rabindranath72's page

rabindranath72 wrote:

I started back in the BECMI days (I am 53 now), and 3.0 (core only) is my preferred version of D&D post-2000, as it retains enough legacy elements of 2e+Player's Option stuff (we loved the concept, hated the implementation) to have that old-school "feel".

If I want something more modern and epic, I have 13th Age. I like 4e, and I would love it if it were less tied to the battlemap, something which I in general dislike in pretty much all games.
Ran some PF1e and PF2e, but there's just too much going on. In general I like opinionated games to exercises in regression to mediocrity like 5e (and the abomination that is 5.5e.)

But if I want a simple old-school experience, nothing beats B/X D&D; or even AD&D 1e if I want something more (but not so much more that 2e+PO, hence 3.0, would be a viable option.)

In the end, it really depends if the game concept "juice" I have in mind is "worth the squeeze" in terms of rules complexity (and player base.)

Great year, GenX! I level up to 53 in the fall. I had a box set when I was 11, and that really turned into improved play-acting on the playground rather than roleplaying/rolling dice. I didn't really start playing until 2e, and I just felt 3.0 improved on some of the issues enough that I stuck with it. 3.5x and PF1 made some improvements, and I am interested in what Corefinder will turn out. I didn't like 4e, nor 2e, and am learning 5.5 (man, does it give a lowest-common denominator vibe!) for business reasons...

Great year indeed :D

I started back in the BECMI days (I am 53 now), and 3.0 (core only) is my preferred version of D&D post-2000, as it retains enough legacy elements of 2e+Player's Option stuff (we loved the concept, hated the implementation) to have that old-school "feel".
If I want something more modern and epic, I have 13th Age. I like 4e, and I would love it if it were less tied to the battlemap, something which I in general dislike in pretty much all games.
Ran some PF1e and PF2e, but there's just too much going on. In general I like opinionated games to exercises in regression to mediocrity like 5e (and the abomination that is 5.5e.)

But if I want a simple old-school experience, nothing beats B/X D&D; or even AD&D 1e if I want something more (but not so much more that 2e+PO, hence 3.0, would be a viable option.)

In the end, it really depends if the game concept "juice" I have in mind is "worth the squeeze" in terms of rules complexity (and player base.)

On March 13, 2017, in this thread, while I was running a 3.0 campaign with my son (and my father) I posted the following:

Aaron Bitman wrote:

...I often feel conscious of the relative merits of 3.5 and PF, but all in all, I still feel I like 3.0 the best. My son made it clear he prefers Pathfinder, and he once made arguments about why we should switch back to it by pointing out some of its merits at some length. I responded "I know that PF has some advantages, but I'm sticking with 3.0." He wasn't terribly happy with me for a while after that, but we continued playing all the same.

In fact, my son prefered PFRPG so much that he GMed it for me later, as I related in the thread My son GMed Pathfinder.

On May 1, 2019, in the thread A goodbye of a sort, I wrote the following:

Aaron Bitman wrote:

My son used to champion PFRPG, while I felt that D&D 3.0 was superior (even as I used Paizo products with it). Consequently, we played both. But in the last year, both of us lost interest in RPGs

<snip>

I just don't have the passion I used to, and I can't make the commitment to a regular game. I expect it will be years before the RPG bug bites me again.

Last month, something unbelievable happened. My son decided to DM a 3.0 campaign for me! Despite all his reasons for prefering PFRPG, he decided that 3.0 would be simpler! We've played every Sunday since then. The campaign is set in Galt and the River Kingdoms, and yesterday, I finally succeeded in doing something I've dreamed of doing for over a decade now: I rescued prisoners from the final blades and smuggled them out of Isarn!

(My prediction came true, though. Since I wrote that goodbye, it WAS two years before I played again, unless you count creating characters.)

I was skimming the thread because someone asked about the differences between 3.5 and 3e so I was reviewing the discussion we had here. So cool to see this thread still around! I am happy you are back in the saddle :) Are you playing 3.0 "core only"? How many players? If you feel like it, I'd like to hear more about your game.

I started a 5e game with my kids a few months back, but we got dissatisfied with it for a number of reasons, so last week we converted to D&D 3.0, and we all are happier!

I suppose I am definitely in the "if everyone is special, no one is special" school of thought.
Thanks for the Al-Qadim links! They look very interesting.

If you can find it, have a look at d20 Call of Cthulhu. Lots of interesting ideas for character types, and suggestions on how to fit D&D-style games with the Cthulhu Mythos.

A couple more advantages of 3.0 come to mind.

One is price. Originally, the 3 core 3.0 books retailed for only $20 each, and many players could get away with buying only the Player's Handbook. And the default campaign setting was $10, or $28 for the more complete book, and a fine setting book it was. Even today, browsing through Amazon, I see that the 3.0 core books are being sold more cheaply by third party sellers than the core books of other editions.

Another advantage was the Monster Manual. For the aforementioned humble price, you got, as the back cover proclaimed, over 500 fearsome foes, which pretty much covered everything you needed. You didn't have to apply a template to a ghoul to get stats for ghasts, or to a horse to get a heavy horse. You didn't have to wait around for the Monster Manual 2 to get camels. The really essential stats were all there. WotC crammed lots of information in there by not insisting that every entry get its own page. It didn't have to fill up each page with a picture, as if we needed a picture of a horse or a dog or a cheetah to know what one looked like. That book was good stuff.

Oh yes, the price! We were astounded as to how they could sell such nice books at so low a price (we now know they were essentially a loss leader for WotC.) In fact, I gifted two of my players with PHBs, which they still use to this day (the prints were also high quality.) Luckily now the hardbacks can be found for a dime and a song; I bought a full set of core books for less than £10, including shipping!

I also wholeheartedly agree with your assessment; the MM is excellent; it was a happy medium between the terse AD&D 1e entries, and the verbose AD&D 2e ones. The thing I liked most is that it covered essentially everything one could want, and then some. The entries for humanoids, specifying which gods they worshiped, and the domains for those gods, were fantastic; in 2e we would need an additional book to get those info. The only thing missing were the two or three pages about monster design which appeared in MM2.

And I like 3.0 monster design, since monsters DON'T follow the same rules as PCs. Recently I had a chat with Richard Baker, who was complaining about how he didn't know how to spend "legally" skill points on the stat blocks for a Mammoth in Pathfinder. I told him he wouldn't have had this problem if WotC and PF had stuck with the 3.0 guidelines :)

As Sissyl pointed out, though, this particular website is not the best place to find other 3.0 players. It's Paizo's website, so it naturally attracts Paizo fanboys, and this website is likely to have an unusually high representation of Paizo-worshipers and out-right hostility to anyone who isn't a Paizo-fanatic. Most of the Paizo-fanatics who liked 3.0 are now playing Pathfinder.

Please understand I am not trying to recruit players, or engage in edition wars. Given that 3.0 is now a legacy game, I was interested in the opinions of those playing the "2nd reincarnation" of the game, or of people who uses PF material in their 3.0 games (like I tend to do.) If the post should prove offensive I'll ask the moderators to close it.

It was also a unmitigated pain with the number of feats and skills a character received vs. how many they might actually need.

I'd like to expand a bit on this issue to explain my position. We didn't (and still don't) have an issue with skills and feats (or lack thereof) since we saw 3e as essentially a cleanup and "logical" extension of AD&D 2e + PO material. "Skills" didn't play a big role in AD&D, they were ancillary to the classes' main focuses (except for the thief and bard obviously) so a fighter with only two skill points isn't that big a problem; and rogues and bards DO get many skill choices. So that's not dissimilar to what happens in AD&D, and we are perfectly fine with that. Analogously with feats, we see them as modularising what where either fixed class abilities, or things that were relegated to out-of-class rules in AD&D; again, no problem for us. In short, we didn't see 3e (and didn't want it to become) as a skill-based system like Rolemaster or GURPS. On a side note, we were pleasantly surprised when we discovered that skills were downplayed in 5e.

They didn't, but Adkison and co. honestly thought that they would, as said by someone who was there at the time.

Thanks for the link! That was me asking Rick Marshall the question about Peter Adkison :)

The unbeatable encounter is in FoF, actually. And agreed, the 3.0 modules were brilliant. Sadly, they had a bad decision resulting in a singular focus on only rules books, not adventures, meaning the first eight modules is really all there is. 3.5 added a few more toward the end of the run of third edition.

You have a good point about the shifting of policy from adventures to rules. I say "shifting" because I recall the main motivation which convinced my group to move to 3e, was Peter Adkison stating that "there won't be any additional rules beyond the three core books, but only setting and adventures"; his idea was essentially to return to the early 1e days. We know that the late 1e stuff was published essentially to save TSR's bacon; and similarly, although the introduction of 3.5, (as stated by Monte Cook) was planned from the start only to fix errata, it actually became a big overhaul (and with all the subtle changes, it's difficult NOT to think they did it to get people to buy the books all over again.)

In my first post in this thread, I mentioned six things about 3.0 that I like, that would make me prefer 3.0 over PFRPG (some "rectangular" monsters, no weapon size penalties, outdoor Spot DCs, simpler DR rules that didn't encourage the "golf bag" mentality, the Size-to-Dimension-and-Weight table, and level adjustment for monster PCs).

I kept hesitating to mention a seventh advantage, because it seems such a prevalent opinion on these boards that Paizo's modules are awesomesauce... but to be honest, many of my favorite modules are for 3.0. The Sunless Citadel is my all-time favorite introductory adventure. Its follow-up, The Forge of Fury, was a great dungeon crawl as well. The Speaker in Dreams is my all-time favorite urban adventure. And my all-time favorite SERIES of modules is the "Coin" trilogy by Kenzer & Company (The Root of All Evil, Forging Darkness, and Coin's End).

Firstly, thanks for the conversion! Interesting indeed!

RE: the WotC scenarios, I totally agree, and it's something I forgot to mention. Indeed the initial run of WotC adventures are seminal for the edition. The thing that strikes me most, which seems to have been lost in the later WotC productions (and third party as well) is the distribution of encounters, and the use of random encounters, per the DMG guidelines. In Sunless Citadel for example there's an unbeatable (by combat) encounter (won't spoil for those who don't own the module) and random encounters to keep the party on their toes and possibly force them to consume resources. In my experience the effect of these solves a lot of the complaints about 3e spellcasters being too strong; wizards and clerics can't simply store all their spells for the "important encounter". They can't simply "rest and recover" at their leisure; the PCs DON'T dictate the pacing of the adventure. This makes resource management very important, and makes fighter types excel since their abilities are reliable. When you look at the later development of 4e, you wonder whether someone really missed something in the design of the game (a.k.a. a solution in search of a problem.)

The unbeatable encounter in the module drives home the point that not every monster encounter should be solved with violence, and that fleeing IS an option. Looking at the encounter distribution table in the DMG we also learn that most of the encounters should be challenging, not cakewalks; so the idea of "balance", meaning that all encounters should be beatable, is NOT really part of the game. I am not sure too many people (including publishers) took these guidelines seriously; in all my games, fighter types have been regularly favoured at the table; in my last Dragonlance campaign, the fighter/knight of solamnia was definitely the most powerful character.

I only experienced spellcaster "domination" of the game at very high levels (14+) but that's not something really new, it was the same as with AD&D, and I really don't have a problem with that, it only means that the DM must design his scenarios in a different way. But that's food for a different thread, perhaps.

I didn't know about those Kenzer modules, I'll have to track them down; thanks for the hint!

Not sure I can be of help with your specific requests, but have you seen 13th Age? It streamlines a lot of mechanics, is fast playing, it seems very hard to "break" and the different classes are designed with different complexity levels in mind, so a player who wants to play something simple (yet effective) can choose a Barbarian. I am still running D&D 3.0, but I am strongly tempted to switch my campaign to 13th Age.

Cheers,
Antonio