I recently (about 2 weeks ago) finished up two major D&D campaigns. What a rush! Two such project ending in the very same week! It took me some time to gather my wits for some kind of resume.
This took 3.5 years and was played in 3.5, using quite a lot of house rules, such as recharge magic. It was based on Pazio's Savage Tide adventure path, one of the best series of adventures ever published IMO. One player got ill halfway and we decided to take a break for him to recover; we used that break for a spin-off police story set in Sasserine. Thus, this was two campaigns in one. The main arc was level 1-20 using the adventure path, the other was set in Sasserine and level 1 to 13, centered on the Chimes of Midnight arc. Both used a lot of filler adventures from Dragon.
This took 1.5 years to play and was played in 4E using some house rules, but generally much closer to canon than Savage Tide. Unlike the other campaign I did not use a lot of filler, tough I did insert "Seven Swords of Sin" in the middle. It’s a much more linear adventure path than Savage Tide, and not quite as good IMO, less bristling with opportunities for interesting roleplay, but still exiting and compelling in its own right.
Judging the Edition Wars?
I should be in a perfect position to judge the edition wars, just having finished two such great projects in the two competing systems? Not really. First, my answer to which system is best only applies to me, my group, and our tastes. Secondly, we only used a tiny part of the 4E rules (the classes my players choose to use), and my version of 3.5 was heavily house ruled.
Comparing 3.5 (heavily modified) to 4.0 and thinking on what system to use in the future, I settled on neither. My next project, to tentatively start this weekend will be using homebrew rules loosely based on the Feng Shui rpg. If I had to choose between 3.5 and 4-0, I think I’d choose 3.5, but not by any great margin.
The problem with 3.5 is mainly the prep time. I really don’t want to spend that much time and effort preparing for play, and I don’t have any really good electronic tools to help me either. This means I am more or less bound to using published scenarios as written. The humongous stat blocks are also hard to read and use in play – 4E really improved the DMs side of the screen. The player’s side of the screen works much better. My players were mostly happy with the rules, thinking they were versatile, not that hard to use, and gave a great variety of options in and out of combat.
The problems with 4E are the mechanics. They are slow and cumbersome, and the structure with encounter/daily powers did not sit well with the group. Combat is not swingy enough for our tastes, which makes it seem grindy and unexciting. We tried half hit points for a while, but that meant fights felt like they finished before you had time to use your encounter powers. Basically, the gamism is at fault because it didn’t mesh with out play style and expectations. In 4E, the problems are mainly on the player’s side of the screen. That said, the group was heavily divided, with some liking 4E quite a lot and others hating it.
But the major problem is actually common to both systems, even if 4E had them to a greater degree. And this problem is classes, builds, and the linear probability distribution of the d20. 4E in particular is very centered on the classes and the various pre-prepared builds. If what you want to play falls just a little outside the given builds, it’s very hard to realize. And some builds are missing – in 4E there is no such thing as a Dex-based leader or an Int-based arcane melee striker, both of which were in demand IMC. This problem is less pronounced in 3.5, but once you notice it the issues carry over; the level 20 druid IMC was pretty happy with her (house ruled) class package deal, but not perfectly happy. The same is true for the 20th level ranger. And the two prestige/multi class builds sure worked, but had lots of little oddities and were very dependent on specific prestige classes – and there is not a prestige class for every role you might want to play. Some game values – such as saving throws and non-armor-class defenses – end up way out of sync with what the game expects. On top of this comes the very concept of a “build” – that you have to plan ahead in order to purchase every feat and option in the right order so that they all add up. All too gamey for me, I want to concentrate on role, not build - I can do builds in MMOs. I also find I dislike the linear probability distribution of the d20, where a modifier has such a different effect depending on which part of the probability scale you are in – I’ve come to appreciate the pyramidal probability distribution of 2d6. That’s why I’m going to try out a non-DnD, non-class system using 1d6 -1d6 for a while.
So, what were the high moments of each campaign? For me personally, a great moment in Savage Tide was at the very end, when Iggliv disintegrated the wall of stone blocking entrance to the room where the players were fighting Demogorgon, stepped out of the mist, and used the Flask of Turney the Mad to capture Demogorgon’s soul.
A lovely recurring theme was crocodiles – one player had to use a fate point to survive a crocodile encounter at level 2, and crocodiles continued to plague the players for much of the arc, cumulating with the great crock in the lake of Tamoachan. That one made for a great pair of crocodile boots!
From Rise of the Runelords, the scene from The Skinsaw Murders where the players pursued a ghost through an entire haunted house, tough a secret door they had failed to notice earlier, trough ghoul warrens, and into a confrontation with the main villain - who was lusting after one of the PCs and the brother of another, and those two were the only ones who got by all the monsters on the way down to see the climactic scene – the others arrived pell-mell as they could.
And again, the final fight (that I had to re-script completely), an airborne conflict in a great empty room, with mages on the ground acting as Flak guns and players having to hitch fly boosts from each other.
Thank You!
In toto, I am very happy with both these campaigns, and as I said I am up and at it again this Saturday – even if that campaign proper will not start until the end of summer I want to thank all the wonderful players who participated,. I also want to thank these boards that gave me a lot of ideas, particularly for the 4E game, and Scott Betts and the Rusty Dragon blog that helped me trough the early levels. Finally, a big thank you to Pazio and the crew there that made it all possible as well as WotC and the game designers behind both editions of DnD.
Wow, congrats to you on that accomplishment. I'm eagerly looking forward to finishing the last adventure for Shackled City soon, and I'm anticipating the nice wave of satisfaction that will come with it. Finishing two must be mind-boggling!