5e no).

I wrote two comparisons between the three system; I'm not sure I could add TSR versions to these comparisons, because I couldn't find an exact quotes on how to deal with these issues (but I'd say TSR D&D is less dependent on minis than 3e and 4e, although supposedly Gygax himself didn't use minis, but Arneson did).

But I'd say 3e was a small break from TSR (especially skills & powers, etc.), while 4e is a big break, and 5e takes a few steps back.

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2017/02/tripping-oozes-in-d-3e-versus-4e-versus.html
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2017/03/does-d-require-miniatures-3e-versus-4e.html

Quote from: Omega on August 22, 2021, 09:38:47 PM
Id day that as long as everyone is on the same page in a 3e/PF session then things are usually going to go alot better than if some are char-opping and some are just wanting to play and the rest are going with the flow.

The system works as long as no one is actively trying to break it or create "I win" buttons. The sessions I played in way back went fairly well and overall it felt like a D&D session.

Third edition worked fairly well, as long as people played the same way they did in earlier editions. The game didn't really break until people started looking at what the rules actually said, and then modified their playstyle to take advantage. That's where char ops rose to prominence. And third edition was very well suited to that kind of analysis, which is why one optimizer could ruin it for the whole group.

The problem with this conversation is that it's so long in the tooth having had 2+ (+ = all the 3e knockoffs) editions to be polluted by it, and several editions before it that everyone lionizes for various reasons, legitimate or not, that we tend to forget the expanse of time we covered in our experiences to land on our opinions.

My personal opinion, as someone that ran a god-awful amount of 3.x - from the start, through 3.5, into Pathfinder, into knockoffs, and who wrote quite a bit about it in Dragon, and a few products for it... I feel *really* comfortable in my opinion which is:

It was a beautiful disaster that lost its way because its mechanical DNA is designed to implode on contact with people that actually want to roleplay without mechanics that get in the way. And that's a LOT of gamers.

A lot of people don't get the comparison to Magic the Gathering - but I totally get it. Magic the Gathering, whether people understand it out not is supposed to be a story of two or more wizards fighting a mighty battle to destroy each other, and their cards and the mechanics that govern them are the implied narrative of the story. Abstract as it might seem. Most people just play it as a card game. The same is true of 3e, but the mechanics are more granular. And because 3e tries to emulate aspects of the editions of D&D that came before, the abstractions tend to not work well with the mechanics and vice versa.

These sacred cows - HP, AC (Ascending or Descdending - take your pick) Classes, Proficiencies/Skills, Vancian/Spellpoints, and "balance" (across all the subsystems) creates an endless mount of needless complexity for the *purpose* of playing a game where you pretend to be an Elf.

3.x showed us older players much of what we suspected: the paralysis of system bloat over good GM Adjudication. From the design side, the idea was that the system would help new GM's run things at a higher level with mechanical inputs. But the fact is its a big mechcanical mess if you run RAW beyond 13th level. Sure you can do it. I've done it many times, but most GM's that aren't particularly experienced will wither under the weight of numbers and mechanics you have to deal with... just to play a fantasy-superhero.

This complexity *is* directly what led to the OSR. Something a lot of people don't consider is that the relative simplicity of the OSR is led by GM's with a lot of experience (generally) They are people that have gone the distance. I'm pretty confident 3e, 4e, and 5e will not be editions that will be referenced backwards kindly in terms of design emulation. I'm sure there will be attempts, but I'd be pretty surprised to see any get real traction.

Ironically I personally detested 4e as a D&D RPG, but I think it could be trimmed down and made into a fairly snazzy tabletop skirmish game - like Talisman on roids.

3e? I look at it as a catalyst of the marketing power of the brand more than a game-design worth pursuing. And we all *wanted* it to be great. In the end... it brought us here - which for many of us is a *very* different place than where we started with 3e.

For example - I play D&D using an entirely different system. I have moved entirely away from D&D system mechanics, and I'd played deeply into 5e after having started in 1978. So I look at D&D as an ex with good style, if I'm being kind. And I currently date a different girl that has that same style, but a different way of effecting it.

So thanks 3e.

I like 3.0/3.5 a lot.  It got me back into gaming after about a 10 year hiatus.  I ran an Eberron game for two years and took the PCs from 1st to 21st level, and remains a favorite gaming memory.

I liked 3rd as it fixed some issues I had, mostly streamlining saves and some mechanics, while allowing better options for character customization.  It did suffer from feat and class bloat, and I get why not everybody loves it, but it was just what I needed right then.

These days, I prefer Cypher since it's easier to run and easier to do different genres and settings.  I just picked up DCC and like its simplicity so far, though the magic system is a bit overly convoluted.

Quote from: tenbones on August 22, 2021, 11:52:44 PM
Ironically I personally detested 4e as a D&D RPG, but I think it could be trimmed down and made into a fairly snazzy tabletop skirmish game - like Talisman on roids.

It's actually really good for a kind of fantasy MCU vibe - there is decent support for PC characterisation (as Big Damn Heroes) as well as tactical combat. You have these long drawn out action sequences, then quiet intermissions with the talky/social stuff. IME 4e Players spend more time on social relations, romance etc than in most (actual) D&D-type fantasy games, because they know their Captain America expy is fairly unlikely to die next session.

Quote from: S'mon on August 24, 2021, 09:25:12 AM

Quote from: tenbones on August 22, 2021, 11:52:44 PM
Ironically I personally detested 4e as a D&D RPG, but I think it could be trimmed down and made into a fairly snazzy tabletop skirmish game - like Talisman on roids.

It's actually really good for a kind of fantasy MCU vibe - there is decent support for PC characterisation (as Big Damn Heroes) as well as tactical combat. You have these long drawn out action sequences, then quiet intermissions with the talky/social stuff. IME 4e Players spend more time on social relations, romance etc than in most (actual) D&D-type fantasy games, because they know their Captain America expy is fairly unlikely to die next session.

This has been my experience as well. There have been entire sessions of 4E where dice haven't even been needed because the PCs are too busy with social interactions to actually head out on an adventure. The fact that those sections were free form and essentially rulings not rules meant all sorts of interesting things could happen.

And, yes, I think a big part of why things leaned that way was that they felt safe enough in their PC's ability to survive that forming attachments that extended beyond the immediate was worth the investment. You could begin a relationship (romantic or otherwise), go have an adventure and reasonably expect to pick it up again after the adventure was done.

It's honestly why PCs in 4E felt much more well-rounded than in prior editions of D&D. You weren't as worried about immediate survival and so could basically move up that whole "hierarchy of needs" chart into the emotional and intellectual levels.

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 24, 2021, 09:55:49 AM
This has been my experience as well. There have been entire sessions of 4E where dice haven't even been needed because the PCs are too busy with social interactions to actually head out on an adventure. The fact that those sections were free form and essentially rulings not rules meant all sorts of interesting things could happen.

And, yes, I think a big part of why things leaned that way was that they felt safe enough in their PC's ability to survive that forming attachments that extended beyond the immediate was worth the investment. You could begin a relationship (romantic or otherwise), go have an adventure and reasonably expect to pick it up again after the adventure was done.

It's honestly why PCs in 4E felt much more well-rounded than in prior editions of D&D. You weren't as worried about immediate survival and so could basically move up that whole "hierarchy of needs" chart into the emotional and intellectual levels.

Yup (sadly IME 3e with non-powegamer players is the reverse, with lots of sudden shocking perma-death even of high level PCs).
I'm certainly no fan of RPGnet and I hate their phrase "Mother May I", but there is something about the way a 4e PC can just do stuff without any need for GM adjudication, that many players find very empowering. "I leap in front of her and take the Troll's blow" "I run up the Gargantuan Carrion Crawler's back, plunging my swords into its neck" - in 'real D&D' that would be "I attempt to..." "Roll... Athletics"; in 4e there is no GM adjudication, the PC is using a hardcoded power to get the result. This has a significant psychological effect on the player IME, they start to feel like superheroes, not hardscrabble adventurers in Fantasy Fucking Vietnam. This is so even when the 4e PC is objectively weaker than the eg 3e PC.  And this then feeds into how they play the character out of combat; they start acting like Black Widow or Thor or Iron Man (if Iron Man couldn't fly, but still had a mean power suit).

Best thing that came from it was ascending armor class, but overall I did enjoy it. The game only got really stupid once you introduced power gaming into the mix. The biggest complaint I had was the disparity between a power gamer and non power gamer in the same party. Encounter the whole party struggles with only for the power gamer to use one spell and kill it ten times over again in one shot. That and a minor gripe about too many charts needing references, oh and lets not forget that magic items are assumed to be part of character progression. But neither of those things are too hard to work around.

As a gm i hated that so many monsters had feats, classes, and special rules not explained on the stat block. I had a rule where I would approve only a small number of books, everything else was case by case and a loose guideline to maximum number of multiclassing.

On the other hand, prestige classes were cool, the introduction of proper skills were good and saving throws that were easy enough to explain. Going a bit into pathfinder here but the idea of flat footed and touch ac were also a great idea when paired with concepts like firearms.

Quote from: S'mon on August 24, 2021, 10:32:49 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 24, 2021, 09:55:49 AM
This has been my experience as well. There have been entire sessions of 4E where dice haven't even been needed because the PCs are too busy with social interactions to actually head out on an adventure. The fact that those sections were free form and essentially rulings not rules meant all sorts of interesting things could happen.

And, yes, I think a big part of why things leaned that way was that they felt safe enough in their PC's ability to survive that forming attachments that extended beyond the immediate was worth the investment. You could begin a relationship (romantic or otherwise), go have an adventure and reasonably expect to pick it up again after the adventure was done.

It's honestly why PCs in 4E felt much more well-rounded than in prior editions of D&D. You weren't as worried about immediate survival and so could basically move up that whole "hierarchy of needs" chart into the emotional and intellectual levels.

Yup (sadly IME 3e with non-powegamer players is the reverse, with lots of sudden shocking perma-death even of high level PCs).
I'm certainly no fan of RPGnet and I hate their phrase "Mother May I", but there is something about the way a 4e PC can just do stuff without any need for GM adjudication, that many players find very empowering. "I leap in front of her and take the Troll's blow" "I run up the Gargantuan Carrion Crawler's back, plunging my swords into its neck" - in 'real D&D' that would be "I attempt to..." "Roll... Athletics"; in 4e there is no GM adjudication, the PC is using a hardcoded power to get the result. This has a significant psychological effect on the player IME, they start to feel like superheroes, not hardscrabble adventurers in Fantasy Fucking Vietnam. This is so even when the 4e PC is objectively weaker than the eg 3e PC.  And this then feeds into how they play the character out of combat; they start acting like Black Widow or Thor or Iron Man (if Iron Man couldn't fly, but still had a mean power suit).

PC's just do stuff... and how. One of the things my own system (that started as a spiritual successor to 4E since no one at all seemed interested in actually supporting that niche*) focuses on with its backgrounds (which aren't 4E or even 5e backgrounds but rather everything non-combat about a class in prior editions) is providing special abilities for outside of combat (though some can also be used in combat) akin to those 4E provided inside of combat.

For example, one possible Aristocrat boon is "Cover the Gaff" which allows you to replace an ally's Persuade check** with your own. One of the Outlaw's is "Distracting Words" that lets you use your Deceit check in place of an ally's Stealth check (and if you'd flank the target when doing so, the ally has total cover for purposes of moving without breaking cover). The military background has boons like "Combat Engineering" which allows you to coordinate excavating trenches and making berms in rapid time and "Fortify Positions" to coordinate placing medium terrain and cover against ranged attacks.

Each background has 50+ boon options (25 basic, 25+ specific to the background), starts with two and picks up an additional one at 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15, so there's a great degree of tailoring possible and options that range from very simple (extra skills, skill bonuses) to complex (the aforementioned Engineering and Fortification boons can utterly reshape a battlefield if you have time to prepare and sufficient allies) in the same way the combat side has options ranging from "I hit it with my sword" to overlapping talents and class abilities that require tracking finite resources.

* It wasn't enough for WotC, but I think the niche is big enough that a "1000 true fans" approach is viable for a smaller publisher.

** Persuade is basically the Reaction roll for anything beyond basic haggling over price or a performance. Success means they take your words in the best possible way, but they won't do anything ridiculous... you could get a 35 on your check and the king will take your suggestion that they hand the crown over to you as a well-meaning joke (instead of throwing you into the dungeon for your impertinence), but would never hand the kingdom over to you.

Extreme rules bloat, Martial/caster disparity, Awful monster building rules

Pick Fantasy Craft or even Pathfinder 2 instead

The less I say about 3.5 the better.  Vidgrip really nailed my opinion of 3e and 3.5e.  I really despise the design philosophy that undergirded that whole era.  The way the WotC applied the MtG "system mastery" school of game design really rubbed me the wrong way.  It felt like the game designers were trying to dictate to the DM how their game will be run and dictating to the player how their character will be played instead of creating a toolkit and letting the players and the GM go wild.  It also really makes me think that the rigidity and "house of cards" nature of 3.5 was not a bug, it was a feature.  After all, we can't have a mere mortal like a DM going in and tampering with the work of the all-knowing Monte Cooke now can we?

My views on DnD 3rd edition are also likely shaped by my experiences.  I first started to get into Tabletop RPG gaming in 1996.  The TRPG scene seemed bright and vibrant to my young eyes anyway. There were all these cool worlds I couldn't wait to explore.  Then I went to Korea for 3 years.  In the days before ubiquitous broadband internet, you really were isolated living on an Army base over there.  When I came back, it was like the K-T Extinction event had hit.  All of the TRPG publishers I'd wanted to get back into were either gone or in hibernation and in their place was a flood of 3.5 OGL crap.  3.5 is NOT a universal RPG but the market forced publishers to act as if it were.  What I found was increasingly, developers were using the 3.5 rules as a base and writing their worlds and lore around the pre-existing rules and baked in cosmology and magic rather than trying to change the rules to fit what they wanted to do because trying to go into 3.5 and change anything is so very annoying, but it's all there was.  Don't like it?  Tough tits.  Have fun rooting through clearance bins and the games sections of used bookstores.

Holy crap, that was a rant and a half.  My opinion on DnD 5e is mostly neutral.  It manages to avoid so many of the pitfalls that annoyed me about 3rd edition.  It's less rigid and modular in ways that most RPGs are.  If you don't like a rule in 5e, it's a lot easier to go in and change it.  Case in point: I despise Vancian casting.   It think it's boring, needlessly onerous and sucks all of the fun out of playing a mage. 5e helpfully includes Spell Points rules right there in the DMG.  It's still not my favorite RPG.  The monsters can be a little too HP spongey for my tastes. The Advantage/Disadvantage system really feels like they prioritized simplicity over playability.

Now that I've discovered the OSR, I don't think I'll ever look back.

Quote from: S'mon on August 24, 2021, 10:32:49 AMI'm certainly no fan of RPGnet and I hate their phrase "Mother May I", but there is something about the way a 4e PC can just do stuff without any need for GM adjudication, that many players find very empowering. "I leap in front of her and take the Troll's blow" "I run up the Gargantuan Carrion Crawler's back, plunging my swords into its neck" - in 'real D&D' that would be "I attempt to..." "Roll... Athletics"; in 4e there is no GM adjudication, the PC is using a hardcoded power to get the result.

This would just move the "Mother May I" onto character generation. Putting more emphasis on rules limiting what PCs can do by only letting them do what's specifically laid out beforehand. I had this problem with FFG's Star Wars rules. Each new class book added new powers that only certain characters could get when those things were often something all characters could do before the book was released.

But I never had my players not trying new things IMC so this is a solution to a problem I don't have.