As an AD&D DM I will say there is a massive difference between the two, but seen mostly via PnP. In these games you see all the restrictions, but as a DM, if you can make the case, you can make the character, I don't care. I will break the rules that I think make no sense because frankly, that is what Gary Gygax told us all to do a LONG time ago. If what you are doing makes sense, and the rules forbid it, break the rule. Just pass it by your DM.
For me I will go 2nd edition every time over any other edition, combat is FAR more interesting, as you can role play melee combat and not have to worry about abilities or feats etc. If my level 1 thief player wants to run up a wall do a back flip and attempt to decapitate an assassin, then he needs to roll a Strength check, a Jump skill check with a penalty, a Dexterity check with a larger penalty, then an attack roll with an even larger penalty, and see what happens. But hey, if he wants to, he can. For those reasons, that and the insane amount of detail they went into with weapons and armor, it will always be preferable.
For me I will go 2nd edition every time over any other edition, combat is FAR more interesting, as you can role play melee combat and not have to worry about abilities or feats etc. If my level 1 thief player wants to run up a wall do a back flip and attempt to decapitate an assassin, then he needs to roll a Strength check, a Jump skill check with a penalty, a Dexterity check with a larger penalty, then an attack roll with an even larger penalty, and see what happens. But hey, if he wants to, he can. For those reasons, that and the insane amount of detail they went into with weapons and armor, it will always be preferable.
Not to disagree with you but that is possible in every single edition, be it 2nd, 3rd or 4th and it entirely depends on your DM.
In 4th edition the DM would probably rule that running up the wall and making a back flip is an acrobatics check with a medium/high DC. Then if that succeeds a normal attack roll would follow. Something similar would happen in 3rd edition.
@Eidolon Isn't what Sontom was saying was that you didn't need to worry about feats in 2nd edition? That it is much more straight forward to simply check dexterity or whatever then worry about specific feats. In that case I would have to say 2nd edition was more open to the possibilities of pure roleplaying. (aka the back flip example) because you wouldn't have to worry about whether or not you had acquired the appropriate feat/level of acrobatics yet.
That's not really true as feats are really rather just bonuses to your characters; they don't give you real abilities most of the time. Acrobatics is just a skill, not a feat. While I agree that skills put a limit on what someone can do the reality is in AD&D what are the chances of a plate wearing paladin doing the above mentioned back flip? They are zero which is similar in 2nd, 3rd and 4th. What are the changes for that same move for a Rogue? Pretty decent, which is again similar across all editions.
EDIT: While I agree that the more open ended rules of AD&D leave more room for real roleplaying; that does not mean that it's not possible in 3rd or 4th edition. Ultimately it all depends on the players, and the DM. If a player wants to do something outrageous, then the DM should always let him (independent of edition) and come up with proper DCs for it (in 3rd and 4th) and rolls in general to resolve the issue.
Yes you can in fact do what I had mentioned in any edition, but 2nd is far more capable of handling the situation quickly. There are no special abilities to be concerned with, just skill and stat checks as determined by the DM. For me the main difference will always be in the roleplayability of your game. 2nd edition was by far the most open ended in this regard, where as say 4th edition is by far the most restrictive I have worked with. 3.5 left some decent room but not enough by my own standards and put too much power in the hands of the players themselves, we all have heard about epic stories of one shotting dragons etc at absurdly low levels. That is simply not possible in 2nd edition, and I tend lean towards it for that reason. If something absurd happened, it was a fluke or the DM did it. I am not setting it above others, as we all play our own games at our own pace and style for enjoyment, but for me, I will choose 2nd every time. I am also a more pure role playing kind of DM, 3 hour sessions of role play and no combat are common with me.
Let's not forget that with Baldur's Gate specifically, it's set in Forgotten Realms. A lot of AD&D restrictions were for the default, de-facto AD&D world laid out in the Dungeonmaster's Guide, Player Handbook and Monster Manual. It was in that world the whole thing about arch-druids existed, restrictions on race/class combos mattered, etc .
Quite right, that was before Toril and Faerun...it was the world of Grayhawk
It's not that they can't, it's just the majority of dwarves wouldn't want to be those classes. If a PC wants to make a dwarven ranger, then the rules should accommodate it, why not? But since the majority of dwarves could care less about cutting down a forest to build their things, they wouldn't want to be rangers in the first place, but exceptions can exist.
I'll chime in to state that exceptions is the key word in your sentence. The main point where 3rd Ed. jumped the shark in my opinion is that it made exceptions the rule. Everything that used to be an exception, and therefore something special and subsequently full of flavor, became normal and mundane. Dwarven Sorcerer? Check. Half-orc Druid? Done and done. Half-fiend elfin Cleric/Mage? There you go.
If everything is allowed, then nothing is special anymore; all flavor is lost and the pursuit of "original" or "weird" becomes the point of CC. Been there, done that. I tried so hard to come up with out of ordinary characters when playing 3rd Ed. that I lost track of how much fun actually roleplaying a Human Fighter could have been. In AD&D, restrictions were there to create flavor and set the archetype for each race and class. Exceptions could be made at the DM's discretion, when appropriate to create something special; I think all DMs have done that more than once.
In 3rd Ed., playing the archetypical combination of race and class seemed to have become a capital sin among players.
Since no one else corrected this, @Belgarathmth, you didn't need a 19 Intelligence to cast 9th level spells, it was half your int. You needed 18 to cast 9th level spells, a 16 to cast 8th level spells, and a 14 to cast 7th level spells and a 12 to cast 6th level spells, 10 to cast level 5... This only went for wizards and not clerics.
And yes, @AndreaColumbo In my view it was that there were no exceptions any more and the slow creep of "Special Powers" into the game via feats and an abundance of new races (via the "Races of" Books- Races of Stone, Races of the Wild, etc.) and new Prestige Classes that multiplied at an alarming rate- and the GM had to keep up with all of that to have any chance to keep up with what their players wanted. It was so wide open and full of choice that it was easy to get lost in all that wide-open choice and end up with an overpowered super-character or a goofy idiot who was too scattered in too many classes to compete. For me, that was the beginning of the WoW-esque creep into the game, and I resisted getting 3e for the longest time. And when I did get into it, I had to drop a crap-ton of money to catch up. I mean did any of those new races or new Prestige Classes really add anything lasting to the game? I don't think so, because 4e did away with all of them.
When I played 2e, I barely even used kits. Most of my characters tended to be Kitless, because so many of the kits for basic characters were kind of pointless if you could roleplay. Oh, my character is a noble fighter? Okay, he starts out with more money and has to spend more every month because he demands the best of everything. So...? So what? How does that help me play Menolly Embersnake, scion to the house of Ember and expendable second daughter to the Lord and Lady? If I can come up with most of that on my own, I don't need the crutch of the kit.
And then 3e was jack of all professions, master of none. Your character can take a level of this, a level of that, blah, blah, blah... no rhyme or reason. It left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. And on the world-building side, the powers that be felt that to be engaged in the world, there had to be these fairly constant "Realms-shaking events", of which the Time of Troubles was the first, and out of that eventually came the death of Mystra and the Spellplague. It was like WOTC kept poking the Realms with a sharp stick to see it jump and when it lay there, bleeding out from its wounds, they decided to Frankenstein it to keep it going and keep poking it with the stick. This raised my ire.
3rd edition is really a completely different beast. You just have to look at DDO.
While the new skill system is interesting there are several drawbacks. Classes will get different amounts of skill points on level up which can be used to train the skills. Additionally there are class skills and non class skills. Some classes get fewer skill points as other classes. Plus your intelligence modifier increases or decreases that amount.
Some builds will have to ignore skills completely because they get hardly enough skill points to invest. Then it's only max one or more class skills. As the characters grow in level the DM will have to set arbitrary thresholds for skill checks. If the DM sets the thresholds so that a maxed build will have a hard time to succeed then the less optimal builds will find it impossible to succeed. And if the DM starts to set individual thresholds players are going to rebel. If the thresholds are too low then the maxed builds are hardly challenged.
I can imagine a DM getting serious headaches when trying to balance all this.
@LadyRhian, I was going by Neverwinter Nights rules in what I said about intelligence, because that's my main exposure to 3rd edition rules. I never played the tabletop version. In NWN, the wizard's maximum castable spell level is base intelligence minus 10.
I'm seriously loving the posts by @AndreaColombo and @LadyRhian you both stated what I was trying to express to @Tanthalas in far far better terms than I could get out.
I've DM'd a few 3.5e campaigns. Everyone that tried to meta-game a combat-related character ended up dying mysterious deaths from my totally legit dice rolls happening behind my DM screen.
Why don't you believe me, guys? That Umber Hulk totally rolled a crit for max damage 3 times in a row.
I also told my guys we were going to do what I call a "city campaign," where combat is not the focus. I gave them instructions to take skills, spells and feats related to talking and espionage. It was such a fun campaign.
@ the realms in general Every realms shaking event heralded the introduction of a new edition. Time of Troubles - 3rd Return of the Archwizards was afair 3.5 Spellplague - 4th To be announced - 5th
The problem with class abundancy is how you perceive them. Either you primarily use classes as something to define how you roleplay (e.g. I'm a ranger and therefore I do such and such) or you already have an idea what your character is able to do and want to express that mechanically (e.g. an assassin who transports himself from shadow to shadow, all the while being unseen -> x/Teflammar Shadowlord/insert class with Hide in Plain Sight).
@10thLich True. Just another thing they changed in 3e. But then, it was much easier to get over 18 in a stat in 3e as well. While in 2e that meant that almost nobody would have been able to cast 9th level spells. Even Ioun Stones could only increase it to 18 in 2e. It took a Tome of Clear Thought, and in most campaigns, those were rarer than hen's teeth.
Y'all have ALMOST convinced me to prefer AD&D. I agree that all the prestige classes in 3e are kinda crazy and I've only read about them,
Out of curiousity, was there any kits for a War Wizard of Cormyr @LadyRhian or is that just something your character was a part of and otherwise just a specialist wizard? I only ask because I know that even though F/M was a multiclass, Bladesinger was an Elven kit for that multi.
Yes, there was a kit for straight Magic User Cormyrean War Wizard in "Wizards and Rogues of the Realms". It wasn't a Fighter/Mage kit. Essentially, off the top of my head, you got bonuses to cast and use combat spells and had a hard time with other spells that weren't useful in combat. You were also arrogant because you considered yourself "Cream of the Crop" when it came to magicians.
@LadyRhian / attributes You'll also have to consider the difference in how high you're able to push those attributes by any means possible and what the effects of those raised attributes are.
In 2e you have your 1-25 range of attributes with strength being the odd one out by having 18/xx in order to represent extraordinary humanoid strength. In contrast to that you have 3e with its 1- the sky's the limit range.
In order to get the same bonuses of a 2e strength of 19 you'd need a 3e strength of 24 for the damage bonus and only a 3e strength of 16 for the to hit bonus. In order to get the damage bonus of a 2e 25 strength score you'd need a 3e strength of 38.
prestige classes The problem with them is, that some should have been feat paths or class options instead of separate classes. Moreover, as time went on and new supplement books came out everyone of them had to have prestige classes. In my opinion prcs shouldn't have been introduced at all. Instead they should have offered class options. And if they felt that some of them should be restricted to certain organisations, they could have added recommendations to those options and let the DM decide. Additionally purely mechanical advantages (e.g. getting better returns on Power Attack than normal [sacrifice to hit bonus in order to increase damage at a 1:3 instead of 1:2 ratio]) which can be discovered/trained by characters on their own, should never be restricted to organisations.
@10thLich That's because 2e set normal human strength from 3 to 18, with 9-12 being average. 3e says 10-11 is "average" human strength. And 3e also did away with uneven bonuses. If you had a 24 Strength in 3e, you got +6 to hit as well as to damage, rather than the +3 to hit, +7 to damage of 2e. I suppose it made your bonus easy to remember, but why change it in the first place? The third edition was supposed to be better and not broken, but it was still just as "Broken", it was just in different ways to 2e.
Yes, the proliferation of prestige classes is one of the most broken things in 3e. I mean, there must literally be 500 of them or more over all the different books. And towards the end, they started bringing out the most WoW-ish books for 3e, like that "Book of Nine Swords" book. "Fighters get maneuvers that are a lot like spells!" And the book was so complicated.... Aiee!
I didn't think a War Wizard would be a Fighter/Mage like a Bladesinger. I more figured they'd be a type of Specialist Mage. Honestly I just looked up what the advantage/disadvantages were and they were pretty cool, especially for someone like me who likes having mobile artillery units.
Advantage was that a War Wizard would get +1 damage per die rolled on a damage spell (Turns MM into an even more viscous spell). The disadvantage is that all spells they cast which do not do damage are cast at half their effective level. Take the spell armor as an example (not the one used in the book), rather than lasting an hour per level, it would last a half hour per level (easiest way for me to figure it out). A really nice bonus/trade off.
And you're right OP wise they did think themselves better than other wizards in Cormyr. Man I really wish I could play one as a plain Wizard. One day I'll make an Invoker to put Dynaheir to shame.
In 2e you have your 1-25 range of attributes with strength being the odd one out by having 18/xx in order to represent extraordinary humanoid strength. In contrast to that you have 3e with its 1- the sky's the limit range.
@Tanthalas - You'll have to admit that 3rd Ed. made exceptions a lot easier to make / play. If players' will was sufficient, it would have happened with AD&D too. 3rd Ed. made a lot of monstrous races that were never meant as playable available to players through a (very) lame mechanic called Effective Character Level (ECL), and kept throwing in prestige classes and monstrous races as if they were raining. The emphasis was taken from roleplaying and put on game mechanics and powerplaying.
Of course, very good roleplaying campagins could still be run—and a lot of fun still be had—playing 3rd Ed. I know I did. Still there are several things that I think made more sense in AD&D, and while some made more sense in 3rd Ed., overall AD&D gets my preference.
@AndreaColombo Race restrictions for classes is definitely something that never made sense in AD&D.
That 3E made exceptions a lot easier to make is one of the good things about 3E, because if you're complaining that too many people played using those exceptions, its obvous that people wanted them.
@AndreaColombo Race restrictions for classes is definitely something that never made sense in AD&D.
That 3E made exceptions a lot easier to make is one of the good things about 3E, because if you're complaining that too many people played using those exceptions, its obvous that people wanted them.
Just because people want something it doesn't mean it is a good idea to give it to them.
Well, I've been on the other side of barricade, so to speak, and probably that's why I like AD&D and its restrictions now. I used to play a half-ogre/half-dragon fighter/barbarian/frenzied berserker, which was actually 1/4 ogre as half-ogre was the base class to which the half-dragon template was applied. Wielding a sword of Wrathful Healing and wearing a ring of Continuous Greater Might, I was basically invincible. Greater wyrms fled from me—literally (our last session ended with me chasing an elder black dragon underwater in a swamp).
In retrospect, that character was a complete mess and a masterpiece of rule-twisting and powerplaying. In a world in which that's the norm, nothing is special anymore and a lot of flavor is lost.
@AndreaColombo Race restrictions for classes is definitely something that never made sense in AD&D.
That 3E made exceptions a lot easier to make is one of the good things about 3E, because if you're complaining that too many people played using those exceptions, its obvous that people wanted them.
Just because people want something it doesn't mean it is a good idea to give it to them.
It also doesn't mean that its a bad idea. Certainly not in this case.
@AndreaColombo That was a problem with your playing group. Allowing an afair +5 ECL character and on top of that a Frenzied Berserker. Imo such a character just begs for having the whole party sealed in a small room with continous damage applied to the FB.
Moreover, playing nonstandard races doesn't mean that it has to be something like a half-ogre/half-dragon. It could also be just a tiefling, aasimar, genasi, drow or svirfneblin.
Comments
For me I will go 2nd edition every time over any other edition, combat is FAR more interesting, as you can role play melee combat and not have to worry about abilities or feats etc. If my level 1 thief player wants to run up a wall do a back flip and attempt to decapitate an assassin, then he needs to roll a Strength check, a Jump skill check with a penalty, a Dexterity check with a larger penalty, then an attack roll with an even larger penalty, and see what happens. But hey, if he wants to, he can. For those reasons, that and the insane amount of detail they went into with weapons and armor, it will always be preferable.
In 4th edition the DM would probably rule that running up the wall and making a back flip is an acrobatics check with a medium/high DC. Then if that succeeds a normal attack roll would follow. Something similar would happen in 3rd edition.
EDIT: While I agree that the more open ended rules of AD&D leave more room for real roleplaying; that does not mean that it's not possible in 3rd or 4th edition. Ultimately it all depends on the players, and the DM. If a player wants to do something outrageous, then the DM should always let him (independent of edition) and come up with proper DCs for it (in 3rd and 4th) and rolls in general to resolve the issue.
I'll chime in to state that exceptions is the key word in your sentence. The main point where 3rd Ed. jumped the shark in my opinion is that it made exceptions the rule. Everything that used to be an exception, and therefore something special and subsequently full of flavor, became normal and mundane. Dwarven Sorcerer? Check. Half-orc Druid? Done and done. Half-fiend elfin Cleric/Mage? There you go.
If everything is allowed, then nothing is special anymore; all flavor is lost and the pursuit of "original" or "weird" becomes the point of CC. Been there, done that. I tried so hard to come up with out of ordinary characters when playing 3rd Ed. that I lost track of how much fun actually roleplaying a Human Fighter could have been. In AD&D, restrictions were there to create flavor and set the archetype for each race and class. Exceptions could be made at the DM's discretion, when appropriate to create something special; I think all DMs have done that more than once.
In 3rd Ed., playing the archetypical combination of race and class seemed to have become a capital sin among players.
And yes, @AndreaColumbo In my view it was that there were no exceptions any more and the slow creep of "Special Powers" into the game via feats and an abundance of new races (via the "Races of" Books- Races of Stone, Races of the Wild, etc.) and new Prestige Classes that multiplied at an alarming rate- and the GM had to keep up with all of that to have any chance to keep up with what their players wanted. It was so wide open and full of choice that it was easy to get lost in all that wide-open choice and end up with an overpowered super-character or a goofy idiot who was too scattered in too many classes to compete. For me, that was the beginning of the WoW-esque creep into the game, and I resisted getting 3e for the longest time. And when I did get into it, I had to drop a crap-ton of money to catch up. I mean did any of those new races or new Prestige Classes really add anything lasting to the game? I don't think so, because 4e did away with all of them.
When I played 2e, I barely even used kits. Most of my characters tended to be Kitless, because so many of the kits for basic characters were kind of pointless if you could roleplay. Oh, my character is a noble fighter? Okay, he starts out with more money and has to spend more every month because he demands the best of everything. So...? So what? How does that help me play Menolly Embersnake, scion to the house of Ember and expendable second daughter to the Lord and Lady? If I can come up with most of that on my own, I don't need the crutch of the kit.
And then 3e was jack of all professions, master of none. Your character can take a level of this, a level of that, blah, blah, blah... no rhyme or reason. It left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. And on the world-building side, the powers that be felt that to be engaged in the world, there had to be these fairly constant "Realms-shaking events", of which the Time of Troubles was the first, and out of that eventually came the death of Mystra and the Spellplague. It was like WOTC kept poking the Realms with a sharp stick to see it jump and when it lay there, bleeding out from its wounds, they decided to Frankenstein it to keep it going and keep poking it with the stick. This raised my ire.
While the new skill system is interesting there are several drawbacks. Classes will get different amounts of skill points on level up which can be used to train the skills. Additionally there are class skills and non class skills. Some classes get fewer skill points as other classes. Plus your intelligence modifier increases or decreases that amount.
Some builds will have to ignore skills completely because they get hardly enough skill points to invest. Then it's only max one or more class skills. As the characters grow in level the DM will have to set arbitrary thresholds for skill checks. If the DM sets the thresholds so that a maxed build will have a hard time to succeed then the less optimal builds will find it impossible to succeed. And if the DM starts to set individual thresholds players are going to rebel. If the thresholds are too low then the maxed builds are hardly challenged.
I can imagine a DM getting serious headaches when trying to balance all this.
http://nwn.wikia.com/wiki/Intelligence?action=edit§ion=1
Why don't you believe me, guys? That Umber Hulk totally rolled a crit for max damage 3 times in a row.
I also told my guys we were going to do what I call a "city campaign," where combat is not the focus. I gave them instructions to take skills, spells and feats related to talking and espionage. It was such a fun campaign.
Every realms shaking event heralded the introduction of a new edition.
Time of Troubles - 3rd
Return of the Archwizards was afair 3.5
Spellplague - 4th
To be announced - 5th
The problem with class abundancy is how you perceive them. Either you primarily use classes as something to define how you roleplay (e.g. I'm a ranger and therefore I do such and such) or you already have an idea what your character is able to do and want to express that mechanically (e.g. an assassin who transports himself from shadow to shadow, all the while being unseen -> x/Teflammar Shadowlord/insert class with Hide in Plain Sight).
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That's because Belgarathmth is talking about the game Neverwinter Nights with its 3rd edition rules, while you're referring to 2ed rules.
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Out of curiousity, was there any kits for a War Wizard of Cormyr @LadyRhian or is that just something your character was a part of and otherwise just a specialist wizard? I only ask because I know that even though F/M was a multiclass, Bladesinger was an Elven kit for that multi.
You'll also have to consider the difference in how high you're able to push those attributes by any means possible and what the effects of those raised attributes are.
In 2e you have your 1-25 range of attributes with strength being the odd one out by having 18/xx in order to represent extraordinary humanoid strength.
In contrast to that you have 3e with its 1- the sky's the limit range.
In order to get the same bonuses of a 2e strength of 19 you'd need a 3e strength of 24 for the damage bonus and only a 3e strength of 16 for the to hit bonus. In order to get the damage bonus of a 2e 25 strength score you'd need a 3e strength of 38.
prestige classes
The problem with them is, that some should have been feat paths or class options instead of separate classes. Moreover, as time went on and new supplement books came out everyone of them had to have prestige classes.
In my opinion prcs shouldn't have been introduced at all. Instead they should have offered class options. And if they felt that some of them should be restricted to certain organisations, they could have added recommendations to those options and let the DM decide.
Additionally purely mechanical advantages (e.g. getting better returns on Power Attack than normal [sacrifice to hit bonus in order to increase damage at a 1:3 instead of 1:2 ratio]) which can be discovered/trained by characters on their own, should never be restricted to organisations.
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Yes, the proliferation of prestige classes is one of the most broken things in 3e. I mean, there must literally be 500 of them or more over all the different books. And towards the end, they started bringing out the most WoW-ish books for 3e, like that "Book of Nine Swords" book. "Fighters get maneuvers that are a lot like spells!" And the book was so complicated.... Aiee!
I didn't think a War Wizard would be a Fighter/Mage like a Bladesinger. I more figured they'd be a type of Specialist Mage. Honestly I just looked up what the advantage/disadvantages were and they were pretty cool, especially for someone like me who likes having mobile artillery units.
Advantage was that a War Wizard would get +1 damage per die rolled on a damage spell (Turns MM into an even more viscous spell). The disadvantage is that all spells they cast which do not do damage are cast at half their effective level. Take the spell armor as an example (not the one used in the book), rather than lasting an hour per level, it would last a half hour per level (easiest way for me to figure it out). A really nice bonus/trade off.
And you're right OP wise they did think themselves better than other wizards in Cormyr. Man I really wish I could play one as a plain Wizard. One day I'll make an Invoker to put Dynaheir to shame.
3E didn't make exceptions the rule, it was the players who did that.
Of course, very good roleplaying campagins could still be run—and a lot of fun still be had—playing 3rd Ed. I know I did. Still there are several things that I think made more sense in AD&D, and while some made more sense in 3rd Ed., overall AD&D gets my preference.
Race restrictions for classes is definitely something that never made sense in AD&D.
That 3E made exceptions a lot easier to make is one of the good things about 3E, because if you're complaining that too many people played using those exceptions, its obvous that people wanted them.
In retrospect, that character was a complete mess and a masterpiece of rule-twisting and powerplaying. In a world in which that's the norm, nothing is special anymore and a lot of flavor is lost.
That was a problem with your playing group. Allowing an afair +5 ECL character and on top of that a Frenzied Berserker. Imo such a character just begs for having the whole party sealed in a small room with continous damage applied to the FB.
Moreover, playing nonstandard races doesn't mean that it has to be something like a half-ogre/half-dragon. It could also be just a tiefling, aasimar, genasi, drow or svirfneblin.
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