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Best Version of DnD?


Kendal
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15 hours ago, TheAuldGrump said:

WotC also outsourced a lot of the writing for non-central parts of their release schedule, getting third party publishers to write some of the books.

 

I am not really paying attention to 5e - I don't hate it or anything, it just does not fill a need for me.

 

15 hours ago, TheAuldGrump said:

 

I don't know if WotC still insists that their designers actually play the game or not.

 

15 hours ago, TheAuldGrump said:

 

I think that actually playing the games makes a difference.

 

The Auld Grump

 

From what I can tell, just about everyone on the D&D team now has some personal connection to the game either in its past incarnations or in its current one. I listen to their official podcast and I'm pretty sure most of the staff they've talked to on it has been playing since at least 3.5, though I know a couple have said they started with 4.

 

Also, holy crap I just figured out how to break quotes on the mobile version of the forums! And it put the name and stuff in automatically! All I had to do was hit return(aka line break/enter/whatever you want to call it) twice in a row and it split the stuff below into a whole new, fully attributed, quote box!

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I know that sometimes even a successful playtest can cause odd problems.

 

When White Wolf was revising their Storyteller system, they found that most people were routinely cranking up the Difficulty - and then complaining that their players were botching too often.... (Hey, maybe because you dropped the likelihood of success, increased the chance of failure, while the chance of a botch  remains the same, maybe? (Do the freakin' math, people!))

 

So, for the new edition they removed one of the axes of moderation and locked the difficulty to 8... making the system way too static. (Two axes of modification - the roll needed for a success, and the number of successes needed. In the old Storyteller you could have an easy but monotonous task by having a low Difficulty, but need lots of successes.)

 

Mind you, making a 'new edition' that is not either compatible with the older editions or can be converted to by those older products... is... generally a bad idea.

 

Yet game designers keep making that same mistake....

 

The Auld Grump

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Oh! Oh! Goodness gracious, me!

 

Looking over the next few bits of Curse of the Crimson Throne -

I'm going to get to use Goremaw!



 

The question is do I paint it up as a standard purple worm or as Cindermaw, the fire tainted worm in the Cinder Lands?

 

I had clean forgotten about that, and that was most of the reason I got the miniature in the first place!

 

The Auld Grump - it actually put points into Intimidate....

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I bought PDFs of the 2e Core Rulebooks yesterday. In looking over the character creation rules, I gained a new appreciation for how easy I've had it by starting with 3rd edition. I never expected every stat to have its own chart that breaks down all the different ways it affects various things. Like open doors and lift gates being percentage rolls based on strength that are separate from each other and from your carrying capacity, while having a high intelligence makes you immune to certain illusions and a high wisdom makes you immune to charm spells.

 

And that's about as far as I got, because every time I try to read a PDF it puts me to sleep. I can do books fine, but for some reason PDFs drive me crazy when I try to read them. I think it's the backlighting of the display. My book pages don't glow in my face. I need to get an e-ink based reader or something, but I want one that's like 10" so that it's not super tiny text. And one that uses color e-ink would be cool...

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7 minutes ago, Unruly said:

I bought PDFs of the 2e Core Rulebooks yesterday. In looking over the character creation rules, I gained a new appreciation for how easy I've had it by starting with 3rd edition. I never expected every stat to have its own chart that breaks down all the different ways it affects various things. Like open doors and lift gates being percentage rolls based on strength that are separate from each other and from your carrying capacity, while having a high intelligence makes you immune to certain illusions and a high wisdom makes you immune to charm spells.

 

And that's about as far as I got, because every time I try to read a PDF it puts me to sleep. I can do books fine, but for some reason PDFs drive me crazy when I try to read them. I think it's the backlighting of the display. My book pages don't glow in my face. I need to get an e-ink based reader or something, but I want one that's like 10" so that it's not super tiny text. And one that uses color e-ink would be cool...

If possible, check the screen refresh rate for the device you are using.  If there is any way to tweak it try a slightly higher or lower rate.

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One of the best things about 3e was that it consolidated things to a single primary system, and made the modifiers universal. (And finally got rid of the decimals after 18....)

 

AD&D essentially had a separate system for each stat - so the number for STR meant something completely different than the number for INT - even when they were the same number....

 

And 1st edition was worse - the systems changed between books of the same edition. (A year between each of the books, if I remember properly - starting with the Monster Manual and ending with the DMG.)

 

AD&D was not really planned ahead of time.

 

The Auld Grump - remember, there is a percentage chance that a dragon is a liar....

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Speaking of older stuff, something's been perplexing me for months and I'm hoping Grump or someone else can clue me in...

 

Keep on the Borderlands had random encounter tables, but I could never find the rules for rolling in the module proper. Did I miss them or were they included in the rulesbook which I did not have?

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A turn is 10 rounds.

 

Yes, even in caves. You can make your own encounter chart to match what you think should be in the area. Of course you can always rule that an area is controlled by the local orcs/goblins/hobgoblins or whatever and no random encounters occur.

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14 minutes ago, BlazingTornado said:

Ok a round is 6 seconds, so that's... every minute? And then a 1 in 6 chance? Eek that must make overland travel complete hell...

Ahh, but a turn in overland travel was a different unit of time.  Something like 10 minutes or maybe a half an hour.  It's been a couple of decades so I don't remember exactly.

 

 

 

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