I’ve often said that the great sin of 3.x design was revealing the great sin of 2e design: that the only thing that saves some effects from being game-breaking if the fact that results are randomized by tables. Things were going to explode as soon as they gave players the power, for example to gate in specifically a titan (who had the innate power to gate in other titans, and so on) instead of choosing to summon something (5% chance it’s a titan).
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Well in all fairness, that isn’t a bad decision to make with the right limitations/etc. Randomizing effects can keep game design from being too static.
The new Appendix E is a powerful admission that D&D does not exist in a vacuum, and that one of the best ways to learn how to be a role player is to immerse yourself in literature.
THIS! It’s by no means a requirement, but a well-read player (or one exposed to a breadth of media, including movies, TV, and video games) will get the most out of roleplaying.
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I love tabletop RPGs. I’m in a group that meets two Sundays a month and does pickup games on Tuesday evenings if we have quorum. We’ve been meeting for about five years.
No one in this group, who almost all grew up playing D&D, will play D&D anymore. There is just about zero interest. I can’t even get folks to play “Dungeon World” which is D&D’s bastard offspring with D. Vincent Baker’s “Apocalypse World,” a wonderful indie game.
We’re all into the story telling and fun aspects of gaming, not crunching numbers and giant books of tables. None of us are really interested in learning a new 500 page gaming manual, generally, full of such things. As a result, we tend to play games using the FATE rules (of which there are many games such as Dresden Files, Day After Ragnarok, Jadetech, etc) or games derived from Apocalypse World, like Monster of the Week. We also play a bunch of stripped down one shots like Lady Blackbird or use the Cthulhu Dark rules to play rather stripped down Lovecraft-based games. All of these games have rules that can be encapsulated in less than 100 pages, often 20 or less, and allow us to just sit down and play, having fun, without the significant memorization and monetary outlay of things like Dungeons and Dragons. I doubt any of us are going to drop $100+ on new D&D books that we’ll probably never use.
D&D managed to own an entire market and then not adapt to changing sensibilities as players (and gaming thought in general) evolved.
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Agreed. What I mean is that in the random lookup table method, you have some possibilities that are clearly more or less powerful, and some where repetition easily leads to abuse. The decision to keep a lot of the function of those spells the same despite stripping out the randomness (we can say with hindsight) was more likely than not to break something.
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Oh, and FATE is CC-licensed so anyone can make derivative games and Apocalypse World is free to use as a basis of games as long as D. Vincent Baker and his game get an acknowledged credit.
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Ah, yes. Totally agreed.
I’ve been running a 5e campaign, and it’s just SO GREAT! We got characters all rolled up in less than half an hour and were neck-deep in pure, uncut storytelling within an hour. I haven’t had this great a time DMing since…hell, the late '80s? We even gots Hammerfall and other power-metal selections banging in the background! It’s Tha Shizznat!
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Myself and many other players will stick with 4E most likely. Fourth developed a significant following, and it’s different enough from 3.5/5e that people are likely to stick with it, at least to the same degree that people stuck with 3.5/2/etc.
That seems like an odd thing to quote when saying that 5th edition didn’t fix the caster supremacy problem. For one, Druids no longer get animal companions. For another, although Druids can shapeshift, they can’t shapeshift into a bear anymore unless they choose one of the types of Druids - which means although they could shapeshift into a more powerful animal, they can’t do other things in exchange. And it’s no longer a feat to cast while being an animal - it’s a special ability that isn’t handed out until something like 17th level.
So, now it’s just that some Druids can turn themselves into a bear at 8th level, but they don’t have a companion and can’t cast spells. Meanwhile, Eldrich Knight Fighters can cast spells.
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i remember that even a few rulebooks were a huge investment back when i was a poor kid. i was grossly envious of my friends with heaps of miniatures, while at the same time i thought they were an unnecessary distraction. never could figure out which was the rationalization. anyway, we were happy enough to use a whiteboard for rough positioning.
also, two of my close friends had religious families. one family was outright hostile to D&D (“if i see that again, i’m going to burn it.”), while the other just kept it on the down-low (“okay, but don’t tell mom about it.”). either way, a backpack with a few rulebooks and a binder was easy enough to lug around, but huge foldout tactical charts and minis are another story.
times are different now, of course, at least for some of us, but…
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As a 3.5 holdout my answer is thus. I’m 40, I see no reason to chase another system that will probably cost me hundreds of dollars. 3.5 is pretty intuitive to me at this point and if you roleplay long enough all the rules are pretty much simplified anyway.
To be fair the 5e PHB is less than 300 pages cover to cover, and half of that is classes and spells. The rules themselves are simple, and the free version is around 170 pages for both the DMG and PHB with stripped down spells and classes.
Just putting it out there that this game is completely awesome:
http://www.kenzerco.com/hackmaster/
It’s everything that AD&D should have been, and wanted to be, but wasn’t. It originally started as a joke based on 2e rules, but then they made a new version that’s completely different, and great. The skills system is among the most realistic I’ve seen, and no matter how high level your character is, if an orc catches him by surprise, he might end up dead.
So how many pages total for the Player Handbook and the DMG for the “normal” version, not some “lite” one?
I guarantee to you that the rules are not as simple as FATE or Apocalypse World. FATE’s full rulebook is around 280 pages but half of that is discussions of skill. So, in one sense, it is comparable but the system as a whole, as you can see in things like FATE Accelerated, doesn’t take much at all. AW is about the same size so I guess I misremembered earlier (I just went and looked).
But, unlike D&D, you don’t have piles of books. For FATE, you need the rule book and, if using someone else’s setting, a setting book. That’s it. For AW, you need just the one book. If you’re doing Dungeon World, it is also 280 or so pages and you just need that one book as well.
My group and I look at acquiring a stack of books full of charts, etc. to be memorized, often with special case rules and tables, and we realize we’re over 40 and can’t be bothered. We just want to play.
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In dozens of sessions of 1E and 2E across several groups, we never touched a mini. Certainly some people used them, and that was fine and the game accommodated them, but it was quite playable either way and you didn’t really miss them. Positioning didn’t matter so much; you could just play abstract instead of keeping track of exactly where everyone was at all times.
3E made the game considerably blander without minis, and 4E made it practically impossible. That sucks, because it jacks up the cost of a basically satisfactory game far beyond “three books and some graph paper and photocopied character sheets.” Playing with minis was fun! My 3.x groups did a lot of it, and I’m glad it’s an option. But we were able to do it because several local GMs had sunk hundreds and hundreds of dollars into minis.
Different people have different playing styles, yes.
A whiteboard is still a great solution.
You were pretty dismissive of people who don’t share your playing style, though.
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