Best Version of DnD?

[Lars Porsenna]

In our group, a lot of us said if D&D 4e was more like Star Wars SAGA there would have been a lot less complaining... :)

 

Damon.

[Gargs]

7 minutes ago, Lars Porsenna said:

@TheAuldGrump Differing experiences certainly have an impact. The gaming group I'm with (playing 20 or more...) tends to be pretty deadly, and a lot of the times Clerics were busy just trying to keep the front-line fighters up so that they can hold back the monsters while the mage(s) do what they do. But I think some of this was influenced by 2e playstyle too, where Clerics could not swap spells, so tended to take a lot of heals supplemented with a handful of choice cleric spells. But especially at low level, if you're a 1st level cleric back then and you DIDN'T take cure light wounds, you were doing it wrong (opinion, but...). Naturally that spilled out over into 3e, PF and now 5e...

 

Damon.

 

Yeah certainly there was an old school mentality of "Somebody needs to jump on the cleric grenade."  Obviously not every group did this, but most groups believed that they needed a cleric in order to be succesful and more to the point, most believed that the cleric needed to bring a substantial amount of healing.  Now whether or not this was in fact true is a matter for debate, and one that largely is going to depend on who the DM is.  With 4ed, the idea was that no one class/role was really needed.  That said, as somebody who DM'd 4ed for quite a while, I can still tell you that a group that doesn't have a healer of some sort in 4ed, is definitely at a disadvantage, even when I would adjust the encounters for the missing player(s).

[Clearman]

The healing aspect mentioned above just touches on one of the reasons why I have lost interest in the gaming, at least with my long term group.  They incessant min/max'ers, and story suffered as a result.  When you boil everything down to a race to deplete the opponents HP pool, everything else, even the battle mat tactics, become secondary.

 

I'm still fond of 1st/2nd edition, and the old school feel of 5th, but a lot of the excitement is gone for me.

[TheAuldGrump]

1 hour ago, Gargs said:

 

Yeah certainly there was an old school mentality of "Somebody needs to jump on the cleric grenade."  Obviously not every group did this, but most groups believed that they needed a cleric in order to be succesful and more to the point, most believed that the cleric needed to bring a substantial amount of healing.  Now whether or not this was in fact true is a matter for debate, and one that largely is going to depend on who the DM is.  With 4ed, the idea was that no one class/role was really needed.  That said, as somebody who DM'd 4ed for quite a while, I can still tell you that a group that doesn't have a healer of some sort in 4ed, is definitely at a disadvantage, even when I would adjust the encounters for the missing player(s).

Uhm... I think that is more 'middle school' thinking than old school - in the original D&D (not AD&D), clerics were the real powerhouses.

 

AD&D might have been where the 'healbot cleric' crept in - but even then, Hold Person was just too useful to give up for a healing spell - as useful as Sleep, but without the hit die limitation.

 

Likewise, Spiritual Hammer was a spell that you could keep using for a while - and which would hurt those pesky critters that could only be damaged by magic weapons.

 

Or, maybe that came up more with 2nd edition - in 2nd edition AD&D I was mostly running Birthright - which had a rather different take on magic.

 

Or, it might be that, rather than avoiding having min maxers in my group, I just had different min maxers. Ones that concentrated on bringing the hurt, not taking it away.

 

I do not think of myself as an old school player or GM - but I started D&D with the original game, in 1976.

 

The Auld Grump - I was playing D&D before Thieves were introduced to the game - when there were Magic Users, Clerics, and Fighting Men. Rangers, Thieves, Druids, and all the rest were added bit by bit in the magazines.....

[Gargs]

Fair enough Auld.  Was speaking from the experience I have had both personally and in speaking with a lot of players.  Its also why I said it was debatable as to whether the thinking was correct.  I mean heck, even in 3.x there was the whole CODzilla concept (Cleric or Druid-zilla) wherein it was quickly discovered that the single most powerful straight class was either cleric or druid optimized for combat rather than healing.  But at any rate I think the idea with 4ed was to get around the stereotypical party "requirement" of Cleric, Wizard, Fighter, Rogue.  

 

I absolutely agree with you though that it was rare that any particular class or ability was truly required provided that the GM compensated for the party limitations and frankly most of the time, there was little to no actual compensation required on the GM's part.  

[TheAuldGrump]

28 minutes ago, Gargs said:

Fair enough Auld.  Was speaking from the experience I have had both personally and in speaking with a lot of players.  Its also why I said it was debatable as to whether the thinking was correct.  I mean heck, even in 3.x there was the whole CODzilla concept (Cleric or Druid-zilla) wherein it was quickly discovered that the single most powerful straight class was either cleric or druid optimized for combat rather than healing.  But at any rate I think the idea with 4ed was to get around the stereotypical party "requirement" of Cleric, Wizard, Fighter, Rogue.  

 

I absolutely agree with you though that it was rare that any particular class or ability was truly required provided that the GM compensated for the party limitations and frankly most of the time, there was little to no actual compensation required on the GM's part.  

Heh, CoD-zilla, on the other hand, is something that I have seen.

 

Pathfinder addressed it, to an extent, by beefing up the fighter - when it comes to damage over an extended time, the Pathfinder fighter is hard to beat - they really are a tank class, with improved armor skills over any other class. (Tankety tankety tank. Tankety tankety tank!)

 

The fighter can still can fall behind, if the GM allows the 15 Minute Adventuring Day, but that is another one of those things that I have heard of, but never seen - my players know, all too well, that if they leave the bad guys alone then the bad guys will do what bad guys do - which is bad things.... (This dates all the way back to my first foray as a GM, back in '76 - when the PCs camped out, healed, and wasted time - then attacked the bandit camp, only to find the bandits gone... while a pillar of smoke rose where the village used to be. Whoops.)

 

The Auld Grump - what do you mean 'the orcs have poisoned the well'?!

[TheAuldGrump]

Because writing (and rewriting) the Starjammer game is taking so much longer than I had originally planned, we are going to restart the Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign - from the beginning, it has been almost a year(?!) since we left off, and a new edition of the campaign was one of my presents last year.

 

And... the other day, I realized that I really want to run Kingmaker for the kids game, when they are old enough... which presumes that I will still be running the kids game in two years time, or so....

 

Megan was absolutely correct that running a kids game again would be good for me.

 

Believe it or not, kids are more goal oriented - and spend a whole lot less time duffing around. There are scenarios where the kids solve the problems in less than half the time the more experienced players need to do the same tasks.

 

They have less of a grasp on battlefield tactics - but have no problems with things like opportunity attacks.

 

I can hardly wait until my own little one is old enough to start rolling dice!

 

The Auld Grump - she already has three sets of fuzzy polyhedral dice.

[Lars Porsenna]

We run Keep on the Borderlands for our kids, and speaking of goal oriented, for some reason they latched on to the goat population in the keep. Now they are building a goat-cheese empire of some sort...

 

Damon. :)

[TheAuldGrump]

9 minutes ago, Lars Porsenna said:

We run Keep on the Borderlands for our kids, and speaking of goal oriented, for some reason they latched on to the goat population in the keep. Now they are building a goat-cheese empire of some sort...

 

Damon. :)

So they are goat oriented?

 

You know, Keep on the Borderlands is such a great starting adventure - even all these years later. A nice little sandbox.

 

The Auld Grump

[BlazingTornado]

...goat population?

 

I must be a pretty bad DM because Keep for me just dragged on and had so much floundering around.

Maybe I should've asked for pointers on adjusting XP for encounters and making sure everything is balanced.... :/

[CthulhuDreams]

It's weird that people think D&D isn't fundamentally about combat. If you count up the page count the large majority of the text is combat rules and this has held true across the editions.

 

this shouldn't be surprising for a genre that started out as a war game?

 

if you want a story game you'd probably be better off playing something built to be that from the ground up rather than a focused combat simulator. 

[Crowley]

2 hours ago, CthulhuDreams said:

It's weird that people think D&D isn't fundamentally about combat. If you count up the page count the large majority of the text is combat rules and this has held true across the editions.

 

this shouldn't be surprising for a genre that started out as a war game?

 

if you want a story game you'd probably be better off playing something built to be that from the ground up rather than a focused combat simulator. 

Given how much XP you get for combat vs how much you get for treasure, and how fragile low level PCs are, it's actually far far better to avoid combat. 

[Sylverthorne]

Fortunately, one does not have to slaughter the opposition, merely deal with them in some long-lasting fashion, in order to get experience. And for PbP games, avoiding combat is practically necessary for avoiding game slowdowns... This is why characters have that nifty 'Diplomacy' skill - and hopefully, players are quick on their verbal feet. You can't count on that, sadly, but it helps keep things moving.

 

Although considering I've had live combats run for hours, quite literally... it's not just PbP that suffers combat slowdown. :/

[Lars Porsenna]

We do quite a bit of Rping in our D&D games. Yes we do a lot of fighting too, but we also do the same in Savage Worlds or most of the games we play. We go on adventures. THose adventures often deal with baddies that need to be put down. Sure we can use diplomacy to head off those threats, but then they wouldn't be adventures...

 

Damon.

[Unruly]

So, the game tonight had the DM throw 3 trolls and a hag at us, in a deep swamp, where moving more than 15ft in a round provoked a Dexterity save to avoid being tripped by undergrowth. We're 3 level 6 PCs - a wizard, a barbarian, and a fighter/barbarian - going up against these things in a situation where they were in favorable terrain. We should have been destroyed, but thanks to my wizardly ways we mashed through pretty well. We got lucky with some bad rolls on the DM's part, that kept me from getting knocked out of the fight fairly early, and a well placed fireball.

 

The fireball was fun, because as I cast it the hag counterspelled it, followed by me counterspelling her counterspell. It made up for the fact that in the previous round I had attempted to jump from a wall into a tree, only to faceplant into the tree trunk George of the Jungle style. But it was the fire damage we needed to bring down 2 of the trolls, and it made the hag try to come after me instead of going after the two melee guys.

 

Hag managed to planeshift out before we could finish her off, making vague threats as she did. But we came away with a small fortune from the hag's lair, and we rescued some guy's girlfriend in the process. We call the guy "Toasty" now, because he was at the epicenter of the fireball, paralyzed by the hag who had been wearing the illusion of his grilfriend, and the shot dropped him from full health to 1hp. So we made jokes about how he looked like he'd been hit with a flamethrower, and he was all singed and burnt like a marshmallow that had been cooked too long. And that made me think of Scorpion's fatality from Mortal Kombat, and how that guy's picture would pop out of the corner and yell "Toasty!"

Edited April 25, 2017 by Unruly