D&D General Hot Take: D&D Has Not Recovered From 2E to 3.0 Transition

[Oofta]

Yeahhhh...in fairness, someone said something couldn't be done before! It wasn't (just) my fault!!

Did I say it couldn't be done? I said that I didn't like the way minions worked.

 

[Clint_L]

OP kind of lost me at Fighter being a bottom tier class. Not on any tier ranking list I've seen, and not in my experience!

1e did sell out 2e by about 2:1, incidentally.

I don't know what it means to say the game hasn't recovered from 2.0. Its popularity is exponentially greater, and the game plays much smoother. There are things that could be tweaked, thus OneD&D, but from my grognard perspective, 5e is the best D&D has ever been. Class balance is the best it has ever been, IMO. It's still wonky at super high levels (which account for less than 1% of games, per WotC, so let's not get too excited about their importance) but you should have seen class balance in AD&D! Your magic-user was basically useless until level 5 (which took some time back in the day) but if a campaign got to high levels they were practically gods. Thieves were basically just there for flavour, clerics were way more one dimensional, and fighters were what you played if your stats weren't good enough to make paladin or ranger (and rangers played exactly like fighters, right down to using plate armour, but with more stuff).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Did I say it couldn't be done? I said that I didn't like the way minions worked.

You decide (bold added):

Bounded accuracy works well for me, I just threw some cannon fodder level 8 monsters at my level 17 party and it worked as intended. I couldn't have done that in previous editions.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Remember the Warmage in 3.5 and the game breaking and dominating combos it could do? Neither do I and 5E bloated hit point total nerf that even further. The 8d6 fireball in 5E is roughly equivalent to a 3d6 AD&D fireball (sometimes 2d6 or 4d6 depending on encounter).

Not an actual response to your post, but just a fun aside.

My 3.5 warmage could shoot an arrow up to a mile and halfish (I forget the exact number of feet) away without any range penalty (some spell and Distance property on a weapon) that would explode in a Maximized Acidball. It started a discussion at the table exactly how far away you can actually discern a human form with the naked eye.

 

[Zardnaar]

Here we are again, in a thread turned into a 4e thread @EzekielRaiden

Well 4E did correctly identify the problem may have came up with the wrong solutions ultimately.

You could do a lot worse mixing 4E engine with 5E bounded accuracy.

I still like Star Wars Saga Edition (which uses 4E engine) but it's numbers are out of whack and it's multiclass rules need an overhaul.

 

[Oofta]

You decide (bold added):

Then they wouldn't have been level 8 monsters, they would have been level 17 minions. I never specifically mentioned 4E. There were other editions before 4E that some of us played, I was thinking 3.5 if it matters.

If we're going to be pedantic and nitpicky about it, I could have thrown the same number of level 8 monsters at level 17 party in any edition, they just wouldn't have had a chance to have much, if any, effect in previous editions including but not limited to 4E.

 

[Zardnaar]

Agree with the hot take, but I feel your breakdown misses some fundamental issues:

1- The Abandonment of Morale rules had a profound impact on combat in the game - as well as tying XP to mostly monster killing.

2- The Abandonment of Hit Dice limits - after 9hd you got a static +1, +2 or +3 hps no con mod. Adding a full HD all the way to Lvl 20 has fundamentally altered the way D&D plays and feels. It has had a cascade of effects on every WotC designed edition with HP bloat effects in every aspect of the game that they have never fully gotten a handle on.

3- The Abandonment of the traditional power checks for casters. Now instead of finding new spells you have access to every spell on you level as you level up. The systematic removal of the need for components and increase in the generosity of cantrips, etc, has just made them increasingly powerful under WotC stewardship. What really needed to happen with 3e was a top down re-think and organization of the spell lists, and how casters should acquire new spells; but now it's too late.


These three changes from 2-3e have had a far more fundamental effect on the direction of the game, and how it is now being played than any of the saving throw, class ability, stat bump, DC Scale, attack bonus, sideshow stuff being discussed.

Ascending AC was on point though...

Your point 2 they thought making hit points the prime defense was a great idea. And then put -5/+10 feats in and spells that don't really care about hit points.

 

[Lanefan]

Admittedly, that's not the whole story. Mages were weak against things like Mind Flayers, but Fighters could (potentially) pick up the slack. Fighters were useless against a creature with +x immunity if their weapon was < x, but the Mages could potentially pick up the slack.

Yep - that's exactly a) why it's a good idea to have a well-rounded party and b) how the game design (perhaps unintentionally!) enforced some teamwork.

The issue there is that (IMO) sidelining characters is a terrible way to design monsters. Especially for an adventure that features particular creatures heavily, certain characters could end up feeling like the appendix of the party.

And this is something, perhaps because it's the environment I started with and still play in, I'm fine with. Sometimes you're the star, sometimes you're the understudy, and sometimes you're the audience.

The main thing is that the DM has to make sure the oppositon is such that those roles can rotate in and out over at worst the medium-term.

I think 5e's approach of dialing down severity (very little SoD) while also reducing the ability to turtle is very good design.

It's part of a broader approach that dials down swinginess, which only serves to make it all more predictable.

Predicatable, for lack of a better word, is boring.

 

[Lanefan]

Going back to Fort/Reflex/Will would be cleaner IMO. It would result in less disparity if you could use the higher of your wis/cha for Will, the higher of your Str/Con for Fortitude, etc. Throw in half proficiency for everyone, and you've narrowed the gap to where there's still some benefit from figuring out and targeting the weak save, but not what we have now.

To avoid the obvious PC-side power creep this idea otherwise produces, I'd suggest using the lower of those stat pairs for the save.

That said, I still greatly prefer the 1e model, where the save is based on the source/type of thing you're saving against rather than on a stat.

 

[James Gasik]

To avoid the obvious PC-side power creep this idea otherwise produces, I'd suggest using the lower of those stat pairs for the save.

That said, I still greatly prefer the 1e model, where the save is based on the source/type of thing you're saving against rather than on a stat.

Yeah, but I tell you, a lot of people didn't really seem to understand the save hierarchy. Or what things added bonuses to saves). And there were always things that defaulted to "spells", to the point that I always felt like 80% of saving throws I made were against spells.

Now people not grokking the rules isn't a strike against those rules, but it does show that they could have been made clearer and simplified.