Quote from: fearsomepirate;956014In 3.x, once the AC gets high enough, your chance to hit becomes 5%,

Tactics.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;956030Tactics.

Tactics might give your mooks a +2 to hit. Maybe +4. When you get to upper-tier monsters 3.5 math means the monsters literally don't give a shit about your mooks or anything they could do. A mid-tier dragon like the Mature Adult Black Dragon (CR 14) has an AC of 29, so there is basically nothing your mooks can do to raise their to-hit above 5%, and they have DR 10, so your crappy straight-10-stat mooks' attacks will do ZERO damage unless they're all wielding d12/2d6 weapons. Which they can't do anything with because they auto-fail their saves vs Frightful Presence. So forget an ambush followed by a mass attack.

You're probably thinking, "So we use the mooks to lure the dragon into a ravine and drop big rocks on it! Surely he can't resist 500 canned snacks!" Big rocks can do as much as ~60 damage to the dragon, so this is totally plausible...right?  So we'll hide trebuchets in the forest set to go off when the dragon flies into the ravine. Now we've got two ways to go about this...

Under RAW, catapults will do, on average, 0.5 damage per hit against a dragon, it takes 4 mooks to service one, and they have to roll a 15 or better to hit. You will need around 2,000 catapults to bring it down in a round, which cost 1.6 million gp.

So you beg your DM to let you roll it up as a trap. Hey, 3.x has RAW for setting up traps! Okay, dragon's got, uh, shit,  Spot +24, REF +14, and 253 HP. I think. Double-check me if you like. To have a 50% chance of this trap working, you need a 70% chance that he doesn't see the trap and a 70% chance that he fails the save...so you need to construct a trap with DC 38 to Spot and DC 28 to dodge...shit, there's math for this...it's like a DC 40 Craft (trapmaking) to do this, I think. You've maybe got all day, so Take 20. Unless you put 20 skill points in Craft (trapmaking), which you absolutely couldn't have unless you're level 17 and spent months of real game time preparing to drop rocks on a fucking dragon, you can't pull this off.

At level 17, it's easier to just kill the goddamn thing the regular way anyway. It's only a CR 14 monster.

This was not a contrived example. I merely tried to think of what I might do with a bunch of crappy mooks in AD&D, then started hunting down the 3.x rules that applied. Because that's what 3.5 DMs do, they find the rules that apply to whatever the heck it is you wanted to do, calculate the DC, and make you roll. And that's the problem half the shit you would just talk your way through and maybe do a roll-under in AD&D has directly applicable rules that start shooting DCs and modifiers up into Powertrip Retard Land so that whatever you wanted to do is formally impossible unless your DM decides to just waive the rules because he likes your idea, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.

TL; DR AD&D = You: "I do a clever thing. " DM: "Meh ok 35% chance this works...*roll*...ok you succeed."
3.5 = You: "I do a clever thing." DM: "Hold on there's actually a rule for this...can you roll a 29 on this 20-sided die? No? You fail."

Quote from: Willie the Duck;955973That's more accommodating, not more fair. In the random roll situation, each player has the same chance as each other of not being able to play the character type they want to play, which is of equal fairness to the situation of each player having a 100% chance of being able to play the character type they want to play.

Chance =/= fair

Quote from: fearsomepirate;9560373.5 math means...

...play a different game.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;956037. . . 3.5 math . . .

Quote from: fearsomepirate;956037AD&D = You: "I do a clever thing. " DM: "Meh ok 35% chance this works...*roll*...ok you succeed."
3.5 = You: "I do a clever thing." DM: "Hold on there's actually a rule for this...can you roll a 29 on this 20-sided die? No? You fail."

AD&D wins.

I kind of think that's his point.

Once again, I quote my friend Brian who converted from 3.5 to OD&D after playing in my OD&D game:  "I like it because I say I want to sneak up behind him and knock him out, you roll some dice, it either happens or it doesn't, and we get on with the damn game."

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;955844In AD&D, if you roll 3 in everything you can't be any character and you reroll. You'll find on the stat tables it says, things like "Intelligence 5 - here or lower the character can only be a fighter." But if they don't have Str 9 they can't be a fighter, either. So you reroll.

The chance of a single 3 is 1 in 216. The chance of an 18, also 1 in 216. So the chance of straights 3s is 1 in 216 multiplied by itself 6 times, as is straight 18s. I've never seen it happen, have you?

In practice, 3d6 down the line will usually lead to a choice of at least two character classes, and often 3. You'll almost never see paladins and the like. But note that excepting the illusionist, the character classes most hard to qualify for are also known as the most disruptive to play - paladin, assassin - or just plain weird - bard - or overpowered at the start - ranger. So while the players may be disappointed at the time of rolling, most DMs are not sad if the players are restricted, and the play will run smoother.  


I'll introduce you to a concept forgotten from 2e onwards: "tactics." Cave men did not manager to make mammoths extinct by going one-on-one toe-to-toe with them - they drove them into narrow gullies and poured dozens of spears into the bastards.

Yes, a bunch of 0-level men-at-arms will do badly in most stand-up fights. The aim of the players should thus be to avoid stand-up fights. Make them ambushes. In this you will find parallels with real-world militaries. The competent professionals don't go Leroy Jenkins: they scout and plan for days and ambush and bring the maximum possible force to bear on the weakest point in the shortest possible time.

A sensible DM will offer bonuses for this, if nothing else using surprise rules. If your DM thinks you're playing Command & Conquer where everyone reacts instantly without fear or confusion and fights to the last hit point of the last man, well what can you do. We have to assume you're not playing with morons.


In practice it is. You realise that a few simple tools are all that's needed. Again, there are reasons AD&D1e and other old games are still played while a thousand universal ones are forgotten. No version of D&D has alone exceeded AD&D1e's sales. No universal point-buy game in all its editions have exceeded the sales and reach of that one edition of D&D. Retroclones of that are popular, retroclones of point-buy games are not. There are reasons for that.

People have been quietly playing, using those few simple tools for almost 40 years now.

OK. Thanks for the condescending explanation of tactics which I didn't actually need.
Now realise this: I tried doing this in 3.5, and it worked like a charm...the first few levels. Getting the ogre in a pit trap with a single spear inside and shooting him with crossbows? Win. Aerial attack with flying ships against morlocks village? Win.
And then we get to the mid-levels. I'll give the word to fearsome pirate for that.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;956014In 3.x, once the AC gets high enough, your chance to hit becomes 5%, and you can't score a crit, so it takes essentially 20 hirelings to do one hit of damage per round. And if the AC is that high, the HPs are in the hundreds, so unless you have an army with you, the creature is going to find a way to ruin your shit. I mean, I appreciate what you're saying. I hate overreliance on dice as much as the next guy. But the last few editions have been designed such that if you don't meet the stats, you're fucked.

As I have pointed out a couple times now, you can't really compare a game where your THAC0 and damage are guaranteed to scale nicely with one where it's heavily dependent on your ability scores. In AD&D, you are not allowed to be a Fighter who takes a penalty on attack rolls. Don't have STR 9? Play something else. In WotC editions, the rules will let you hang yourself much more easily, so it's dumb to make comparisons.


Pretty sure Mentzer Basic and 3.0 both did, and if 3.0 did, it probably means 5e has as well.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;956037Tactics might give your mooks a +2 to hit. Maybe +4. When you get to upper-tier monsters 3.5 math means the monsters literally don't give a shit about your mooks or anything they could do. A mid-tier dragon like the Mature Adult Black Dragon (CR 14) has an AC of 29, so there is basically nothing your mooks can do to raise their to-hit above 5%, and they have DR 10, so your crappy straight-10-stat mooks' attacks will do ZERO damage unless they're all wielding d12/2d6 weapons. Which they can't do anything with because they auto-fail their saves vs Frightful Presence. So forget an ambush followed by a mass attack.

You're probably thinking, "So we use the mooks to lure the dragon into a ravine and drop big rocks on it! Surely he can't resist 500 canned snacks!" Big rocks can do as much as ~60 damage to the dragon, so this is totally plausible...right?  So we'll hide trebuchets in the forest set to go off when the dragon flies into the ravine. Now we've got two ways to go about this...

Under RAW, catapults will do, on average, 0.5 damage per hit against a dragon, it takes 4 mooks to service one, and they have to roll a 15 or better to hit. You will need around 2,000 catapults to bring it down in a round, which cost 1.6 million gp.

So you beg your DM to let you roll it up as a trap. Hey, 3.x has RAW for setting up traps! Okay, dragon's got, uh, shit,  Spot +24, REF +14, and 253 HP. I think. Double-check me if you like. To have a 50% chance of this trap working, you need a 70% chance that he doesn't see the trap and a 70% chance that he fails the save...so you need to construct a trap with DC 38 to Spot and DC 28 to dodge...shit, there's math for this...it's like a DC 40 Craft (trapmaking) to do this, I think. You've maybe got all day, so Take 20. Unless you put 20 skill points in Craft (trapmaking), which you absolutely couldn't have unless you're level 17 and spent months of real game time preparing to drop rocks on a fucking dragon, you can't pull this off.

At level 17, it's easier to just kill the goddamn thing the regular way anyway. It's only a CR 14 monster.

This was not a contrived example. I merely tried to think of what I might do with a bunch of crappy mooks in AD&D, then started hunting down the 3.x rules that applied. Because that's what 3.5 DMs do, they find the rules that apply to whatever the heck it is you wanted to do, calculate the DC, and make you roll. And that's the problem half the shit you would just talk your way through and maybe do a roll-under in AD&D has directly applicable rules that start shooting DCs and modifiers up into Powertrip Retard Land so that whatever you wanted to do is formally impossible unless your DM decides to just waive the rules because he likes your idea, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.

TL; DR AD&D = You: "I do a clever thing. " DM: "Meh ok 35% chance this works...*roll*...ok you succeed."
3.5 = You: "I do a clever thing." DM: "Hold on there's actually a rule for this...can you roll a 29 on this 20-sided die? No? You fail."

Yeah, sad to say, but that's exactly how it works in a by-the-book game.
And in 3.5, most games are by-the-book:). It's a different gaming culture.

Quote from: Tristram Evans;956041...play a different game.

Which I do;).

Quote from: Black Vulmea;956043


AD&D wins.

My favourite retroclone wins, actually:p!
But your overall point is right.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;956044I kind of think that's his point.

Once again, I quote my friend Brian who converted from 3.5 to OD&D after playing in my OD&D game:  "I like it because I say I want to sneak up behind him and knock him out, you roll some dice, it either happens or it doesn't, and we get on with the damn game."

Your friend's point is also half the reason why I got into OSR games:).
The other half, that I spotted first, was the support for consistent-sandbox games in weird settings;).

Quote from: fearsomepirate;956037TL; DR AD&D = You: "I do a clever thing. " DM: "Meh ok 35% chance this works...*roll*...ok you succeed."
3.5 = You: "I do a clever thing." DM: "Hold on there's actually a rule for this...can you roll a 29 on this 20-sided die? No? You fail."

DMs can be retarded whatever the system. If your DM is retarded, suggest they become a player for a while to learn from your better example.

Quote from: AsenRG;956047OK. Thanks for the condescending explanation of tactics which I didn't actually need.

Your subsequent comments suggest you did.

Quotein 3.5, most games are by-the-book:). It's a different gaming culture.

Which is why I spoke of bringing AD&D1e into other games. 3.5, like virtually every game ever written, has somewhere written that in the end the DM can just handwave all that shit and do what they reckon. Whether they do or don't is, as you say, culture. And cultures change. That's hard when it's a whole country, it's not a big deal when it's one game group.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;956072Your subsequent comments suggest you did.

Fine:).
Your examples still don't work in 3.5, though.

QuoteWhich is why I spoke of bringing AD&D1e into other games.

Which means "it wouldn't work in pure 3.5 as written, unless you add AD&D1e to it".
And this is exactly what I, and others, told you;).

Quote3.5, like virtually every game ever written, has somewhere written that in the end the DM can just handwave all that shit and do what they reckon.

But there's no obligation for the GM to do so.
And there are rules in the DMG that cover your examples, too. So most GMs would just use those. When you buy a set of books that thick, the logic is that you don't need to handwave stuff when the rules are already there.
Otherwise, why are you paying for those over 1000 pages of the 3 corebooks, not to mention the extra supplements, if you're using less than half of them:D? Just use a slimmer and cheaper system, like any retro-clone and most earlier editions provide!

QuoteWhether they do or don't is, as you say, culture. And cultures change. That's hard when it's a whole country, it's not a big deal when it's one game group.

You're talking about the culture of the game group. I'm talking about the culture of 3.5 fans. The two need not be the same, but often the larger edition-wide culture influences the smaller group-culture.
And the influence is going to be "use the damn rules, or you also have to change X, Y, and Z in order to maintain the balance* of the system".

*Yes, I do realize how funny it is to talk about "balance" in 3.5, given that half the classes make the other half look like NPC classes, but 3.5 fans seem loathe to admit it;).

Quote from: Voros;95587840 pages, 40 pages...

What's the current chest thumping over; it appears to have moved past point buy to gming style.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;956044I kind of think that's his point.

Once again, I quote my friend Brian who converted from 3.5 to OD&D after playing in my OD&D game:  "I like it because I say I want to sneak up behind him and knock him out, you roll some dice, it either happens or it doesn't, and we get on with the damn game."

Yes. I think there's a good reason that 5e ended up not drinking too deeply from the 3.5 well. The 3.5 rules actively prevent you from doing the kinds of things you expect to get away with using your wits and imagination in the older games. That's my point.

Quote from: Kyle AaronDMs can be retarded whatever the system. If your DM is retarded, suggest they become a player for a while to learn from your better example.

The 3.5 DM is not being retarded when he makes you roll your Craft skill according to the explicit rules given in the manual any more than the AD&D DM is being retarded when he tells you that the goblin hit your wizard in mid-cast, making him lose his Sleep spell. That's the game. Those are the rules. Playing the game the way you're imagining doesn't mean "bringing 1e to 3.5," it means starting with the 3.5 SRD, gutting it, and building a retroclone on the skeleton.

Quote from: Nexus;956086What's the current chest thumping over; it appears to have moved past point buy to gming style.

This thread has always been about edition warring.

Quote from: Sommerjon;956100This thread has always been about edition warring.

And the blind squirrel staves off starvation for another day.

2000 catapults versus a dragon, and the test for plausibility is how many gp it "costs"?

A 2000-catapult "trap" ?

The game system's power curve clearly broke the universe's logic a LONG time before this point.