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S.L.Acker wrote:Depends if you're talking high level or not, detect traps and knock are both low level enough to be ever ready once those slots are no longer your main combat punch.

Yeah, but detect traps work only once (unless you are into Pathfinder and you can cast 0th spells at libitum) and is much crappier than having a rogue (whose search skill is maximized, and can actually disable the trap), and there are much better 2nd level spells that would actually save the group's ass instead of stealing work from another guy once.

Even when they take them, they do so to be able to use them when the one that can do it is likely not going to be available (in a fight, unconshious, too distant) when they plan to use it.

You're also ignoring the fact that a good wizard doesn't need wands, he just needs a safe place to recharge his spells. So at the right levels the Leomund's spells or rope trick allow them to recharge in any situation where time isn't a huge issue. Seeing as even the most dickish DM won't make every task time critical this again makes Mages broken.

Heh, I once purchased the Temple of Elemental Evil adventure, and they were expecting that players would just find a dark corner and sleep it out unnoticed every now and then. While hacking their way through the fucking temple's areas. If that isn't bullshit, I don't know what is. Can't they go looking around for the rope trick's window with a detect magic or similar? I mean it's not a new spell nor a massively high level one. No they must search with lanterns and send lowly idiots to do that, because this is Fantasy!

On average, they don't have time to sleep it off on command unless it is a random encounter during dicking around (hwere recharging is hardly a necessity anyway). Too much similar to a computer game otherwise.

As for tasks only wizards can do, you should recall that at high levels it takes him very little of his total xp to craft scrolls.

Limited ammo and little chance to make new ones to replace expended ones due to deadline. They can't make enough to go without their teammates for more than a session or two and still have other objects they want. They may do it occasionally, but not as a habit.

As for divination, starting at level 1 you have things like instant search which allows you to take 10 on a search instantly

You fucking kidding me? You should waste a 1th level spell with this crap when there is someone that will do it with a much higher chance of success? A rogue does better than this spell from 4th level onwards.

by level 2 you have locate object

Yeah, situational, one-shot and there are much more useful spells at that level.

level 3 clariaudience/clairvoyance

Being a well-known spell, most intelligent enemies know how to counter it to some degree. Works a bit like spy sats on Afghanistan (seeing what you were looking for is a bit of a crapshot). Not always worth the spell slot. Does not upset me if not in a wand.

4th level starts the scrying fun (One time cost of a nice mirror), you also replace your party scout with a arcane eye (no cost, can be cast anywhere within line of sight meaning arcane eye + fly means you can get that sucker lots of places).

There are situations that require spells and situations where the enemy took precautions so the scout has to do its Tom Clancy job as usual. Most of the enemies they face have class levels, they do know this shit and use it against the party too.

I can (and did) play the "they scried you so your cool plan (or at least this part of the plan) fails" card to save my ass. Ain't that cool?

Even so, it sounds like a great way to kill PC's, one lucky hit knocks them to zero and then you finish them next round. The enemies in the game world will quickly learn that things tend to get back up if you let them so they really should aim to keep people down for good.

It's actually the opposite. By keeping the dropped PC alive they did create a significant distraction, and likely forced a retreat.

If they kill it, then they just added another reason to be positively wiped away from Earth.

This reasoning is also behind most military actions. If you injure a soldier, you actually incapacitate 2 or 3 soldiers because someone has to bring the fucker to a medic, if you one-shot him, then they will just have another reason to come at you.

Besides, they don't really have the time to go there and see if he is still alive or not while there are others still on their feet.

Of course it doesn't solve the problem of PC's just never getting hit thanks to high AC and miss chances

That's normal, they are really challenged only by some fights. But this does not mean that the weaker fights become "mopping the floor and laughing" like with those scenes in Lord of the ring at the Helm's keep.

How do you deal with your main tank having stacked miss chances so anything that gets passes his AC, including crits, just miss him 50%+ of the time?

Why that?

Only if your players suck, you still haven't dealt with the issue of a party that goes all out with front loaded damage.

Front loaded damage is pointless against reasonably smart enemies. Because it leaves so gaping holes on other sides that you can exploit.
That "AND MY AXE!" guy of yours is toothless against say a spellcasting or ranged or flying enemy (not exactly uncommon at his CR), or a group of ghosts, or a succubus disguised as a bitch at the tavern (no equipment! yay!), or a fucking 4th level aristocrat using his connections to make him Enemy of the Crown or whatever does not need to engage in melee to fuck you in the ass.

Cover doesn't save you from getting crit, it just gives you a bit of an AC boost which a natural 20 ignores anyway.

Cover boosts stealth as well, and that helps not being detected at all. Also, full cover does negate any attack.
May sound strange but before I had non-melee people just sitting in the light and having a drink while melee did their work.
Being sure that no stray shot would really harm them.

You're also ignoring the fact that it makes any classes that aim to boost crits significantly more powerful and makes more attacks better than strong attacks.

It was intended. This was to balance the general power of spellcasting classes without using stuff that looks too WoW for us (like books of nine swords).
Also forced a change in PC building, which is always a welcome thing.

Civil War Man wrote:A mage can effectively ignore the hit point mechanic, and just throw spells until the opponent fails a saving throw.

Or runs out of spells. There is a limit on how much Wails of the Banshee (or a slightly lower level spell) you are willing to cast on stuff the melee kinds can handle by themselves.

If the DM lets them have only a few enemies between sunrise and sunset, then of course a wizard pwns everything. His weakness is limited ammunition.

That's the same reason we see soldiers armed with assault rifles, not bazookas.

The point is that being this a game where a lot is in the DM hands, if he does not know exactly how to handle stuff, then you have these issues. Better written DM books would help a bit.

That said, yes, fighters suck.

someone_else wrote:

Civil War Man wrote:A mage can effectively ignore the hit point mechanic, and just throw spells until the opponent fails a saving throw.

Or runs out of spells. There is a limit on how much Wails of the Banshee (or a slightly lower level spell) you are willing to cast on stuff the melee kinds can handle by themselves.

If a large amount of encounters are an issue, then the spell casters have things like animate dead, planar binding, dominate X, reserve feats, all day buffs, and then some, to go the duration. A melee character can keep going as long as his hp holds out. Which in D&D is less than a wizard has spells at about level 3 on ward.

As for the rogue searching- Kobold cloistered cleric does it better, trap finding, similar skills, magic to boost said skills.

edit-and the fighting classes can be replaced by trained mules at low levels

I'm not exactly sure I want to wade into this crap, but I would like to point out something.

Why are we arguing 4E vs 3.xE? If you want to debate the merits of either system, then it's improper to do so with one system's obsolete versions. If you're going to have this debate, then debate 4E vs Pathfinder. Half of the problems with 3E mentioned herein have already been addressed by Pathfinder, so a lot of the arguments amount to bizarre, twisted strawmen on account of railing against problems which have already been fixed. (sucky Fighters, for example)

someone_else wrote:

S.L.Acker wrote:Depends if you're talking high level or not, detect traps and knock are both low level enough to be ever ready once those slots are no longer your main combat punch.

Yeah, but detect traps work only once (unless you are into Pathfinder and you can cast 0th spells at libitum) and is much crappier than having a rogue (whose search skill is maximized, and can actually disable the trap), and there are much better 2nd level spells that would actually save the group's ass instead of stealing work from another guy once.

Even when they take them, they do so to be able to use them when the one that can do it is likely not going to be available (in a fight, unconshious, too distant) when they plan to use it.

Sorry, I was thinking of the Cleric spell Detect Traps which lasts for 1min/level in the book and can be made to last for 24 hours at first level. lance gave a great example of a cleric build that can fully replace a rogue with his cloistered cleric. Thus any player that wants to play an optimal trap finder should just play a tricked out Cloistered Cleric with the right buffs (any touch, fixed range, or personal spells) made to last for 24 hours.

You're also ignoring the fact that a good wizard doesn't need wands, he just needs a safe place to recharge his spells. So at the right levels the Leomund's spells or rope trick allow them to recharge in any situation where time isn't a huge issue. Seeing as even the most dickish DM won't make every task time critical this again makes Mages broken.

Heh, I once purchased the Temple of Elemental Evil adventure, and they were expecting that players would just find a dark corner and sleep it out unnoticed every now and then. While hacking their way through the fucking temple's areas. If that isn't bullshit, I don't know what is. Can't they go looking around for the rope trick's window with a detect magic or similar? I mean it's not a new spell nor a massively high level one. No they must search with lanterns and send lowly idiots to do that, because this is Fantasy!

On average, they don't have time to sleep it off on command unless it is a random encounter during dicking around (hwere recharging is hardly a necessity anyway). Too much similar to a computer game otherwise.

If you pull the rope up and hide in a well enough placed spot then the enemy is going to need a high search check to spot them. Seeing as a smart party realizes that they're still not 100% safe they could also be dicks and do things like setting a second rope trick up elsewhere so the enemy stops searching when they find that one. They could also trap the areas around the one they chose to use, problem solved.

Also, how is unreasonable that the wizard, in game, would want to rest after his source of power has run down? If he assumes he's reasonably safe then it isn't an issue at all.

As for tasks only wizards can do, you should recall that at high levels it takes him very little of his total xp to craft scrolls.

Limited ammo and little chance to make new ones to replace expended ones due to deadline. They can't make enough to go without their teammates for more than a session or two and still have other objects they want. They may do it occasionally, but not as a habit.

Sounds like your mage needs a Dedicated Wright. Then he can just make the skill checks to craft a ton of scrolls and let the little bugger work. It gets even better if you set your crafting friend up inside a bag of holding so you can reach in and get a handful of scrolls out as needed. If he runs low on work just take an extra hour or two at the start of a day to start some more scrolls for him to finish. It gets even better if the party includes a well built Artificer .

As for divination, starting at level 1 you have things like instant search which allows you to take 10 on a search instantly

You fucking kidding me? You should waste a 1th level spell with this crap when there is someone that will do it with a much higher chance of success? A rogue does better than this spell from 4th level onwards.

Remember that your rogue should optimally be a cleric or mage in the first place. They can do all the trap finding and springing, have combat buffs so they kill as well as an average fighter, and still have more spells to spare. So that mage using instant search might just be your rogue.

by level 2 you have locate object

Yeah, situational, one-shot and there are much more useful spells at that level.

How do you define more useful? This spell gives you an easy way to tail somebody by doing something as simple as paying him with a marked coin. If your games really involve all these people hiding behind organizations this gets you the locations of the ones that aren't in plain sight.

level 3 clariaudience/clairvoyance

Being a well-known spell, most intelligent enemies know how to counter it to some degree. Works a bit like spy sats on Afghanistan (seeing what you were looking for is a bit of a crapshot). Not always worth the spell slot. Does not upset me if not in a wand.

Yes, but at the same time you can zero in on that coin you planted earlier with such a spell. It's even worth using just to see what's around the next corner so the rogue doesn't have to risk taking point. Don't forget, your mage/artificer can get a mobile scroll factory or two going at low levels as well.

4th level starts the scrying fun (One time cost of a nice mirror), you also replace your party scout with a arcane eye (no cost, can be cast anywhere within line of sight meaning arcane eye + fly means you can get that sucker lots of places).

There are situations that require spells and situations where the enemy took precautions so the scout has to do its Tom Clancy job as usual. Most of the enemies they face have class levels, they do know this shit and use it against the party too.

I can (and did) play the "they scried you so your cool plan (or at least this part of the plan) fails" card to save my ass. Ain't that cool?

So your party is too dumb (and likely lacking in resources thanks to a DM that hates common magic items) to stop scrying used against them and your monsters are always wary of the fact that somebody could be scrying on them. Sounds like you run a very fair game.

How are they stopping your magic eye given that it can squeeze through holes an inch wide with a size bonus on hide checks, now keep in mind that spot isn't a class skill for many classes and you start to see why this little eye can get a fair ways without even being detected. Even if they do find it, the description gives no way of killing it so they would need to chase it and trap it under a box or something as it buzzes around the ceiling.

Even so, it sounds like a great way to kill PC's, one lucky hit knocks them to zero and then you finish them next round. The enemies in the game world will quickly learn that things tend to get back up if you let them so they really should aim to keep people down for good.

It's actually the opposite. By keeping the dropped PC alive they did create a significant distraction, and likely forced a retreat.

If they kill it, then they just added another reason to be positively wiped away from Earth.

This reasoning is also behind most military actions. If you injure a soldier, you actually incapacitate 2 or 3 soldiers because someone has to bring the fucker to a medic, if you one-shot him, then they will just have another reason to come at you.

Besides, they don't really have the time to go there and see if he is still alive or not while there are others still on their feet.

Your party really doesn't know that it's always better to leave any healing until after the enemies are gone... That's their stupidity then. A smart party would leave him down and drive the enemy off first. Out of combat healing is so much more cost effective, read costs one spell to heal all day, than saving somebody in combat. Also, you could kill the guy just by lobbing some AoE his way even if you're not sure.

Of course it doesn't solve the problem of PC's just never getting hit thanks to high AC and miss chances

That's normal, they are really challenged only by some fights. But this does not mean that the weaker fights become "mopping the floor and laughing" like with those scenes in Lord of the ring at the Helm's keep.

A minor encounter should be easy because parties should be built for front loaded damage as it's the smart way to solve combat. Those little mooks should never get a second shot off. Actually, your system is still flawed, because enemies still need to confirm crits so an enemy with a low attack role is still no threat unless he rolls double 20's.

How do you deal with your main tank having stacked miss chances so anything that gets passes his AC, including crits, just miss him 50%+ of the time?

Why that?

Stacked miss chances are better than simply boosting AC at higher levels. Miss chance works against things like touch attacks which is hard to armor against, prevents grapples from starting, it's just all around better than AC. So if your party tank isn't using miss chances he needs to rethink his build and items.

Only if your players suck, you still haven't dealt with the issue of a party that goes all out with front loaded damage.

Front loaded damage is pointless against reasonably smart enemies. Because it leaves so gaping holes on other sides that you can exploit.
That "AND MY AXE!" guy of yours is toothless against say a spellcasting or ranged or flying enemy (not exactly uncommon at his CR), or a group of ghosts, or a succubus disguised as a bitch at the tavern (no equipment! yay!), or a fucking 4th level aristocrat using his connections to make him Enemy of the Crown or whatever does not need to engage in melee to fuck you in the ass.

How is your front loaded damage useless against flying or ranged attacks? If they are using anything other than AoE ranged attacks then pull out a tower shield and walk behind it, doesn't matter if you aren't proficient, you'll drop it before you attack. If the enemy can fly, then either ask the mage to get you up there too, or let your ranged party members deal with it. A Bow Cleric should have him down in no time.

As for casters why are you assuming that captain front loaded damage doesn't have allies with him to help him deal with things? For that matter why are you assuming he doesn't have a bow? Hell, that charging Goliath was just one example of dealing damage in large chunks. A druid can do just as well and defend himself against spells, while still having the means to deal with, or flat out ignore ghosts.

A succubus at a tavern is a read herring, that's going to fuck anybody who isn't ready. Thankfully it only costs 3,000gp to get an item that always allows you to detect evil so you know better than to go anywhere near her. That 4th level aristocrat could also fuck over anybody at any time, so he's not just front loaded damage guy's problem. His party should also have a guy who can talk to cover for him, maybe somebody who can cast charm or something...

Cover doesn't save you from getting crit, it just gives you a bit of an AC boost which a natural 20 ignores anyway.

Cover boosts stealth as well, and that helps not being detected at all. Also, full cover does negate any attack.
May sound strange but before I had non-melee people just sitting in the light and having a drink while melee did their work.
Being sure that no stray shot would really harm them.

Full cover will only give added stealth to classes focused on it everybody else is still going to get spotted by any reasonable foe, if not then your cleric rogue can just wander up and off him anyway. Full cover also means you're not attacking back, it just lets the enemy set readied actions to murder you when you move.

You're also ignoring the fact that it makes any classes that aim to boost crits significantly more powerful and makes more attacks better than strong attacks.

It was intended. This was to balance the general power of spellcasting classes without using stuff that looks too WoW for us (like books of nine swords).
Also forced a change in PC building, which is always a welcome thing.

You just made a bow wielding Cleric even more broken. Way to go! You can also get a master thrower with a sling putting out 12 shots a round by level 8ish if I'm not mistaken. You just created a whole new world of broken.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:I'm not exactly sure I want to wade into this crap, but I would like to point out something.

Why are we arguing 4E vs 3.xE? If you want to debate the merits of either system, then it's improper to do so with one system's obsolete versions. If you're going to have this debate, then debate 4E vs Pathfinder. Half of the problems with 3E mentioned herein have already been addressed by Pathfinder, so a lot of the arguments amount to bizarre, twisted strawmen on account of railing against problems which have already been fixed. (sucky Fighters, for example)

Pathfinder didn't really fix the fighter mage gap, it also doesn't have the flexibility that 3.5 did so you run into that wall.

lance wrote:If a large amount of encounters are an issue, then the spell casters have things like animate dead, planar binding, dominate X, reserve feats, all day buffs, and then some, to go the duration. A melee character can keep going as long as his hp holds out. Which in D&D is less than a wizard has spells at about level 3 on ward.

As for the rogue searching- Kobold cloistered cleric does it better, trap finding, similar skills, magic to boost said skills.

edit-and the fighting classes can be replaced by trained mules at low levels

Right, right. But it's observations like that last one that make me question the use of the word 'broken' to mean 'potentially unbalanced due to the way the system works.'

Look, I don't mean to slight the thought you've put into this, but is the system really 'broken' in the sense of 'does not work' on account of someone having figured out a way to hack around the system?

Maybe a trained mule would be about as dangerous in a fight as my first level fighter. So what? I don't want to play a trained mule, the DM doesn't want a party that relies on jackasses (in either sense of the word). And my character is, at first level, basically adequate to deal with the stuff a reasonable DM will throw at us. The fact that I can do something under the 3rd Edition ruleset (assuming Pathfinder didn't fix it, since I don't know jack about Pathfinder) doesn't mean I need to do it, that it is compulsory to do it, or that it ruins the game.

If a summoner-wizard can theoretically batter his way through a ridiculous number of encounters per day, whereas a party of swordsmen with no caster support will hit their limits a lot faster... well, I'm having a hard time getting too worked up about this.

I sometimes wonder, if the Internet had been popular in late '70s when AD&D came out, what would have happened. The proliferation of Internet forums devoted to analyzing the game has done a lot to make build analysis and optimization more practical; how long would it have taken for the geek community to look over AD&D, figure out how to "win" it, conclude Gygax was an idiot and the game was "broken?"

I'd give it six months. Maybe less.

Heck, I'll make that a prediction about 5th Edition- which, yes, is likely to just be 4th Edition with the names changed and the rules reshuffled, unless there were a LOT of ideas kicking around for 4th Edition that got left on the cutting room floor when Hasbro-WotC published it. Assuming the system has enough complexity that the PC classes aren't just varying machines for dishing out varying numbers of d6s of damage and kicking opponents from one 'square' to the next, then this is going to happen all over again. About a hundred thousand smart, interested people will descend upon 5th Edition, pore over the rules, find the optimum tactics and strategies for breezing through the game, and proclaim it 'broken' if there are other methods presented as being worthwhile even though those strategies are possible.

I give it six months. Maybe less.

On a more positive note, that seems to be part of the fun- there is a sector of 3rd Edition players who enjoy this about as much as they enjoy playing the game. And it certainly is satisfying to know and grasp the rules of a game so well that the strategies for 'winning' it become trivially easy. But I think that some perspective is lost when we declare a game "broken" because this class of individual has it all figured out.

---

S.L.Acker wrote:Sorry, I was thinking of the Cleric spell Detect Traps which lasts for 1min/level in the book and can be made to last for 24 hours at first level. lance gave a great example of a cleric build that can fully replace a rogue with his cloistered cleric. Thus any player that wants to play an optimal trap finder should just play a tricked out Cloistered Cleric with the right buffs (any touch, fixed range, or personal spells) made to last for 24 hours.

This strikes me as an interesting but pointless abstraction. As a rule, I don't want to play a Trappist monk, I want to play a chancing bastard with burgling experience. Mechanically, the fact that I can dig into Unearthed Arcana and Complete Divine and find a way to make a Trappist monk into a better mine-detector than my chancing bastard... it just doesn't seem relevant to the way I want to use the game.

Every time you say "SMART players would always do THIS," in a game meant to be enjoyable for the flexibility and versatility of how you play it, you make me less convinced that we're playing the game for the same reason. A game that was 'not broken' for your purposes would probably be 'broken' for mine.

Among other things, the utility spells, scrying, and so on would probably have to go because by nature they cannot be easily 'balanced' by abilities granted to more combat-oriented classes. Player abilities would have to become more quantifiable- no more save-or-die spells, just direct damage and ways to impose penalties when the combat-oriented classes can do more or less the same, so that we can mathematically verify that the game is balanced.

And now we're half way to 4th Edition already...

If you pull the rope up and hide in a well enough placed spot then the enemy is going to need a high search check to spot them. Seeing as a smart party realizes that they're still not 100% safe they could also be dicks and do things like setting a second rope trick up elsewhere so the enemy stops searching when they find that one. They could also trap the areas around the one they chose to use, problem solved.

I think it partly comes down to how much of the Evil Overlord list the opposition has read, how professional they are, and how intelligently they use the resources that they, logically, ought to have. Detect Magic is not that hard to use; who uses it heavily, and who doesn't? In a world with as much magic as D&D... even assuming the system was perfectly balanced, I'm not sure someone who lacks the ability or inclination to realize they're being screwed with by a magician counts as a serious opponent.

Also, how is unreasonable that the wizard, in game, would want to rest after his source of power has run down? If he assumes he's reasonably safe then it isn't an issue at all.

It's reasonable, but there are a lot of situations where it isn't practical- they may be on a clock, which is not part of the Standard Dungeon Crawl but is still very possible: "we need to find the Jewel of Might within two days or we may not get back to Westport before the army of Demetrius the Besieger gets there!" Or enemy patrols may make it dangerous to rest anywhere near their base of operations- think "infiltrated the kobold/hobgoblin/ogre mage fortress," not "exploring the gelatinous-cube-haunted ruins."

There are probably other options; those are just the ones that appear off the top of my head.

I remember a passage from the old DM Guide for AD&D that analyzes this very question at great length: looking at different levels of intelligence and organization among a group of monsters, and how those affect what kind of defenses they'll prepare, and how they'll react to the party going away and coming back for another attack. A colony of giant ants will respond less well to the PC's hit and run tactics than a competently led bandit troop or the fortress of a professional army.

by level 2 you have locate object

Yeah, situational, one-shot and there are much more useful spells at that level.

How do you define more useful? This spell gives you an easy way to tail somebody by doing something as simple as paying him with a marked coin. If your games really involve all these people hiding behind organizations this gets you the locations of the ones that aren't in plain sight.

It's situationally useful- some days, a cunning 3rd or 4th level wizard will have it ready because he expects to need it. Other days... not so much, I would think.

At higher levels you can afford to carry more 'utility belt' spells around with you, but making a habit of doing a lot of it will eat into your ability to endlessly spam the spells that let you breeze through combats.

Honestly, many of these optimization schemes (not just yours) seem to rely very heavily on the wizard's ability to tailor his response to unexpected situations. I don't think it's all that hard to see how that assumption can break down in play. Prepared for a set piece action the wizard becomes dominant; confronted with the unexpected or the complex, less so.

Which, when I think about it, isn't entirely unreasonable as a feature of the game, though obviously it can get taken to extremes where the wizard is played with so much OOC genre savvy and IC intelligence-gathering ability that he makes the party invincible.

Simon_Jester wrote:Right, right. But it's observations like that last one that make me question the use of the word 'broken' to mean 'potentially unbalanced due to the way the system works.'

Look, I don't mean to slight the thought you've put into this, but is the system really 'broken' in the sense of 'does not work' on account of someone having figured out a way to hack around the system?

No, and that wasn't my claim.

Maybe a trained mule would be about as dangerous in a fight as my first level fighter. So what? I don't want to play a trained mule, the DM doesn't want a party that relies on jackasses (in either sense of the word). And my character is, at first level, basically adequate to deal with the stuff a reasonable DM will throw at us. The fact that I can do something under the 3rd Edition ruleset (assuming Pathfinder didn't fix it, since I don't know jack about Pathfinder) doesn't mean I need to do it, that it is compulsory to do it, or that it ruins the game.

It has less to do with what you want to play, especially as how you won't really be playing the mule. You'd be playing a person who bought the mule, in the party that has to divide loot. If the 8gp mule does your job why should the rest of the party bring you along? What a reasonable DM throws at you is subjective. A fighter might be fine in some parties, in others he's going to be dead weight.

Honestly, many of these optimization schemes (not just yours) seem to rely very heavily on the wizard's ability to tailor his response to unexpected situations. I don't think it's all that hard to see how that assumption can break down in play. Prepared for a set piece action the wizard becomes dominant; confronted with the unexpected or the complex, less so.

A wizard can be crazy prepared using divinations, versitile spells, and abilities like uncanny forethought which lets him cast any spell from his spell book a few times per day. Reduced DC and caster level, but that doesn't really matter with most utility spells. Plus he has the ability to actually swap out what he does unlike the fighter who is pretty set and can change 1 feat a level.

lance wrote:No, and that wasn't my claim.

Oh. OK. I may be misreacting because all this triggers memories of long conversations I've had on Giant in the Playground in years past. Sorry if I was getting in your face there.

It has less to do with what you want to play, especially as how you won't really be playing the mule. You'd be playing a person who bought the mule, in the party that has to divide loot. If the 8gp mule does your job why should the rest of the party bring you along? What a reasonable DM throws at you is subjective. A fighter might be fine in some parties, in others he's going to be dead weight.

Personally, I think a reasonable DM would indulge the players' desire to play heroic swordspersons. It's not as if there aren't a hundred good stories to be told about them. As to why the rest of the party brings the heroic swordsperson along? Welll... maybe because demihumans are social animals. Or because in-world not all wizards have that optimized build that lets them carry around a midget in a Bag of Holding to churn out infinite scrolls for them, so they do try to conserve magic and use it only against opponents that would be hard to defeat by hitting them with clubs.

Now, one legitimate point is that even within a single PC level there's a wide range of ability, from degree of optimization. That's a bug in the game, though it can be exploited to create differently-flavored campaigns. If both protagonists and antagonists use optimized builds, the world at 5th level looks very different from the way it looks in a more stereotypical campaign... but who's to say that one play style is more valid or less valid than the other?

Honestly, many of these optimization schemes (not just yours) seem to rely very heavily on the wizard's ability to tailor his response to unexpected situations. I don't think it's all that hard to see how that assumption can break down in play. Prepared for a set piece action the wizard becomes dominant; confronted with the unexpected or the complex, less so.

A wizard can be crazy prepared using divinations, versitile spells, and abilities like uncanny forethought which lets him cast any spell from his spell book a few times per day. Reduced DC and caster level, but that doesn't really matter with most utility spells. Plus he has the ability to actually swap out what he does unlike the fighter who is pretty set and can change 1 feat a level.

Yes, which is why in the next paragraph I said:

"Which, when I think about it, isn't entirely unreasonable as a feature of the game, though obviously it can get taken to extremes where the wizard is played with so much OOC genre savvy and IC intelligence-gathering ability that he makes the party invincible."

Simon_Jester wrote:This strikes me as an interesting but pointless abstraction. As a rule, I don't want to play a Trappist monk, I want to play a chancing bastard with burgling experience. Mechanically, the fact that I can dig into Unearthed Arcana and Complete Divine and find a way to make a Trappist monk into a better mine-detector than my chancing bastard... it just doesn't seem relevant to the way I want to use the game.

Every time you say "SMART players would always do THIS," in a game meant to be enjoyable for the flexibility and versatility of how you play it, you make me less convinced that we're playing the game for the same reason. A game that was 'not broken' for your purposes would probably be 'broken' for mine.

Among other things, the utility spells, scrying, and so on would probably have to go because by nature they cannot be easily 'balanced' by abilities granted to more combat-oriented classes. Player abilities would have to become more quantifiable- no more save-or-die spells, just direct damage and ways to impose penalties when the combat-oriented classes can do more or less the same, so that we can mathematically verify that the game is balanced.

And now we're half way to 4th Edition already...

It's true that in many games people want to play Gord the Downtrodden Rogue, or Jarric the Silver-Tongued. Mechanically, however, a well built Cleric will outdo those characters in near every way. It also logically follows that in a world where such classes have a mechanical advantage most successful 'rogues' will be Clerics; or if magic is made more rare, then the top 'rogues' will be Clerics. In a world with an equal amount of adventuring classes power will be heavily skewed to the point where not going to mage college/joining the clergy will make you a second class citizen. Thus your desire to be a 'rogue' of the class rogue makes you a not very well off sort in any logically ordered D&D world.

My comments about smart players should likely read, "Players who want their concept to be as mechanically optimized as possible for their chosen role." However I'm mainly using them to show that even with house rules and vastly restricted magic items, magic using classes are vastly above martial and skill based classes.

It's not entirely true that you would need to cut utility from mages to make them balanced. If one added a reputation mechanic that had actual effects in the game world then men of the church, held away from the world, and mages from their ivory towers, would have less influence on things right out of the gate. Adding in fluff about how people view the power of mages and how they are tightly monitored and they have a lot of people just waiting for them to slip up. One mechanical and one fluff based change and you can make playing a mage less attractive.

I think it partly comes down to how much of the Evil Overlord list the opposition has read, how professional they are, and how intelligently they use the resources that they, logically, ought to have. Detect Magic is not that hard to use; who uses it heavily, and who doesn't? In a world with as much magic as D&D... even assuming the system was perfectly balanced, I'm not sure someone who lacks the ability or inclination to realize they're being screwed with by a magician counts as a serious opponent.

I don't doubt that some monsters would sit right outside where the rope is and camp the exit. That's why things like decoy rope tricks placed to fool people come in handy. Then you get into a cold war of counter-countercounter-countercountercounter type game planning against intelligent foes.

It's reasonable, but there are a lot of situations where it isn't practical- they may be on a clock, which is not part of the Standard Dungeon Crawl but is still very possible: "we need to find the Jewel of Might within two days or we may not get back to Westport before the army of Demetrius the Besieger gets there!" Or enemy patrols may make it dangerous to rest anywhere near their base of operations- think "infiltrated the kobold/hobgoblin/ogre mage fortress," not "exploring the gelatinous-cube-haunted ruins."

There are probably other options; those are just the ones that appear off the top of my head.

I remember a passage from the old DM Guide for AD&D that analyzes this very question at great length: looking at different levels of intelligence and organization among a group of monsters, and how those affect what kind of defenses they'll prepare, and how they'll react to the party going away and coming back for another attack. A colony of giant ants will respond less well to the PC's hit and run tactics than a competently led bandit troop or the fortress of a professional army.

Again, I don't disagree with some things being time sensitive, but as a person playing a caster I would be a bit miffed if the DM was constantly preventing me from using my class features (such as scribe scroll which mages get straight away) and denied me access to things that allow me to have fun in encounters all day (such as either resting, or having access to wands). Then again, an intelligence 16+ mage should be able to think of a way around his limitations, so getting a mechanical midget in a sack to crank out scrolls could be what he comes up with. Thus resting might not be an issue to a forward thinking mage with a series of magical factories in his backpack.

It's situationally useful- some days, a cunning 3rd or 4th level wizard will have it ready because he expects to need it. Other days... not so much, I would think.

At higher levels you can afford to carry more 'utility belt' spells around with you, but making a habit of doing a lot of it will eat into your ability to endlessly spam the spells that let you breeze through combats.

Usually this is where simply buying up cheap scrolls or getting wands helps the mage do his thing with greater ease. However in a game where items are restricted we need to do craftier things. Jinni wish farms come to mind in this case...

Honestly, many of these optimization schemes (not just yours) seem to rely very heavily on the wizard's ability to tailor his response to unexpected situations. I don't think it's all that hard to see how that assumption can break down in play. Prepared for a set piece action the wizard becomes dominant; confronted with the unexpected or the complex, less so.

Which, when I think about it, isn't entirely unreasonable as a feature of the game, though obviously it can get taken to extremes where the wizard is played with so much OOC genre savvy and IC intelligence-gathering ability that he makes the party invincible.

Yeah, a good wizard with a player that knows his stuff is deadly. Though your above super genius level mage almost deserves OOC knowledge to compensate for the gap between the player and his character.

Hey! Instead of hashing out this topic yet again, lets just take a look at the long-debated topic of class versatility with The Tier List! Seriously, this topic has been debated to death and that list is the most reasonable assessment of class versatility, all other things being equal.

Anyhow, I think the best ideas people have had recently are not so much "should be 4E" or "should be 3E" but more "should have large amounts of versatility." I know classless systems get brought up alot, or story-teller systems, but D&D is there to fill the class-based RPGs people want, so they should probably stick to it. I think what would be best would be to get the people behind the alternative systems from Tomb of Battle or Magic of Incarnum and have them hash out some ideas. Oh, and hire much, much more competent editors. Oh, sweet lord, the editing.

I think the basic incompatibility of our approaches, SLAcker, is that I don't actually want my characters to be "best;" I want them to be good. Good enough that they can do impressive things (on the scale of whatever the party is doing at the moment), but not 'optimized' in the sense of "I want my Diplomacy score so high I can convince a man that he is a ham sandwich and send him wandering off in search of mustard." I like playing characters with limitations, because the nature of the limits tells me a lot about the nature of the person.

If the DM and the Monster Manuals are kind enough to supply my fighter with things he can fight meaningfully, I don't really mind that much if the wizard's actions have more to do with shaping the outcome of the battle- within reason, and assuming this doesn't become a serious IC point of friction.


Anyway, I think Erik has a point- the real key to D&D is going to be combining versatility with a class-based progression system. 4th Edition seems to have suffered from its lack of versatility; they made it basically "balanced," but at the cost of stripping out everything not easily quantified from the system and turning it into a bland world that feels like it exists largely to provide a place to stand while doing your dungeon crawl.

My view is mostly that any system which provides enough diversity is apt to become unbalanced when analyzed by a million geeks that can all communicate with each other online. As long as some options are better than others, those options will be found, indexed, and cross-referenced until the One True Build is found.

And I don't think that's a major fault of the system, because it flows out of the system's diversity, which is in itself a good thing.

Simon_Jester wrote:I think the basic incompatibility of our approaches, SLAcker, is that I don't actually want my characters to be "best;" I want them to be good. Good enough that they can do impressive things (on the scale of whatever the party is doing at the moment), but not 'optimized' in the sense of "I want my Diplomacy score so high I can convince a man that he is a ham sandwich and send him wandering off in search of mustard." I like playing characters with limitations, because the nature of the limits tells me a lot about the nature of the person.

If the DM and the Monster Manuals are kind enough to supply my fighter with things he can fight meaningfully, I don't really mind that much if the wizard's actions have more to do with shaping the outcome of the battle- within reason, and assuming this doesn't become a serious IC point of friction.


Anyway, I think Erik has a point- the real key to D&D is going to be combining versatility with a class-based progression system. 4th Edition seems to have suffered from its lack of versatility; they made it basically "balanced," but at the cost of stripping out everything not easily quantified from the system and turning it into a bland world that feels like it exists largely to provide a place to stand while doing your dungeon crawl.

My view is mostly that any system which provides enough diversity is apt to become unbalanced when analyzed by a million geeks that can all communicate with each other online. As long as some options are better than others, those options will be found, indexed, and cross-referenced until the One True Build is found.

And I don't think that's a major fault of the system, because it flows out of the system's diversity, which is in itself a good thing.

It might be a difference born from me mainly DMing. I had interest in the game and got my friends into it, but I had no experienced group to shape my DMing style. The first character I ever had was a friend who rolled up a Half-Gold Dragon Fighter, and that kind of set the tone from there. My players are a bit on the power gamey side, but they know how to have a good time with things and as DM I accept what my players play style is and plan for any plan I have to go out the window in short order.

One example was when I made a badass dungeon and put an adamantine door on it. I figured that the door would hint at how nasty the things in side were and how much loot might be within. The party pried the thing off it's hinges and never went inside at all.

My characters, when I get to play, tend to be in the middle of the parties power curve. Also, if I was really a power gamer, would Bryan be without resist magic right now?

I'm not saying you are, I'm saying that it's a stylistic thing. I've never been given specific cause to worry about it, so I don't preoccupy my mind with it so much, which is admittedly probably a luxury for the infrequent player.

Come to think of it, basically all my DMing experience was in my teens, and my groups didn't contain a lot of people inclined to powergame.

Simon_Jester wrote:I'm not saying you are, I'm saying that it's a stylistic thing. I've never been given specific cause to worry about it, so I don't preoccupy my mind with it so much, which is admittedly probably a luxury for the infrequent player.

Come to think of it, basically all my DMing experience was in my teens, and my groups didn't contain a lot of people inclined to powergame.

That works.

I think this thread really shows how where you start and the people you start with shape your perception of the game.

------

Also, someone_else, sorry if I came off as overly hostile. It wasn't intended.

S.L.Acker wrote:It might be a difference born from me mainly DMing. I had interest in the game and got my friends into it, but I had no experienced group to shape my DMing style. The first character I ever had was a friend who rolled up a Half-Gold Dragon Fighter, and that kind of set the tone from there. My players are a bit on the power gamey side, but they know how to have a good time with things and as DM I accept what my players play style is and plan for any plan I have to go out the window in short order.

I'm not sure how you can use a half-dragon character as an example of powergaming, barring very specific exceptions of which half-dragons aren't, if your intent is to powergame anything with a level adjustment of more than +1 is a waste of class levels.

Simon_Jester, I believe that the issue with 3.5E casters is not so much that they can be optimised to break the game, but that they are so inherently powerful that they often break the game completely by accident. A player can decide to try out a character focusing in these fancy "save or die" spells that they've heard so much about, and will proceed to crush all opposition even if this was not their intent. The player can decide to roll a Druid and take Natural Spell at level 6 (since it's an obvious choice) and will similarly proceed to be far more powerful than their comrades. The player can choose to play a Truenamer and cry themselves to sleep. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Even single spells can do horrible things to party balance and the game's plot. A medium-level caster can easily afford to spend the majority of their low-level spells on utility spells such as knock and make the party Rogue utterly redundant at their lock-picking job (several minutes to take 20 on the skill check, versus one round to cast knock is not a difficult choice to make). Fly and related spells negate the vast majority of natural and artificial terrain at a very low level with no reasonable way to counter it before medium levels. Protection From Arrows invalidates a whole class of potential combatants with a negligible investment of resources.
All of these effects originated from a single minor choice, but are quite capable of "breaking" a game all by themselves without a hint of optimisation. This is, I believe, the most major issue with 3.5E casters, not the fact that they can be optimised into an unkillable one-person party or minor deity.

And at high levels, non-casters become utterly reliant on casters.
A non-caster can't compete with a casters fly-spell, or with his teleporation. He has no way to bypass a Wall of Force, or to get to another plane. And so on.

Yes, there are magic items - but those are also crafted by casters (Pathfinder at least allows good non-caster crafters to create magical items).

D&D high-level adventuring (almost) doesn't work without casters. They get game-changing abilities, while non-casters only get better at their given job.


4E tried to balance this by turning all those game-changers into rituals, removing the worst of them. Of course that massively changed the style of D&D, which was understandably a source of complaint.

General Schatten wrote:

S.L.Acker wrote:It might be a difference born from me mainly DMing. I had interest in the game and got my friends into it, but I had no experienced group to shape my DMing style. The first character I ever had was a friend who rolled up a Half-Gold Dragon Fighter, and that kind of set the tone from there. My players are a bit on the power gamey side, but they know how to have a good time with things and as DM I accept what my players play style is and plan for any plan I have to go out the window in short order.

I'm not sure how you can use a half-dragon character as an example of powergaming, barring very specific exceptions of which half-dragons aren't, if your intent is to powergame anything with a level adjustment of more than +1 is a waste of class levels.

It was less an example of power gaming and more an indication of the types of characters I get to deal with. Also, that was a first ever character, my players know all about Tauric Shadow template stacking even if they blissfully choose not to use it.

Zinegata wrote:First rule previews come out in 3 weeks actually.

If they are far enough along in the process to already have mechanics to test, WotC either had this project going for a fair bit of time already or this will be Edition 4.5 with a fancy wrapper. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I was hoping for something more then the soul-less leveling of the classes that 4th edition brought about and the boredom of having a MMO translated to Pen and Paper. Have there been any rumors if they are going back to a more 2nd or 3rd edition "feel" for the game or blazing gloriously into the future by doubling down on the 4th edition style?

Well, let me just say that I'm aware of the big "magic-wielding characters dominate" problem of 3rd Edition, and still do not consider 3rd Edition "broken" in the sense of "having fun." Whereas 4th Edition seems to be- the complaints revolving around it have a lot to do with the lack of fun created by stripping out all the nuances and detail.

Hey everyone.

I am planning on posting this to Wizards of the Coast, and wanted to get everyone's opinion on it.

An Essay to Wizards of the Coast.

It was with a certain amount of, multiple emotions, that I saw the announcement of next edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

The first was curiosity. What direction would the game take? The second was satisfaction. I make no bones that I did not like anything to do with Dungeons and Dragons fourth edition, and the changes it brought to this hobby. That includes in continuality, game mechanics, or setting fluff. I liked the Forgotten Realms the way it was, thank you. And if I wanted to play WoW or Everquest, I’d have had accounts on those years ago.

However, I’m not here to complain about 4th edition. I’m here to give a detail explaination of my hopes and expectations, and how I would go about accomplishing them, for Fifth edition.

But first, my background with this game.

I am 35 years old, and I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons when I was about 12. I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons for approximately 23 years. During that time, I played with most of my friends, my future wife, my sister and some of her friends, my father, and even 'friends of a friend' I only met once or twice.

I have played every incarnation of the game published up to Fourth Edition. I also Dungeon/Game Master bi-monthly games with my friends, as well as bi-monthly games with just my wife.

I have also collected, in one for or another, every single piece of published material for Dungeons and Dragons. This includes the entirety of Dragon Magazine, Dungeon Magazine, most of Polyhedron, most of the original Judge’s Guild stuff, and every piece of RPGA stuff I have been able to get my hands on. I will admit, these are mostly electronic at this point. But I still have my original Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk Boxed sets, and a bookcase worth of old D&D materials.

However, my entire 3.0/3.5 Collection is hard copy. I had to buy a new bookcase just to hold them.

I introduced my wife and most of my friends to the game. Two of the members of my current gaming group I have known since I was 14, and we have been playing in the current incarnation of our group since a few months after the release of Third Edition (this was one more of happenstance, not planning). One of the other members came back to it after going away for college, under the condition we were not playing 4th edition (he made the same World of Warcraft comparison I did). I hope to one day, fate willing, to have kids and introduce them to the hobby as well. I have also meet new friends via 'looking for player' ads on websites. Including 1 guy that became a very good friend and helped me renovate my house without asking for anything beyond feeding him.

My wife and I have been running a continuous campaign, that is just the two of us, for approximately 16 years. We’ve been romantically involved for 14, and married for 5. Actually, I should correct that, we reset the campaign when we switched to 3rd edition (about 1 month after it came out) in recognition of how badly we had garbled it with bad book-keeping, damaged or missing character sheets, etc. It’s multi generational (and rewrites of the past characters), and we’ve “adventured” three generations of the same family group, with 1 “redo” of a group when we were not satisfied with the over-all story. (It just didn’t work in the end). One of the members of this family, the 'great grandfather' of the 3rd generation, is my 2nd D&D character. I've been using him, in some for or the other, since I was 13.

Now then…

My journey into and within Third Edition
When third edition was announced, at first, I was very hesitant with the idea. I liked AD&D as it stood at the time. Sure, it was a little, mechancially questionable in places, but nothing that a house rule from a Dungeon Master with a few braincells couldn’t handle.

As I watched 3rd edition unfold, with the information we were given, I was intrigued. Many mechanical elements I’d wondered about over the years were being incorporated. Armor Class ranging from High to low was replaced by ‘Higher is better’, and THACO was removed, simplying combat math and speeding up the game. To Hit charts were removed. Monsters had variable hit dice like classes, and monsters could take classes. Monsters had stats beyond intelligence, and ability scores were expanded beyond ’25 is maximum’.

The game wasn’t just simplified. It was streamlined and expanded upon.

By the time the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide were published (let alone the Monster Manual), I was eager to get a hold of them, but they flew off the local gaming shelves very fast. When I did get a hold of them, I read them over, and I was very pleased. D&D had also became more plug and play. It wasn’t as fixed and focused. No more dual classing or racial level limitations, and character progression stacked.

If I wanted to play a Human fighter for a few levels, then switch to cleric, and then switch to monk, I could, and it wasn’t being penalized anymore for it. If I wanted to fight unarmed in that scenario, I could, with my fighter and clerical combat training aiding it. That kicked ass!

And the plug-and-play aspect of it was great. Custom rules could be created and dropped on without any problem, and removed and replaced just as easy if they were problematic. I also saw that the system would allow for a lot of customization of characters that didn’t require bending over backwards to accomplish. Kinda of like a home computer, hence my plug-and-play comparison.

I enjoyed the changes to the campaign settings as well.

In Greyhawk, the Wars were over and things more or less stabilized.

In the Realms, the setting was given a kick in the ass without a dreaded “Realms Shaking Event”.

In Dragonlance, the dreadful ‘Age of Mortals’ was put to rest, and an good explanation for it was offered.

Ravenloft wasn’t handled as a setting by Wizards of the Coast, but at least most of the material for it was updated to third edition.

Dark Sun eventually got a clean-up and update.

I was disappointed that Mystara didn’t see much love outside of the ‘Savage Tide’ adventure path (and even then, indirectly at best), but still, it’s the thought that counts.

Heck, even Spelljammer got a partial clean up in Polyhedron. (I’ll admit that overhaul of the Spelljammer ships made ship to ship combat annoying as hell, but still, it’s the thought that counts).

Over the time, I saw some of my favourite adventures get sequels and updates. Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, the 3.5 version of the original Ravenloft adventure, the Shadows of the Abyss trilogy in Dungeon Magazine, and of course, the Savage Tide adventure path took us back to the Isle of Dread. Then there's the updates on the website for Tome of Horrors and White Plume Mountain.

Wizards of the Coast not only provided a mechanically good game system (no system is perfect), it honoured the previous 20+ years of Dungeons of Dragons by keeping it going, just with their own ‘touch’ to it. If D&D was a car, they didn't slap a new coat of paint on it or give you a new car. They buffed out the dings, fixed the damage to the car, and put in a new engine. But it still 'felt' the same, even if the stick shift no longer felt sluggish moving out of park.

Combined with my like of updating older edition adventures, my group was set. Some adventures, we’ve played using the rules from every edition of the game now. I can’t tell you how many times they saved that Goat candidate from that Golem in Greyhawk City. They even Voted for him too.

Over the course of third edition, I purchased every non-Eberron Wizards of the Coast book. I was not knocking Eberron with that, just I already focused on two campaign settings, and didn’t want to toss in a third or fourth at the time. I also picked up third party D20 System books as well. Specifically Mongoose Publishings generic books, Alderac Entertainments books, Green Ronins, and Sword and Sorcery.

Quite frankly, I walk into the local gaming store I used for that, and I still get a discount from them from all that.

I stopped collecting third party D20 System books (partially from lack of use, partially from the fact PDFs take up less room on my shelves), and started collecting D&D Miniatures with the release of the Colossal Red Dragon. At this point, I own all the DDM from Harbringer to Night Below. I’d own all of the rest of them, but I stopped buying around the time of Desert of Desolation because we were planning to move and needed the money for renovations. I’ve since restarted that, and I’m about 80 sigh of completing the Desert+ sets. I also picked up all the Icons, even that dorky looking version of Orcus, and the Collector Sets. I had to install new shelves in my game room for them. At 2 feet by 8 feet, they fill up two of them and are about 2/3 of the way to filling up the third.

Fourth Edition
When Fourth Edition was announced, I went through the same initial reaction that I did to Third Edition, but with more enthusiasm. My wife and I discuss things at length, and decided if Fourth Edition worked for us, we’d download the conversion book, take the core books out from the local public library, and try re-running an adventure with established characters. If it worked better (emotionally or mechanically) then before, we’d update.

So, you can imagine my reaction when I read on the WotC Website that there would be no Conversion Book, and that your hope was you’d stop played 3.5 and just switch to a new Fourth Edition game.

That raised a rather large red flag in my mind. However, during a discussion with fellow gamers, they said a conversion guide might not be needed.

So, when Fourth Edition came out, I checked the local library during my lunch break (fortunately, my office building at the time was literally across the street) about 2 weeks later, and there was the PHBK for 4E. I checked it out, and sat down and read it at my desk that afternoon. Fortunately, the project I was working on the time was one of those ‘go until this part is done, and then wait for the reply from testing and the manager’.

After work, I returned the book to the library, and went home. And I told my wife my opinion straight out:
“That’s not Dungeons and Dragon’s. It’s the unholy spawn of conspiracy between World of Warcraft, Everquest, Ultima Online, and an old M.U.D”

A little harsh, but it expressed my distaste nicely.

Why the Hate?
I think the best summary of it is this;

I could build a character using any of the classes in Basic D&D, and then, depending, port it over to AD&D, AD&D2E. I could build any character in the previous systems, and thanks to the conversion guide, update them to 3rd Edition/3.5 with a minimum of ‘loss’. Sure, some of Kits where never converted, and so was a lot of other ‘crunch’/mechanics, but converting them was a breeze. And as the various expansions came out, more was converted, updated, or could be used as a substitute.

“You want to use your old Elven Fighter/Mage with the Bladesinger Kit? Okay, that would be a Elf with 4 Levels in Fighter, 1 or 2 levels in Wizards, and the rest in Bladesinger. It might take use 30 to 40 minutes to retool him. Game is at 6, get here at 4:30, then we’ll have Pizza.”

Fourth Edition? Not that I can remember. IT was a hole new game system, and it didn't even feel the same. 10 minutes to cast Knock? What gives?

So, I did not buy any Fourth Edition books. I didn’t bother checking out the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, as the Grand History of the Realms had already informed me that the Forgotten Realms as I knew it was gone.

The transition from any of the previous incarnations of Dungeons and Dragons to Third Edition was relatively smooth. There was no transition to Fourth Edition. From my perspective, and the 5 million plus customers lost, there was no transition, there was a car accident. If Dungeons and Dragons was a road, you hit a break wall at 100 miles an hour, totalled your car, and then go into a new vehicle you had to learn to operate, and then go on a different road.

So, what would I like to see in the next edition of the game, mechanically, then?
First, put Fourth Edition on the ‘ideas’ pile, not the mechanics pile.

Now, take 3.5 Edition, and clean it up. Make 5th edition what Fourth edition should have been. What third edition was to the previous editions. A clean up and simplification of the rules. Put out a conversion guide for 3.X to 5.0

Then, take a look at the Fourth Edition books, and take the new class abilities from them, and turn them into Alternate Class Features, Substitution Levels, and Feats. That would allow the Fourth edition players to rebuild their characters into the new rule set.

And massively playtest it. Put out a call for players of Fourth Edition, and those that didn’t update to it and stuck with 3.5. Playtest it until everyone is sick of playtesting and want’s to see the final products. Encourage Character Op discussions on it, and adjust the rules to prevent powergaming.

Put conversions of the 3rd and 4th edition character material on the Website, and slowly put it into print form. This will allow for more playtesting, and more fixing before it even reaches print.

In other words, support the past of the game into the new version of it, and make it so that the people that spent hundreds or thousands of dollars and either edition can actually use their investments.

Also, offer the ability to download Watermarked PDF versions of the new books, cheaper then the hard copies. A lot of people use computers for book-keeping in RPGs now, and pulling the books up in Adobe Acrobat off a thumb drive is a lot easier then lugging around the sourcebooks, or flipping to the right page.

Or even better, put Watermarked PDFs you have to register on a CD with each book. Or 'anyone that orders the book from Wizards of the Coast directly, can order the PDF for $2.00'. That would cut out the distributors, and raise your profit margins.

Also, have a character generator program (ala Lone Wolf’s Hero Lab), ready to go with the rules, and release updates for it with every book and Web Article. Hell, liscence it out to Lone Wolf and let them do it, but you must have computer support.

What would I like to see from the settings?
Well, I’ll address that by setting

Greyhawk –
Some actual support for it, and not in the form of ‘generic organizations and source books’.
Put out a book about the setting, and another about Greyhawk City at the very least.

Forgotten Realms –
Hit stop button (or finish the current story arcs), and reload a backup from before the Spellplague. In the novels, have Mystra resurrected say ‘Oh hells no’ to that and afterwards. She used to be the Goddess of time, let her use that. If you still want to advance the timeline, go ahead, but don’t do it by destroying or nullifying 20 years of story and source material. And if you do advance the timeline, include a explaination and timeline as to what actually happened.

And anyone that says ‘The Realms is to detailed/complicated/complex’, don’t hire them to write novels for it or support it, or at least have their material looked over by someone that knows the Realms backwards and forwards. Or just ignore them.

Eberron –
Ask the original creator. I have no knowledge of Fourth Edition Eberron, and have barely looked at the Eberron books besides looking for character material. What I have seen does interest me, but until my group campaign ends it’s current story arc, the odds of an Eberron campaign are low. Maybe as a side excursion, but I’m getting off topic.

Other Campaign Settings –
Run a poll on the website, including a mail in one. Ask ‘Which Campaign Setting would you like to see get support for next?’ And list the old campaign settings. Greyhawk (after the first two books), Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Planescape, Spelljammer, Mystara, etc. Heck, allow right in votes, and votes at conventions over the course of 6 months (start with GenCon obviously). And whatever the winner is, get their old design team back, and go for it.

At the next GenCon, release a primary setting book or two, and maybe an adventure or adventure path (depending on how many votes come in). If sales are good, keep supporting that setting until sales decline.
And when it’s released, restart the poll for the other campaign settings.

For all Campaigns -
More adventure paths. They make things so easy for the Dungeon Masters. When I was running the original 3.0 adventure series, or the adventure paths from Dungeon Magazine, I barely had to do any work besides re-reading stat blocks on occasion.

And the Minis Game?
The lack of support for the Minis game after DDM 2.0 was a major sore spot for a lot of people. Many people spent more on minis then they did on source books!

So, if you are going to support the minis as a seperate game, get update cards for every single miniature ready. And actually, adapting the fourth edition rules into the mini game would probably be a good idea. The minis game and core D&D game do not have to be interchangeable in mechanics.

Also, to maximize sales, linking up the miniatures game releases with products would be a good idea as well. New monster book coming out? Well, over the next two miniature game releases, we’ll be covering most of the monsters from it.

In that regard, take a que from Pazio and how it’s handling the Pathfinder miniatures game. The miniatures will support the books. New monsters in a splat book or adventure path? Here are the miniatures for it. Oh, and if you buy a case, odds are, you’ll get the entire set.

The alternative would be to go the Heroscape route, and release the monsters in fixed configuration packages. Also, being able to order singles of a monster directly from you (or from the local distributor) would be a great thing. That way, instead of having to buy a package 4 times to get the number of a monster you want, and ending up with extra miniatures and paying more, you just go ‘I need 4 Iron Golems for the adventure I am planning on running next in 2 weeks. I better go to the gaming store and order them’, or if you are running a pre-planned story, you could order them further in advance.

Also, support the game. Start a DDM miniatures league, and support it. Prizes, tournaments, etc. Even if the store that want’s to host one can only generate 4 players, that’s still enough for a small tournament.

Would this cause me to come back as a customer?
I honestly have no idea. If I could drop my 3.X stuff into 5.0 and play (essentially just replacing the PHBK + DMG, the approach Pathfinder took), I probably would. I might not do it immediately, likely waiting to hearing reviews from people online and face-to-face, and possibly until whatever story arc my groups are working on have started to wind down (people don’t like switching horses mid-stream, etc), but I’d be inclined towards it.

And if you did that, even if I don’t buy the core books, I’d be all over the setting books.

One more thing..
Oh, and so you know, Paizo already did all this, and I switched over to Pathfinder already, without hesitation once I read the corebook.

What I said above, that's what you need to do to lure me back as a customer.

In the meantime: Fear my Werewolf Pathfinder Barbarian 20, WOTC Frenzied Berserker 10

Gah, Double Post.

I think this is a very solid analysis of how to do this, Solauren. I am not an especially active player, so the degree to which D&D intertwines with your life is somewhat foreign to my experience, but I understand how you feel about it and I think you make a strong case.

[reflects randomly]

Large corporations (like Hasbro) have a deep tendency to want to standardize how they treat all products, genres, brands, and market sectors. The problem with that is that all their standardization is geared to the average customer, and no one is average. 10% of people differ from the average in this way, 5% differ in that way, 20% differ in the other way... the average man is just an amalgamated blob you get by cancelling out all the diversity and flexibility that makes us human.

So a product marketed to the "average customer" will never really feel right to any actual living person, any more than a "one size fits all" shirt will actually be well fitted to any one person.

I would very much agree with with complaint of the lack of continuity between 3rd and 4th ed the lack of conversion and the underlying change to how the game worked killed the product.

The problem now is that if 5th ed follows on from 4th you keep your 4th ed players but further alienate 3rd ed, if 5th ed plunges back into 3rd ed then you might loose your 4th ed players (the people who are buying your product now) in order to possible gain people from the 3rd ed how are playing pathfinder now, if 5th ed goes off into a different direction entirely then you loose both 3rd and 4th ed lovers.

Seporate rant

A problem I've had with D&D and with many other role play games is the fluff to rules ratio in source books. Personally I like my books to be fluff heavy 80 or 90% preferably. Maybe its that I'm not very imaginative but I have difficulty in coming up with new idea's by myself, however, I can mix and match ideas from different things and come up with something which might be better than its components, some roman history here, a section from an old WFRP book on elven phycology and some things about V trancing in Order of the stick and I put together a new idea on how an elven civilisation might work. I dont think I've ever run a game in a published setting but I have books for most of them and grab the bits I want. I loved the old world of darkness clan/tribe/kith/tradition books and they only had 3-4 pages of rules in a 60 page book. My favourite source books are oWOD mage the book of worlds (I dont even like th umbra much but mages in space, the land of nod, the attrocity realm, mirror universes get me thinking), Shadowrun Dunklezan legacy of a dragon (dozens of little things that might be important) and nWOD intruders (evil creapy things books, ideas, places, people, all just a little wrong) all full of ideas no one's going to use them all in one campaign but there's something there you can use for any campaign. I like ideas but dont want them pinned down with rules which make them harder to fit together.

D&D has always been more rule heavy, creatures all need stat blocks at least but 3rd ed started to get a bit overkill for me, every book was a few pages background, a dozen new spells, a dozen prestigue classes, some items, a few creatures mostly stat blocks rather than details of what they are like, how they live etc, and that was about that. The settings that had the most potential to me spell jammer and Planescape faided away. 4th ed seemed even worse (I dont have many books so I might be wrong) background became shorter and more generic and books bacame more full of pages of monster stats, class abilities and such. I understand the idea of leaving the setting more up to the GM but any GM who slavishly follows the exact setting in a book isn't doing it right. To an extent I dont want my players to have to much chooice mechanically (role play is up to them) the more options they have the more I have to cram into the background, 7 classes OK, I can fit that in most of them are fairly general, I need some sort of mages guild an organised religion, maybe some compatative fighting schools which teach things like fighters, monks, rangers, but if we have a players who's half kolbold and makes clockwork monsters, one who uses magic powered by captured demons and one who kills people in their dreams I now have to see how I can fit this into the setting particularly if they arrive mid game (I know I could just ban them and I often do but it seems a bit nastly if someone's set their heart of a class or race, maybe I'm to soft).

I've forgotten the point I was making in the first place mostly, generally I want less rules and more background / setting for my games and D&D seems to be working away from this.

End of rant