Best Version of DnD?

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

I'm a points guy myself, for much the same reasons as Doug posted.  I also use the standard array for my own characters most of the time. 

 

I will use whatever the method requested by the DM though; as proven by the numerous PbPs I've been involved with here.

[VitM]

I tend towards using the standard array, plus 3 to 6 additional stat points (not following the point buy system, purchased 1:1).  That way there's enough to buy a stat up to 18 or buy off the 8, whichever the player prefers.

 

I remember reading about one rolling scheme that I really liked: All players roll 1-3 sets of stats (4d6) and picks one to keep, the other is discarded.  Then, everyone compares what was kept and anyone can use any of those arrays to make their character.  It allows you have the variety of rolling without having anyone get stuck playing the village doofus.  If the set of numbers you rolled was trash, you can just take the array your friend rolled with the 3 16's.  Or you can take an overall slightly worse array because it's the only one that someone rolled an 18 in, or was the only array without a stat below 11, or whatever.

[dwarvenranger]

Dice for me. Generally I do better than I can with a standard point buy. As a DM I also have my players roll. If someone does horrible and can't make what they're looking to do, I'll roll a pair of d4's and let them add them to two scores.

[PaganMegan]

On 10/05/2017 at 11:04 PM, Doug Sundseth said:

 

I'm pretty sure that a round in that version of the game is one minute and a turn is 10 minutes. Which means that you're likely to get one random encounter per 2 hours.

 

Aside: In OD&D, this meant that a fighter in full plate traveled at 3'/minute indoors. 

One MINUTE?!

 

That's longer than it takes in self defense courses, and we deliberately go slow!

 

That's long enough to hold a conversation, and suddenly jokes that Grump made about D&D make sense. I just never looked at how long a round was!

Edited October 16, 2017 by PaganMegan

[Reaperbryan]

2 minutes ago, PaganMegan said:

One MINUTE?!

 

That's longer than it takes in self defense courses, and we deliberately go slow!

 

That's long enough to hold a conversation, and suddenly jokes that Grump made about D&D make sense. I just never looked at how long a round was!

I had understood a Round as 6 seconds, and a Turn as 1 minute...

[PaganMegan]

On 10/15/2017 at 4:43 PM, TheAuldGrump said:

You Tube has many, many tutorials for CC3.

 

In a weird way, what causes a lot of problems for folks using CC3 is that it is not a paint program - it is a CAD program.

 

So a lot of things that people already know how to do... don't work, and terms that mean one thing in a paint program mean something entirely different in CC3.

 

But it can do some amazing things - I have been using it for more than ten years now.

 

It is easily worth the money.

 

That said... ... ... giving a copy to a nine year old, no matter how gifted, seems like a recipe for disappointment. Though Matt has said that it is mostly so she can use the maps that other people have done - so, I have pointed him in the direction of the free map viewer.

 

Does anybody know of a good, easy to use, tile based mapper, these days?

 

If DungeonCrafter was still around, it would be easy.

 

The Auld Grump

You took Engineering.

 

It makes sense that you would be comfortable with a CAD program.

 

The easiest mapping program I ever used was on Mum's C64.

 

A paint program called Doodle. It allowed you to make objects and use them as stamps, so I made bricks and used them as walls, and I made tables, beds, chests, and chairs and furnished the dungeons I made.

 

Wow! I just realized I was Sam's age when I did that!

 

She's ME!

[Doug Sundseth]

9 minutes ago, Reaperbryan said:

12 minutes ago, PaganMegan said:

One MINUTE?!

 

That's longer than it takes in self defense courses, and we deliberately go slow!

 

That's long enough to hold a conversation, and suddenly jokes that Grump made about D&D make sense. I just never looked at how long a round was!

I had understood a Round as 6 seconds, and a Turn as 1 minute...

 

Depends how far back you go.

 

OD&D had a turn as 10 minutes, during which you could travel 3" in heavy armor (or up to 12" in no armor). 1" = 10 feet in a dungeon or 10 yards outside. (This also affected spell areas, btw, so outdoors a fireball was a really big thing indeed.)

 

The conceit was that a combat round of 1 minute covered many attacks and parries, and only the most effective of those was the one that you rolled for. As I think somebody mentioned above, this was sort of based on the Hollywood fight scene thing where Errol Flynn and his nemesis would swing at the air above each other's head repeatedly, then occasionally get in a decorative cut to the cheek or buttons or draw an elegant line of blood down an arm.

 

Didn't make any sense whatever for movement, of course.

[Unruly]

I've always played with rolls, and even then it's been a modified version of the 4d6 drop the lowest system that became the standard rolling method in 3e. My friends have always done 4d6 drop the lowest, reroll 1's(once). It makes it more likely that your character is going to have an average score of about 13, and tends to avoid getting super-low scores. It also has the "drawback" that characters tend to have a 16-18 in about 3 stats, making them pretty powerful from day 1 compared to anyone using a standard point buy.

 

That said, I've been wanting to switch to either point buy or standard array for when I DM. I've run into too many characters over the years who have had 16 or better in all their stats and who then became absolute supermen, and that includes characters of my own. When a DM consistently throws encounters at your party that should technically be lethal but you come out of them without breaking a sweat and without spending many of your resources, you're a bit overpowered.

 

And I understand that how you've built your character, aside from their ability scores, can make a big difference in that. As can your tactics and teamwork. But at a certain point if you're still pulling out wins there's a problem. And I noticed that with my most recent group when I ran them through an Adventurer's League module that was meant for levels 1-5 while they were level 5. I only had 3 players, so I looked at the rules the AL gives for modifying the scenario, and I determined that running it in an unmodified state would be tough, but possible if they played smart. By the end of the module I had cranked the difficulty up to the max and they still basically waltzed through it.

[BlazingTornado]

Dice.

 

Random rolls help make varied characters, and helps break from the norm. It can give characters weaknesses that flesh them out. You'll never get a Raistlin Majere or a Grog Strongjaw with Point Buy. With Point Buy the worst anyone can get is "slightly below average", particularly in 5E.

 

4 minutes ago, Unruly said:

My friends have always done 4d6 drop the lowest, reroll 1's(once). It makes it more likely that your character is going to have an average score of about 13, and tends to avoid getting super-low scores. It also has the "drawback" that characters tend to have a 16-18 in about 3 stats, making them pretty powerful from day 1 compared to anyone using a standard point buy.

You should try ditching the "reroll 1s", but have a set number that the rolls need to meet.

Matthew Mercer's method of rolling is 4d6, drop the lowest, and if the sum total of the six stats is lower than 70, reroll it all. I've used it as the standard for my games and it's turned out pretty interesting so far... And more than once I've had a character end up with a stat of 7 or lower.

[Reaperbryan]

17 minutes ago, Doug Sundseth said:

 

Depends how far back you go.

 

OD&D had a turn as 10 minutes, during which you could travel 3" in heavy armor (or up to 12" in no armor). 1" = 10 feet in a dungeon or 10 yards outside. (This also affected spell areas, btw, so outdoors a fireball was a really big thing indeed.)

 

The conceit was that a combat round of 1 minute covered many attacks and parries, and only the most effective of those was the one that you rolled for. As I think somebody mentioned above, this was sort of based on the Hollywood fight scene thing where Errol Flynn and his nemesis would swing at the air above each other's head repeatedly, then occasionally get in a decorative cut to the cheek or buttons or draw an elegant line of blood down an arm.

 

Didn't make any sense whatever for movement, of course.

yeah, the idea that a warrior in plate, trained in combat in plate, could only move 30 feet in 10 minutes is *absurd*

[Unruly]

It's right up there with the idea that a knight in full plate couldn't mount a horse without a crane. The only time that was even remotely close to being true was when they started doing stuff with jousting armors where they basically mounted the leg armor onto the saddle to prevent someone from being dismounted.

 

Or that a 65lb suit of armor is really cumbersome and limiting. I've had some old soldiers tell me that their armor is actually far less limiting and cumbersome than their modern combat gear was. Primarily because it's not all piled onto their back and shoulders and has the weight distributed across the whole body.

[TheAuldGrump]

Just now, Reaperbryan said:

yeah, the idea that a warrior in plate, trained in combat in plate, could only move 30 feet in 10 minutes is *absurd*

I think that in Gygax's head, people were actually moving around a lot - but the figures stayed where they were so you could see who was fighting whom.

 

Which is why movement outside of combat was so much faster.

 

Not defending, by the way, just explaining - this was something that bothered me when OD&D was  new, and it never really stopped bothering me. Like THAC0, I consider the one minute rounds pretty danged silly.

 

*Whack!* So, how are the wife and kids?

 

Can't complain, can't complain. You still seeing that barmaid on your days off?

 

Yeah, she and I have come to an understanding.

*Whack!* As long as my boots are the ones under the bed when I get back from the dungeon, I don't ask questions. Which reminds me, how many HP you have left?

 

*WHACK!* More than you did.

 

I think that the 6 second round was introduced in late 2nd edition AD&D, in their Combat Options book.

 

The Auld Grump

3 minutes ago, Unruly said:

It's right up there with the idea that a knight in full plate couldn't mount a horse without a crane. The only time that was even remotely close to being true was when they started doing stuff with jousting armors where they basically mounted the leg armor onto the saddle to prevent someone from being dismounted.

 

Or that a 65lb suit of armor is really cumbersome and limiting. I've had some old soldiers tell me that their armor is actually far less limiting and cumbersome than their modern combat gear was. Primarily because it's not all piled onto their back and shoulders and has the weight distributed across the whole body.

In the SCA there was a guy that managed to swim the length of an Olympic sized pool and back, while wearing full plate.

 

Even with chain armor, some of the weight is supported from a belt that is around your hips, taking some of the weight off of your shoulders.

 

The Auld Grump

[BlazingTornado]

3 minutes ago, Unruly said:

Primarily because it's not all piled onto their back and shoulders and has the weight distributed across the whole body.

That's the thing, though, isn't it?

An adventurer has that plate armor or chainmail... and then also has that backpack with all the rations and the torches and the bedroll and the mess kit, plus the javelins or crossbow and quiver somewhere.... Sure the armor itself is properly distributed but just like a modern soldier, there's still all this gear being lugged around on top of the protection.

[Reaperbryan]

8 minutes ago, BlazingTornado said:

That's the thing, though, isn't it?

An adventurer has that plate armor or chainmail... and then also has that backpack with all the rations and the torches and the bedroll and the mess kit, plus the javelins or crossbow and quiver somewhere.... Sure the armor itself is properly distributed but just like a modern soldier, there's still all this gear being lugged around on top of the protection.

A sensible adventurer buys a bag of Holding or portable hole as fast as possible and carries only what he needs and that bag.

[BlazingTornado]

Just now, Reaperbryan said:

A sensible adventurer buys a bag of Holding or portable hole as fast as possible and carries only what he needs and that bag.

Yeah but we're talking OD&D movements here, so this is that era where you couldn't buy magic items, wasn't it? You could only find them through adventuring.