In the game session 2 weeks ago, I concluded the party’s foray in the Demonwebs layer of the Abyss with the wretching of Ptolus (the campaign’s home base) out of the material world and plopping it up in another layer of the Abyss ruled by the Demon Prince Gratzz.
Last Friday’s game wasn’t stellar nor was it bad. Much like a game we played 2 sessions ago, it resumed itself to a large fight against demons and then a quick series of short encounters to move the story forward before we stopped for the night.
I won’t go into last Friday’s game much, I want to discuss the changing social aspect of our game more than what we played. Anyway, it was pretty standard fare…
The Actual Game
Right after Ptolus crashed into the Demoninc city of Zelatar, the city was ‘attacked’ by a few flights of Vrocks (Vulture Demons). The party had trouble fighting the Mirror imaged, flying-all-over-the-place, teleporting demons but were never in any true danger.
During the fight, the city was ripped out of the Abyss and placed in a parallel plane of shadows as explained here, transforming the whole city in a dark, sinister version of itself.
The PCs met with Rule of Three (the Adventure’s main Patron) who was very nervous about the latest events. The players confronted the nervous Gith who confessed of being one of the numerous bastard sons of Gratzz. He confirmed that he was using the PCs to discredit Lolth in the eyes of the various demon lords by disrupting her latest schemes.
The sudden annexation of Ptolus (and near-instant shift in the Shadow plane) was a serious wrench in his plans as he was a wanted ‘man’ in Zelatar and he feared treachery by one of his countless siblings.
He was able to convince the PCs that he was sincere and that following the initial plan was the best way to save their world. That plan’s nect step was going into Zelatar and meet with Ambassador of Orcus (who wants to see Lolth fail too) to get the time and place of the meeting of the Demon Lords in the Demonweb (in order to crash that party) and the means to access it.
Only, he had no idea how to operate the various portals he opened in Ptolus from this shadow plane.
The party accepted to play along, according to their rules, in exchange for Rule of Three giving them a merchant charter for Zelatar and promising to bring them to Mechanus after they were done with Lolth.
Then they hunted for a way to attune the PCs to the Shadow world in order to activate the portals (using some shadow demon trapped in pocket watches made by Ptolus main Crime lord).
Finally they shifted to the Abyss, right beside the Shadow of Ptolus, and entered the Demonic city, dodging a fiendish Slave trader and getting attacked and poisoned by some Viper Trees while entering the city of the Dark Prince.
(It was 10h30pm, we stopped there)
D&D has become our Poker Night
It’s no mystery to my players (nor the regular readers) that my interest in D&D 3.5 is waning rapidly. Much like it often happens with me, my interests is dropping faster than my enthusiasm to see the campaign through.
Having a somewhat mercurial temperament and being prone to embrace change rapidly, the promise of a shiny new toy makes me long for D&D 4e while causing some ennui with my current game.
However, a recent realization on my part makes me want to see the campaign through.
You see, our current playing arrangement makes it that we start gathering at around 16h30 every two Fridays. However, we don’t start our game until 18h30 (possibly 19h00) while we wait for players who finish work later.
During that time we shoot the breeze, drink beer and eat chips and play some Magic the Gathering or other short and simple games like Munchkins or Toc Toc Toc (English name Knock,Knock).
When we do start playing, we can manage about 4 scenes with about 2 average combat encounters. On evenings where a complex combat encounter occurs, that’s pretty much all we do.
A few months ago, this would have driven me insane… or at least upset me a lot. As you have been able to see on this blog, I tend to take my D&D very seriously…
However, with our current workloads, job rushes and parallel projects, I’m beginning to consider our bi-monthly D&D gathering as the equivalent to a casual Poker night. We have fun, but the D&D game is currently an excuse to hang out together rather than the relative importance of the campaign.
It’s not so much the rolling of dice or the weaving of the story… It’s about a bunch of friends hanging out and laughing at stupid jokes and drinking nice red wine to celebrate’s one’s recent promotion (Congrats Stef!).
The reason I’m okay with that is that I don’t spend so much time preparing the game anymore and I don’t want to stop seeing my buddies either. I also know that, like myself, most of players are also awaiting the next edition and aren’t all that involved in the game anymore.
Heck I’d argue we were never really that much into it… a legendary campaign this one isn’t. Entertaining? Yes. Gripping and deep? No. We hit the campaign’s zenith in the session where we entered the Beastlands.
…and that’s okay for me.
So for the remainder of the campaign, I’m going to go with the adventure as written (with modifications based on player choices and the current story)… I have a grand finale planned, if the players decide to bring the game there.
One reason why I don’t worry so much about this current campaign’s overall success is that the players have started talking about the next campaign, choosing character classes and even backstory concepts.
That’s good news right?
Chatty’s Patent-Pending Game Session Review
Lessons Learned
- If I have to hack the adventure further, plan for shorter fights and scenes because play time is limited in remaining sessions and actual Friday Night time.
- D&D as Poker night is okay as long as everyone has fun.
What players liked
- Cixi started doing critical hits like there was no tomorrow again! Weee!
- Flying characters are cool… Stef’s half-dragon new home grown racial level has flight…
What players disliked
- Yan’s character wasn’t able to have a significant impact in the fight against the Vrocks.
- The cleric is not the most mobile of characters and it’s impact on the game remains somewhat limited.
Have a nice week all.
(Chatty taps the mike repeatdly)
Is this thing on?
Hmmm… maybe I should post that article about the sexual perversities that D&D 4e’s subliminal messages will engender in gamers over 25… that ought to elicit a strong response… 🙂
Meh… as long as the Canadiens beat the Bruins in the Series all is good in Chatty land.
I really bums me out when the feel of a campaign drops from “Yeah!” to “Meh.” If I feel like that happened, I try to fast track the ending and get the whole thing over with in favor of a campaign that is shinny and new.
Keep on the Shadowfell comes out next month. I was thinking about doing it as a one-off adventure to serve as an introduction to 4th edition for my players and myself. That way, no one is in “for the long haul” and can try some things and learn the rules. Since you guys are so anxious for 4E, do you think that would be a nice alternative to your current campaign?
Munchkin rocks! We love that game.
I plan on starting Keep on the Shadowfell as soon as the PHB is out…
it’s going to be our Summer game (we usually only play 2-3 times during the whole summer).
Normally I’d have nuked the campaign at that stage and start planning a new one… but it’s because we’re blazé of D&D 3.5… starting a new one wouldn’t fix anything…
Plus it’s not bad it’s just ‘ordinary fun’…
Kyle Aaron would say our group is in the Stagnation phase… and he’d be right.
I should start a Paranoia XP Adventure… to shake things up…
The Canadiens frenzy is really something… I went shopping yesterday, I think a saw at least 100 little flags on cars, anywhere I was looking I could count a dozen in a few seconds. You should show your support on the blog and put the Canadiens Logo somewhere… 😉
I’ll look into activating the editorial banner speech bubble script as soon as Graham is done with his exams…
Damn that would have made for a great April 1st joke…
Changing the Blog’s Theme to a Chatty’s Hockey Corner and put a picture of Don Cherry instead of mine!
LOL! That would have made people scratch there head alright… Even more to those that actually knows you… Big Hockey fans we are not… 😉
All of this drama over a system? I don’t mean to be rude, I’m just curious? What exactly do you think that 4e can do that older editions can’t? I mean, it’s still D&D.
Perhaps it’s just me, CHANGE IS BAD!!! I don’t want to learn all new rules, I don’t want to make all of my favorite books worthless until I figure out a way to transfer the information over to the new edition (if it’s possible). People are suppose to be resistant to change, not (GASP!) embrace it!
I did look into GURPS, but I found that the core books are just too expensive. I don’t have the money to update to 4e either . . . not that I ever would if I did have the money, I invested into the system that I use. It is a tool to unlocking personal creativity within the boundaries of a system of rules. I have studied my system and can now use it to play in any time, from Prehistoric to the Victorian era and everything in between. Hours of brainstorming with other DM’s to tackle the problems of ship to ship battles, developing military tactics and transferring that over to fit the mechanics of the game.
There are no MASTERS of Dungeons and Dragons, the game is never complete. One can always become a better story teller, a better crunch manager, a better wizard, a better thief, a better warrior . . . . Writing your own dungeons, this is challenging but rewarding as well! Creating new weapons, new spells, new magical items, new monsters. Players can also develop their own class kits, develope new tactics, new nonweapon proficiencies. Role-playing is the name of the game, each new character created is a brand new edition to the game.
How does this get boring and dull?
-RIP (devils advocate)
Ripper X’s last blog post..Exposition & Advanced Character Developement
My current game is similar; it was intended as a final hurrah for 3.5, but isn’t hitting the super-cool mark. There’s been a lot of character changing and optimizing, which might be impeding people’s opportunities to really sink into their characters.
Despite that, we’re at the comfortable and fine state– we do a lot of pregame chatting and off topic discussion creeps in easily throughout the night. The prep makes me appreciate my off group’s Primetime Adventures game, but we’re still having fun.
(Chatty Cracks knuckles)
First up I agree that a system is not the only important thing in a good Role playing campaign.
Also, you have to know that our decision to switch to 4e (unless it turns out to be an unplayable pile, which I highly doubt) has already been made.
The drama comes from me wanting to keep our game alive for a few more weeks and actually finish a campaign for once, while at the same time dealing with the enthusiasm of the new version.
Change is not bad… it happens all the freaking time! I prefer to spend energy dealing with crashing into the wall caused by the change (it’s inevitable, whether you are against or for a given change) than by rallying against it.
Yes it totally sucks that I’m losing about 1000$ worth of books come June… But I got a lot more milage from 80% of all my books than I ever got with my Gurps sourcebooks I used for about 10 years… or from 2 Video cards I could have purchased for the same price on my computer.
Let’s just say that if my gut feeling is true, D&D 4e will be closer to what we are looking for in a RPG game than all other options I’ve examined so far.
It seems to go for a faster, more action oriented, simpler to prep for version of D&D.
I don’t want this to degenerate into a rant against 3.5… I’ve loved playing that game… and I still do
But it’s been 8 years man and my list of house rule is now so long that I can’t remember what it is we use anymore…
Plus if 4e is simpler to Prep for… just that is going to be worth it.
All the arguments you bring about making the game better ourselves are all true… but my free time is limited…. and a team of guys and girls at WotC have been doing it for 3 years now… so I’m willing to fork up the cash and see if the way they did it works for me…
D&D is my main free time hobby after blogging. I have the money to spend on it… if 4e sucks, I’ll look into Star Wars Saga, Mutant and Mastermind or that new Spirit of the Century d20 port I’ve seen floating around instead.
Peace man, we’ll see how it turns out in June.
@ Scott:
I think you just hit a critical hit on the proverbial nail here ScottM…
Since this too was our last game, we kept switching and tweaking and changing things…
plus the adventures weren’t all the linked thematically so we never got very deep in the story.
Ripper X –
Change is bad? Fuck that, change is awesome! Without change, you get stagnation.
Keep the same rules, sure! But you are even changing constantly within your ruleset. New monsters, items, spells, all of this is change. Without that, you’d probably be fed up with your game.
But you need to remember a couple things.
1) People like me, we like and thrive on change. We’re changeophiles, if you will. We’ve done all the hacking in 3.5e that you mention! And we’re tired of it. After a while of hacking, you’re just recreating the same thing over and over. We want a new system to hack.
2) People like Chatty and I, we’re crunch freaks. Any crunch is exciting, even if it’s only so that we can hack out the bad crunch. But good crunch? Smooth, effective crunch that results in reduced prep time and smoother games? It’s like fucking porn to us!
You go ahead and stay with 2e. Nobody is making you change.
But 4e gives people like us the change we crave, and the smooth, effective crunch we love.
Damn Graham what’s got into you? Exams are looming ehh? And there I was with one of the web’s lowest swear ratios!
Sigh… 🙂
Regardless of my friend’s somewhat colorful commentary, I too embrace change… no wonder that my bosses come to me to spin decisions and scope changes…
Well, part of playing Devil’s Advocate is becoming a hypocrite. I had gotten bored with fantasy long ago. I just don’t understand the genre, and can’t wrap my mind around it. A player had picked up a boxset called Masque of the Red Death, and then our group just kind of drifted apart, so I never so much as cracked the box open. I stashed it and there it stayed for years! Until one fateful day I was remembering old adventures that I had played, and again wanted to play. The friendships that we forged hadn’t deteriorated, it’s just actually getting together on a regular basis can be daunting, but I found that I wasn’t alone.
I dug out all of my old books, and WAM!!! I found this old boxset and started reading and it was incredible! All new classes, all new weapons, non-weapon proficiencies, it was a whole new game! It totally jazzed me and got me rethinking the game.
It was the change that led to all of us getting interested in the hobby again. After this campaign I think that I’m going to return to the core game, but with a different philosophy then I had before. I am now older and wiser and I think that I’m a better DM then I was all those years ago because I now AM a full fledged writer, and I know exactly what I want to get out of a given game.
An energy boast, no matter where it comes from, is always welcome. Anything that helps the creative juices to start flowing again is a good thing.
RIP
Ripper X’s last blog post..Creating Mysteries part 1
[philosophy]
Change is change. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, usually it just is. When you don’t have a choice you cope with it, when you do have a choice you embrace it, resist it, ignore it, or just put up with it. All of which are valid responses.
This applies to gaming as well as life.
[/philosophy]
3e let me down in a big way so I am cautiously optimistic about 4e, although I haven’t been keeping up on the revelations. I’ve only played 2e in depth (and love it) and reading the 1e DMG is always a happy place.
I tend to be cautious about changes in gaming systems – I find there’s often a certain….something….about the first edition of a game, a something fresh and unique and excited that gets compartmentalized, rulesed, and edited out as it starts going through editions, which makes the game less fun for me. I like my crunch leavened with fluff, my fluff with crunch, and it all iced with je ne sais quoi 😀 If 4e can do that for me I’m happy to put it on my list, if not I’ll keep looking at different games.
Ripper X – Bingo, buddy. Your change came from both fluff and crunch. My change comes from both, too, but my excitement for 4e is coming from crunch change.
Sandrinnad – Can I ask what about 3e let you down so bad?
Ok, small rant here. You’ve been warned…
Every time the 4th Edition discussion comes up someone says: “I just can’t afford all new books…” or something like it. Seriously???? Right now on Amazon, you can pre-order all three core 4E books for about $60. That is one new Xbox 360 or PS3 game. That is dinner out for 3 people. That is 6 movie tickets. That is not even a day’s work if you make $10/hour. Ok, so maybe you’re 13 or there abouts. Don’t you have a birthday? Christmas? What about mowing a couple lawns over the summer?
In fact, to buy my 4E books I donated a pint of blood to a local research company. $60 for an hour of sitting on a chair and drinking orange juice.
So, yes, I have given my blood for 4th Edition. 😉
I guess my point is that I got years of mileage out of my 3.5 books. If you compare the (hours of fun)/(cost) ratio of D&D vs. other mediums, D&D wins out for sure. I think it’s worth the investment.
Thing is Green… it doesn’t really stop at 60$ now does it?
The 4e business model will follow 3e’s with a gazillion Sourcebooks and Monster Manuals…
All us Obsessive Geeks will collect them like chase Magic the Gathering rares…
Admit it, you know you wants it!
🙂
The reason companies release new editions of roleplaying games is to inject a dose of Shiny When New into their product. It’s probably not a big surprise that people are attracted to that. Especially in a creative endeavor.
Some of the more recent D&D books have been about as different from the older stuff as the new edition will be but it doesn’t have the same feel. The book of 9 swords (or whatever it’s called) lets warrior types work more like casters. But even with large changes like this most games are built to work off of their core book(s) with anything else being “extras”. Changing this by, for example, releasing a setting book with all new write-ups on classes and custom rules for all of them is possible but unless you want to charge people for a lot of ink and paper that they’ve already paid for, you’ll still have to refer them back to the core book(s). I’ve seen this sort of thing done here and there but my impression was that while it can be very popular, it isn’t the same for the players or the publisher as a new edition of the core game. Since it has to refer to the core game it’s tethered and can only go so far or make certain types of changes.
With new editions you can see that things are changing. Most games undergo significant revamping between editions. Some game elements I was first introduced to in Earthdawn are now making their way into D&D 15 years later. To make rules addendums (basically official house rules by another name) for all of that would have been a nightmare. So I understand why they did a new edition even while some people groan under the weight of all the books they now have which will go the way of the dino. If you’re one of those people and you end up in a group that prefers to try the Shiny New Thing then that analogy might be a good thing to keep in mind.
Dinosaurs didn’t so much disappear. Some died out sure but others just adapted and turned into all the species of birds we have today. Anything cool you really like is worth taking a closer look at, simplifying and potentially adapting to the new system.
Blah. If I keep leaving comments like that Chatty is going to tell me to get my own blog. Sorry! ^.^;
Now now, would I do such a thing? 🙂
If you all get blogs, I won’t have any readers left…
Good analogy Lanir.
For good or bad ( I think good), I firmly believe that D&D was due for a new edition.
Greenvesper,
I can pay for D&D or design/homebrew a free game or use a free game already online (or a commercial game I already have). This means that the fun/cost-ratio explodes into infinity, as long as any fun is had. That I’d call cost-effective.
Tommi’s last blog post..Fluxx and Uno; system and memory
Well for the 3rd edition I never bought anything else then the 3 core books. So basically it can stay at that 60$.
The more you play the more you’ll want variant hence buy other book but still the core book can take you a long way.
Of course like Tommi, Rip and some other have said you can make up your own material which all comes down to free time.
My free time is limited and any time saved preparing is worth a lot so fun to cost ratio includes the time factor in the cost. This time factor is really subjective and varies depending on how busy you are.
So Tommi I would change your equation to the following: (Fun+free time)/(cost+time need preparing) 😉
Oh hell! We’ve got an Engineer and a Mathematician loose around here…
Head for the bunkers!
🙂
Yan: So, I need a game that is free and requires very little prep. With no prep, the value still explodes into infinity.
The real problem with the equation as is: If there is a game that will do more prep for you than it costs, it will have negative value (unless the game also sucked very much and there was little time to play it, in which case the overall value would still be positive).
Phil: Ha! Too late.
Tommi’s last blog post..Fluxx and Uno; system and memory
Now, the thing that scares me about a system that eliminates prep, is that it would get old quickly, at least in my mind. But this is an impossibility! You still need to draw or download maps, place your encounters, create a storyline, set goals, create NPCs . . . what exactly can 4e do? So far I see that they eliminate rolling hp (which I think stinks). It could be spooky if all of your characters have the same abilities, and all of the monsters have the same stats too.
My prep time isn’t all that harsh. I run a game every three weeks and spend about an hour a night prepping for heavy prep sessions, but those are rare. I also use open campaigning, which really cuts down on the amount of prep that you do.
Prep is fun for me, it’s part of the creative process where the story starts unfolding before my eyes, and becomes real.
Ripper X’s last blog post..Creating Mysteries part 2
Just so my point of view doesn’t get lost in the sea of comments here Rip.
I too love prep. I love prep too much.
When I create an adventure, I want to have Hobgoblin shock troops, Bugbear Archers and a Half-Fiendish Were-boar Ogre as their chief.
Being a stickler for rules, I always wanted to create them by the rules, including appropriate templates, feats, Skills and Magic item…
This took me hours, a Regular 5 room dungeon would take me 4 hours of stat work, one hour for battle maps and about 1 hour for story.
I can’t do that anymore, but I STILL want to craft my own.
(I could buy these nifty 3rd party books full of stated up humanoids, and I may if 4e sucks)
If I read what’s planned for 4e correctly and by trusting Mike Mearls based on the work he did in Iron Heroes, foes will be a lot easier to design.
Each Monster entry is supposed to feature various versions of the creature and a sliding rule apporach to set stats rapidly and properly…
I think they will do that by dropping the 3.X symmetry of having monsters follow the exact same rules as characters. That means that chances are, monsters won’t have feats (but racial combat abilities) or a severely limited number of them, nor will skill matter so much (they never do).
I don’t want Zero prep… that would be awful. I want smart, fast and efficient tools to help me prep.
The equation was just a spur of the moment thing and not that well formulated. Still the idea was just to add the inherent cost of having to make your game world in the equation.
That being said a RPG game with no preparation time is called a computer game everything else requires, at least, some logistics… :p
@Yan: World of Warcraft needs preparation man! A nice comfy seat, a lock on the kids’ room, a few liters of caffeinated beverages and a few more friends with too much free time and/or not enough sleep!
🙂
Ripper X – yeah, as Chatty said, it’s the mechanical prep that sucks, not story prep.
I think the most telling part was when it was said that creating a brand new monster with an appropriate challenge rating in 4e would take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, depending on your DMing experience.
With 3e, this was essentially impossible, and an NPC would take about 1/2 hour. A monster from scratch? Likely to take an hour per iteration, with a couple iterations involved..
I will agree with your comments Chatty. As a 3e layman, those monster stats are just daunting! I am doing something kind of silly, I’ve downloaded Tomb of Horrors off of the official D&D site, they updated it to 3e and I’m downgrading it to 2e, but customizing most of it to fit my campaign, but it just amazed me at how complex they made the monsters!
My game mastering style is that each monsters primary job is to serve the story. Computers have cut down my prep time considerably, I use to have to write all of this crap longhand and sometimes I can’t even read my handwriting! Not to dis on 3e, but the monsters seem to take up too much space! Why would they have feats and skills, or even ability stats for that matter? Not for some monster whose only impact on the story is that he gets killed and then forgotten as soon as the PCs leave the room. It’s just silly!
I don’t know, I guess that I’m well read enough to know what each monster is capable of, not that I’m happy with all 2e monsters. Vampires for instance are just stupid as written, level drain . . . WHAT?!?! Heck, with all the crap that they wrote down for Gargoyles, I’d hate to see their stats for real badass monsters! It would go on for days! It just seems over analyzed, which to me, hurts my game. I once read this book on Writing Technique full of tons of rules of professional writers, and as a result I couldn’t write anything for a few years until I threw that book in the trash. Technique comes naturally, over analyzing things slows you down.
Simplifying monsters would be a bonus for ANY game. D&D is attractive to book readers, all of us are very well read! At least that is my impression. And if a DM doesn’t know what a gargoyle is, then he needs to spend more time playing and reading fiction.
Man, I am windy. Maybe I should start my own blog too, huh?
RIP
Ripper X’s last blog post..Creating Mysteries part 2
@World at large: Why do I have a strange feeling that a running gag about creating blogs is forming in this community? 😛
@ Rip: I couldn’t agree more and that’s why I wrote about 4e seemingly embracing what Gygax did in 1e and have monsters built differently than characters a few days ago (just with better math underneath it all now).
A lot of people liked having the engine open to play with. I was one, 3-4 years ago.
There are thousands and thousands of crunchy forum posts on the net about 3e monsters tweaked to perfection. Hell there is a complete fan-driven 3.0 to 3.5 conversion of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil on Monte Cook’s old forums.
Hopefully the next version will deliver the same crunchy thrill, but with with far less indigestible bits.
No, you’re right. The thought process was twofold.
1) Have characters, NPC, monsters, etc use a single unified mechanic for advancement. A noble goal, but ultimately flawed.
2) With monsters using the same mechanics, it will make advancing them to make them tougher more formulaic. It will also make adding class levels (troglodyte barbarian, for instance) easy. This succeeded, but formulaic doesn’t mean simple. Especially when it came down to determining CR afterwards.
2 also allowed for monstrous races to be used as PCs easily. A goblin of lizardman could be picked up and used as a PC with little trouble.
4e is definitely moving a little bit back towards 2e-style monster creation, but is trying to do it better. They’re giving guidelines for creating monsters of a certain CR, and for creating monsters in general. 2e and prior versions gave little to no help if you wanted to create your own stuff.
Monsters no longer use the same creation methods as PCs. Having ability scores, however, enables you to still add levels of Rogue to a goblin, or Cleric to a kobold chief.
Oh, and level drain? It doesn’t exist in 4e. Same with all the other hard-to-balance, overly complex stuff.
Yan: I wasn’t taking the thing seriously.
On prepless games: There is a storygame called Universalis that makes prep practically impossible. In it, everyone is kind of GM and spends coins to add to or change the fiction. There is no prep possible because everyone has exactly the same amount of power (disregarding any variants with a GM).
There is another story/roleplaying game called Capes, which is strange and which I haven’t played. No GM there, either.
Both of these games must be played with no prep. To call or not to call them roleplaying games is a semantic argument.
My personal take on prep is that necessary preparation should be very close to zero, but the presence of optional prep is no problem. Sometimes it is fun, sometimes not.
Tommi’s last blog post..Rules as toys
@Graham – basically it was a whole bunch of little things and a couple of bigger ones that added up to one great big ‘meh’. Some weren’t WOTC’s fault (of the 2 DMs who tried to introduce 3e one is a rules-lawyering jerk who can’t be bothered to learn the rules and the other is lovely but has the attention span of a gnat on speed) but some were (the books were more expensive than other books at the time, the artwork is channelling Diablo, the faux balancing of classes, and the character sheet).
For me the bigger issues were the feats and the actual physical design of the books. Partly it’s flat-out prejudice: I don’t like treed systems in anything – computer or pen&paper – and I think they’re a particularly bad fit in a system with classes. I also really dislike the idea that I should plan my character out several levels ahead when creating it – if I’m creating a 10/20/whateverth level character I might as well play a 10/20/whateverth level game – I would rather have my character develop through the game. As for the books….I have bad eyes and I stare at a computer screen all day. Between the glossy paper, beige background, faux lines & other background details, and not-black text I can’t read the books for more than 1/2 hour to 1 hour at a time, which really doesn’t allow immersion in the system.
Mostly it was such a letdown because I was initially quite excited about it 🙂
This is one thing that 4e should be appeasing. Feats and abilities shouldn’t be treed any more, or at least very little.
In any case, I do understand most of your reasonings, though I don’t think the artwork is a great reason to reject a system. 😛 The class balance was greatly fixed in 3.5e.
Just one question.
I definitely understand the beige background. I have pretty good eyesight, and it can still hurt. Luckily, 4e seems to be dropping the beige colouring.
But my question is, did you have a different book than me? I just checked the 3.0 PHB, and the text is most definitely black.
@Graham – yay! on the tree pruning and the beige removal! I may have to move from cautiously optimistic to plain old optimistic 😀
the text….hmmmmmm….my books are in storage right now so I can’t check but I could have sworn the text was dark brown rather than black….I’m willing to believe I was thinking of another book though 🙂
the art….ya, it’s not a very good reason to reject a system 😀 It does give an indication of the focus and general feel of the system though (did you ever see the art for Werewolf 1st ed? Yikes)….It’s sort of the chocolate sprinkles on top of the cherry on top of the disappointment parfait 😀