JPS

I was expecting Shakespeare, but great work nevertheless.

I will never be able to look at Mazzy the same way again. And if I look at her your way, she'll probably hit me, so thanks to you, I'll never be able to look at Mazzy again...



I liked the story a lot ? the in-jokes were suitably in ("Manager Bondari, we need to reload a new cannister of O2 into your suit."), the technobabble was suitably... umm... technobabbly ("Two giant cables, (Tapered Mono-molecule diamond fibre) each hundreds of miles long, rotated in Toril orbit, the ends touching down to the edge of the atmosphere once every 4 hours.") and all of the characters were cast in roles that I never would have expected but that still could have been no other way.

I must admit I skipped most of the songs, though...  

All in all, I would rate the story four turnips and one bottle of turnip beer (and no, I'm not telling you what the scale is):

:turnip:  :turnip:  :turnip:  :turnip:  :drunk:

From what I've heard, the Forgotten Realms had their own cosmology way back before it was a D&D setting. It was bought (or licenced, or leased, or however these things work) by TSR during a phase when their policy was that anything that existed in one of the settings should exist in all of them, and so the FR cosmology was forced into the standard setup with the planes and the Great Ring and everything.

When the FR sourcebooks were being rewritten for 3rd edition D&D, the rules (or the company) were no longer the same, and so the people responsible decided to go for something as close to the original version as possible, which is probably a good thing. It does lead to some problems with compatibility at times, though...

EDIT: Oh, and I belive that the official line is that the planes have always been the way they are now, and that people in the realms have always known it, and if that causes serious continuity problems in your campaigns we're very sorry, but you'll have to live with it. I thought I had a link, but I seem to have lost it.

Unlike the other drow deities, Ghaundaur was never a member of the Seldarine or a mortal drow - he's existed as an amorphous blob since the dawn of time.  Upon arriving in the Abysss, Lolth took his domain, forcing him to retreat to the paraelemental plane of ooze.  She later forced him to help her in her campaign on Faerun.

Here is a short hymn to Ghaundaur that I felt compelled to write after reading this. Because that's the kind of person I am. Imagine it being recited by a priest or cult leader at a secret gathering of the faithful, but not too loudly, because then the Matron Mothers could hear them.

Oh, and you'll also need to imagine that what followers of Ghaundaur really want it to turn into happily bouncing blobs of primordial goo, but really, what other reason could thay have for following a god of slime?

---

O Blob
Who has existed
Since the dawn of time
In eternally amorphous gooeyness

O globule of semi-liquid viscosity
Holy glob of slimy insubstantiality
Grant us the gift of extatic elasticity

There are pros and cons to both systems, but I think I like 2E a bit better for the simplicity of it.  Now some may say that I am obviously smoking something, but let me explain.

In 2nd edition, you did have a lot of numbers you had to figure out, like THACO, AC, all the adjustments and saving throws, but once you did that once, you didn't have to calculate so much on the fly.  You just rolled the dice.  In 3E you have not just regular AC, but Deflection AC, unarmored AC (for certain spells), and all sorts of weird adjustments.   Combat, due to all the feats actually becomes more complex, with more calculation and more modifiers.  And don't get me started on Attacks of Opportunity.  While it makes sense in some cases, the rules don't in others.  A lot of these changes were wrought for realism, but really only added more complexity. 

(I chose to reply to this post because it has the most material to work with. Nothing personal )

Are you sure you are really comparing 2nd edition to 3rd edition here, and not "a game you've played for several years" to "a game where you haven't had time to get used to the quirks yet"? The 3rd edition is by no means perfect, but many of the arguments against it that I've seen against it (and in favour of 2nd edition) come down to familiarity and preference rather than any real difference in quality (they're both good games) or complexity (they can both be insanely complicated if you're not familiar with them).

And then there is the Hit points and Attack Bonuses situation.  You have creatures with 500 hp and a +45 to hit.  That means a player's got to be able to dish out some insane amounts of damage.

And these creatures are rare and should be encountered sparingly and killed even less often. I agree that giving, say, a dragon lots and lots of hit points doesn't automatically make it impressive, and anyone who tries to make an encounter with it exciting and dramatic based only on the numbers would probably fail. But I don't see anything inherently dramatic or exciting about 185 hit points and a THAC0 of -10 either...

And finally, the biggest thing was the discounting of stat points.  No adjustments and a 16 and a 17 are effectively the same thing.  That sucks in my opinion because a 17 is statistically harder to get than a 16 (6+6+5 as opposed to 6+5+5 or 6+6+4) but it doesn't mean anything.  So those stat points you get don't mean much either.

Compared to 2nd edition, where 6 is in some circumstances effectively the same thing as 14 but you have to look at a table in order to remember which numbers apply to which stats

Then there are things I'm ambivalent about, such as having to AIM magical attacks.  And having to use the native combat bonuses of your spellcaster (which suck) to do so, effectively limiting his usefulness to anything other than buffing spells or magic missile until he's high high level.  While it is A LOT more realistic, it add another roll.  And no combat action in my opinion should have more than 2 rolls except in special occaisions.  Which it now can (to hit, saves, and damage)  At least they should have had a spellcaster attack chart, different from the usual one.

I agree about trying to keep down the number of dice rolls, but I don't agree that this made spellcasters useless. I would point out that ranged attack rolls are usually against a lower AC than normal attacks, but this would mean that you were right about 3rd edition being more complex, so;

Look behind you! A three-headed monkey!

Now, there are some things I like, the higher the number the better the AC (but not all the weird situational stacking rules they have now), improving stat numbers over time, a better skill system (but not the skill point distribution or the distribution across classes: like why do priests and mages only get 2 points per level and wh aren't spot and listen, two basic skills if you ask me, not just general??)

I agree about the skill points. When I played, we used to take a more relaxed approach to this and let the characters have the skills that made sense for them, as I'm sure players everywhere do and have done, whatever game or edition they are playing.

As to the flexibility - I don't like the removal of the stat restrictions because it does cheapen the classes some, now anyone can be a pally or a ranger instead of having to roll well enough to be one.  The species restrictions don't bother me as much.  But this flexibility, this ability to choose usually leads in one way.  MASSIVE UBER POWERGAMING.  Which I do in CRPG but I absolutely despise in RPG.  At least in 2E it was damn hard to get away with it.  Now, you can create UU's uber cheese characters and make em legal.  2E you could allow an elven paladin or a gnome mage fighter or a tiefling or anything, but as a DM you could just say no and have the rules back you up.  Now, if someone produces a character that is pure mutated powergamer goodness, if you say no, they can whine and complain about how the rules clearly allow them to do it.  It's the reason I stopped DMing.

I'm sorry to hear that you've had bad experiences with this, and even more that it made you stop playing (I stopped because of lack of time and because we all moved in different directions, which I guess is kind of bad, too).

But I'm afraid I'm going to have to scrutinize you a bit anyway: are these the same people you played 2nd edition games with, and if so, did they really never try to exploit the rules to their advantage in any situation back then? I seriously doubt that the rules as such encourage people to be powergamers (or that other rules would have stopped people who were determined to make overly powerful characters).

The problem I have with the more restrictive rules of 2nd edition is that I feel that they restrict the characters way too much and therefore interfere with my enjoyment of the game. But then again, I haven't played much with those rules... (yes, I'm trying to suggest something here (the smilie is supposed to be looking up at my first paragraph, in case anyone was wondering (and yes, I know double parentheses are bad, so let's make them triple)))

So, some of the cosmetic stuff was pretty dang good.  But the core changes they made in my opinion take away a lot of the difficulty and challenge, that is now replaced with overpowered monsters and the like.  If I ever do play again, it will probably be a mutated form of the two.

Okay.. I've rambled long enough.

You never said what the "difficulty or challenge" of 2nd edition was, so I'll take the liberty of interpreting it in a way that suits my own devious agenda. I hope that's alright with you.

If the changes took away a lot of the difficulty and challenge for the players and replaced this with bigger challenges for the characters, I fail to see how that's a bad thing...

Yeah, I know. That's not what you meant. Let's just have a turnip and be friends, shall we?

:turnip: