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 Farseer Faenyin wrote:
snip

That post pretty closely describes my own experiences (except I wasn't lucky enough to get the Encylopedia Magica volumes back then!) up until I started reading and playing retroclones of D&D Basic. It really blew my mind. Nowadays, it's hard to look at newer editions of D&D as anything but miniature-based skirmish games.

 dementedwombat wrote:
To be honest I like 4e best.because it gives me a very well balanced combat system then leaves me alone afterwords and lets me do the rest of the game however I feel like running it

As far as a miniatures-based skirmish game goes, I totally agree.

 Manchu wrote:

 Farseer Faenyin wrote:
snip

That post pretty closely describes my own experiences (except I wasn't lucky enough to get the Encylopedia Magica volumes back then!) up until I started reading and playing retroclones of D&D Basic. It really blew my mind. Nowadays, it's hard to look at newer editions of D&D as anything but miniature-based skirmish games.

I do agree that the games certainly allow for much easier miniature representation and were obviously designed with miniatures and a certain playmat in mind.

I don't know if I feel only negatively about this. My players seem to enjoy having models available for their 'beloved characters' and using them. Plus we have some players that aren't as good at being able to understand two dimensional descriptions of locations let alone if you add any kind of third dimension to a battle area. I'm sure those players love the addition of miniature system support.

 Manchu wrote:

@adamsouza: I don't think your party's wizard is a good example of the power gaming possible in 3.5; if the wizard had been power gaming as hard as your party's thief and archer, he'd have left them in the dust.

True, that my experiences may not be typical, but I've yet to see someone actually play an uber wizard in 3E, to the point where the rest of the team is irrellevant without the rest of the team gimping their own builds.

I found that more prevalent in AD&D and 2E where massive fireballs and ricocheting lightning bolts cleared dungeon rooms faster than their compatriots could move.

About Monte Cook leaving next, I was acutally releaved when I heard the news. His design blogs were all about taking D&D Next back to it's 0D roots, which I feel is a terrible idea. I was always comfrotable with the distinction between AD&D and the more basic basic lighter versions, because I simply ignored that the lighter versions exist.

What I would like to see for next ?
1.) Game balance of 4E, at least as far as monster design.
2.) Older style magic items.
3.) 3E style Alchemy. The 4E Alchemy items were ludicrously expensive, and the scaling for them was nonsensicle.
4.) Magic system that falls somewhere between old and new. I liked at will spells, per encounter spells were something new, and daily is basically how they always were to begin with.
5.) Convert some of the Class powers to a unified list of feats, give characters feats at every level

Don't worry, I feel sure that D&D Next will be much, much more like 4E than 0E.

 Manchu wrote:
Don't worry, I feel sure that D&D Next will be much, much more like 4E than 0E.

I'd be okay with that

For what it's worth, most of the "amazing wizards" I've seen ruin the encounters and make them unfun by denying the monsters the ability to do anything relatively useful (grease and then stinking cloud on top of it anyone?) rather than actually killing the monsters. The alternative are archery fighters/minmaxed gunslinger who just kill all the monsters before they get to act, but at least then the encounter is over and we can move on with our life.

This sense of control of course leads to more and more people playing wizards (Pathfinder society organized play) which leads to more and more times where 2-3 wizards all got assigned to the same team and were absolutely unable to actually do anything since none of them actually did damage.

I had to DM a 3 wizard one druid pileup once...I think that's the event that finally snapped my soul and made me hate Pathfinder.

Druids in 3.5 could get really ridiculous, but then, they are casters so that is par for the course.

I heard they were the second worst right behind clerics.

Yep, Clerics are for sure the worst because they are the class that can literally do EVERYTHING, and usually do it better than the classes who are supposed to be good at it. Stand up front and bash stuff, cleric's got it. Sit in the back and cast damage spells, cleric's got it. Social encounters, cleric. Support/healing spells, cleric again.

It's because cleric more than any other class is played so differently by different people (paladin style smashing, convert the heretics social force, healing bot...), and apparently the game designers decided they would make everybody happy and make the class actually good at doing everything rather than splitting it into about 3 "cleric archetype" classes. They went halfway with this with the Paladin class, but nobody used it because it was still worse than the cleric overall, even if it was slightly better at bashing stuff.

Sorry, clerics are right up there with the range increment on bows and people who ban psionics without ever reading the rules on my "things that annoy me about D&D" scale.

Druids just break the game from an action economy perspective. When your character effectively gets 3+ activations per turn (druid, animal companion, summoned stuff) it doesn't really matter how average those activations are. You'll be doing stuff by shear weight of numbers. Not to mention they are full casters and can rip things apart in melee. They also have the unfortunate side effect of making a single player's turn last the same amount of time as the rest of the party (worst case scenario here).

I swear, people who complained about 4e's combat taking longer all played druids and wizards in Pathfinder. It does take longer, but because everybody actually takes the same amount of time. Playing the gunslinger who can get your turn over in 2 minutes or less makes sitting through the wizard's 15 minute save-fest a real pain.

 dementedwombat wrote:
Sorry, clerics are right up there with the range increment on bows and people who ban psionics without ever reading the rules on my "things that annoy me about D&D" scale.

I allowed psionics, but felt that they were dealth with poorly often. I consider them spell like abilities and allow people to apply spell defense like SR and Anti-Magic Field to psionics. Otherwise it's far too powerful.

I think of it as, you do a psionic campaign or a magic one. Or you allow only a tiny bit of psionics into the magic-based campaign to shake things up. But if you just apply all the magic stuff to psionics it's just more magic so far as feeling, at least IMO.

 Manchu wrote:
I think of it as, you do a psionic campaign or a magic one. Or you allow only a tiny bit of psionics into the magic-based campaign to shake things up. But if you just apply all the magic stuff to psionics it's just more magic so far as feeling, at least IMO.

I agree. But I feel that psionics ARE magic. It isn't physical, it isn't natural...it is mystical in nature and works like 'magic' in all respects except name. Saying psionics are better "because...because...they're not magic" is a cop-out and makes no sense in the environment of Greyhawk or Faerun

Sure, I understand. I differentiate them as a matter of genre flavoring. Magic, to me, is the "volume knob" for fantasy. Turn it up and you have High Fantasy, turn it down and you have Low Fantasy. I think of Psionics as a different knob, where you can add/subtract scifi/Cthulhuesque flavor.

I just like it because the system is much better thought out (in my opinion). I like having a mana bar

I'm personally referring to people who think they're overpowered though. It's kind of like a wizard who could actually use all his spells in one encounter. They can apply as much force as necessary to any given encounter day. Sure, they can completely blow one encounter out of the water, but then they've literally got nothing left for the rest of the day.