#(and a Pokémon ranger imho) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

feyariel · 2 years

Text

After telling a friend about how I hate 5e (and I do), a little way into the conversation, said friend asked me, "Well, what is the best version of D&D: 3.x, Pathfinder, or 5e?" Apart from saying that PF 1e is just 3.x and shouldn't be treated differently, I had to say that none of them are.

It's like my current fork of my PokéProject™ in which I'm trying to remake Pokémon a way I would like while staying true to it: it doesn't work because there's a lot I don't like.

I'll go briefly over editions:

Chainmail: Not an edition. The action economy is IMHO poorly defined despite it being the main feature of the game, there's no such thing as Attributes (Ability Scores), etc. The magic system is more to my liking.

OD&D: There are bits and pieces that I like, but it's hard to tell if this is like BD&D in that dwarf, elf, and halfling are racial classes (a case can be made for this from how the rules worked prior to Greyhawk and the introduction of the Thief class) or like AD&D in that dwarves, elves, and halflings have to advance in certain ways to certain levels (post-Thief, elves could also advance as Thieves ad infinitum). There are lots and lots of questions that do not get answered and not a whole lot makes sense. Much of my complaints go with BD&D, so skip to that.

BD&D in its various forms: There are seven characters (Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric, Thief, Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling) and an optional eighth ("Mystic" [Monk]). You have not!THAC0, AC that is better the lower it gets (and can stack both high Dex and Full Plate for no reason), HP, six ability scores, and five saving throws. None of the races really align with the ability scores they're noted for except the Dwarf, since Dwarves are just Fighters who trade level progression for racial traits. Task resolution is not spelled out well, let alone codified as a single thing. Hell, you can only make perception-type rolls if you have the specific class ability to do so. In short, what characterization you provide has to be entirely RP-based, as you have no mechanical decisions you can make to differentiate your character from others and very little control over what you can and cannot do period.

AD&D 1e: As before, but now there's a convoluted system of class level maximums that allow you to multiclass (kinda sorta). "Bard" is effectively a prestige class which tries far too hard to be specifically the Bards of the Druidic Order, but it doesn't work terribly well towards that end and unnecessarily excludes elves from taking levels in the class.

AD&D 2e: More-or-less 1e with some added stuff. Proficiencies exist now and are percentile-based despite perception-style rolls still using a single d6 and attack rolls using d20s. THAC0 is an official rule. Fighters get "maneuvers," as were kinda a thing in one version of Basic, but they're as equally ill-defined.

3.0: The system is intentionally incomplete because Hasbro-WotC planned during development to market a revision a few years down the line and then immediately begin work on the next edition. (No, I am not making this up.) Thus, Ranger is a useless class that kinda updates the 2nd ed. version but not really, there are lots of odd hold-overs that don't make sense (e.g., Gnomes have Illusionist [not Wizard] as a favored class), there are errors here and there (e.g., "dazzled" is a worthless condition), monsters advance haphazardly for no real reason, etc. The system was not playtested well enough to see high level issues that would become obvious to people who played it. Due to oversights, WotC's edition/revision schema, the way they printed splat material but didn't create a good-enough database to keep track of all their new rules, and other idiotic ideas (like Monte Cook's notion of having some rules cater to and trap newbies in bad decisions while having others that more experienced players would like, all without notifying other designers not to use the newbie rules as taxes), many of the fundamental problems with 3.0 never got addressed. There is almost no reason to use 3.0 because 3.5 is better in literally every way, down to trying to maintain game balance.

3.5: A turn-off for new players (which PF only exacerbated) is presentation-related. The character sheet is busy and full of equations; these equations are almost never needed, but they sometimes are because the system loves to make you lose X stat's bonus to Y derived stat. There are lots and lots of feats, but only some of them are good; most of the time, you have to worry about feat taxes and not getting enough feats. The skill system relies on arbitrary skill rank caps and using other kinds of bonuses to inflate the total roll instead of simply making it expensive to raise skill ranks (either by making it increasingly expensive to do so or by giving you like one point per level to spend on raising any of your stats -- ability scores, saving throws, attack rolls, skills, HP, etc.). People complain about floating bonuses when this really only matters if you decide to have multiple buffs going at once in the middle of combat. For the record, I LIKE how 3.5's prestiging works. People complain about it for two reasons: first, they cite imbalance but have no real grasp of that, and second, they want class systems to be cleanly class-based. The main balance issues with 3.x are related to poor scaling, primarily with skill ranks and with how magic users trump mundanes. (That has always been a problem, but 3.0 got rid of having different XP growth charts for different classes, which made the problem worse.)

Pathfinder: If you can imagine it, there is likely a way of doing it, regardless of what class you pick. However, the system is a patch of 3.5, does not address fundamental issues, and at times creates weirder complexity because the devs had some weird idea and/or it was late enough into 1e that they were more focused on 2e. Don't use Occult Adventures. Fortunately, the entire game is open-sourced, so the fandom was much better able to create support and additions. Paizo's decision to discontinue support in favor of 2e, which I think is worse in nearly every way, was very nearly apocalyptic to me, regardless of what problems I had with this version.

4e: The number of ways in which this is an abomination is too great for me to list here. I am willing to burn these books and I think book burning is one of the greatest offenses you can commit.

5e: 3.x needed an overhaul and simplification; this was not the way to do it. I've tried a few times to be brief about this, but every time I try, I end up ranting. I hate 5e -- not so much that I consider it an abomination, not so much that I'm absolutely unwilling to play it, but enough that I would literally play anything else except 4e instead of it.

In short, were I tasked with picking an edition I thought was "nearly perfect," I'd say, "Why don't I make my own system instead?" And it would end up looking little to nothing like any of the above, especially since I greatly prefer point buy systems to class systems. And as my creation would diverge, I'd feel worse and worse: on the one hand, I'd be failing at making D&D; on the other, trying to conform to D&D would stifle my decisions.

0 notes