TRPG General Chat

LegendaryDude

20:01

There's a similar option for 3.5

Zachiel

@LegendaryDude If we go with the assumption that I want a character who can hold his ground even while not spending money on consumables, going for vow of poverty and/or monk means heading in the wrong direction.

I'd like to play a monk. I'd play one if they weren't so weak. I play a cleric instead. Even if I hate every god in the setting.

(By the way, I chose to play a cleric just because they can cast divine power and they can persist it.)

LegendaryDude

I guess I don't understand the problem you've having? Based on what you've written, it seems you're not having fun because you're choosing character options that make it not fun for you. So naturally my question to you is, why are you choosing those options?

Zachiel

@LegendaryDude Because I have no idea of which character options I like. Also mind that I need to have other people like them as well, or nobody will play with me.

A_S00

I have a question I want to ask about the history of 3.5 that I am worried might be too broad. Is there a way for me to get it vetted by this chat before posting, or should I just post it and be ready to accept edits and guidance if it is deemed problematic?

Zachiel

20:17

@A_S00 We're not omniscient, but maybe we can spot some problems in advance, or answer it here if it's no good match for this site no matter how you spell it. Go ahead!

@LegendaryDude And probably because I have a tendency to like things I can't create, and get bored at things I can do fine.

A_S00

@Zachiel OK - the question is basically "How did the 3.5 come to be such a mess?" I've got it nice and formatted, with some examples to narrow down what I mean by "such a mess" and a reminder about the Back It Up! principle so that answers cite things like designer interviews, stories from playtesting, or mechanics that are obviously holdovers from earlier editions, rather than just being subjective impressions.

Would this be in-scope?

LegendaryDude

@A_S00 if you ask it and it's too broad the community will help you steer it in the right direction. Having a question closed isn't a negative thing. It means we are preventing you from getting answers that are potentially unhelpful until we get your question sorted out to attract only the right kinds of answers.

I think if you have narrowed it down to prevent speculation it might work

best thing to do is to ask and see what happens

A_S00

OK, I will go ahead and post it then, and remind myself not to take any guidance I receive personally :)

LegendaryDude

@Zachiel This: "Also mind that I need to have other people like them as well, or nobody will play with me."

I don't get this at all

I've never made up a character and have someone say, "That's dumb, you can't play with us."

A_S00

0

Q: Why is D&D 3.5 such a mess?

The Premise: D&D 3.5 is my favorite TTRPG. It's also a huge mess: There are well-documented, major imbalances among the game's classes, even using only core material. The game's designers couldn't agree on what the rules of the game actually are. There are many examples of silly editing SNAFU...

LegendaryDude

20:23

@A_S00 So, one thing you might tweak is the question itself. It's rather presumptive; some people might not agree that it's a mess so you'll likely get some frame-challenges to that effect.

But of course you're free to leave it as is. I'm no authority on 3.5, that's for sure

And I tend to agree that even PFRPG is a bit of a mess (and likely for the same reasons, and having been around for only about half the time that 3.5e has been)

A_S00

I think most folks who play a lot of 3.5 agree that it's a mess...even those of us who like it a lot

If you know of a more neutral way to express that idea, though, I'm open to suggestions

Zachiel

@LegendaryDude this is not a tabletop game, it's a mmorpg-like game. When every player can choose who to play with, it is entirely possible someone gets left out.

LegendaryDude

@Zachiel I will revert back to my previous statement, then. I guess I don't understand the problem. Sorry :\

And I don't mean that in a dismissive "I don't understand" way, I mean it in a "I don't have enough information to understand where the problem is coming from" kind of way.

@A_S00 So, immediately I see a problem with it.

"...what I'm really interested in here is learning new things about how the game was designed, how it was (or wasn't) playtested, and how this history led to the glorious, sprawling mess of a game that I've played and loved for so many years."

That statement is too broad.

DForck42

@A_S00 might be worded a bit better as "Why were a lot of things designed poorly/had little to no play-testing"

A_S00

@LegendaryDude Do you think the question as a whole is too broad, or just that sentence implies that I'm looking for excessively broad answers and should be removed?

LegendaryDude

20:29

That sentence seems like you're asking for a list of reasons

List questions don't do very well because lists answers lead to speculation and they also lead to incomplete answers

Any answer that doesn't list all the reasons is, by default, wrong

DForck42

honestly, I'd just like to see what the supposed design process for 3.5 was SUPPOSED to be vs what actually happened

but that's probably a story FOR EACH BOOK

A_S00

@LegendaryDude Well, I do expect good answers to the question to cite more than one "reason," since I expect there really IS more than one reason 3.5 turned out the way it did. But this is equally true of the most highly-upvoted 3.5 question ever on this site: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/1/…

LegendaryDude

KRyan presents a pretty good defense of the question in his comment, though

Zachiel

@LegendaryDude Heh, I know. People outside the game are not familiar with the implication of that sort of game and people inside the game have probably already found their balance and don't like spending time discussing technicalities, they'd rather play and have fun, and there's already enough people that it's not a great problem if I'm unable to join.

LegendaryDude

@Zachiel What game is this, exactly?

@A_S00 Yes, but the list of differences between PF and 3.5 is finite and can be qualified.

@A_S00 Interestingly enough, pretty sure that question is what brought me to RPG.SE from a Google search when I first started running Pathfinder.

Zachiel

20:37

We have some chats. Each chat is a location in a popular area of a famous setting. We create our first level D&D 3.5 character (using a subset of the available material) and we roleplay the daily life of our characters, focusing on when they meet or associate with other PCs.
Sometimes we meet random monsters, Sometimes we meet NPCs and we get things to do. Sometimes some of us has ambitions and actively works towards fulfilling them, such as dominating the politic scene or going around with a pirate ship. Stories emerge.

The game is in Italian so I don't think you would recognize it by its name.

LegendaryDude

So, it's a MUSH?

Zachiel

Sort of. We do not have automatically generated dungeons or monsters, there's volounteers moving them.

LegendaryDude

MUSH's don't have automatically generated dungeons and monsters; MUDs do.

MUSH's usually require a judge or GM of some sort to make anything happen.

Zachiel

Oh, ok

So I think it's a MUSH, yes. But I also think I've tried to determine if there were any differences in the past and I've found some, I just can't remember which ones right now.

LegendaryDude

There's a subtle difference and they are usually used to mean the same thing, but IME MUSH is a lot more free form and doesn't usually have a static world with rooms and mobs and so on like a MUD would.

Zachiel

20:40

We call each of these sites "a land", here

LegendaryDude

What distinguishes a MUSH is that any player can usually create new rooms or objects and script them in order to create a scene using a limited built-in scripting language, whereas MUDs are generally static and written by a team of developers/coders who maintain the content.

Zachiel

Our world is somewhat static since we don't want players to rise too much in power (we want to keep the main NPCs of the setting alive and places should be kept recognizable. Once we had Waterdeep declare war to Luskan but less than a year later a peasant revolt (led by some players) got us back to the starting situation as expected.

Then I said every chat represents a place but it's totally ok to say "we need this other place today, let's just pretend we are playing there instead", clearly signal it and be happy with it.

LegendaryDude

Alright, so it's kind-of-sort-of a MUSH but it seems more free-from in the play, and less object/room driven. Scenes are probably more emergent based on what's happening in the RP?

Zachiel

Yes.

Most often it's courting someone, talking about how to face the next threath, having some quality time with friends, teaching things to apprentices, meeting someone new.

Right now I'm playing that cleric. I'm in love with this mage that's way younger than him yet equally powerful, and she's the second in command in a force of rangers. So, since she stopped playing but she does not want her character to disappear, I'm just hanging out with her boss and some other of her force, tonight. I'm sort of a police consultant, à la Charles Eppes in Numbers.

A_S00

21:01

Okay - consensus seems to be that that question is, indeed, too broad. Do you guys think there's a useful, less-broad version of that question that it could be edited into, or not worth attempting to salvage?

BESW

@A_S00 Maybe each of your bullet points could be stretched into a question.

"Why did 3.5 have such sloppy editing?" for example.

I'm not confident that'll produce the effects you want though.

@RollingFeles Do not feed the ego.

nitsua60

21:37

@A_S00 It looked really good to me: you provided good examples and reminded everyone of Back It Up! That demonstrates clearly that you know site norms and are trying to make sure the question works. On the other hand, given I've played exactly 1 session of 3.x (I don't know which) I won't contradict the estimation of those who know better that it's still too broad. Sad--I'd love to see the 20Kword answer that I imagine KRyan could produce!

"What managerial and design choices guided the growth of 3.5?"
Perhaps?

Zachiel

@nitsua60 20K? You're underestimating the breadth of the matter.

nitsua60

@Zachiel (I only say that because I think the post-limit lives somewhere around there. I can't find a citation for that, though.)

BESW

"No," the angel said, "we are not good or evil. That's you humans." "Oh, of course. You are all good." "What? No! We are holy or unholy."

Tweeted by MicroSFF on January 10, 2017 at 5:52 PM

Zachiel

@nitsua60 On the other hand, I'd be interested in trying to determine which edition you played.

(I like the investigation game, I don't care much for the actual result)

Can you remember which class and race you played?

nitsua60

@Zachiel I'll tell you everything I remember...

A_S00

21:47

I have no doubt that someone COULD write a lot more than 20k words about the story of 3.5's development, but I don't think an answer of that length (or shorter) would necessarily be so incomplete as to be bad.

When I was writing the question, I imagined an answer might have something like ~4-5 sections, each of which would be something like "The designers didn't expect players to do any real amount of optimization (link to story about the Druid playtester not taking Natural Spell)", "There were a lot of assumptions about how the game would be played still left over from 2nd edition (link t…

Like, a long answer for SE, but not a book.

(I made those posts up; I don't know if those folks actually said those things)

It sounds like I underestimated the scope of answer that would be required, though.

nitsua60

I'd been living in Chicago for a few months and my downstairs neighbor mentioned he played D&D. "I play D&D," I responded. (I had not, at that point, played D&D in over a decade.
I showed up and saw books that looked like nothing I knew, with artwork that looked like nothing I knew--no Larry Elmore there!--and dice that looked familiar.
They handed me a pregenerated character. I rolled what dice they told me to.
Which one does that sound like?
=D

Zachiel

@A_S00 Well, I have interesting stories about in-house playtester SKR proudly reporting he played a Int 13 wizard (ask KRyan, I think that still makes him mad), or a story about how developers had to increase DCs of shackles and locks since players unexpectedly maxed out the relevant skill, but I wouldn't use them to answer that question.

Joshua Aslan Smith

Kryan is a good source of everything wrong with 3.5/pf

A_S00

@Zachiel Sure, I imagine those sorts of "playtesters were bad at optimization" stories would only really be relevant to the balance concerns, which is a small piece of the question.

Zachiel

@JoshuaAslanSmith KRyan is a good source of everything wrong with SKR, too.

nitsua60

21:52

@A_S00 You need to do a KRyan interview on the topic for the RPGSE blog, rather than pose it as one Q&A =)

Zachiel

@nitsua60 I could show you some book covers.

Joshua Aslan Smith

lol

BESW

@A_S00 It's not even being bad at optimisation. It's valuing their personal roleplaying over their own mechanics while creating those mechanics.

A_S00

@BESW yeah that makes sense

BESW

A fundamental flaw in 3.5 is that the devs seemed to have a really hard time imagining playstyles outside their own... for a game that was explicitly trying to cater to all possible playstyles.

Joshua Aslan Smith

21:54

Edition war, edition war never changes

2

A_S00

see now, with a citation or two, that would make a great section to an answer to my question :P

nitsua60

@Zachiel It's not going to trip any memories. Confused as all heck I went to a bookstore after that session, bought a PHB and DMG and tried to figure things out. I now know that one was 3 and the other was 3.5.

BESW

@nitsua60 Heck, I owned the 3e and 3.5e PHBs for a while, and even holding them one in each hand I often had to take a moment to figure out which was which.

nitsua60

@BESW I've got the 3.5 PHB and 3.0 DMG. I do keep the 3.0 DMG out on the shelf, because over the years I've come to appreciate that they did put a lot of good stuff into that book. Specifically: their thinking about how and why they advise things.

CTWind

Heh, I keep a copy of the 4e dmg around for similar reasons.

I don't play 4e anymore but I still think the DMG for it was a good one.

Joshua Aslan Smith

22:01

5e's DMG was pretty underwhelming

more magic item list than anything else

its only saving grace is that the Enhanced Arcana free articles basically are hot fixes that expand/clarify all the stuff the DMG breezily covers or fails to cover like the half a page about how to create custom classes

Lots of great art

BESW

I keep 6th Ed Call of Cthulhu for the group dynamic advice.

Zachiel

@nitsua60 Except maybe the part where they flat out say "Practice illusionism. Trick your players into believing they're the ones in charge."

CTWind

Eh, I still at least get some bursts of inspiration reading through it. I actually really like the animism-based deity system they briefly go into.

nitsua60

@Zachiel But even there, they're presenting it with enough "behind the scenes" that you can accept or reject the advice in an informed way. Rather than some editions' "you should never let the players see..." without any reason given.

Zachiel

I still remember the time when one of my players, who read the DMG before I became a DM, pointed me to the page where it was written that DMs should get the players to collaborate and make things easier and told me "you see this? It's not going to happen".

He was upset with me not letting him have his way by only using clever reasoning and kept trying to sabotage the game by creating overpowered characters - for a given definition of overpowered, I guess. When I play the game, being a cleric never seems to be enough to deal a significant portion of damage to monsters. I guess in a party of 6 it mattered way less - he was just frustrating to hit.

The Oracle

22:11

1

Q: Why are certain chatrooms giving me a Page Not Found?

I was trying to find a chat room associated with an answer to a few different questions, but in all instances I kept getting hit with a 'Page Not Found' presumably because I lacked the 20 rep to participate. I was under the impression that in order to participate in chat I need 20 rep on the rel...

support

DForck42

22:26

@Zachiel sounds like a GREAT person to play with...

Ahriman

Sigh

Random drive by downvoting without a comment makes me sad

nitsua60

@Ahriman I always assume if I haven't gotten a downvote, it's just that no-one's reading my stuff =)

DForck42

@Ahriman meh

Ahriman

@nitsua60 I always hope for a comment

Sadly it's not to be

Did I missany shocking events?

DForck42

@Ahriman tbh, I don't let random downvotes bother me. they're just part of so and any online community with voting

a single upvote is worth...10? downvotes

Ahriman

22:36

@DForck42 hello!

DForck42

@Ahriman ohla!

Ahriman

I'm not too worried bout it

Zachiel

@DForck42 Oh, to play with maybe. To play for, absolutely no. He's of that old way of gaming where he thinks that in-game tactics are not fun and the real fun is being smarter than the GM or being manipulative. Good thing he stopped playing, even if I miss his friends that do not want to play if it's not with the whole gang.

nitsua60

@DForck42 5

DForck42

@Zachiel btw, I was being sarcastic ;-) but yeah, that's unfortunate

@nitsua60 thank you

I couldn't remember if it was 1 or 2 points

nitsua60

22:39

For the FAQ: Let the question go unanswered if you do not have a good answer to it.

@DForck42 1 to cast the DV, 2 to receive it.

DForck42

@nitsua60 k

Shalvenay

23:15

if a tag is no longer used by any Q's, how long does it take for the Stack to zap it?

BESW

Forever, if it's got a wiki.

Otherwise, 3am UTC.

Shalvenay

OK

BESW

80

Q: How can we get rid of misspelled and unused (or "zombie") tags?

During the re-tagging of questions, tags sometimes become orphaned from existing questions. Are these zombie tags ever removed from the tags list? What if a tag is misspelled and needs to be removed? How do we get rid of it? Return to FAQ Index

support faq tags tag-pruning

I could be wrong about the wiki exception; I know it's true of single-use tags with a wiki, where single-use tags would otherwise go fzzt after a few months.

nitsua60

VtC unclear system needed.

Shalvenay

23:43

@nitsua60 has system tag now

nitsua60

cool

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