ITT weird things that nobody seems to remember

I liked the section about enslaving monsters to dig shit for you.

I'm sure that's little more than large amount of slang and euphemisms designed to mask things.

"How's your mum (Opium supply)?" "She's doing good (We're fucked), got that nasty flu going about though (The City is on to us, get your stash out of the city)" "Aww bless her (You should've told me earlier you daft cunt" "Thank you (What the fuck did you just fucking say about me you little bitch I'll have you know that I have 300 picked locks...)"

That bags of holding can and should rip if you do stupid shit with them.

The concept itself works okay, the dragon section just struck me as odd. Beaten with subdual damage, they back down and allow you to take their treasure, give them orders and even sell them to a new owner. It all just felt a bit off.

>I'm sure that's little more than large amount of slang and euphemisms designed to mask things.
you would be wrong

>alignment languages, which are maybe the stupidest part of D&D that nobody remembers.
With a high degree of certainity, yes. Not only does nobody remember that those were a thing (in 2nd edition, and barely mentioned there either, so most people probably missed that they were a thing), they were also incredibly dumb. Like, how the hell does being a certain aligment automatically make you know a laguage that every being with that alignment, and only those beings, can automatically speak and understand? How does that work, and when has you being able to speak Lawful Good or whatever ever come up in a game?

I always thought it was kind of like Christianity's latin or some shit.

Because alignment is a cosmic force in D&D, not an abstract thing.

COfag here. that's exactly what it is. shop talk. hand signs. being in the know. knowing when to shut the fuck up and not be messy.

what are you going on about
what the hell is a COfag

They didn't have 10+ years of turboautists crunching the numbers to figure out what the system's balance actually was like. Towards the end of 3.5 they were figuring out what the actual issues were, but by then it was far far faaaar too late to try and fix it, so they stuck with not making things worse until it was time for 4e, where they could tear it down to the d20 mechanic and rebuild it with some actual balance considerations.

Naturally the internet hated it because it wasn't the 3.x they remembered.

that's how Gygax described it but then alignment isn't religion and people from other countries aren't different species (or fucking aliens)

Thet would imply that every Christian could automatically speak ecclesiarchic Latin, and and converting into Hinduism would cause you to immediately forget it and learn how to speak Sanskrit, or whatever.

This is what 4fags ACTUALLY believe.

I see 3aboos still exist.

My friends and I fixed a lot of stupid shit with house rules. Or you can, y'know, play a better game?

Why do you think 5e is much more popular than 4e ever was despite 1/100 of the 4e's content? Could it be because 4e is a shitty system?

Because it undid a lot of the mechanical progress 4e made to cater to the market of neckbearded grognards afraid of trying something new.

Lowest common denominator and all that.

> mechanical progress of 4e

from a mechanical standpoint, 4e was far better constructed than 3 "lets have rules for as much mundane shit as we can and also a separate subsystem for as many different flavors of magic as we can" point x.

Whether or not you or I prefer it is obviously subjective, but the game was far more coherently designed.

4e was incredibly slow past low levels, even moreso than 3e

>my players aren't smart enough to decide shit and rough out modifiers before it's their turn
>clearly this is the system's fault

> Nobody likes my system
> Clearly they're not smart enough to appreciate it's depth and intricacy

No dipshit it's the wealth of fucking interrupts and all of the other bullshit rolling and power checking that god damn everyone and everything had to do. 4e is the slowest edition, this is the general consensus.

Well you seem to be under the impression that 3.x isn't a bloated trainwreck of a system that only succeeded because it was more or less the only game in town, so I'm not exactly wrong.

I still enjoy the fuck out of 3.x mind you, but the underlying system is fucked so hard that to actually fix its issues you have to burn it down until you have just a d20 mechanic and rebuild it from that, because houserules can only get you so far.

Paladins had the same thing, with slightly more wording: "A paladin who gains a level in any class other than a paladin may never again raise her paladin level, though she retains all her paladin abilities. The path of a paladin requires constant heart. If a character adopts this class, she must pursue it to the exclusion of all other careers. Once she has turned off the path, she may never return."

Also, though this fact is brought up a lot more commonly, 3.5 paladins do not have to follow a diety - a devotion to righteousness is enough for their powers - and at least fluffwise they may never associate with Evil characters, and can only have Lawful Good followers and henchmen.

It's actually a little ridiculous how restricted paladins were in the rulebooks. I've never seen a GM actually follow through with half of this, and I think even Pathfinder toned it down a fuck ton.

3.5 darkness spell creates shadowy illumination.

still being a 3aboo to this day is just pathetic. You should reconsider your choices in life and in games.

Ad&D paladins had to donate their money to the Church, and had strict limits on how much equipment they could own.

Pretty sure CO stands for Covert Operations. But I could be wrong.

But why? I know in 2e they could get an amazingly powerful sword, and maybe that's true for AD&D too and you need to make them a bit harder to play, but they've been a lot weaker since then.

Baldur's Gate actually does have thieves' cant, but you pretty much are always expected to have a thief in-party (which is still weird that your 16yo sister raised in an abbey somehow knows it).

But 5e has none of this. Some old class abilities for bard, ranger and paladin were even shoved into the basic magic system.

2E is AD&D.

In 1E, Monks, Clerics and Paladins had a vow of poverty; it was kept for Paladins and Clerics. FWIW it's not that they could get an amazingly powerful sword, it's that owning it was okay if it was in your limit so you had to sell the old sword and give a chunk of that money away as a tithe.

Once you are free of the hell that is 3.5 monk, it's to keep you from going back to it when you have momentary insanity.

I'll say death by massive damage, after a while it will come up every combat; most common houserule that exists is to ignore it, even above ignoring multiclass xp.

Also 3.5's spider eater, worse than even daze for days from sea hag is its fucking paralysis for 6 weeks minimum and unpreventable death from implanted eggs at CR 5.

Paladins weren't the only ones with an alignment restriction.

Monks, Barbarians, and Druids all have alignment restrictions to their class, it's just that nobody (sane) plays monks, and chaotic/neutral is the easiest alignment to have for the purpose of murderhobo'ing.

But I wanna play a monk

Spotted the newbie.

Surely 5e must have improved them from the 3e and Pathfinder versions?

They did actually.

Monks are okay in 5e.

They're not as good as they were in 4e but they're still miles better than what they were in 3.X.

Why were monks so bad in 3.5e anyway? On paper, they look great.

They have tons of shit and none of it makes them any better than a fighter. A lot of it is stuff that is useless and only good for roleplay, like Tongue of the Sun and Moon, which is basically a slightly better at will comprehend languages. At level 17.

They look great because their class table is full of goodies, but most of those goodies are trivial nonsense like minor bonuses to saving throws. A lot of their class features rely on different attributes, so they're always short on key numbers. Flurry Of Blows is actively harmful. And unarmed doesn't count as a two-handed weapon in a system where two-handed weapons are king.

Meanwhile the fighter's table just says "bonus feat" over and over again so it looks boring, but you can take Power Attack with your very first one of those and that's better than the entire Monk class.

Meanwhile the sorcerer's table says jack shit and gives you spells, which looks even more boring, but you can take Color Spray with one of those and that's better than the entire fighter class.

Meanwhile the druid's table is full of all the same trivial nonsense as a monk's plus a spells per day table plus Wild Shape, the only ability in 3.5 that might actually be as good as spellcasting, which somehow all gets lumped under "boring nature douche" so people still somehow miss this.

And by "Attone" they mean "kill everyone who learned druidic. Nature possible gives you quest spells and powerful boosts until the only way for someone to violate that rule is by acting at the same level of power as a mid-high level world-saving player or their mid-high level world-killing enemies.

Goerge Lucas's rpg system did lack a few key features.

In 3.5, there's a 5th-level Druid spell that costs a token amount of experience and gives you a permanent Colossal Animated Object servant. Because Awaken works on trees, and the decent ones like oaks and pines are big enough to qualify as Colossal. After a day's work you can have several tons of muscle follow you around, making this game's sorry-ass necromancers shit themselves.

Yet somehow nobody remembers this spell except when they want to play as a housecat.

Flavor. It could be argued that paladins had a lot of class abilities in a game where they were less pronounced than WotC D&D, but the truth is, many things in 2e are the way they are because crunch follows fluff. Which sounds awesome but is not necessarily always better.

It's not just that the goodies are trivial nonsense, they also come at levels long after they would be useful to have.

From reading on the subject and from what I understand, the alignment you choose was more or less treated as your character's religion, and that's why you chose it as opposed to figuring it out through character traits.

So is pretty damn close.

>hit man is actually a thieves cant word

Huh. I'm surprised how many of these snuck into the english language.

The reason why Paladins, Rangers, Druids, Assassins, and Monks had such stringent requirements for playing were balance reasons. The 4 main classes, Fighter, Thief, Cleric, and Wizard, were the core classes. All of the other classes were "sub" classes, or variations on the core. They had much higher requirements to even get into the class, and a large reason why they were so sought after was they were just straight up more powerful than the core classes. I mean, not only are you guaranteed to walk into them with a base line of really good stats (when you rolled them), you're also getting core class abilities plus MORE. You rolled with core classes when you weren't good enough for other things.

The only non-core class that got shafted, in my opinion, was the 2e Illusionist. And that's simply because if your Intelligence score was at a certain point, you could straight up IGNORE illusion spells for no reason.

>weird things that nobody seems to remember
There are tabletop games out there other than Dungeons and Dragons.

>rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/13/optimizing-a-dd-3-5-monk

The link has a pretty good examination of the monk, and why it's bad.

But the tl;dr is: "Too much MAD, not enough synergy between class abilities. They're basically a grab bag of shit that don't mesh well."

I had a GM tell me that the Druid language was magical, so non-druids couldn't learn them, and if you changed classes, you forgot how to speak it. I guess like faction languages in World of Warcraft, where not only can you not learn the other side's language, but if you are born a panda man and join the horde, you forget your native tongue and can no longer speak to other pandas on the alliance side.

I don't know if that's in a DnD book somewhere or it was just this guy's bullshit explanation, but either way, the stupidity of it blew my mind.

Well, if you do something to them that would rip them. You sound like one of those DMs that "let's" players leave shit around because they never actually said they pick them up again. I can see it now, "I drop the bag of the ledge." "OK,' dice clank, 'a huge rip opens up in the bag."

"Like" that, but in a way where it is actually not at all like that. Sometimes people just have ideas that are incredibly retarded.

Maybe there's some truth to that, but really, it didn't require 10 years to work out how the balance and xp and whatnot worked in that game. I mean, I figured most of it out after just a year or two of playing, and that was when I was a kid with zero knowledge of or experience with role playing games. An experienced gamer, especially someone designing a game, should be able to understand all those concepts quickly and easily, even without extensive play testing, just through an understanding of player behavior, some logical deductions, and basic math.

>Why do you think 5e is much more popular than 4e ever was?
>Could it be because 4e is a shitty system?

It could be that, but 3rd, 3.5, and Pathfinder are equally shitty, and 5e is only slightly better. I think the main things that hurt 4th edition were the OGL and the cultural backlash of bringing in new players. Because of the massive proliferation of the d20 system, you had a whole generation of gamers who really didn't play any other games. They came up in the hobby at a time when every game imaginable was available in d20 format, and that conditioned them to see it as the only real viable system. They didn't know much else, and they were used to the idea that every game they picked up would have those same basic mechanics. So when the new edition of DnD came out, that perception exaggerated the normal negativity that always accompanies a new version of something popular.

And a lot of old school players absolutely hated the influx of new gamers that 4th edition brought. 4E was really designed to coax in the younger, MMO-bred audience, and it did that pretty well. I was playing then, and there were a lot of new people showing up for a year or two, who were video gamers and WoW fags, who had not come up through the old paths of Magic the Gathering, Lord of the Rings, and Neverwinter Nights. But a good number of the older players or more traditionally recruited players really disliked them. They saw them as "casuals", not real nerds. They felt like their hobby was being commercialized and was selling out to the same normie audience that had laughed at them in gym class, or whatever. And it made a lot of players turn on 4th edition for reasons that didn't really have anything to do with the mechanics.

>in 2nd edition
Pretty sure 2e's the first one that dumped them.

Hmm, no, I think it was more or less the fact that 4th used a lot of keywords common in video game experiences, such as Dailies, removed a lot of mystery from the game, such as having all of the magic items up front in the PHB with level limits, all of the class abilities looking or even playing incredibly similar to each other within their class genre (Tanks played like tanks, strikers like strikers, etc), and the fact that a lot of the fluff didn't match up to the action like in the powers cards posted above, which went in the face of the main appeal of D&D which was the fact that the fluff was intrinsically involved with the mechanics.

It just didn't feel like D&D to play, and that turned people off to a point where Pathfinder took over.

I would like to know what MMOs play like 4e because that would actually be more enjoyable than playing DDR in the Warcraft universe or in some shitty korean mumorpuhguh.

Unless a teamwork-focused tactical multiplayer RPG came out at some point prior to 4e what you're saying is a complete falsehood that has been repeatedly debunked. 3e's problem was "Too much fucking content, no quality control, zero balance, and skills that let you godmod".

That's because you're making intelligent beings who start as friendly, but may or may not feel like helping you out. Not mindless servants who don't mind being used as cannon fodder, which is what most adventurers would like.

Any Final Fantasy Game. world of Warcraft for certain.

Any MMORPG where you have 'hot buttons' to activate your abilities which all have cooldown times.

>teamwork-focused tactical multiplayer RPG prior to 4e
You mean like EverQuest?

And yet, there were no restrictions to stop you multiclassing INTO monk.

>It just didn't feel like D&D to play, and that turned people off to a point where Pathfinder took over.

Please consider killing yourself

I see that the bad 4e memes are still alive and well. If you are not willing to inform yourselves, at least shut your fucking mouths.

>bad memes

Given that they still get a rise out of people I would say that they're working as intended.

Holy shit this. I have complete collections for

>Shadows of Esteren
>Legend of the Five Rings
>Rouge Trader
>Middle Earth Role Playing
>Shadowrun
>The One Ring
>World of Darkness
>Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Yet they are all collecting dust never used since no one else ever wants to play them.

>Any MMORPG where you have 'hot buttons' to activate your abilities which all have cooldown times.
I'm sure this is what he meant by "Playing DDR" because that's all WOW-clones tend to be.

Tell me about it. All my group wants to play is Pathfinder.

Meanwhile, I've got PDFs and books for:
>Ryuutama
>Tenra Bansho Zero
>Golden Sky Stories
>Changeling: the Lost
>Mutants and Masterminds
>Edge of the Empire
>Burning Wheel
>Eclipse Phase
>Unknown Armies
>Dungeon Crawl Classics
>Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game
>Mistborn Adventure Game
>Bionicle Lost Chronicles
>Song of Swords
>Time Wizards
>Nechronica
>Rune Quest
>The Riddle of Steel
>Deadlands
>Dogs in the Vineyard
>Dragon Age

I've got all these games and nobody to even give them a try with.

Because that way you wouldn't have the min-max bullshit with autists sticking two levels into fighter, 3 into some Prestige Class, 2 in another 6 in some other entirely unrelated class, and more munchkin bullshitlery feats, without at least being 3 levels behind the rest of the party.

The thing is, no DM really cares about EXP, it's just more like "Everyone is now level [x]" whenever they beat a boss or reach a significant point in the story, because no sane DM wants to calculate out EXP for ever single possible obstical the PC's encounter.
So that stuff happened anyways.

Try to convince them of Dragon age by saying "You know it's really cool because you basically crit every time you roll doubles.out of three d6's, and also you get cool special powers every single time you crit. So shit's constantly going off the wall"

They hate learning new rules more than anything. It took them four years to jump from 3.5 to Pathfinder. I'm probably going to have to scrape together my own new group to play any of these games.

d u m p u
How fucking lazy these guys are? If they are that tired after school/work, they can always pop a sixpack and turn on TV. It's even less effort than playin vidyas.

Tell them mutants and masterminds is built on the same d20 OGL ruleset as Pathfinder. That makes it a good way to Introduce them to point buy systems.

in 3.5 there was a few spells that could let you straight up make a clone of yourself, stats, spells and the whole bit. A 7th level spell let you clone literally ANYTHING provided you grew it in a vat for a year, oh yeah and its under your control, it was at only 70% of power though.
literally by level 14 you could ride around on a 70% neutronium golem under your control not giving a singular fuck about anything.

While we're discussing stupid shit, who remembers those rot grubs that lived in garbage heaps?

>These small creatures will viciously burrow into any living flesh that touches them, for they greatly enjoy such fare to dine upon. The attack is automatically successful – no attack roll is necessary provided they have been touched by bare skin. If there is any question of whether or not bare skin has been exposed to a rot grub, multiply the would-be victim’s Armor Class by 10, not counting shields. This is the chance, rolled on percentile dice, that the rot grubs are touching bare skin.
The victim must immediately apply flame to the wound (1d6 points of damage per application) or have a cure disease spell cast upon him. Flame kills 2d10 grubs per application, while a cure disease kills all of them. Unless these measures are taken, the rot grubs burrow to their host’s heart and kill him in 1-3 turns.The most insidious aspect of the rot grubs is the anesthetic secretions that they use on their victims. Often this dulls the burrowed area, making the victim completely unaware that he has been invaded. Victims should roll Wisdom checks on 1d20 in order to realize that something is gravely wrong. This roll can be made every round, but time is of the essence! Within 1d6 rounds, the rot grubs are deep enough that they cannot be affected by the flames.

>automatic attack success
>chance to not even notice
>dead in 3 turns
>no saving throw

I believe this creature led me to quitting an AD&D campaign in disgust. This monster only exists to kill unwanted players.

Hold one-off events for holidays where you go tourist in another game. If they don't enjoy it, no harm done, but they might like it enough for a follow up or even a campaign.

It's more stubbornness than laziness. That and a cliquish attitude. But they're my old group I've played with for over a decade.

I'll give it a go with that. They love their superhero shit.

Thanks to Volo's Guide to Monsters, rot grubs are back in 5E. Also putting in an appearance are the flail snail and the froghemoth.

That 3was the theory but in actuality in AD&D if you didnt snag weapon specialization and use the 3 good weapons in the PHB you couldnt hope to keep up with a guy that could

Paladin and Ranger fairly sucked shit without the above Druids when not a retarded dual-class gimmick were just an alternate Cleric Monks were a collection of random barely useful abilities combined with weak combat ability and suckshit thief skills and to this day nobody could tell you want the assassin did that mattered

Ok, well, fuck playing D&D ever again.

Except Spelljammer.

Oh yeah to keep on topic and still rag on the game I started RPGs with

Fluffwise in AD&D Humans are versatile but short lived beings that adapt better than established races live short lives that force them to have to make an impact before it ends. Demi-Humans live longer lives honing things they do to perfection over the course of the centuries

Mechanically Humans can raise to unlimited level in a single class allowing them to achieve a level of capability in a class that benefits them long term as they hone their skills to perfection beyond the Demi-humans. Demi-humans get a massive short term mechanical benefit from being able to Multi-class but are struck with level limits that mean they will cap out in progression in their short adventuring career. Fortunately being multi-class gives you a greater set of options allowing you to adapt to any situation with a variety of abilities beyond the limited scope of humans

This is "find new players for those games" territory.

Alignment languages make more sense when you consider that in OD&D law and chaos were less about making a moral choice and more about picking a team in a cosmic conflict. They were directly inspired by Moorcock's Eternal Champion cycle, where these two primordial forces fight against each other over countless aeons and dimensions. It's like, if you are a NATO country then your army knows how to conduct operations in English (and the same for Warsaw pact and Russian I believe) even if the country itself is not English speaking.

Pretty much half the problems people had with 3.5 were because they didn't read the fucking rules.

I don't think I've ever seen players understand how AoO properly work.

Guild Wars 1. 4E took a fair amount of inspiration from it.

They still dont

The amount of asshats I still see on 5E boards posting shit like "Paladins cant keep up with Wizards in damage" and "Basic Humans are the best generalist class" is fucking unreal. Its like basic math has become a super power

That's what happens when you court players that are allergic to basic math and call anyone who has any idea what the fuck they're doing a minmaxing munchkin.

I've had a moron - not here, elsewhere - try to argue that wizards are better than fighters at doing damage even if they have no spells at all, just cantrips. It's like talking with a lunatic.

3rd edition D&D just introduced a lot of cancer. Some of it wasn't necessarily an issue with the system (lord knows it gets enough flak on that front) but with the fanbase being newbies who had no idea how tabletop is supposed to work.

Maybe it's because people don't like to read and learn new things, maybe it's because the RAW was vague and confusing and the RAI wasn't clear unless you used third party resources like the SRD, maybe it's because people got burned by shitty GM's and just decided to be a shitty GM in a different way, or maybe it's a combination of all three of them.

Whatever the case, the system just bred an entire generation of shitty players and shitty GM's who, to this day, still have no fucking idea as to how the game fucking works.

And it's the only game I've seen where this type of shit happens to such a degree, it's mind boggling.