Does anybody want to play D&D?

Anonus

I figured sometime after school got out for most people would be okay?

@Jane floated the idea and I wonder if anyone is up for it, and wants to run it

I have zero familiarity with the mechanics

glennmagusharvey

Well I guess I'm no longer in an active campaign...though I'm also busy with some other things. Also have a pending campaign if this person ever finishes writing the scenario.

D&D in a somewhat large nutshell.
* tolkienesque medieval european high fantasy, with snotty elves, mountain-dwelling dwarves, mischievous goblins, treasure-hoarding dragons, and various other fantasy tropes. may be able to do other things (has psionics-based and east-Asian-inspired material), but see comment about mechanical simulationism below.
* how to do almost everything: roll a 20-sided die, add modifiers, see if result meets a certain number. natural 20 usually means something nice; natural 1 usually means something not nice.
* relatively heavy on mechanics, compared to other tabletop RP systems. not the heaviest, though. it's a little like playing a strategy RPG, with characters that have lots of traits/abilities, and working out the results of each action individually in a relatively simple manner. for example, you take what weapon was used on what enemy during a particular swing and calculate whether that hits and if so how much damage it does as a single number. leans toward simulationism on the scale beween simulationism and abstraction, but doesn't go all the way. this also means that some mechanical pieces are kinda set in stone with regards to character classes -- e.g. paladins are always lawful good and expected to behave that way. you can houserule some changes to things though and this is pretty common practice.
* classic d&d is basically edition 3.5 and most accurate to what i described above. I hear 4th edition streamlines the mechanics and goes toward the abstraction side, while 5th edition somewhat balances between the two. a fork of 3.5 that's also popular is called Pathfinder. 1st edition is basically a tabletop wargame a la WarHammer and 2nd and 3rd editions are basically an unrefined version of 3.5.
* 11 standard character classes. many more in supplements ("splatbooks"). six basic character stats ("ability scores"), a large variety of skills like diplomacy and lock-picking (mainly to do out-of-battle things), and also special traits/abilities some of which depend on your race d others you get to choose. large variety of magic spells and magic items too.
* to play, you need a Player's Handbook, or know the info in them. most of the standard 3.5 PHB's information can be found on d20srd.org , but not character creation, I think. to run a game, you need a PHB, and also a Dungeon Master's Guide and a Monster Manual. or at least know the info in them. if you're playing Pathfinder, all the mechanical info in the core rulebook (basically PHB + DMG) and other official sourcebooks are online at d20pfsrd.org .
* can make up your own story or open world adventure, and there are also prewritten adventure books.

Yarrun XIX

I mean

I already sort of have a campaign in the works.

And you have another campaign in the works.

Salix Babylonika

I'm tied up with the Studio TRIGGER Discord's game and might also be joining yarrun's. I don't really have the time to juggle three D&D games.

Anonus

Yarrun XIX said:

I mean

I already sort of have a campaign in the works.

And you have another campaign int he works.

I do

I just wanted to make Centie happy

Princess Alice

Well, I appreciate the thought, Anonus. :3

Bee

Just a word of advice, try not to go 3.5 if you want a campaign to go past level 10 or so.  Or at least adopt the 5e death mechanics/penalties.  That shit is not at all balanced.

glennmagusharvey

Bee said:

Just a word of advice, try not to go 3.5 if you want a campaign to go past level 10 or so.  Or at least adopt the 5e death mechanics/penalties.  That shit is not at all balanced.

How so? I've never played a campaign past level 7 or so.

Bee

That's right before it starts getting nasty, yeah.  3.5 is called Rocket Tag for a reason.  The campaign Rott is running for me, Justice, and Leigh is in the mid-teens and he had to stage an entire leg of the story in the underworld to do away with the level penalty on death.  We've had several long talks about tuning and design in general, and pretty much agreed to migrate to 5e next campaign -- less bursty and death mechanics are a lot less obnoxious.

Death in 3.5 sets you back to halfway through the previous level (potentially almost a level-and-a-half loss spanning weeks of play), and there are a LOT of ways to cause it instantly.  In the low teens, barbarians regularly power attack for 100+ damage a pop, wizards and clerics have gobs of save-or-die spells, and monsters generally have 4+ attacks a turn with a higher BAB than your AC.  Also any single hit of 50+ causes a fort-save-or-die.

Let's put it this way.  A mind flayer senses your thoughts from several rooms away, ambushes you in a narrow corridor with schism up, and mind blasts your entire party twice a turn with a high DC 60 foot cone that causes a long-lasting incurable stun, then proceed to kill people with impunity in a way that requires a 7th-slot resurrection (13th level cleric) and 10,000 GP (you still take the level loss).  Most of them also have wizard levels and will ambush you fully buffed.  With more than one of them, they can very easily party wipe or at least kill several party members, setting them back weeks of level progress.  If it feels at all threatened, it can Plane Shift away and deny you rewards -- and if it feels vindictive, it can Plane Shift you into the elemental plane of fire, which potentially requires a level 17 cleric and 25,000 GP to bring you back.  This is a level 8 encounter that usually has relatively little in the way of loot.

CR 13?  Beholder, with 10 free action eye rays every turn, each causing a 150-foot save-or-die.

And it just gets nastier from there.  Mid-level wizard?  Machine-gunning Quickened first-level no-save spells to tank your strength to 1.  15th-level wizard?  Anyone they point at dances uncontrollably for a handful of turns with no save.

Salix Babylonika

I thought Mindflayers were suspicious of magic

or maybe that's only sorcery/ers specifically, I've forgotten

Bee

Just sorcerers -- they have a lot of wizards.  IIRC sorcs were distrusted by other mindflayers because they could resist each others' psionics better.

I mean they're suspicious of basically everyone in general, but that's why they give sorcerers an unusual stink eye.

Anyway, the main thing is that 3.5 seems to be built around campaigns that start at X level, not playing contiguously 1-20.  If you don't house rule death mechanics somehow, it'll probably stall out just because people will die repeatedly and lose all their progress during the teens.

glennmagusharvey

Some clarifications on the history of D&D and how the gameplay worked, from a friend on IRC:

Eh, the edition differences as you describe them aren't quite accurate.

Basically, original D&D (0D&D or "0e") was in a way intended as a sort of fantasy heist game.  Delve into dungeons, get treasure, try not to get into fights if you can avoid them, eventually save up enough to become a land-owning ruler.  But there's the intent, and there's what happened in the field.  The intent was communicated poorly, and people were more interested in adventures for their own sake and in combat.
Not to mention all the neat monsters.

From there came the original two "branches" of D&D, Basic and Advanced.  The idea was that Basic was what people could screw around with and Advanced would be the tournament dungeon-crawling rules.
In practice, people tended to either play around exclusively with Advanced anyway because of nerd pride, or used an amalgam of Advanced chargen with Basic-like gameplay.  Either way, it was hard to get any respect as a pure Basic player.  The first edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is what's known as 1e, and the first edition of Basic is what's known as B/X.  B/X was followed up by BECMI, and then the Rules Cyclopedia, and little really changed about people's attitudes toward it.

Meanwhile, the "Satanic Panic" happened, which resulted in AD&D Second Edition trying to seem a lot more like a nice, clean, innocent game.  It presented itself as a heroic fantasy game, while still basically having rules that were more suited for a high-attrition dungeon crawling challenge.

Also, by this time other PRGs were offernig more character creation freedom than D&D, so people were starting to chafe against cookie-cutter fighters and such.  Plus there were people who chafed about the relative strength of the fighter and the myriad ways the wizard could be cockblocked...  Trying to address this started with the Player's Option books, informally known as "2.5".

Oh yes, 2e also introduced important things like the nonweapon proficiency rules that serve as the ancestor of 3.x's skill system.

Anyway, the transition to a more tactical RPG style started with "2.5", but the 3.x editions really solidified it.
4e went too much in that direction, though, basically trying to be a finely-balanced combat system with a few token nods to yea-maybe-stuff-happens-between-battles in there.  If there's such a thing as too balanced, 4e is it.  4e classes basically all work off the same basic distribution of at-will, encounter, daily, and utility powers, with little mechanical difference betwen any two defenders, strikers, controllers, or "leaders" (healers/buffers).

I hear that there was the beginnings of a "4.5"-esque reworking, but it didn't get far before 4e was written off as driving off more old folks than it was attracting new folks.  (And don't get me wrong, 4e does have its fans, mostly people who didn't already have expectations of D&D.)

5e is basically their attempt to strike more of a balance between 3.x and older editions.  Simpler than 3.x or 4e, but actually having a bit of customization room.  Not quite sure whether it's supposed to be on a grid or not.  A few ideas survived 4e, but mostly they tried to pretend it didn't happen.  While 4e is an edition I'm not really interested in, 5e is one I'd be willing to at least try.  I will say this for it, it does at least make itself easy to hack.  While I'm not sure how the heck I'd add, say, an Exert skill to replace some of the older-edition exceptional strength ideas without breaking the system in half, I'm pretty sure in 5e it'd work fine.
(Really, it's more of a debate whether 4e would have been more successful with its own brand or not...)

...One of the other issues with 4e is that it basically had an "implied setting"... and forced assumptions about said implied setting onto existing settings.  This caused riots in the Forgotten Realms fandom in particular.  (Since they were kind of riding on Eberron's early success in particular in coming up with it, it wasn't as incompatible with that... but it definitely had awkward incompatibilities, ilke "of course the gods are real".)

I have heard good things about the 4e treatment of one of the many previously 2e-exclusive settings, though -- Dark Sun.  4e's idea of first level is actually pretty compatible with how tough starting Dark Sun charcters are supposed to be, they learned their lesson about forcing setting constraints to conform quite so much, the variety of non-divine healers really helps the whole no-clerics thing work...  Haven't heard about just how they dealt with defilers vs. preservers, though.

Oh yes, I'd say in terms of rules 1e and 2e are about as similar to each other as 3.0 and 3.5.

Also, I'm pretty sure "4d6 drop the lowest assign to taste" originated in 2e as an alternative rolling method, Method V.  It was so popular it stuck.  Though it's important to understand for benchmarking purposes that a random person off the street has 3d6 in order.  ...And yeah, older editions basically had players plucking random people off the street as their adventurers.  It was expected that sheer numbers and attrition would make up for that.  The idea of "you're playing the heroes from the start" was something that other people read into it and were frustrated that the rules didn't quite support.  It wasn't until 2e that D&D itself was trying to claim things of that nature.

Sources include Michael Mornard as far as the original intent of D&D, old Dragon Magazines, Let's Read Dragon Magazine, and my own observation of Internet discussions for the later stuff.  And, of course, comparing the rules with all of this.

Bee

4e had good reason for being largely forgotten.  Everyone had way too much longevity to the point that the infamous "four hour goblin fight" is distressingly likely.

5e simplified things in a good way IMO.  3.X had far too much bookkeeping for far too much one-round decapitation.  Leveling up was a massive chore for as often as they expected you to do/undo it, and even just rolling your 4 attacks + haste ends up getting super complicated because the buff stacking just got absurd.  It's a wonderful system for a PC game, but as a tabletop it gets REALLY tedious in the latter half.

Bee

Let me put this into perspective for you.

One of our recent boss fights involved five monsters with very high monk levels.  Each one had nine attacks per round at different iterative bonuses.  Within the first couple turns, one of the tanks got slaughtered before anyone could move, we had seven different spells buffing/debuffing attack rolls, damage, and AC to varying degrees (attack buffs constitute about half our total accuracy bonus once we're at full steam), every attack that hit our AC had to roll miss chance against our displacement cloaks, and every hit that landed THAT triggered a save-or-blind roll, and every enemy who got blinded had to roll an additional miss chance from that on every one of their attacks.

The fight lasted maybe eight rounds, and almost two hours.

glennmagusharvey

Bee said:

Let me put this into perspective for you.

One of our recent boss fights involved five monsters with very high monk levels.  Each one had nine attacks per round at different iterative bonuses.  Within the first couple turns, one of the tanks got slaughtered before anyone could move, we had seven different spells buffing/debuffing attack rolls, damage, and AC to varying degrees (attack buffs constitute about half our total accuracy bonus once we're at full steam), every attack that hit our AC had to roll miss chance against our displacement cloaks, and every hit that landed THAT triggered a save-or-blind roll, and every enemy who got blinded had to roll an additional miss chance from that on every one of their attacks.

The fight lasted maybe eight rounds, and almost two hours.

oh gosh yes, encounters in 3.5e (and Pathfinder as a result) take Really Freaking Long.