First comment! ;)

I’ve never play DnD before but i find your opinions to be quite reasonable..

second comment, but more noteworthy.

Your vid cut off halfway through man. Error perhaps?

second comment, but more noteworthy.

Your vid cut off halfway through man. Error perhaps?

Agreed. I’m off to play 4e DnD on IRC now.

third? haha whatever. im a hardcore spoonyfan. is that a even a term? haha oh well.

third? haha whatever. im a hardcore spoonyfan. is that a even a term? haha oh well.

I might try to talk my friends into 4th at some point, but at the moment we are working on a White Wolf campeign.

btw I totaly feel your pain about song of ice and fire, i believe the next book was going to focus on what happened at the wall…It doesnt help my waiting that Jon Snow is my favorite character…. damn it

Dude, go to sleep its late….

Dude, go to sleep its late….

Lol, have you considered Everquest 2? :P They have a hell of a referral program.. shoot me an email if interested. Also, a friend of mine playing DDO was saying a lot of the same stuff you’ve mentioned. He’s playing both EQ2 AND DDO at the moment and was thinking about dropping DDO entirely just because he can get a much better experience just running over his friends house and getting some guys together.

I think I’m going to try and get some friends together for 4th edition.

I think I’m going to try and get some friends together for 4th edition.

My group is to poor for 4th We’ve kinda stick with 3.5 or more obscure role playing games, most provided by me.

D&D 4th was not made for the “standard” D&D player. Its made for WOW-players thinking about continuing their raids and stuff in a pen&paper format.
Our group started with AD&D, it was ok, but there are a lot of..more intersting..systems out there.

If you are the crunchy type, try GURPS 4th Edition. Its very well done, covers a lot of situations, your can build ANY character and you can play ANY setting with it. SF, Cyberpunk, low-magic, high-magic, shadowrun, vampire, supers, you name it.

We played a star wars campaign a few years ago BEFORE the prequels came out, and it was a blast. We tried a warhammer campaign with it, and it was one of the best campaigns we ever played, i even started a campaign based on the XCOM-games(no no, the OLD ones), and my players love it.

If you like freedom, flexibility and lots of option, try it. There is a GURPS lite pdf you can download at sjgames.com for a first look. But if you like nice and simple, its propably not for you :)

I started out in 3ed ED, & i had a wonderful DM who made it insanely fun. My older cousin of course shat on all my love for it by pointing out all the flaws, But for someone who had never played D&D before I think 3ed ED really simplified the whole thing enough for me to get really interested in a table top RPG. Hackmaster its so much fun to make a charter in hackmaster, even if you know hes going to get killed in some horrible way or you rolled up as many quirks & flaws as your DM would allow & now you have no eyes, A fear Of Goats,1 leg & now you just cant play that guy because for some reason the pixie fairy fighter love to ride on his pet goat, Its just really fun to roll up a charter. Anyhow never gave 4th a real good shot, I just wrote it off as something else that would take way to much money that i had already spent to play the game & told people it over simplified the game to get out of playing it with them. Maybe i should give it another chance?

D&D 4th was not made for the “standard” D&D player. Its made for WOW-players thinking about continuing their raids and stuff in a pen&paper format.
Our group started with AD&D, it was ok, but there are a lot of..more intersting..systems out there.

If you are the crunchy type, try GURPS 4th Edition. Its very well done, covers a lot of situations, your can build ANY character and you can play ANY setting with it. SF, Cyberpunk, low-magic, high-magic, shadowrun, vampire, supers, you name it.

We played a star wars campaign a few years ago BEFORE the prequels came out, and it was a blast. We tried a warhammer campaign with it, and it was one of the best campaigns we ever played, i even started a campaign based on the XCOM-games(no no, the OLD ones), and my players love it.

If you like freedom, flexibility and lots of option, try it. There is a GURPS lite pdf you can download at sjgames.com for a first look. But if you like nice and simple, its propably not for you :)

Interesting, I felt that 4TH edition DnD fell apart after level 14 whereas unbalanced skills show thier ugly heads. For example, the barbarian gains a skill to attack his Con mod+1 times as an encounter power, Avenger’s AC becomes higher then the Defenders AC and Rangers can attack infinately as long as they can hit each time. Don’t even grt me started on the epic tier…. damn demi-gods…

Interesting, I felt that 4TH edition DnD fell apart after level 14 whereas unbalanced skills show thier ugly heads. For example, the barbarian gains a skill to attack his Con mod+1 times as an encounter power, Avenger’s AC becomes higher then the Defenders AC and Rangers can attack infinately as long as they can hit each time. Don’t even grt me started on the epic tier…. damn demi-gods…

I admit to having never played pen and paper RPGs, but for one short DnD campaign, but I love to read the books of many various settings and games. As far as systems go, I’d have to say that Savage Worlds really seems like the funnest, quick-and-easy system, but as far as settings go, I really like White Wolf’s Scion books (I hear they’re a trainwreck to play, however).

That was awesome; I just watched the previous and then reloaded, and lo and behold, Part 2 was up!

I was invited to join a group a couple of years ago, and we would meet every weekend to play D&D (I believe it was AD&D) Shadowrun roughly 8 to 12 hours in a row from dawn to morning. Unfortunately though, I had no prior experience with either games and as such had trouble following since I had to learn on the spot. Over time, shit happened and the group just kinda disbanded… To be fair, some of those guys had been playing for a good 15 years and it got a bit too serious, not to mention that I felt like I sucked, likely due to inexperience.

I have two or three friends who may be interested in trying out D&D or Shadowrun if I play the DM; again, I lack experience in playing tabletop RPGs, but I’m pretty good at creating scenarios for other types of games, if I may say so myself. My friends have no experience whatsoever either, safe for one of them who joined the other group for a short time, so what would you recommend? Also, do you need to read the entire guide book or is only part of it actual rules while the rest contains extras?

Though this question is directed at Spoony, who is no doubt pretty busy at the moment, I would gladly take more recommendations.

That was awesome; I just watched the previous and then reloaded, and lo and behold, Part 2 was up!

I was invited to join a group a couple of years ago, and we would meet every weekend to play D&D (I believe it was AD&D) Shadowrun roughly 8 to 12 hours in a row from dawn to morning. Unfortunately though, I had no prior experience with either games and as such had trouble following since I had to learn on the spot. Over time, shit happened and the group just kinda disbanded… To be fair, some of those guys had been playing for a good 15 years and it got a bit too serious, not to mention that I felt like I sucked, likely due to inexperience.

I have two or three friends who may be interested in trying out D&D or Shadowrun if I play the DM; again, I lack experience in playing tabletop RPGs, but I’m pretty good at creating scenarios for other types of games, if I may say so myself. My friends have no experience whatsoever either, safe for one of them who joined the other group for a short time, so what would you recommend? Also, do you need to read the entire guide book or is only part of it actual rules while the rest contains extras?

Though this question is directed at Spoony, who is no doubt pretty busy at the moment, I would gladly take more recommendations.

OK, Spoony. You are failing us all here.
YOU KNOW you need to do a review of Rifts, because it keeps cropping up in your reviews of D&D. Just make sure you remember to point out that Rifts has THE SAME DAMN PROBLEM THAT EVERY PALLADIUM GAME HAS. The ONLY stat that matters is Physical Prowess. That’s it. That is the failing of the game. Sure, if you have supernatural strength it is nice to hit harder, and if you pack around your ridiculous automatic grenade launchers or pilot a bot that launches missiles (in volleys of at least four, or why bother…) you can get around it some. But at the end of the day, the best stat is going to be going to physical prowess, and since any character can take run as a skill, the dump stat is always gonna be speed. That game is broken at the CORE.

And don’t even get me STARTED on when things really went to hell, that would have been upon the release of the South America 2 campaign book, when the power levels of starting characters became so utterly ridiculous that even letting your players read the book was a mistake punishable by death. Mercenaries was BAD, but SA2, Oh my god…. Federation of magic? Really? We needed that? How about just making a decent system of rules for techno wizardry, something that was supposedly available and fleshed out in the main book for the stupid thing. The ONLY reason to play it was for the world, but even that wasn’t unique, it was freaking “Gamma World” with dimensional portals that open randomly and a sprinkling of high tech Nazi’s. Seriously. Rifts. Hah!
/sigh. I ran that miserable game for something like 14 years, off and on. At the start it was some of the most fun I have ever had. Toward the end it became a trial by fire, and I haven’t touched the damn thing since ’04. Every time they released a new book. Floods of ridiculous, both powerful and stupid, OCC’s were released RCC’s that would never get played and served no purpose other than to annoy me by cluttering up a page in the book. The fact that they never had decent rules for bot and power armor repair or modification, though they had the skills to do so and every freaking book they published released more crap that everybody wanted. Too many books. Too much escalation. And the simple fact that it didn’t matter if you were a Juicer, a Rogue Scholar, A Headhunter, A mind Melter or a freaking dragon, there was incessant whining if the Physical prowess couldn’t crawl to the low twenties after skills.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a pushover GM. And I am exaggerating some for effect, my players were not really all that bad. But… Rifts and Palladium in general just kinda suck. They need to give up on their system and just write world book material for OTHER games. THAT they are damned good at.

I think my soap box just collapsed under the weight of my contempt. I guess I will stop now.

I started with 3.5e and I was excited when 4e was coming around. I think I was shafted on the DM though, combat took forever and even playing once a week for a year we never got into Paragon Tier. No matter which version you like or play, its the DM that can either make your experience awesome or total crap. Oh, and speaking about the game falling apart at later levels, you can actually one shot Orcus if you’re a sorcerer/anything/Demigod by throwing his own instant death attack right back at him.

I started with 3.5e and I was excited when 4e was coming around. I think I was shafted on the DM though, combat took forever and even playing once a week for a year we never got into Paragon Tier. No matter which version you like or play, its the DM that can either make your experience awesome or total crap. Oh, and speaking about the game falling apart at later levels, you can actually one shot Orcus if you’re a sorcerer/anything/Demigod by throwing his own instant death attack right back at him.

I never met somebody who actually played Rifts – as in played by the Palladium ruleset. I know several people – myself included – who play Rifts with GURPS or another system as crunch. The setting is great, the world books are among the best fluff I’ve ever found for a RPG but the rules are just useless.

As for DnD, I’ve been trying to get a 4th ed session off the ground for months now, but most DnD players here prefer to stick to 3.5 for various reasons, usually “I don’t want to buy new books” and “That game is made for mmorpg kiddies and I’M A MAN! *punch*” And while I could get over my initial “They changed it, now it sucks” reaction to 4th ed as the system, I hope someone fries eternally for what they did to Faerûn.

OCC,AD&D,DMing,they all sound like serious diseases.It’s quite hilarious for those who don’t understand rpgs.
I do ,though.

OCC,AD&D,DMing,they all sound like serious diseases.It’s quite hilarious for those who don’t understand rpgs.
I do ,though.

Wooo, someone sticking up for 4th! I’ve found the balance refreshing after high level 3/3.5 spellcasters.

Funny seeing someone with all those planescape books, I just left a campaign where I was playing planescape for the past few years. Odd setting, but fun.

Oh god Rifts… I only played a session or two, but all I remember was my OCC was so useless compared to someone else’s OCC, I felt beyond useless.

I got the 4th edition into my hands (never played it though) and my take on it is:

- Character classes are too generic
- Artwork is ugly
- Game setting reminds me more of Final Fantasy then a Tolkinesque world
- Discourages role playing (every situation is supposed to be “rolled out” with dice)

All in all it seems to be a table top miniatures wargame in disguise
I’d stay away from it

I got the 4th edition into my hands (never played it though) and my take on it is:

- Character classes are too generic
- Artwork is ugly
- Game setting reminds me more of Final Fantasy then a Tolkinesque world
- Discourages role playing (every situation is supposed to be “rolled out” with dice)

All in all it seems to be a table top miniatures wargame in disguise
I’d stay away from it

I’ve been waiting for a follow up! It’s sad people write 4e off as WoW the roleplaying game or the antithesis to roleplaying. Oh no, it’s more accessible and has streamlined rules! Oh no, it leaves roleplaying to the players rather than muddle it up with rules! Don’t worry about people not liking the game, it is selling extremely well. Complainers are just very vocal.

It’s great that you’re a gamer Spoony. It’s good that you seem to know what you’re talking about too. I don’t really agree with you about 4th Ed or 3rd Ed. Personally I prefer 3.5 D&D but I suspect it’s much in the same way you prefer AD&D, I grew up into 3rd Ed. I do agree with the general opinion that 4th Ed plays more like a boardgame than a roleplaying game. It simply didn’t feel at all like D&D to me. That said I’ve only played with the core three books for 4th Ed so perhaps I’m missing something. That’s just my opinion. Keep up the good work.

It’s great that you’re a gamer Spoony. It’s good that you seem to know what you’re talking about too. I don’t really agree with you about 4th Ed or 3rd Ed. Personally I prefer 3.5 D&D but I suspect it’s much in the same way you prefer AD&D, I grew up into 3rd Ed. I do agree with the general opinion that 4th Ed plays more like a boardgame than a roleplaying game. It simply didn’t feel at all like D&D to me. That said I’ve only played with the core three books for 4th Ed so perhaps I’m missing something. That’s just my opinion. Keep up the good work.

Wow HC…I mean, I think you just went to 4chan’s /tg/ board and copypasted the first edition wars post you could find and put it here. Seriously dude, at least try a bit.

BLOODY PATH GOES IN EVERY FIELD

BLOODY PATH GOES IN EVERY FIELD

Nice Shout out on Shadow run, love that game, thought SR4 was a little to easy to break from the get go, though

I agree with you about 3rd / 3.5, 4th and Shadowrun. I don’t think 4th deserves the bum rap that it gets. Especially following the atrocity that was 3rd / 3.5. I think the moment that sealed the door for me on 3.5 was when I went back to play it after playing 4e for a while, and I went to level my character from 8 to 9.

It took me 45 minutes.

45 minutes! Just to put it into perspective, leveling a character from in 4th takes a tenth of that; and I -knew- what I wanted to take before going into it! Modifying saves, BAB, skills, sifting through billions of books for the feat I wanted etc etc etc… By the time I finished leveling the character, I didn’t want to play anymore and I haven’t touched it since.

Something I thought was funny was when you mentioned that 3.5 games don’t tend to go past level 9 or so, and I’ve never been in one that has (even in games that started at level 7 or 8). I honestly thought it was just my rotten luck until you mentioned it and I realized that it was par for the course.

Shadowrun (2nd edition) was a book I picked up after playing the rpg on the SNES (and later the Genesis version, which is a much closer representation of what Shadowrun is) when I was in Jr. High, and man…I read it cover to cover twice and still wasn’t sure how to run it (and actually never did). Even then I thought that you’d needed to have a degree in Mathematics to run it. Even when I finally played it in college, 5 years later, the guy who ran it was a Comp. Sci major / Math minor.

The Marvel RPG was fun in a quick, dirty, goofy way (purely from a rules standpoint, it’s literally possible to die from a papercut), and the “Ultimate Powers Book” is truly an -amazing- resource for writing. The book is around 25 years old now, but I maintain that for jump-starting character ideas, getting a sense of how powers (no matter how mundane) could work in the real world and all…I can’t think of anything that beats it.

I always thought Gurps was a great system that never got much airtime. It gives you a great, robust set of mechanics to use and lets you create whatever flavor / setting you wanted to accompany it. It’s an amazing system if you’re the sort that’s very creative and enjoy creating your own world, but if you’re not that kind of person then you’ll not know what to do with it.

I’m carrying on, but thanks for the great Vlog, Spoony!

I agree with you about 3rd / 3.5, 4th and Shadowrun. I don’t think 4th deserves the bum rap that it gets. Especially following the atrocity that was 3rd / 3.5. I think the moment that sealed the door for me on 3.5 was when I went back to play it after playing 4e for a while, and I went to level my character from 8 to 9.

It took me 45 minutes.

45 minutes! Just to put it into perspective, leveling a character from in 4th takes a tenth of that; and I -knew- what I wanted to take before going into it! Modifying saves, BAB, skills, sifting through billions of books for the feat I wanted etc etc etc… By the time I finished leveling the character, I didn’t want to play anymore and I haven’t touched it since.

Something I thought was funny was when you mentioned that 3.5 games don’t tend to go past level 9 or so, and I’ve never been in one that has (even in games that started at level 7 or 8). I honestly thought it was just my rotten luck until you mentioned it and I realized that it was par for the course.

Shadowrun (2nd edition) was a book I picked up after playing the rpg on the SNES (and later the Genesis version, which is a much closer representation of what Shadowrun is) when I was in Jr. High, and man…I read it cover to cover twice and still wasn’t sure how to run it (and actually never did). Even then I thought that you’d needed to have a degree in Mathematics to run it. Even when I finally played it in college, 5 years later, the guy who ran it was a Comp. Sci major / Math minor.

The Marvel RPG was fun in a quick, dirty, goofy way (purely from a rules standpoint, it’s literally possible to die from a papercut), and the “Ultimate Powers Book” is truly an -amazing- resource for writing. The book is around 25 years old now, but I maintain that for jump-starting character ideas, getting a sense of how powers (no matter how mundane) could work in the real world and all…I can’t think of anything that beats it.

I always thought Gurps was a great system that never got much airtime. It gives you a great, robust set of mechanics to use and lets you create whatever flavor / setting you wanted to accompany it. It’s an amazing system if you’re the sort that’s very creative and enjoy creating your own world, but if you’re not that kind of person then you’ll not know what to do with it.

I’m carrying on, but thanks for the great Vlog, Spoony!

I’m curious what your opinion on Pathfinder is. D&D 3rd edition is my personal favorite (and yes, I played AD&D 2nd Edition all through high school), but I have to concede that it had many of the problems you mentioned. I feel that Pathfinder addresses al lot of these problems. That said, I also think that it isn’t different enough to convert someone who isn’t a 3E fan to begin with. Thoughts?

4e gimped the customization ridiculously. By this point, it’s tabletop WoW.

4e gimped the customization ridiculously. By this point, it’s tabletop WoW.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD REVIEW RIFTS!! HA!

That game is so epic, love it when you’re digging through books for RCC’s to fit your OCC perfectly, and Kevin did NOT write south america! he had to revise it and scrap it cause the dude that did it was a fucking MUNCHKIN, he munched and muched HARD, my GM bitch slapped us if we ever looked at that book, then I got the pdf and read it and was like… what the FUCK this is so BROKEN, I mean the shit in that book is COSMO KNIGHT broken, and NO ONE gets to be a cosmo knight! EVER!

Also anyone that says they were are a munchkin! MUNCH!

Sewer rat OCC is the only way to go! mwahahahahaha SO MANY SKILLS! MWAHAHAHAHAA!

Good review Spoony! I personaly have never played 4th but i am realy intersted in trying it. Right now my group is into the new PATHFINDER rules set. I think you should check it out. The rules are solid and the classes are all pretty balenced out. Well except for claric but that is because of our Home rule that says that the gods decide which spells you get for the day. But enough rambeling. Keep up the good work!
By the way if you don’t want any third edition books anymore i will gladly free up some of you space. Just saying…

Good review Spoony! I personaly have never played 4th but i am realy intersted in trying it. Right now my group is into the new PATHFINDER rules set. I think you should check it out. The rules are solid and the classes are all pretty balenced out. Well except for claric but that is because of our Home rule that says that the gods decide which spells you get for the day. But enough rambeling. Keep up the good work!
By the way if you don’t want any third edition books anymore i will gladly free up some of you space. Just saying…

I never really played table top d&d. In fact there was only one table top rpg i used to play all the time and that was ghostbusters the roleplaying game. It’s rules were simplified compared to d&d, but it had a quirkiness and sense of humor to it. I wish i still had those books! Has anyone else ever played that one?

Squee a planescape, starjammer and forgotten realms fan, I love you spoony.

I allways wondered about D&D online since I first heard of it and wondered about the choice of eberron as a world, Id love a multiplanar campaign especially if they included dark sun and the far plane.

I agree with you on the “its a good starter and overall game” but I still have to unoquivically hate it for what it did to forgotten realms even though of course it didnt happen im my campaign. This is probably gomma make me sound like an idiot who doesnt know a thing about rpg’s or a 3.5 fanatic but part of the fun of 3.5 is the unbalanced factors and either trying to ballance them or just running round nuking stuff as early as possible, also if you give it a chance eberron can be fucking hillarious sometimes.

As for my collection I pretty much have 3/4 of all 3.5 eddition sourcebooks (no adventures though) and like a couple 2nd eddition books, as for setting forgotten realms all the way got nearly all 3.5 and 3rd edittion forgotten realms books appart from the last 3 they released and a couple of the early 3rd eddition books I also have d20 modern and future (just got both last month) everything else I have in digital format; 2nd eddition (mostly artifact books), planescape, eberron, starjammer and possibly dark sun, ravenloft and al quadim.

Squee a planescape, starjammer and forgotten realms fan, I love you spoony.

I allways wondered about D&D online since I first heard of it and wondered about the choice of eberron as a world, Id love a multiplanar campaign especially if they included dark sun and the far plane.

I agree with you on the “its a good starter and overall game” but I still have to unoquivically hate it for what it did to forgotten realms even though of course it didnt happen im my campaign. This is probably gomma make me sound like an idiot who doesnt know a thing about rpg’s or a 3.5 fanatic but part of the fun of 3.5 is the unbalanced factors and either trying to ballance them or just running round nuking stuff as early as possible, also if you give it a chance eberron can be fucking hillarious sometimes.

As for my collection I pretty much have 3/4 of all 3.5 eddition sourcebooks (no adventures though) and like a couple 2nd eddition books, as for setting forgotten realms all the way got nearly all 3.5 and 3rd edittion forgotten realms books appart from the last 3 they released and a couple of the early 3rd eddition books I also have d20 modern and future (just got both last month) everything else I have in digital format; 2nd eddition (mostly artifact books), planescape, eberron, starjammer and possibly dark sun, ravenloft and al quadim.

Planescape! I loved the PC game, and have been interested in getting a hold of the AD&D campaign setting books, but like you said, they’re hard to come by these days. I’m actually in the process of DMing a D&D campaign that revolves around plane hopping and players spending much time in Sigil. It’s a very interesting setting that everyone should try.

I never really grew up with D&D or any form of tabletop RPG; that hobby’s even more obscure here in the UK, and I don’t know anyone locally who plays such games. I recently got a copy of Shadowrun 4th Edition to get ideas for a story I was writing, but that’s about the extent of my tabletop knowledge.

Your videos on the subject always seem enthusiastic and well-informed though, and I have to admit you’ve got me interested in playing a tabletop game at least once. The only thing that slightly irks me are what you’re usually restricted to in terms of player race; the generic “human/elf/dwarf” choices don’t interest me. Saying that though I do remember seeing a D&D add-on book called “Savage Species”, or something like that, that gave you guides on making certain monsters into player characters, so it seems pretty open-ended in that regard.

As I say, a good video. You really help to make this subject interesting to non-fans like myself.

I never really grew up with D&D or any form of tabletop RPG; that hobby’s even more obscure here in the UK, and I don’t know anyone locally who plays such games. I recently got a copy of Shadowrun 4th Edition to get ideas for a story I was writing, but that’s about the extent of my tabletop knowledge.

Your videos on the subject always seem enthusiastic and well-informed though, and I have to admit you’ve got me interested in playing a tabletop game at least once. The only thing that slightly irks me are what you’re usually restricted to in terms of player race; the generic “human/elf/dwarf” choices don’t interest me. Saying that though I do remember seeing a D&D add-on book called “Savage Species”, or something like that, that gave you guides on making certain monsters into player characters, so it seems pretty open-ended in that regard.

As I say, a good video. You really help to make this subject interesting to non-fans like myself.

I have to agree with you on the DnD 3 and 3.5 edition DBZ battlefests.
Things tend to get out of hand really fast, and the ‘epic level campaign’ stuff is just plain broken. Our core group tried to see what’d happen if a party actually progressed that far.
It ended with a discussion that characters past level 20 should start losing Con score because they always just Gated everywhere and anything in front of them died at the blink of an eye.

There is a way to prevent this from happening (despite stopping cold at lvl 20 and ending the campaign) and that’s by putting a limit on things. Our last Birthright/custom mashup lasted no less than 4 rl years of monthly (at the start even every 2 weeks), we stopped at lvl 20 and had a limit on just plain magic. One spellcasting class allowed in the party and the world itself was low-key magic using. It meant that the magical things we actually did encounter were always more awe-inspiring.
Sigil /can/ be used in a 4th edition game, by the way. As a setting there’s nothing preventing you from using the lore and appearance of the planes.

And on the contrary to the RIFTS-scenario. I actually felt that ADnD was going that way. After the many splatbooks and the additional rulesets in “Spells and Magic” and “Skills and Powers” there was just so much you could get and choose. People spent hours nudging and minmaxing points to create the perfect armor-plated warrior-mage, it just wasn’t funny.
And that was before they tried to figure out their THAC0.

I love 4th ed. Can’t understand why people say it discourages roleplay. You really need rules to tell you how to interact with people? Compare with the latest edition of Shadowrun, where the books do not tell half of what you’d need to know about shadowrunning or how a shadowrunner behaves. It’s a compilation of rules and your expected to pretty much figure the rest out. Yet no one says it discourages RP. What kind of RP is it you think cannot be done in 4th ed?

4th ed actually makes DMing fun. Creating encounters, and inventing my own monsters is not only easy, but fun. 4th ed gives DMs a liberty they never had, where you can create your own monsters, fitting your own vision, and the rules make sure that this monster will be balanced for the party. And that kind of freedom pays off for the players who get more engaging encounters.

I love 4th ed. Can’t understand why people say it discourages roleplay. You really need rules to tell you how to interact with people? Compare with the latest edition of Shadowrun, where the books do not tell half of what you’d need to know about shadowrunning or how a shadowrunner behaves. It’s a compilation of rules and your expected to pretty much figure the rest out. Yet no one says it discourages RP. What kind of RP is it you think cannot be done in 4th ed?

4th ed actually makes DMing fun. Creating encounters, and inventing my own monsters is not only easy, but fun. 4th ed gives DMs a liberty they never had, where you can create your own monsters, fitting your own vision, and the rules make sure that this monster will be balanced for the party. And that kind of freedom pays off for the players who get more engaging encounters.

What about Paranoia? players arn’t even ALLOWED to know the rules (because they’re optional) you can even kill their player character for asking (it’s ok because each have six clones and can buy more)

2ND EDITIONS IS THE BEST!!!! Hand down….

2ND EDITIONS IS THE BEST!!!! Hand down….

I’ve been a DM for several years now, and i liked 3.5. Honestly i kinda like to super powered characters, it could be that because it was my first RPG. On that note i say take a look at Pathfinder its makes great improvements to the 3.5 rules, kinda like a 3.75. http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG . On the note of 4th I do like it, I’ve done an entire campaign on 4th and i and my players enjoy it, wizards also has some interesting tools to help both the DM and player, its balanced, powers are cool, and well teamwork is rewarded. But their are things i didn’t like, NPC’s don’t feel flushed out they fell just kinda like monsters now, it kinda just makes villains less compelling at least to me.

My Group picked up D&D 4th Edition and Shadowrun 4th edition roughly at the same time but focused more on D&D. Now with D&D we all had a good grasp on how the world works and thus promptly invented our own so that each DM can just add a new country or village where he needs them. And we also found that being a DM in 4th Edition is extremely easy, pick fun monsters, adjust their level a little, add some flavor or borrow some things from another monster, as long as you keep it in the limits that are suggested in the Dungeon Masters Guide it works.
Now we just got to Paragon Level and one problem really shows. You need to have all characters on the same level of optimization or combat becomes really boring for someone in the group and we had to allow several character rebuilds to even that out. Playing a character the way you want is to some degree possible but if one builds his infernal warlock with the single goal of doing as much damage as possible and another his rogue around being the sneaky scoundrel you run into problems with your encounters. Do the Monsters have lots of hitpoints or high defenses then the rogue might just as well sling rocks at them, make them weaker and the powerful warlock wipes out half the room in a few rounds. Build them to counter the more powerful character and he has nothing to do anymore. Its an old problem and nowhere near as bad as it was in 3.5 sometimes but you really have to find your niche in the group. Our rogue stopped being a striker and became more of a controller instead, the wizard focused on blasting and being able to negate attacks against him so now the warlock is the typical glass cannon. I like 4th Edition very much, you can do extreme minmaxing and pick unbalanced combinations but I see not that much of a problem with that as long as all characters in the group do it to the same degree.

No when we started Shadowrun, only a few had a real grasp on how the world is supposed to work and we found three problems:
One, the character creation takes ages and in the end you almost always end up being ridiculously overpowered in the aspect you chose to focus on. And then you have almost no improvement left, you are already at the highest level except for some rare military grade gear that is slightly better than what you have.
Two, the combat is really deadly which is ok because you don’t really want to get into much of a fight against someone that is more powerful than you, it fits the world. But one unlucky roll and you are done for, we toned it down quite a bit so we yould actually have a combat situation without someone dying.
And three, the books are really horrible, especially the corebook unless you get the 20th anniversary corebook. Nothing is done by reading a few pages about a certain topic, it is always spread out over three to five points sometimes in several books. And sometimes they re not even referenced, it says that it works like XYZ but not where to find the rules for that. You would think they were mortally afraid of repeating themselves, always crossreferencing everything. I started as a drone rigger, so I look at the drone combat and it says drones count to my subscription limit which is explained somewhere else. So I go to that page where it says that my subscription limit depends on my commlink and is twice my system rating. So why couldn’t it repeat that in the description regarding the drones? Why not write “(System x 2, see subscribing p. xyz)”, is that too much? There are lots of examples like that and we still take half hour breaks in the game to find out how exactly one thing or the other might work. Slowly it is getting better but after going through the really REALLY great D&D books with their perfectly streamlined design and the very simple but effective rules, fighting through such a swamp of bad design was really hard.

My Group picked up D&D 4th Edition and Shadowrun 4th edition roughly at the same time but focused more on D&D. Now with D&D we all had a good grasp on how the world works and thus promptly invented our own so that each DM can just add a new country or village where he needs them. And we also found that being a DM in 4th Edition is extremely easy, pick fun monsters, adjust their level a little, add some flavor or borrow some things from another monster, as long as you keep it in the limits that are suggested in the Dungeon Masters Guide it works.
Now we just got to Paragon Level and one problem really shows. You need to have all characters on the same level of optimization or combat becomes really boring for someone in the group and we had to allow several character rebuilds to even that out. Playing a character the way you want is to some degree possible but if one builds his infernal warlock with the single goal of doing as much damage as possible and another his rogue around being the sneaky scoundrel you run into problems with your encounters. Do the Monsters have lots of hitpoints or high defenses then the rogue might just as well sling rocks at them, make them weaker and the powerful warlock wipes out half the room in a few rounds. Build them to counter the more powerful character and he has nothing to do anymore. Its an old problem and nowhere near as bad as it was in 3.5 sometimes but you really have to find your niche in the group. Our rogue stopped being a striker and became more of a controller instead, the wizard focused on blasting and being able to negate attacks against him so now the warlock is the typical glass cannon. I like 4th Edition very much, you can do extreme minmaxing and pick unbalanced combinations but I see not that much of a problem with that as long as all characters in the group do it to the same degree.

No when we started Shadowrun, only a few had a real grasp on how the world is supposed to work and we found three problems:
One, the character creation takes ages and in the end you almost always end up being ridiculously overpowered in the aspect you chose to focus on. And then you have almost no improvement left, you are already at the highest level except for some rare military grade gear that is slightly better than what you have.
Two, the combat is really deadly which is ok because you don’t really want to get into much of a fight against someone that is more powerful than you, it fits the world. But one unlucky roll and you are done for, we toned it down quite a bit so we yould actually have a combat situation without someone dying.
And three, the books are really horrible, especially the corebook unless you get the 20th anniversary corebook. Nothing is done by reading a few pages about a certain topic, it is always spread out over three to five points sometimes in several books. And sometimes they re not even referenced, it says that it works like XYZ but not where to find the rules for that. You would think they were mortally afraid of repeating themselves, always crossreferencing everything. I started as a drone rigger, so I look at the drone combat and it says drones count to my subscription limit which is explained somewhere else. So I go to that page where it says that my subscription limit depends on my commlink and is twice my system rating. So why couldn’t it repeat that in the description regarding the drones? Why not write “(System x 2, see subscribing p. xyz)”, is that too much? There are lots of examples like that and we still take half hour breaks in the game to find out how exactly one thing or the other might work. Slowly it is getting better but after going through the really REALLY great D&D books with their perfectly streamlined design and the very simple but effective rules, fighting through such a swamp of bad design was really hard.

I used to try to attempt 3.5. I agree completely, that once the parties get to mid-levels, it gets insane, especially with the splat-books, and that the well-designed classes that happened to be in splat-books didn’t have enough source material to hold up well to the base classes. Any who, I decided to look back into AD&D 2nd just for fun, and came to realize I loved it a lot more then 3.5. My only problem with 4e was that, looking into the books, everything looked waaaay too balanced and I dunno, just didn’t look like my cup of tea…. So I’m making my own campaign setting for AD&D 2nd now.

I would LOVE to play D&D or any role playing games ( a friend told be about a Swedish one called mutant, and it sounds awesome), but I cant get a group together.

I would LOVE to play D&D or any role playing games ( a friend told be about a Swedish one called mutant, and it sounds awesome), but I cant get a group together.

Yay! its good to know theres some love for 2nd edition, since all my friends are fixated with 3.5 >.>

You put into words my problem with 3 and 3.5, its a meta gamers paradise. I mean, just to show my friends what kind of problems there was with 3 (3.5) I showed them how easy the rules where to be bent. When ya can make a lv 10 character who can dish out, on average, 4,000 damage a turn (no exaggerations either, I did on average 4,000 damage a turn), its kinda silly. Yet my friends wouldn’t play ADnD with me Q.Q

Its also really hard to convince them to try 4th, which in terms of a ballanced game system, is superior to all other games. I still love 2nd, mostly because of the raw freedom it gives the DM, but 4th edition plays wonderfully.

On a side note, if ya like role playing games and the like you should consider trying a game called Decent. Its a self contained board game which is really quite fun. Its great if you have a group of friends who want a one shot type thing and don’t want to go though the lengthy process of making good characters and such, they just wanna kill shit. This game succeeds in that, I particularly like how the game is set up. The DM (for say) is bound by many many rules, but is actively trying to kill the players. If your always a DM like me, its quite a change. Forget balancing encounters or trying to be fair, your goal is to win at all costs. Now thats awsome

I’m curious, have you ever tried out Mutants and Masterminds? It’s by FAR my favorite game system to use for just about anything. It is basically a universal system masquerading as a superhero game. It’s simple, effective and infinitely flexible.

I’d recommend giving it a shot.

I’m curious, have you ever tried out Mutants and Masterminds? It’s by FAR my favorite game system to use for just about anything. It is basically a universal system masquerading as a superhero game. It’s simple, effective and infinitely flexible.

I’d recommend giving it a shot.

Okay, I’m no longer going to expect Spoony to have good taste in ANYTHING.

I hear a lot of people are turning to the pathfinder rpg because they didn’t like 4th edition. Some people even call it 3.75 I am curious to hear your opinion on it.

I hear a lot of people are turning to the pathfinder rpg because they didn’t like 4th edition. Some people even call it 3.75 I am curious to hear your opinion on it.

The Heroes of Legends book reminds me of MechWarrior 3e, Select your background and then roll your poison. :D

But anyways, my favorite RPGs are Shadowrun 4e and D&D 4e (never really played AD&D), but I have the same complaint about D&D 3.5, things just got out of hand at higher levels, especially for a group where half of us min/maxed, and the others focused on roleplaying. My only complaint with shadowrun is that character creation is so long. To make our groups first characters, it took around 5/6 hours total for four people!

Anyways, awesome stuff you do here spoony!

There are a lot of things to hate about D&D 4 if you approach it as an updated version of D&D. Paladins with no alignment/behavioral restrictions for instance. If you just mentally approach it as WotC releasing a brand new RPG called Diandifor though, it comes off much better. This also defuses the complaint that it’s really designed with only straight up dungeon crawling in mind, and doesn’t work for a more city based, political intrigue sort of campaign at all. I mean, yeah, it’s true, but that’s part of the game. Shadowrun’s rules suck if you want to run anything that isn’t a grim gritty cyberpunk game with fantasy elements tossed in, but nobody gripes there.

The one thing you can gripe about though without being able to write it off as not accepting the game on its own terms is that it very much strikes me as a bait and switch situation. The first time you play it, it’s pretty great. You make a character, get a tight little power pack, run through some surprisingly fun combat, come away with a positive impression. Play it a bit longer though, and some problems become apparent. The basic monster book is really really lacking in variety for low level encounters. You are going to get burnt out on fighting goblins. Then even at higher levels, most of the monster list is really the same 5 basic monster flavors having a variation for every level, which is rather nifty but again, I like having a huge bank of obscure, weird, stupid monsters, so I never have to reuse anything if I don’t want to.

Then when you start leveling, that little power pool which seems really neat at first level really doesn’t grow very much. I’m still going to really just be tossing out my one fun thing or 2 per fight, then falling back on my 2 basic attacks… of course, as I level, I have to recalculate how they work, since for every ability I have, it works off a different offensive and defensive stat, gets a bonus from my level, I probably have feats giving bonuses here and there to anything with, say, the Fire tag… and even if I don’t, I better darn well jot all those tags down in case a monster takes more or less damage from anything with the Radiant tag. I’m still looking for a way to practically manage everything beyond rewriting your whole character sheet every time you level up, or using half a sheet just to expand out all the math so you don’t forget when to tweak what.

There are a lot of things to hate about D&D 4 if you approach it as an updated version of D&D. Paladins with no alignment/behavioral restrictions for instance. If you just mentally approach it as WotC releasing a brand new RPG called Diandifor though, it comes off much better. This also defuses the complaint that it’s really designed with only straight up dungeon crawling in mind, and doesn’t work for a more city based, political intrigue sort of campaign at all. I mean, yeah, it’s true, but that’s part of the game. Shadowrun’s rules suck if you want to run anything that isn’t a grim gritty cyberpunk game with fantasy elements tossed in, but nobody gripes there.

The one thing you can gripe about though without being able to write it off as not accepting the game on its own terms is that it very much strikes me as a bait and switch situation. The first time you play it, it’s pretty great. You make a character, get a tight little power pack, run through some surprisingly fun combat, come away with a positive impression. Play it a bit longer though, and some problems become apparent. The basic monster book is really really lacking in variety for low level encounters. You are going to get burnt out on fighting goblins. Then even at higher levels, most of the monster list is really the same 5 basic monster flavors having a variation for every level, which is rather nifty but again, I like having a huge bank of obscure, weird, stupid monsters, so I never have to reuse anything if I don’t want to.

Then when you start leveling, that little power pool which seems really neat at first level really doesn’t grow very much. I’m still going to really just be tossing out my one fun thing or 2 per fight, then falling back on my 2 basic attacks… of course, as I level, I have to recalculate how they work, since for every ability I have, it works off a different offensive and defensive stat, gets a bonus from my level, I probably have feats giving bonuses here and there to anything with, say, the Fire tag… and even if I don’t, I better darn well jot all those tags down in case a monster takes more or less damage from anything with the Radiant tag. I’m still looking for a way to practically manage everything beyond rewriting your whole character sheet every time you level up, or using half a sheet just to expand out all the math so you don’t forget when to tweak what.

I am glad someone finally defended it, I like a lot of the aspects of it. Any chance of a review of Forgotten Realms lore changes, though?

Alot of those games you brought out are rather good.

But 4th edition is still the black sheep. But I really think it has to do with the huge change in the system, But to each there own.

Alot of those games you brought out are rather good.

But 4th edition is still the black sheep. But I really think it has to do with the huge change in the system, But to each there own.

on the subject of Planescape, the game Planescape: Torment is a REALLY good game. I assume it’s in the same setting as the Planescape campaign.

You should do some videos about Rifts. I mean….it was a really shitty game, but the books were still really fun to read, i got about 20 of them laying around here. They could of did something more interesting with the ideas they had….but whatever. Imma go jack off to carmella bing now.

Hey Spoony, i recommend you a RPG called “The Dark Eye”. Its very well done and i used to play it alot in my childhood.
Go check it out, i think its even better than AD&D. :)

greetings

You should do some videos about Rifts. I mean….it was a really shitty game, but the books were still really fun to read, i got about 20 of them laying around here. They could of did something more interesting with the ideas they had….but whatever. Imma go jack off to carmella bing now.

…Mark of Amber?! Red Steel!? Dude, you own these too!?

Have you seen the D&D podcast thing Penny Arcade is doing? PLEASE do one of those with some of your group!

…Mark of Amber?! Red Steel!? Dude, you own these too!?

Have you seen the D&D podcast thing Penny Arcade is doing? PLEASE do one of those with some of your group!

Okay, okay, I’m good now.

Problems I’ve had with 4th Edition that they might have fixed since my three unfortunate experiences with it:

1. If you don’t pick a party exactly like the ones they perscribe in the book (I played a 4 man of Paladin, Marshal, Wizard and Ranger and was smote by Goblins because a Lv. 1 encounter consisted of two ‘waves’ with no rest inbetween.)

2. There is no way of healing a person who has no Healing Surges left. (In 3.5 and all games before, healing implied some magical method or whatever. In 4th Edition it seems to imply ‘hit points’ measure ‘will to fight’, and at a point people just can’t get up anymore no matter what you use. While in theory it makes sense, in a game it’s not much fun to eventually reach a point where you can’t get up until you’ve rested, which in some cases like when you’re on a ticking clock, you just can’t do, ESPECIALLY when most encounters occur in freaking WAVES.)

3. Does EVERY adventure involve Orcus in some way? I can’t stand this guy and the idea that he’s responsible for all undead. Rituals to create Vampires require Orcus’ divine intervention? Screw that! What would Strahd say!? I know it’s D&D and you don’t have to use all the names given you by Wizards, but they seem to want to impose their will wherever they can. I swear, they’ll copyright the word Goblin before they’re done…

4. Fighter Variants are better than Fighters will ever be. The Penny Arcade podcast’s unveiling of the Avenger class, and the Spellsword an old fellow gamer of mine played in a 4th ed game illustrated that Fighters can only hit things really hard and move people. Fighter variants can hit things really hard, move people, teleport, hit with range, deal different damage types, are super-effective against other types of monsters… Fighters were outmoded one sourcebook into the proceedings. That isn’t great. (I guess this was kinda true in 3.5 too… effing Book of 9 Swords…)

5. Toolbox is no longer Toolbox. When “Sleep” lasts one round, there’s no longer a point in having it. As a matter of plot, my wizard put our Rogue to sleep so we could tie her up and drag her along on our adventure to the next town, as our client- her father- had told us to escort her, and my guy- a brash human merc- chose to do so by any means necessary. But she immediately woke up, got out of the bonds with a single Thievery roll, and stalked back to town. I couldn’t cast Sleep again because it was my daily (I think) so so much for that plan.

6. Players are outmatched. Level 1 monsters seem to get +9 modifiers while Level 1 players seem to get +3 if that. They don’t deal as much DAMAGE as players, but they don’t need to if they always hit, and focus their fire on one player at a time.

7. Lack of versatility in plotlines/boss battles. Maybe this is because 3.5′s been around longer, but it’s really easy to make epic storylines with original villians BECAUSE of all the crazy DBZ bull-nonsense available to us. With 4th Edition, everything is pretty much cookie-cutter, and the players know because of the specific formula Wizards has been kind enough to craft for us, you’ll never create anything surprising or overwhelming, unless you’re a clumsy newb or a sadistic douche.

On the whole, all the things I complain about are based on personal experiences circa a few months after 4th came out. I admit 3.5 had a TON of faults, but they were nothing a few house rules, and some trustworthy players and DM’s couldn’t fix. Personally I think teamwork is more fun and should be rewarded more handsomely when it happens naturally, rather than being shoved in your face by cold, unfeeling game mechanics. I feel healing magic should not be judged by human limits, because it’s freakin’ MAGIC! I feel fighters should be better at fighting than anyone else (except maybe barbarians). I feel Undead can HAVE a patron God, but do not NEED a patron God. Most of them are too rotted to know the difference anyway, and Vampires should be too proud to answer to ANY God.

There’s more cards I’m not showing with this whole 4th Edition mess, but these complaints are the most prominent… I’m sorry for wasting so much space voicing them, but I thought maybe you might like to hear one rabid gamer’s response put into full and complete sentences as opposed to “4th Ed Sux Lol.”

Hi Jenx,

actually I didn’t copy paste anything. I was just less vocal than usual. If I have the same conclusion than someone else, it should reinforce that there’s something to the criticism.

So Spoony’s a Song of Ice and Fire fan? What’s your take on the impending HBO adaptation?

*sigh* love the D&D stuff, just don’t have anyone to play with

I’m still reading through the comments, but I have some of my own in response to Kurosan’s questions about starting up a new game.

Most games (at least the ones with decent introductions) will tell you up front that, while *players* don’t need to read the whole rulebook, the *game master* really should. You don’t have to memorize everything, but if you’re not willing to make up large chunks of rules *and setting* on the fly, you should at least be familiar enough with it that you can answer any questions that come up with a single page-flip and a brief skim – ideally without having to stop the game at all. I’m not sure what you mean by “extras;” some games have optional rules, in which case the book will say so, and in most cases any book beyond the core rulebook(s) can be considered optional, but about the only thing that would really qualify as “extras” would be fiction, and that usually helps to give you a sense of the world if nothing else.

It sounds like your Shadowrun group kind of sucked. If you were new to the game and they knew it, they should have taken the time to prepare you a bit before hand and to give you advice during the game on how to play effectively. If they didn’t, they were being jerks.

For a first time GM, even if you’re a good scenario creator (for what other sorts of games, incidentally?) you probably want to consider a couple of published adventures. Unfortunately, the current edition of Shadowrun doesn’t have a lot of them, and “On the Run,” the explicitly introductory one, isn’t really very good. Any edition of D&D, though, has lots and lots of adventures to choose from.

E6 is the only way to play D&D3.0

D&D is actually realistic up to level 5

http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/d&d-calibrating.html

Great article showing that D&D math with average stats does match our ideas of reality.

Beyond level 6 you are now playing superhero fantasy (not heroic fantasy). D6 keeps the heroic fantasy level while allowing character growth by feats (and there are thousands), your character grows horizontal instead of vertical.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=352719

Spoony, while I disagree with you that 4e is superior to 3/3.5 (and I’ve probably been playing longer than you; I got my start with the red box back in ’81) I do agree that characters (usually) get pretty complicated at higher levels. I think the break point is a little higher than you do, though: around level 12-15. And I don’t necessarily mind; you just have to pay attention to your character’s advancement. I think I would have a bigger problem with starting at high level than growing my character to high level.

To me the big problem with the 4e classes is that they’re so specific. One thing I really love about 3e is that two different rogues or fighters or even wizards aren’t going to look alike, even if their primary weapon or ability is the same. In 4e, you’re either going to be just like all the other effective fireball wizards or axe fighters or you’re going to be a level or two behind in effectiveness.

The other thing that 4e really doesn’t do as well as 3e is inclusiveness. I’d played Basic/Expert/Companion/Master, AD&D 1 and AD&D 2 before getting to 3, and all of them had things the others couldn’t do. 3e, especially 3.5, did a really good job of letting you do any concept you could’ve done under any earlier ruleset and a bunch more besides.

That said, Third Edition did wind up suffering from serious class-happiness by the end. I won’t use anything out of tome of battle, for instance, either as a player or as a DM. It’s not necessarily because of balance, the new classes and abilities are just a different way of doing things the core book already does just fine.

Hehehe see my friend LOVES 4e and so we ended up trying it online(via a virtual table top) and i DM’d mind you not a huge fan of 4e, BUT i will say this after several dungeons i can’t deny that 4e is good, it does what its ment to be however… that being said i have say that i still prefer 3.5 4e feels to limiting, i can’t do stuff i want to. Btw i dunno if know this BUT! 3.5 was continued by another company(alot like hackmaster) called Paizo, they picked up 3.5 and new book is called simply ” pathfinder” went back and revised game and tried to balance it alot more my friends and i dumped 4e for pathfinder because we don’t feel that limitation that 4e had. At anyrate, 4e is not bad i could sit down and play a session(still enjoyed my 4e kobold dungeon nothing like humiliating some PC’s with 1 hp kobolds!) but i doubt i could ever call it ” better ” then 2e or 3.5e, also nice to know that hackmaster is old AD&D! now i must pick it up, and i to still have my old 2e complete books! guess not the only old school nerd!

Hehehe see my friend LOVES 4e and so we ended up trying it online(via a virtual table top) and i DM’d mind you not a huge fan of 4e, BUT i will say this after several dungeons i can’t deny that 4e is good, it does what its ment to be however… that being said i have say that i still prefer 3.5 4e feels to limiting, i can’t do stuff i want to. Btw i dunno if know this BUT! 3.5 was continued by another company(alot like hackmaster) called Paizo, they picked up 3.5 and new book is called simply ” pathfinder” went back and revised game and tried to balance it alot more my friends and i dumped 4e for pathfinder because we don’t feel that limitation that 4e had. At anyrate, 4e is not bad i could sit down and play a session(still enjoyed my 4e kobold dungeon nothing like humiliating some PC’s with 1 hp kobolds!) but i doubt i could ever call it ” better ” then 2e or 3.5e, also nice to know that hackmaster is old AD&D! now i must pick it up, and i to still have my old 2e complete books! guess not the only old school nerd!

I love AD&D (It’s what baldur’s gate used) It’s fairly balanced, but overpowers mages at low levels sadly.

Screw the Haters, 4e rocks! If you don’t like it don’t play it and shut up!

As someone who has been pidgeonholed into DM’ing almost from the 1st time I played I would have to say 4e is a godsend. Before a dungeon that would take me hours to map, write story for, populate and balance (then re-balance when someone suddenly can’t show) would take hours if not an entire day. Now I can populate and balance the dungeon on the fly and can focus much more on story and plot development. I also enjoy not having to go through a pile of 15-30 books to find a prestige class that breaks the entire game apart. I would still rather be a player in AD&D or 3.5, but if I have to DM 4e is the way to go.

A little Planescape trivia:
Did you know that miniature giant space hamsters predated Baldur’s Gate by three years? Boo wasn’t the first to be mentioned canonically. The first mention of the miniature versions of the Gnomish spelljammers were in “In The Cage: A Guide To Sigil.” This supplement book had a full page advertisement on the very final page about a petshop in Sigil that sold (surprise, surprise) miniature giant space hamsters (fun for kids!).
Perhaps that was where Minsc got his own little companion.

Hey Spoony, ever play Ravenloft?

Ah Dungeons and Dragons.
What I have sunk my money into…
3.5e core books, and complete adventurer…(Scout/Ninja/spellthief)(And the ton of prestige classes, including daggerspell mage, so some good…)
4e core books, and Keep on the shadowfell, I haven’t played it yet. But I did a short single encounter with my little sisters, they had a blast.
And my 2nd edition book, just the Players handbook.

My current in person game is second edition. I even asked my DM’s thoughts about 3.5, he said that the players got too powerful too fast. Granted I have yet to play a high end third game, I only have played a short game in hiatus with my IM buddy with a scout from complete adventurer. That’s where the skermish mechanic came from in fourth. :)

When I have looked over the rules, it didn’t seem that over kill, but any game can have that happen I guess.

I have only heard of rifts overkillness. players playing Dragons? hmm…

I wonder how long it will take for people (beside me) to mention that the creature on that 1st ed book is an Ifriti.

Spoony,

I’m in complete agreement that D&D 3.5 is good up through about level 4-6, then starts to fall apart. Fortunately, someone else came to this same conclusion. If you like the heroic feel of low-level 3.5 Ed, you should give E6 a shot. The idea is that you level to 6, then stop leveling and instead gain feats. I’ve been playing for probably 7 or 8 years now, mostly as a DM, and E6 has been the best experience I’ve had so far, in terms of game mechanics working well with the story. Here’s the link to the PDF.

http://esix.pbworks.com/f/E6v041.pdf

Spoony,

I’m in complete agreement that D&D 3.5 is good up through about level 4-6, then starts to fall apart. Fortunately, someone else came to this same conclusion. If you like the heroic feel of low-level 3.5 Ed, you should give E6 a shot. The idea is that you level to 6, then stop leveling and instead gain feats. I’ve been playing for probably 7 or 8 years now, mostly as a DM, and E6 has been the best experience I’ve had so far, in terms of game mechanics working well with the story. Here’s the link to the PDF.

http://esix.pbworks.com/f/E6v041.pdf

Spoony,

As far as free online games go, have you tried Perfect World International? I have found the quests to be a bit repetitive but the only things in the game that cost actual money are things to tweak your character but aren’t necessary for game play.

Maybe your should look into The Dark Eye (former Realms of Arkania).
It has a more Realistic Medieval Fantasy feeling. And even high Class Characters are never God like.

Maybe your should look into The Dark Eye (former Realms of Arkania).
It has a more Realistic Medieval Fantasy feeling. And even high Class Characters are never God like.

SoIaF is a tricky one to play. You need people who know the books and are willing to roleplay a lot. Hack and slash games are just impractical, even for a fighty character like the one I played (a minor Frey knight, heading for the Wall to atone for his family’s sins).

4 is WAAAY too mechanized
you see, a fighter learns shield bas at level 3
…
…
NO
i don’t want that.
even if you are a level ONE you can smash things with your shield, you don’t need a SKILL for that.
i play on 3.5, but with my rule book, where i have did some balancing work on classes so all have fun, and about over lv6, this is where when things on my settings get really epic. cause i throw like masterful goblins, or KNIGHT orcs. if you are not careful, you are gonna get SLAUGHTERED.

since i have a thing called puncture, and if a hit penetrates your armor, it has a slight chance of hitting a vital organ and K.O you (instant -4) even if you had like 250 hit points.

not to mention bone break and severe limbs.

above LV6, enemies get BRUTAL on my setting, and it is harder to survive than before actually.

4 is WAAAY too mechanized
you see, a fighter learns shield bas at level 3
…
…
NO
i don’t want that.
even if you are a level ONE you can smash things with your shield, you don’t need a SKILL for that.
i play on 3.5, but with my rule book, where i have did some balancing work on classes so all have fun, and about over lv6, this is where when things on my settings get really epic. cause i throw like masterful goblins, or KNIGHT orcs. if you are not careful, you are gonna get SLAUGHTERED.

since i have a thing called puncture, and if a hit penetrates your armor, it has a slight chance of hitting a vital organ and K.O you (instant -4) even if you had like 250 hit points.

not to mention bone break and severe limbs.

above LV6, enemies get BRUTAL on my setting, and it is harder to survive than before actually.

Why whine about the rules? Its not hard to change or remove them…

The whole concept of ‘rolling your background’ that you mentioned about Heroes of Legend is used in the Mechwarrior roleplaying game in the Battletech franchise. One of the guys in our roleplaying group is really into Battletech…and another one of us is hugely fanatic about Planescape.

My friends are awesome.

The whole concept of ‘rolling your background’ that you mentioned about Heroes of Legend is used in the Mechwarrior roleplaying game in the Battletech franchise. One of the guys in our roleplaying group is really into Battletech…and another one of us is hugely fanatic about Planescape.

My friends are awesome.

TOKYO GORE POLICE FOR THE WIN

This rocked, I don’t agree 100% but I love hearing about the games and running games and playing the games. Games being roleplaying tabletops.

OK, I see that people really like to rant on 4e, so I’m just dropping here a short list of the more legitimate (in the sense, different from “It doesn’t feel like DnD anymore!”) complaints:
- the one I hear most often, monsters have ridiculous amounts of HPs on higher levels, the solo fights will go forever and the last 10 rounds you will be just spamming
- many of the powers are really similar, with a damage + stock effect format, and lack explanation about how they actually work, other than metagame (often trying to come up with something will necessitate changing their mechanics)
- keeping track of so many status effects going on and off is a pain in the ass
- The Mongol dilemma–soldiers on horseback can defeat a number of the game’s monsters by virtue of the monsters not having decent ranged attacks. Same goes for a flying monster that picks up a bow.
- the 1HP Minion mechanic is actually pretty wonky
- after all the sacrifices in the name of balance (many iconic character concepts and class abilities) you can still hack the game to be much more powerful than you are supposed to, for example by: stunlocking (Originally, ste save mechanic was simple. Then they let you fvck with it by adding modifiers and putting people to Sleep forever), using multiattack powers (they underestimated the extra modifiers), Leader powers that give overly big bonuses of infinite healing (from Divine Power), making an entire party of one class (4 Wizards + Warlord or 4 Paladins + Cleric are much better parties than normal ones), Demigod epic destiny

Plus some of the funnier screw-ups:
- Adjectivenouns: “Darkleaf Armor: Darkleaves from the gravetrees of the Shadowfell give this armor its protective properties.”
- Bear Lore: Nature check DC 20: Bears attack with claws! (I am not making this up. Google it if you want)
- There are seriously 5 different monster abilities all named Evil Eye

… this comment was much shorter in my head

OK, I see that people really like to rant on 4e, so I’m just dropping here a short list of the more legitimate (in the sense, different from “It doesn’t feel like DnD anymore!”) complaints:
- the one I hear most often, monsters have ridiculous amounts of HPs on higher levels, the solo fights will go forever and the last 10 rounds you will be just spamming
- many of the powers are really similar, with a damage + stock effect format, and lack explanation about how they actually work, other than metagame (often trying to come up with something will necessitate changing their mechanics)
- keeping track of so many status effects going on and off is a pain in the ass
- The Mongol dilemma–soldiers on horseback can defeat a number of the game’s monsters by virtue of the monsters not having decent ranged attacks. Same goes for a flying monster that picks up a bow.
- the 1HP Minion mechanic is actually pretty wonky
- after all the sacrifices in the name of balance (many iconic character concepts and class abilities) you can still hack the game to be much more powerful than you are supposed to, for example by: stunlocking (Originally, ste save mechanic was simple. Then they let you fvck with it by adding modifiers and putting people to Sleep forever), using multiattack powers (they underestimated the extra modifiers), Leader powers that give overly big bonuses of infinite healing (from Divine Power), making an entire party of one class (4 Wizards + Warlord or 4 Paladins + Cleric are much better parties than normal ones), Demigod epic destiny

Plus some of the funnier screw-ups:
- Adjectivenouns: “Darkleaf Armor: Darkleaves from the gravetrees of the Shadowfell give this armor its protective properties.”
- Bear Lore: Nature check DC 20: Bears attack with claws! (I am not making this up. Google it if you want)
- There are seriously 5 different monster abilities all named Evil Eye

… this comment was much shorter in my head

Spoony, have you ever heard of OSRIC? (http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/osric/) It’s a (better organized) clone of 1st edition AD&D. As I understand, it was originally conceived to provide a reference for those as wished to publish 1st edition compatible material. Since then the self-styled “old school renaissance” has spiraled off in all kinds of odd directions. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, if any, on the matter.
I agree with you that 3e didn’t scale well at all. Particularly the rapidly accruing bonuses provided a lot of extra bookkeeping for little net effect. Of course, I always felt that AD&D had too much esoterica for esoterica’s sake and preferred Basic/Expert.
Furthermore I second the recommendation of E6.

Holy crap, you have the Planescape original box sets? Ohh, man, Spoony, you are like the king of D&D. I want you to join my campaign.

Holy crap, you have the Planescape original box sets? Ohh, man, Spoony, you are like the king of D&D. I want you to join my campaign.

Spoon! (10 points if anyone can remember what cartoon that came from.)

Anywho, I hope you got the D&D stuff I sent you from your wish list on Amazon. I think I put next day shipping.

Glad to see you in such a talkative mood especially on D&D. I still remember squeeing with joy when NWN came out and it followed the D&D rules so closely. But glad to see that you enjoy a good geekout like the rest of us.

BTW, when are you going to review FFX? There are some of us out there who would love to rip that POS a new one. Especially X-2. Do NOT get me started on that piece of fan wankery!

FFXI seemed a bit of an odd duck because it was an MMO played on the X-Box. I haven’t even given XII a second glance but XIII looks like it might actually be worth something. It might even get me to invest in a PS3. Maybe…

Anyway, keep the reviews coming. I wish I still had my comics so I could do a video on how much I hated the Phalanx saga…

I just starting trying to get into D&D, but most of my friends won’t play because of the negative stigma (I can almost guarantee that they’d have played if I’d picked any other RPG), and the ones that already do play on Saturday, when I work.

Stupid $30 books :-(

I just starting trying to get into D&D, but most of my friends won’t play because of the negative stigma (I can almost guarantee that they’d have played if I’d picked any other RPG), and the ones that already do play on Saturday, when I work.

Stupid $30 books :-(

Enjoyed your post Spoony.

Just one suggestion that no one else here has mentioned, and that’s Castles & Crusades, published by Troll Lord Games (http://www.trolllord.com/). It’s licensed under OGL and takes 3e, strips away all the klunky over ruled, numbers heavy nonsense and leaves what a lot of the oldschool ad&d crowd thinks should have been 2e’s successor. (I’m not a PR guy for TLG even though I’m sounding like one here!). Gygax was working for TLG for a while and the Trolls are really good guys – I’m sure they’d appreciate a video blog plug if you play or read it and enjoy.

Good to hear an opinion on 4e from someone who’s been with tabletop gaming for a while for once. Still kinda breaking into it myself, but I’ve played both 3.5 and 4e (and Pathfinder, for that matter) and both have their merits. Ultimately I think it depends on who’s DMing it all, not to mention how creative your players are with the ruleset.

Anyone else want Spoony to DM a game for them after seeing this?

Good to hear an opinion on 4e from someone who’s been with tabletop gaming for a while for once. Still kinda breaking into it myself, but I’ve played both 3.5 and 4e (and Pathfinder, for that matter) and both have their merits. Ultimately I think it depends on who’s DMing it all, not to mention how creative your players are with the ruleset.

Anyone else want Spoony to DM a game for them after seeing this?

Hey Spoony, just finished watching your opinions on 4th Edition and other games. I really liked the honest review, while it got it’s faults, it’s seriously well designed. I’m a fan of 3.5 since it’s what I started in, but you’re right about when you hit into the mid to high levels things do tend to get ridiculous. The book I absolutely hate the most is the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords; It has to be the most broken book in all of 3.5 D&D. Thankfully, 4th Editions takes concepts from that and well, that’s where the Warlord class came from, which I definitely like ten times better.

You’re right about Shadowrun about never lending your books out! I just got back my Augmentation book from one of my friends who has had that probably for the past 3 months, just to max out what he can with cybertech.

I’ve been playing DnD for about a two years now ,and yet I seem to be drowning myself in trivial shit games where all it is point A to point B, bs that gets annoying quickly. I know you will most likely never read this why would you, but I shall ramble on I need some way to make this game more interesting than the stuff our DM keeps feeding us ,and I would switch people if it was just that easy no one else I know is willing to take this guys place. It’s kind of hard to have a DM who is bi-polar. At times it’s good ,but most of the time he flips out and quiets. If you have ANY soultions in that Spoony head of your’s will you send them my way.

I’ve been playing DnD for about a two years now ,and yet I seem to be drowning myself in trivial shit games where all it is point A to point B, bs that gets annoying quickly. I know you will most likely never read this why would you, but I shall ramble on I need some way to make this game more interesting than the stuff our DM keeps feeding us ,and I would switch people if it was just that easy no one else I know is willing to take this guys place. It’s kind of hard to have a DM who is bi-polar. At times it’s good ,but most of the time he flips out and quiets. If you have ANY soultions in that Spoony head of your’s will you send them my way.

The farthest I got was to Thor on Nocturne ,and kicked his giant hammer weilding ass with out any help I had to give a good couple of tries ,but I made it.

Constructing, or finding, a D&D group is damn near impossible. I’ve been wanting to play it for a long while now, but just as with Magic: The Gathering, people are needed to have fun.

Stupid MMO’s

Constructing, or finding, a D&D group is damn near impossible. I’ve been wanting to play it for a long while now, but just as with Magic: The Gathering, people are needed to have fun.

Stupid MMO’s

Finding a DnD group is not that hard, there are sites for this around the net if you don’t have a dedicated rpg supply store in your neighborhood. And when that fails you can still play online with a group, check out rpgloop.net for example. And when even that fails, get out your copy of Neverwinter Nights 1or 2 and go to a server dedicated to roleplaying.

Oddly you guys seemed to hate the Book of Nine swords for 3E. I found that was one of my favorite books, simply because it made fighters fun to play again. Where as in basically every other edition prior to 4th, fighters were just “I attack, I attack again” on every turn. And that was crazy boring.

I find 4E sort of odd. Everyone complains there aren’t enough options, yet when someone’s turn comes up, they always seem to take a while choosing what they want to do. Even at level 1, where you’ve got like 4 powers.

Oddly you guys seemed to hate the Book of Nine swords for 3E. I found that was one of my favorite books, simply because it made fighters fun to play again. Where as in basically every other edition prior to 4th, fighters were just “I attack, I attack again” on every turn. And that was crazy boring.

I find 4E sort of odd. Everyone complains there aren’t enough options, yet when someone’s turn comes up, they always seem to take a while choosing what they want to do. Even at level 1, where you’ve got like 4 powers.

I’m thinking about getting into Shadowrun. Anyone have any suggestions on which books I should buy first?

finding a dnd group online:

with a vent, messenger, and a postable dice roller like on gaia online or the hard to find now add on for msn you can play a really good game of dnd with anyone even if there not local. vent lets things happen naturally like you would have sitting around a table. messenger lets you talk behind peoples back or come up with stuff with fellow players with out distrupting the game by leving the main vent channle. the dice roller well what would dnd be without dice. lastly because of the web it lets you do kool things becasue you can use anything on the web to. players have acess to stratagy guilds and wiki pedia for riddles or inendated infromation. you can toss up map images with simple a1 numbering to keep trake of where you are. and you can just keep expanding. the hardest part local or online. no one ever wants to dm

finding a dnd group online:

with a vent, messenger, and a postable dice roller like on gaia online or the hard to find now add on for msn you can play a really good game of dnd with anyone even if there not local. vent lets things happen naturally like you would have sitting around a table. messenger lets you talk behind peoples back or come up with stuff with fellow players with out distrupting the game by leving the main vent channle. the dice roller well what would dnd be without dice. lastly because of the web it lets you do kool things becasue you can use anything on the web to. players have acess to stratagy guilds and wiki pedia for riddles or inendated infromation. you can toss up map images with simple a1 numbering to keep trake of where you are. and you can just keep expanding. the hardest part local or online. no one ever wants to dm

I’m glad to see you sticking up for 4th edition. One of the things that put me off ever seriously playing 3.5 was the leveling of min-maxing from ridiculously unbalanced supplement material. There was no hope in hell to introduce new players to that game if they were hoping to play with a group of veterans who knew all the gimping tricks.

4th edition mechanics are easy to understand. Some people think this has simplified the game, but my opinion is that it’s cut out all the unnecessary headache associated with 3.5. The system works, it’s fun, and teamwork in battle is what sways that ‘hard’ encounter in your favour.

A common complaint I’ve heard is about the dumbing down of the (knowledge) skills. The reality is that skill encounters aren’t perfect as things stand right now – they tend to leave some classes out in the cold if they have either poor social skills (e.g. Druid) or poor environmental skills (Nature/Dungeoneering/Perception/Endurance; e.g. Rogue), but that was always the case really. In my mind though, it’s the DM’s perrogative to design these encounters around the party (so there might be something useful for the rogue to do when trying to find a path through a swamp) and reward player ingenuity in solutions. My current DM’s attitude is this: if we come up with a solution to situation he hasn’t forseen, his response is, “Go for it.” We’re playing the game to have fun, and people sometimes forget that.

Other than that I can only really parrot previous comments, but the main one is this: balancing encounters is easy and straightforward thanks to the Monster Manual layout, so DMs can spend more time on their campaign setting and less time worrying about combat. This is how it should be. The monster variation might suck a bit right now, but that’s what supplements are for.

Hey Spoony, have you tried Pathfinder yet? I’m curious to know what you think, especially with your overall negative opinion of 3 and 3.5. A ton of people are saying Pathfinder is the game 3rd edition should have been.

Hey Spoony, have you tried Pathfinder yet? I’m curious to know what you think, especially with your overall negative opinion of 3 and 3.5. A ton of people are saying Pathfinder is the game 3rd edition should have been.

You like free games? Play some Soldat!
http://www.soldat.pl
Its a 2D Multiplayer shooter, you can register for 9$ if you want but it doesnt give you any advantages in the gameplay.
And if spoony reads this Id really like to see your oppinion on this game.

Hey Noah, you seem like a really knowledgeable old school gamer. If you were interested in doing so and had the extra time to look would you mind checking out my site? I’m self published author and designer of tabletop RPG’s. I’ve sold quite a few copies of my game, Gaia Saga, but am still working on going mainstream. I’d really appreciate it if you checked it out and told me what you thought.

Love the site and the vlogs by the way. Keep up the good work, the wife and I love your stuff.

Hey Noah, you seem like a really knowledgeable old school gamer. If you were interested in doing so and had the extra time to look would you mind checking out my site? I’m self published author and designer of tabletop RPG’s. I’ve sold quite a few copies of my game, Gaia Saga, but am still working on going mainstream. I’d really appreciate it if you checked it out and told me what you thought.

Love the site and the vlogs by the way. Keep up the good work, the wife and I love your stuff.

You have Spelljammer! In its box! That game was awesomeness personified. I want to play it again now… I used to be in a campaign where I was playing a deep dragon and our quest took us into space and onboard a stolen vessel. Ah, happy days.

I prefer 3.5 myself. I almost prefer how freeform it can be if you are just prepared to be creative with the rules without bending them too much. It always felt like a good session when I had the books before me and I knew what to roll for what. And dividing my twenty siders into low rollers and high rollers (I had one which rolled twenty frequently, always good to get players off their guard mwahaha!)

This brought back many happy memories of gameplay. I’ll just wallow now :)

Woah I could rant on and on of how great 3rd edition is and you didn’t like it wtf yet you like 4th, 4th is so brutal it runs slow the combats in any group I’ve played in have always bin painfully slow it feels way to much like an mmo the way it’s built completely discourages role playing I’d rather play any mmo over 4th like it has some fun things and interesting ideas but over all it’s really not that good it discourages you from being evil and like having evil characters for a darker campaign it relies to heavily on team work.

It’s stupid how some of the powers work and very lame how you can only use a limited amount of magical items that per every 10 levels not mention like most magical items ins that games at lower lvls suck and or are way over priced they game tires way to hard to over balance everything so that it’s like a scale selling stuff you get penalized for and thes are just some of the problems man I could probobly take a whole page up. I’ve played 2nd edditon and hack master too as much as they are not my fave I’d rather play them over 4th

Also like 3rd or 3.5 I just like to throw them into the same pile jsut 3.5 was like the patch that fixed most of the problems also 3.5 never felt like a dbz campaign untill you reach epic lvl then it started to seem like it, or somtimes if you earned the power a like lvl 16 it can feel that way if you ether A your DM is a retard and gives way magical items and gp for free and has +5 magical long swords under the pillow thats dumb but if you work hard for your shit and have a good dm and you want to be super demi gods you should be able to become that. I just can;t see why you complain about 3.5 that much I don;t know hardly anyone who even complains about it nearly as much as you do I’m sure there is people who slam it worse then you do but just saying if you rather play 4th over 3.5 your credibility as a role player has dropped severely sorry. I’m sure I’ll get the super nerds in their parents basements after me now but w/e I most likly won;t read what they have to say.

P:S sorry for the bad gramer

Woah I could rant on and on of how great 3rd edition is and you didn’t like it wtf yet you like 4th, 4th is so brutal it runs slow the combats in any group I’ve played in have always bin painfully slow it feels way to much like an mmo the way it’s built completely discourages role playing I’d rather play any mmo over 4th like it has some fun things and interesting ideas but over all it’s really not that good it discourages you from being evil and like having evil characters for a darker campaign it relies to heavily on team work.

It’s stupid how some of the powers work and very lame how you can only use a limited amount of magical items that per every 10 levels not mention like most magical items ins that games at lower lvls suck and or are way over priced they game tires way to hard to over balance everything so that it’s like a scale selling stuff you get penalized for and thes are just some of the problems man I could probobly take a whole page up. I’ve played 2nd edditon and hack master too as much as they are not my fave I’d rather play them over 4th

Also like 3rd or 3.5 I just like to throw them into the same pile jsut 3.5 was like the patch that fixed most of the problems also 3.5 never felt like a dbz campaign untill you reach epic lvl then it started to seem like it, or somtimes if you earned the power a like lvl 16 it can feel that way if you ether A your DM is a retard and gives way magical items and gp for free and has +5 magical long swords under the pillow thats dumb but if you work hard for your shit and have a good dm and you want to be super demi gods you should be able to become that. I just can;t see why you complain about 3.5 that much I don;t know hardly anyone who even complains about it nearly as much as you do I’m sure there is people who slam it worse then you do but just saying if you rather play 4th over 3.5 your credibility as a role player has dropped severely sorry. I’m sure I’ll get the super nerds in their parents basements after me now but w/e I most likly won;t read what they have to say.

P:S sorry for the bad gramer

4th is good ive been playing since D&D and AD&D is my favorite i can do THAC0 in my head to this day, you must rember, 1) 3rd and 4th were desigend wiht the intention of bring in new younger players in i was there for the offical release at gengon lol, also 2) its now run by wizards the marketing machine that rivals only marvel in my opiion, also.. I had to make photo copies of the shadow run books to keep mine HAHAHA love that game.. haha DO NOT play the video game you will hurt yourself..

My flatmates baught me beginners d&d 4th edition set for my bday today. None of us has ever played today so later we gonna give it a go. Hopefully its fun.. not a wow player but flatmates are so maybe they’ll like it more then I but we’ll see.

My flatmates baught me beginners d&d 4th edition set for my bday today. None of us has ever played today so later we gonna give it a go. Hopefully its fun.. not a wow player but flatmates are so maybe they’ll like it more then I but we’ll see.

haha, surprised you criticised 3rd ed for being ‘Dragonball Zish’ and then praised 4th ed which is even more Dragonball Zish since you never run out of energy attacks which everyone slings around and stuff, but I know where you’re coming from.

I prefer 2nd ed for its magic etc, it was pre internet board whiners, so balance is thrown out for ‘in setting realism’ which I prefer.

just pointing out DDO isn’t the only D&D online. been trying to get a game together over on dndonlinegames sense may. it’s a good option if you don’t have enough free local people willing to play. just go there with friends. if you do looking for pc/dm you’ll get nothing done.

just pointing out DDO isn’t the only D&D online. been trying to get a game together over on dndonlinegames sense may. it’s a good option if you don’t have enough free local people willing to play. just go there with friends. if you do looking for pc/dm you’ll get nothing done.

I admit, your remarks on 3rd and 3.5 kind of hurt my feelings (but not really that much), since 3rd was the first edition I really got into. (I'm eight years younger than Spoony). I'm not really counting the 1st edition AD&D manuals my dad had lying around, since I just got into the pictures and the flavor text while glossing over most of the technical rules.

The weird thing is, I would continue to collect 3rd and 3.5 edition sources for the flavor text and art. And since I played and fucking loved Baldur's Gate II (one of my biggest nostalgic games), Forgotten Realms is my really preferred setting of choice, though I am kind of getting interested in Eberron, if only because I want to make a story akin to that campaign setting. It did annoy me, having to struggle with 2nd edition rules like THAC0 and the multitude of unnecessary saving throw types. Give me Fortitude, Reflex, and Will any day.

Anyway, my point is that I have over ten, maybe over twenty books from 3rd and 3.5, but I rarely ever played an actual campaign, mostly from lack of friends who shared this interest. Whenever I did try to play, I'll admit that keeping track of all those numbers and modifiers really annoyed me. But that Rifts OCC thing you mentioned? That's something I noticed pretty quickly in 3rd/3.5. There are so many prestige classes out there, perhaps more than 200, that it's gotta be hard to choose one for a single character!

Anyway, now that I've taken a bit of a closer look at both games, I think I'd gladly play either 3.5 or 4th. It really depends on what sort of game I'm in the mood for, and having a good DM is more important than choosing the right game, if you ask me.

(Also, Order of the Stick, one of my favorite webcomics, pretty much lives and breathes 3.5. You guys can check it out if you want. You might not like it, but it's worth a look.)

I agree! I mean I don't like the fact that everything is combat-based and honestly I would houserule some of the rituals to make them into non-combat magic (except for the more powerful ones), like Knock or Speak Language, but overall it's not a bad system.

Oh man, everything D&D related hypes me up, alot. Just because of this I finally created user account.

I really like the way you see things as a oldschool gamer, since I'm quite new to D&D. I have always being playing with 3.5 rules, and this really makes me buy those 4 edition books.

I can't argue with AD&D or 4 edition, since I have never played them. But when I'm DM, and I feel like 3.5 rules are falling apart I just make up own things to balance things out. Also I'm not good at following rules at all, most of the time I fight with those. I think some house/campaign rules help a lot at balancing.

All this D&D made me think great movie I should watch now, I don't know how well known Gamers: The Dorkness rising is in US. Since atleast here in Finland, almost none have ever heard of it. If you are D&D fan, I would advice to check that movie out. It is small budget movie, but hell, it is one of the most entertaining movies I have seen. Mostly because all of it's D&D cliches.

Happy easter!

I can't find out where I can send you a pm. So I hope you read this section someday. I also live near Helsinki. You can send me email to “ecchiahwa at hotmail dot com”, so we can discus more about gaming or such:)

I have to weigh in on the positive side of 4th edition. I liked a lot of the streamlining that took place for 4e, making the mechanics a lot easier to handle, especially as a GM, and allowing me to focus more on the campaign and the players. How streamlined is it? This is the only system that I could easily balance two different campaigns and three multi-session “one-offs” concurrently without losing my mind. (There were some sever player scheduling issues, so I was running “one-offs” with different characters/levels on the short-term; we'd frequently play the one-offs because there was a two to three hour gap in player availability on some days.) I'm not sure that'd even be possible in 3rd.

Skill challenges: I don't usually use skill challenges as done in the book, as it's the only mechanic that really struck me as clunky (my system is that my players actually role-play, and maybe make have to make a skill-check if I feel it's appropriate). I think the skill challenge system there is more like a back-up for new GMs that maybe haven't gotten the hang of actual role-playing yet. Sadly, I've been in some campaigns in 3.5 as a player where the GM's RP would have been improved by the skill challenge system, at least in that it might have gotten them started moving in the right direction and maybe they could have eventually graduated to actual RP… I like the beginner-friendly system – why should I have to kill myself over the system rules to have fun with my friends? I like that the flavor of attacks/powers actually feel like what they're supposed to be.

I like what they've done with the spell-casters – it was always tiresome at the low levels to cast a couple of spells and then be relegated to “back-up crossbowman” for the rest of the day.

I've played a decent amount of 3rd/3.5 – there is no way I would have DMed for that system, even if there was money involve. I definitely think the system is a massive improvement. I noticed from my players that the ones who complained the most about the system changes were from the types who really love to build min-max damage munchkins. (Not saying that's everyone, or even most people, that's just based on those I've personally played with in 4e.) Most of what they were really upset about was the fact that it is a balanced system, which amuses me.

These days if I game, it's usually either D&D 4e or Call of Cthulhu (CoC as player only, usually no farther forward than the '30s for setting). CoC wins as the only system that the thought of getting into any combat at all is utterly terrifying. Oddly, although I've gotten into 4e as a GM now, I haven't gotten to be a player in it since about three months after it first came out. ^_^

Interesting opinion, Spoony. Honestly, I’m probably going to give D&D up in favor of GURPS after my current campaign is done. More and more, working as a DM, I find myself annoyed by the restrictions that D&D places on me, and wanting to do different things. While 4th edition may be more streamlined, I’m finding that, as a DM, I’m not a fan of being told what I can and can’t do. GURPS, as paralyzing as all the options can be, remedies that problem rather handily.

what do you think about warhammer 40k’s Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and deathwatch

You know, I would LOVE to see what you think of Pathfinder. It’s an OGL game that (while not a D&D Product) fixes a lot of problems in 3.5 while still retaining flexibility and make-your own encounters. It also streamlines stats and trims skills somewhat (lots of options, but you don’t have to roll three times for spot, listen etc) Honestly, my friends and I love it. Plus there’s the tasty new Advanced Players guide out now… Again, I’d love to see your take on it.

Well over a year later, you are STILL waiting for the next Ice and Fire novel, as am I. Give it to us damn it. I haven’t even read A Feast of Crows. I keep putting it off because the next one isn’t out

You know, I’d really like to see what your take on the Pathfinder system is, Spoony.