Hmm...I need to buy a copy from DriveThruRPG (provided they sell it) and check it out. My friends like to play the EverQuest campaign setting, but the 3.0 version of it needs serious rules adjustments. Porting it to "3.75" might be helpful.

That, and I've personally been tinkering with a Final Fantasy Tactics port to d20 for years now, and I've yet to get the system quite right. Maybe these new rules would help me in that side project (that no one would probably play  ).

I agree 4.o isnt a "fantasy simulator" it is an rpg. Your mileage will vary. Still D&D was never a good fantasy simulator..if I had a nickel for every time a lvl 1 wizard was killed by a housecat I could afford the pathfinder book!

My issue with d&d over the years was each edition had more and more rules for what you could do and each of these subsystem of rules really only made the game less accessible and in my experience limited what your character could do.

Ive had the skill system discussion many times in the past and while some folks really enjoy adding ranks here and there I always thought that this stuff was better off hand waved. ((you mean the Fighter who rp'ed as coming from a fishing village the whole campaign cant pilot a small boat effectively because he has only average intelligence and took rope use?))

The first ed players handbook was art that definitely inspired a whole generation of gamers but for my money the basic set (and then the expert book woo-oh meta gaming on that cover) art of the 1981? issued red book was the most inspiring art. That was the game I wanted to play...fast paced, fighting dragons and exploring the isle of dread.
My 3rd lvl dwarf was different than yours not because of anything on my character sheet he was different because Milane had a personality. No one else could play Milane. it wasnt because they  couldn't move a painted lead dwarf 4 inches on the table next to the plastic dinosaur that was really Fire-broung the dragon but who could things like "My clan will have soup made from your toes!" (I still say he said bones but at least 3 other insist Milane had a thing for feet.)

With the players handbook, the rules said Milane could have been almost anything (even a cleric but not a wizard.) It  changed the game into something more complex though still very fun and I admit I got every book as it came out. Still I missed the early days when it was more about character than characteristics and I think 4th edition while being a modern interpretation is closer to that game than any since.

I think 4th is like the child of basic D&D and chess.
I think 3.5 is like the child of basic D&D  and the Tax code.

Sadly the greatest appeal of 4th edition to me is becoming less and less relevant as the "Tax Code creep" grows and grows with each new "Core Rulebook."

Ah Bartleby, ah humanity.

@Dr. Nemesis

Your comment on 4e character types is totally on point.  The bard I play at our meetups made that apparent.  My character can insult as a ranged attack.  Clever bard!  It's basically Magic Missile.  'Smatterafact, almost all of the at-will ranged attacks in 4e are Magic Missile + slide/push/stun/etc, ad nauseum, with damage types varying from power to power.  To this I say, "Whatevs!"  One must always remember that they also publish Magic: the Gathering (not hatin', just sayin').

On wound penalties:  That's always been a problem with lots of game systems.  It's totally, um, unrealistic...

...which is why I've decided I'm only going to play Battletech from now on.  So many little dots!  I hear the H.E.R.O. system is equally ridiculous.  Anyway, here's my question: who says you carved a hole in my chest cavity, anyway?  You?  If I were DM, I'd tell you to cool thy jets and save the description for the kill.  Otherwise you're basically just replacing combat rules with role-playing.  Sure, it sounds rad, but if your target has any HP left, you probably haven't carved a hole out of its chest cavity.  It's kinda-sorta-almost cheating.  Also: how do you carve a hole out of a cavity?  I digress.

@hewhorocks:

Regarding the class-skill mismatch: I feel it's up to the player to ensure that his or her character really "makes sense."  I rolled a Pathfinder monk the other day and trained in only 1 skill that wasn't a class skill - healing, which I felt was relatively legit.  As much as I wanted to give my character some wacky skills, I just couldn't do it.  It's the player's responsibility to write a character sheet that actually matches the character.  Having said that, a player whose character is from a fishing village should pick skills that reflect he or she having been raised in a fishing village.  I could have picked Ride as a skill for my character because it might come in handy, but the fact is that my character spent most of his life in a monastery in a major city in Eberron.  This is without mentioning the fact that Pathfinder (and, I assume, 3.5) gives players TONS of ranks to pump into their skills; those upset about not having the skills they want are crybabies.  To them I say, "Maybe you should have planned your character better!"  This exemplifies how you can actually turn characteristics into a character.  The two go hand in hand; the characteristics should reflect the character.

On that note, you should never need a skill.  A balanced party should have it covered, and any DM worth his/her salt shouldn't put a party in a situation like that.  But, hey, so you don't have the skills - well, that's part of why RPGs are fun, right?  Sometimes you just have to figure it out.

ooo! OOO! OOOO!! another 3.x vs 4e vs Other Systems discussion! i love these!!

for my two coppers, i started playing d&d by knowing what the game was, but not having books. my brothers and i made up rules, got some dice, and pretended. THAT is what d&d comes down to: pretending and having fun. the rules we used inspired the actions we took, but didn't force us not to untie a rope because we used a big sword and that sort of thing. we eventually upgraded to boardgames like HeroQuest and Dragon Strike, and from there, it has all been an addiction of horrid proportions. my uncle had 1e and 2e books and the original heroes unlimited, and we played both of those. my very first d&d character was an assassin named Fuzz, and my older brother rolled awesomely and made a paladin. needless to say, our party devolved into a heinous social situation in a forest, and that campaign ended. but d&d was awesome!

i ended up growing all the 2e stuff, going into the skills & powers sets, and all that, absorbing the rules and having fun (i do my own taxes with no difficulty, to let you understand my rules/math prowess and joy at the systems). eventually, TSR was gone, then WotC came about with more that Magic (which i started playing in '93) called D&D 3e. and it was good!

all the rules, all the options! it progressed/digressed with each new supplement, depending on how you look at it. when it was stopped for 4e, i embraced the new edition and left the old. so now i play 4e (in addition to occasionally playing GURPS and d20 modern, Star Wars, etc, on the side). is 4e better than 3.x? i like it more, but only because it is as complicated as i want it to be, but not too much so. some folks NEED certain rules to play a character, but the rules only help shape the combat. if you want a painter-character, then your character paints in 4e. in 3.x, you needed skill points to paint. since painting doesn't have anything to do with combat and rarely (if ever) has any skill challenge application, there doesn't need to be rules to cover it. 3e had rules for stuff that didn't need rules; that became the problem after all the supplements came out to cover everything. however, for those that played it for its entire duration, it was canon.

my younger brother loves 3.x and calls 4e "broken." i don't know how he comes to that when, as it was pointed out, a low level fighter always beat a low level wizard, and at level 20+ a wizard said "die" and the fighter died. the rules made it a more broken system to me, though many players and DMs worked around it to make it fun. 4e equalized everything, to keep players on the same level for the most part, making it less broken in that regard, though it also made most characters too similar in power for some players. someone said that the class role was basically the class, and that is almost true. there are some differences, such as a fighter (defender role) being far different from either a paladin or a warden, but in general all three take lots of damage, deal a decent bit back, and keep enemies on them during fights. oh well, i guess it all depends on what you want your character to be in the end that makes you pick differently there: a weapons master; a holy knight; a force of nature.

and on the thought of a 4e bard insulting someone to damage them: try flavoring the effect rather than reading the book's description. if it is a ranged attack, since a bard is arcane think of it as a magical bolt or ray, or an effect that happens only on the target. it is magic; it doesn't need to follow the rules of physics. maybe the bard hums a tune to touch his arcane energy source, maybe he dances around a tree like an acid-tripping-elf in a forest, but describe it the way you want. the effect and damage are rolled the same as a longsword slowing an enemy, so just describe it better. the game works better if you try to enjoy it more than if you try to read the book aloud and have fun. it just doesn't work that way, to those that need a rule for everything, and everything needs to be as written. and as just mentioned by sombrenote: use houserules to make things work better for you. that's how i started gaming: houserules only, call it d&d, and have fun.

in general, i play 4e because it is the newest version, and most likely to be supported for the next few years. has it got problems? yes. did 3.x? yes. i still play 3.5 every once in a great while online, but rarely, simply because after examining all the rules i've seen more flaws in it that there should be. so, play on with whatever game you like. play a character, not a set of statistics. if your fighter grew in a fishing village, assume he can swim, catch a fish, bait a hook, and all the other stuff one might expect. he just might do it better than the monk that never fished before.

oh, and that leads me to one last thought (finally!): player characters in most games are better-than-average compared to most people. that means that while most people can put a worm on a hook and fish, or tie their shoes, a player character is more likely to catch the bigger fish quicker, and can tie many types of knots that common folks like myself cannot tie. i'm a 10 in stats, heroes are 11+. so if your "hero" doesn't have ranks in knot tying, he can probably tie his shoes and untie many knots, he just isn't a sailor-class knot maker.

i'm sure i might have ruffled some feathers, might have brought up some good points, might have changed some minds, but in the end, i just gave my own thoughts and agreed/disagreed with others. so lets not fight, lets just game on.

and pathfinder actually sounds interesting as a newer 3.5...i never did really try it, but i might now to shake things up. thanks for the review beyonder!

if i'm not mistaken, the "insulting bard attack" is actually their at-will power called "vicious mockery." now, many powers have a name that make one instantly think of something, rather than make something up for themselves. one sees that this is the name of an actual power, deals damage, is ranged, and says "wow, i just insulted you and it was a magic missile!" i call this narrow-minded, to some extent. that would be like saying that in the game swinging a hammer and rolling a die for damage is exactly the same as using a rapier and rolling die for damage. no its not! use your noodle, folks, and try to imagine something different.

here is the published flavor text from "vicious mockery:"

You unleash a string of insults at your foe, weaving them with
bardic magic to send the creature into a blind rage.

so, some might say this cements the attack into being an insulting magic missile, but really, it is just flavor text. look at some fighter powers, and they say things like "You constantly swing your weapon about, slashing and cutting into nearby enemies." or whatever. that doesn't mean you must be using a sword to have that power. it is flavor, a little snippet of a way you could describe the power while you are using it in-game at the table.

anyhow, there are many people that live inside the lines of a square, and can't image other shapes in their world. that's fine; RPGs aren't for them, perhaps. as for  making 4e like World of Warcraft: i've never played that MMORPG and never will, because it has about ZERO actual roleplaying. as i understand it, you simply kill things until you are high level, brag to your friends about being high level, then start over. that sounds like a stupid time to me, but then again, i like to think and use my brain for more than watching flashing colors on a computer screen. then again, i did play both diablo games WAY too much, but at least that was free...

i haven't done meth though, and i hear that is almost as addictive, so one point for me!

and just to relate this to pathfinder: if in pathfinder a class description says you might be a "heavily armored mace-wielder, a longsword and chainmail fighter, or a talented rapier master"to describe a fighter, does that mean you can't use a whip, axe, or quarterstaff, or that you can't wear hide armor? i mean, if it isn't written out then how can i pretend it correctly? 

Still back to Pathfinder....

Its pretty, but man is that book expensive or what? It might represent a good value but I'm not sure something that big will hold up to "gamer style" use.

hewhorocks wrote on Mar 25^th, 2010 at 5:29pm:

Dr. Nemesis wrote on Mar 25^th, 2010 at 11:48pm:



I think the first quote answers the second: it isn't 99% dead, it is that if the dice say you get hit again, your luck runs out, and the hit takes you down. hewhorocks' examples show this, in that a character can take 20 damage and you don't have to say he was hit in the gut with a sword each time; it just means that eventually his chances to live run out in the fight.

think of two mid-to-high level rogues fighting with daggers, doing 1d4 damage each hit. neither are benefiting from sneak attacks or anything, just 1d4 damage for the sake of this example. now, if each combatant has 40 hit points (an arbitrary number, don't think about it too much), it will take between 10 and 40 hits to fell an opponent. imagine getting stabbed with a dagger. now, would you take that 10 times in a fight, no matter now long you've been adventuring? probably not. it is up to the storytellers (players and DMs) to describe the situation as perhaps slight nicks and cuts, maybe energy spent in dodging, or whatever. when one combatant hits 0 hp though, it signifies that either the combatant took a lethal stab, or at least one that dropped him from the fight like a gut-shot, or otherwise had to end the fight in a loss (though most rules call 0 unconscious, at least).

it takes me back to "using the imagination" which isn't necessarily a rule written in the books, but it makes the rules for any game system that much easier to swallow.

i like wound rules, such as a certain percentage of HP gone giving penalties, or crits giving penalties, and that sort of thing. i embrace it when it is a houserule, but i don't use it often when i run a game. i also liked the differences between piercing, bludgeoning, and slashing weapons versus some things, such as a spear being less effective on skeletons and chainmail but more so on large creatures and leather armor. its a fun addition to the rules to make it work better, but not necessary if nobody wants it.

i'm actually getting more interested in pathfinder and i think i'm gonna look for a copy of the book to see if i find it worth buying. 560 pages or whatever sounds nice to me, leaving less to question one would hope. we'll see.

and even though this thread dropped a good bit from the original purpose, i'm enjoying seeing other perspectives and people with good thoughts on the issues discussed.