Post myths and truths

Myth: tabletop players are smelly, lonely neckbeards.

Truth: some tabletop players are smelly, lonely neckbeards, but the true neckbeard grows within.

Myth: Alignments are required for character development
Truth: Personality, Motivation, and Companionship are required for character development.

Myth: The rules are a guideline that can be ignored for the sake of the narrative
Truth: The rules are just as important as the narrative in creating a campaign that's consistent throughout and only poor GM's focus on one at the cost of the other.

Myth: Every campaign needs to be perfectly balanced around the capabilities of the party.
Truth: Campaigns that are balanced around the party require less strategy than campaigns that aren't.

Myth: Chaotic or Lawful and Evil or Good
Truth: [Chaotic or Lawful] or [Evil or Good]

Myth: Alignments control your character's actions
Truth: Your character's alignment changes based on your character's actions

Allignments are pretty resistant to change though.

The best way to look at them is mostly just cosmic teams and general dispositions.

>Allignments are pretty resistant to change though.
Your alignment is exactly as resistant to change as your DM makes it.

Myth: Veeky Forums is creative
Truth: Veeky Forums is subversive

Myth: Human Male Fighters are all the same
Truth: Human Male GREATSWORD Fighters are all the same

why not both?

Don't judge Veeky Forums by its worst members. It makes this whole place less fun.

The problem is Veeky Forums's worst members are also its most vocal.

Myth: Have you tried not playing D&D
Truth: Have you tried not playing 3.Pathfinder

Speaking of which-

Those are two really shitty memes you are trying to push here.

Myth: Caster supremacy has always been part of D&D
Truth: Caster supremacy has always been part of WotC editions of D&D (3.5 and everything that followed) except for 4e

Myth: Casters have always been divided in, at least, sorcerer and wizard
Truth: There was only a single arcane caster class until 3.5, which was called "Magic-User" until 2e

>There was only a single arcane caster class until 3.5, which was called "Magic-User" until 2e
Well, there was the Bard, and specialist wizards.

>Well, there was the Bard, and specialist wizards.
And, even in 1e, illusionist.

Really, is talking out of his ass.

C'mon, grognard. Take off your nostalgia goggles. And quit it with the awkward misinformation.

>You CAN pick a race just for flavor, but it's not fucking likely. You pick it because it has tangible mechanical benefits to the class you wanted to be.
Nah, I pick races almost entirely for flavor. I'll take a race with a WIS bonus even if I'm making a CHA caster because I want to play that race. I'm sorry your players are min-maxers and munchkins, though.

That's doable because WIS is still good. Nobody plays half-orc sorcerers because that's stupid and they'll just pick a non optimal but still good class

Myth: Chaotic Neutral
Truth: Chaotic Evil/Stupid, but I don't want to be booted from the game.

I play half-orc sorcerers, so congrats on your hyperbole

>My personal preference instantly proves you wrong.
>But don't ask me to prove it or anything lol

Myth: Evil characters tend to be the most disruptive characters in the party.
Truth: Chaotic characters tend to be the most disruptive characters in the party.

D&D older editions are better, nerd.

That's one heck of a minority opinion you've got there.

hy·per·bo·le
hīˈpərbəlē/Submit
noun
exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally

You've never been behind the screen, have you?

>Myth: Races and classes
>Truth: Races are classes

That's not a myth and a truth. Those are both different ways of handling fantasy races. They are literally opinions.

Or is this entire thread a bunch of 'myth' = something I think is subpar and 'truth' = my way of doing it? Because that's dumb and fuck you.

On the contrary, I've played in, and run, several games over the years and one thing I've noticed between shit games and great games is that shit games tend to lack consistency and focused on either being Role-Play or Game.

Without Role-Play, it's just four hours of watching a bunch of nerds roll dice. Without Game, it's just four hours of listening to some motherfucker talk and maybe we'll get to roll dice and make decisions once or twice a session.

Without Role-Play, it just boils down to how effectively you optimized your character during character creation. Without Game, it just boils down to how effectively you can entertain the GM enough to get away with stupid shit and seeing how far you can escalate that.

So, from my experience, the best games tend to be ones that have equal measures of both and try to stay as close to the rules as possible without becoming too rigid.

>Without Role-Play, it's just four hours of watching a bunch of nerds roll dice. Without Game, it's just four hours of listening to some motherfucker talk and maybe we'll get to roll dice and make decisions once or twice a session.

Even with Roleplay, it's just four hours of watching a bunch of nerds roll dice.
Even with Game, it's just four hours of listening to some motherfucker talk and maybe we'll get to roll dice and make decisions.

Regardless of how you try to pretty it up, to pretend that one or the other provides "meaning" or "purpose", it's still just a roleplaying game. Trying to strike a balance between the two is just your preferred style, and is not inherently better than people who purely enjoy the roleplay or who purely enjoy the game. That's why boardgames and narrative systems exist, and why it's perfectly fine for a session or even a campaign to lean heavily towards one or the other if that's the group's preference.

Worrying too much about balancing the two is to pretend there's some intrinsic value or merit in either Roleplay or Game, when both are just means to ultimately accomplish the same goal. Both can entertain the group, and often inserting one side would actually detract from the overall experience simply because it goes against the rhythm and flow.

Sometimes, the players will steer the game simply from one challenge to one battle to the next, bludgeoning through roleplay just because they are enjoying the Game so much. At others, they're so engrossed in the story and characters that you wind up going an entire session practically without rolling a single die, and not even noticing. To resist that is to not appreciate that, and some of the best sessions I've had were when a group just synchronized together in one particular mode and carried it to its extremes.

Fine, but you were still spouting blatant misinformation with your thing about there only being the magic-user until 3.5.

That, and ignoring the incredible power difference between high level casters/noncasters in previous editions. Though magic users were very weak at lower levels, they dominated the higher levels to a point where a well-prepared magic user was effectively invincible against anyone except another well-prepared magic user.

I'm not so sure about that one.

Magic-users are only as powerful as their spells. In 3rd edition and above, they get to directly choose what spells to learn and cast, allowing them to essentially cherrypick all the best bits and become precisely as you described.

But in earlier editions spell acquisition was entirely under DM's purview: he decided what spells they'd find, what lay on the scrolls that fell on their paths, and what the enemy wizards they beat up held in their spellbooks. The only ones who got to pick any spells on level ups were the specialist wizards, and even then only in their specialist school, severely limiting their effectiveness.

They also got less spells overall, because high intelligence didn't grant them any new ones; saving throws were far easier to make in higher levels, limiting the power of their magic a good deal; and concentration wasn't a thing and a single accidental push from an ally could cause the spell to be botched.

Wizards were still powerful, but they weren't invincible.

>But in earlier editions spell acquisition was entirely under DM's purview:

This is largely a niggling detail. The best spells were common and effectively expected, with only DMs with a specific intent denying them from their players. And, even later editions still ultimately required DM approval, making it a moot point.

There were plenty of mitigating factors, but at the end of the day, caster supremacy at higher levels didn't just exist, it was expected and encouraged. It was a "reward" for surviving through the lower levels, which was a risky proposition.

Myth: Rollplaying isn't roleplaying
Truth: there's no such thing as rollplaying.

Initiative was also very different in 2e. It was trivial for a fighter to disrupt high-level spells, which took longer to cast. Wizards faced the choice of using a faster low-level spell or risking a higher-level one they might lose.

We once dealt with a powerful wizard boss fight just by charging and piling up on her, then carrying her kicking and screaming back to the Plot Device so that we could kick her out of our friend's body.

The other thing is that it took next to nothing to interrupt a spell. A fighter with darts could paralyze a spell caster of high level just because he could have 3+ chances to hit them before their good spells ever got finished, and there were no concentration checks or saving throws to not lose a spell when you were hit. Add to that a strict percentage change for spell failure against creatures with magic resistance, and a percentage chance that any given creature could locate an invisible creature and then attack it without much penalty at all, and casters were not the monstrous things they are in 3.X.

Do we need to discuss defensive spells like stoneskin, or are you going to put that under "it's not a problem if the DM doesn't let them have them"?

You can find invisible creatures in every edition. More importantly, a magic user would keep a retinue of servants (the other players) in front of them to absorb attacks while they dominated the battlefield.

The "casters weren't broken in 2e" joke is a bad one. You might as well be arguing wizards in 3.pf aren't broken because you can steal their spellbooks and material components. Stuff like this amounts to nothing more than cute details when compared to the ultimate effect and power they had.

>defensive spells like stoneskin

Are there other spells besides Stoneskin that do anything like this anyway?

Besides, Stoneskin still doesn't make you immune to a good shove.

Myth-D&D 3.5 was when D&D started getting broken

Truth-D&D was always broken as shit

Seriously AD&D has a tier list just like 3.5 its just broken in different ways which often stem from fractured rules as much as stupid imbalance. Not to mention there are basically two different campaigns the theoretical one where you play for years and eventually reach high level and the real ones where you never actually hit Elven/Dwarven level limits and a multi-classed Demi-human was leagues better than anything not an Elven Fighter/Mage or Dwarven Fighter/Cleric

At least in 2e the wizard actually needed the other players there.

metagaming faggot

i bet your character choices are based on its' alignment instead of the other way around, too

>perfect balance doesn't exist, so 2e couldn't have been better-balanced than 3.5!

Fallacy of the excluded middle, user.

So what happens if the wizard fails his chance to learn spell percentile on Stoneskin? Unless he's a transmuter and/or has a really high intelligence, there's actually a good shot at that happening and then he can never learn the spell.

In 3e and later he could just try again the next morning.

>Seriously AD&D has a tier list just like 3.5 its just broken in different ways which often stem from fractured rules as much as stupid imbalance

AD&D was not a perfectly balanced game, but if you claim it was ever even remotely as broken as 3.5e, you're delusional.

>freeform roleplay isn't a thing

Myth: Freeform roleplay isn't a thing.
Truth: Freeform roleplay is basically adults carrying on to play the game they played as kids, arguing about how they're never going to lose.

In many ways, particularly at both extremes of low and high levels, it was more broken.
And, 3rd edition on has a lot more documentation on how to avoid the common mishaps thanks to the internet and much larger playerbase.

You need to be delusional to be clinging to nostalgia so hard. There's plenty of good reasons just about no one plays 2e and earlier anymore, and one of them is that back then, the standards of party balance were nowhere near what they are today.

Exactly. I'm sorry you convinced yourself you're to good for that.

>just about no one plays 2e and earlier anymore
>what is the entirety of the OSR movement
No user, party balance in the TSR editions is just thought about significantly differently to what you're expecting.

>In many ways, particularly at both extremes of low and high levels, it was more broken.
Whatever brokenness 2e might have, it's never ruined a game for me or rendered any character so powerful that he could do everything by himself, or anyone else completely useless. 3e does all three of those things regularly.

Elves and dwarves were pretty powerful, yeah, particularly the multiclasses, but they didn't have much more defense against instakill poison traps than your regular human guy.

>And, 3rd edition on has a lot more documentation on how to avoid the common mishaps thanks to the internet and much larger playerbase.
From what I've seen, most of it boils down to "Have you tried not playing D&D?".

>You need to be delusional to be clinging to nostalgia so hard
I have no nostalgia to 2e because I started playing on 3e.

>There's plenty of good reasons just about no one plays 2e and earlier anymore
But there are also plenty of good reasons why some people, like myself, still do. Outside some balance bumps, 2e is still pretty great.

>back then, the standards of party balance were nowhere near what they are today
Well, neither were they in 3e, so I don't really know what you're going on about.

>what is the entirety of the OSR movement

Myth: OSR movement is real.
Truth: OSR movement is less than a full nursing home's worth of fat grognards who cling to the past and complain about "back in my day...", while being utterly blinded to how complete trash their games actually were.

The entirety of the OSR movement is barely a blip. It's actually kind of cute that you think such a tiny percentage, even when assembling all the different systems that fall under that umbrella into a single unit, is enough to try and alter the statement of "just about no one."

>
Or is this entire thread a bunch of 'myth' = something I think is subpar and 'truth' = my way of doing it? Because that's dumb and fuck you

Where do you think we are?

Honestly, just about any RPG system or movement besides 5e, Pathfinder, and maybe the combined World of Darkness, is barely a blip.

But I still wouldn't place any of those three anywhere near my top 5 favorite RPGs. I'm sure you would, though.

Found the munchkin.

>Whatever brokenness 2e might have, it's never ruined a game for me or rendered any character so powerful that he could do everything by himself, or anyone else completely useless

Have you ever played 2E above level 6-7? Never mind level 12+, where what you described is pretty much the default, intended state of the game.

>Elves and dwarves were pretty powerful, yeah, particularly the multiclasses

Multiclassing elves and dwarves were pretty shit past the levels where outcomes were mostly governed by rangom chance. Dual classing was the path to power. You could be Fighter 10 or Fighter 9/Wizard 10 on the same EXP budget, and then progress in Wizard normally.

>but they didn't have much more defense against instakill poison traps than your regular human guy.

Or you could be a fucking caster and solve all traps by sending your summons to trigger them.

>From what I've seen, most of it boils down to "Have you tried not playing D&D?".

I did. There is no other system better than DnD, specifically 3.X, for fantasy with presumed power levels above mundane mortals, and it is not even a fucking contest.

>Outside some balance bumps, 2e is still pretty great.

Besides being broken as fuck, 2E is in that weird middle ground, where it has complexity and extensive rules, while not providing much payoff in terms of options. If I'd ever want to go retro, I'd try Rules Cyclopedia.

>Have you ever played 2E above level 6-7? Never mind level 12+, where what you described is pretty much the default, intended state of the game.
Yes.

>Multiclassing elves and dwarves were pretty shit past the levels where outcomes were mostly governed by rangom chance. Dual classing was the path to power. You could be Fighter 10 or Fighter 9/Wizard 10 on the same EXP budget, and then progress in Wizard normally.
Yes, but you needed pretty great ability score rolls for this - far less than guaranteed even with 4d6-drop-lowest, let alone 3d6-in-order we tended to use.

>Or you could be a fucking caster and solve all traps by sending your summons to trigger them.
Not until level 5. No more than once a day until much later, unless you were a conjurer in which case you'd miss on a bunch of other cool spells.

>There is no other system better than DnD, specifically 3.X, for fantasy with presumed power levels above mundane mortals, and it is not even a fucking contest.
Pathfinder, 4e, 5e, plus a bunch of hipster games no one cares about for some reason.

>Besides being broken as fuck, 2E is in that weird middle ground, where it has complexity and extensive rules, while not providing much payoff in terms of options. If I'd ever want to go retro, I'd try Rules Cyclopedia.
Personally I rather like the middleground: 2e can do both the old-school dungeon crawling and new-style epic fantasy tales about equally well. And option-wise, it has mostly everything ever brought up in any D&D system before then, not to mention having a whole bunch of stuff made on it purely by the virtue of being the primary mainstream game for over a decade. Specialist priests and wizards and kits in particular are well up to my ante.

>If I'd ever want to go retro, I'd try Rules Cyclopedia.
I prefer Bx and a number of retroclones myself, but to each their own.

>Caster supremacy has always been part of D&D

It fucking was, since the days of Gygax' personal gaming table. There was like a dozen caster PCs who survived to high enough level to leave their impact on Greyhawk there, versus a sole fighter.

Myth: Thing I don't like.
Truth: Thing I do like.

Just summed up the entire thread for you there, OP.

No clerics, though, which leads to me believing at least a part of that was because wizards were just so cool.

Granted, casters were quite powerful even back then, but not to such incredibly broken levels as in 3e and beyond, where even the druid's animal companion could out-fight the fighter. At least back in 2e the fighter was good at what he did. Unless the wizard casted Tenser's Transformation.

You seem to just be simultaneously bad at both games, in opposite directions.

2e is very easy to break. Even just a casual walk along the internet is enough to collect a wide list of incredibly broken and poorly concieved builds, and it was only too easy to also fuck up a character with any number of subpar options, including the entirety of being a thief.

At the same time, it's very easy to play a balanced game of 3e, with plenty of helpful tier lists and advice on how to filter all the content.

Basically, both games are "broken", and simultaneously both games are very easy to fix, with perhaps latter editions having a bit of an edge thanks to cumulative experience, drastic changes in information exchange, and a sugnificantly larger player base. But, perhaps in hopes of fairness to older editions, that makes some people try to argue that the games can't be examined outside of a limited fashion, a fashion no one plays because that's not how they were intended to be played.

There's really no point in any of this system warring, because the different editions just appeal to different people, and only autists hope to try to conclusively "prove" something as supremely subjective as which edition of D&D is best.

2e is great. But, class balance is a big problem, and not one that should be attempted to be argued away by saying it was worse in a later edition.

>Unless the wizard casted Tenser's Transformation.
Even then, the wizard's on a time limit, while the fighter can flex all day. Of course,
the wizard can solve that with Permanency if he doesn't mind losing a point of CON, but he's got to be pretty high level to pull that one off.

Pretty sure the wizard can't cast spells at all while he's Transformed like that, so he'd need to have another wizard around to cast the Permanency on him.

And the end result would just be a weird berserking fighter.

He can if he can convince the GM that doing so counts as a form of attack, and that he can't close to melee with the enemy.

>saving throws were far easier to make in higher levels,

In 3.X always saving on a 2 was not uncommon, in fact that was the expected baseline in an optimized 3.5 party.

In AD&D 2, given a wide selection of save-penaltizing spells, even at high levels you could be easily stuck with a 50% or worse chance of saving against instant loss, unless your GM dropped that Ring of Protection +5 in your lap.

>The other thing is that it took next to nothing to interrupt a spell.

In AD&D a high-level wizard was next to impossible to interrupt, because even if you had magic items to deal with the fact that he's flying and invisible, you still had to get past his Stoneskin, which effectively negated you for several rounds. Played there, done that. Besides, level of spells did not impact saves. Some level 1 and 2 SoLs remained useable at any level, and those had better initiative adjustment than any sword.

A cleric was a different tale, but if supplements were allowed, a cleric could easily be a better fighter than figher, and have little need to cast anything in the middle of combat.

The difference between the two editions, I think, is that in 3e it's virtually impossible to have a fighter and a wizard in the same party, unless the fighter is really good at char-op and the wizard is deliberately gimping himself.

In 2e wizards were still powerful, but all other classes were pretty good at what they did - even thief - while there was very little overlap between them, meaning you really did need to have a fighter to fight things, unlike later on. Minmaxing and character building were also somewhat hampered by the random nature of character generation: dual-classing and paladins were hard to get.

Neither game is perfect, balance-wise, but 2e has a bunch of other things to go for it that 3e lacks.

Myth: OSR movement is fat grognards who played them "back in day"
Truth: OSR movement has tons of people who were too young to play D&D in the 70s and 80s who enjoy the type of tabletop offered by OSR

>classes

Ugh.

>In 3.X always saving on a 2 was not uncommon, in fact that was the expected baseline in an optimized 3.5 party.
Any even remotely optimized wizard could get his save DCs to utterly absurd levels.

>In AD&D a high-level wizard was next to impossible to interrupt, because even if you had magic items to deal with the fact that he's flying and invisible, you still had to get past his Stoneskin, which effectively negated you for several rounds.
Stoneskin is far less universal a spell that people think, for a number of reasons, and spell failure chance was far more crippling than in 3e: if you failed to learn the spell, you were never going to get it.

Invisibility was of an entirely different spell school, and you likely had severe penalties to learning either that, or Fly and Stoneskin. All in all, a single wizard having all three spells, and having managed to cast them before the party gets in, would be far more rare than you make it sound.

>Besides, level of spells did not impact saves.
Yeah, but none of them incur the save penalties you mentioned earlier, so if the enemy saves at 3 or higher they would be essentially useless. Most of the level 1 spells, Sleep and such, were also based on hit dice.

>A cleric was a different tale, but if supplements were allowed, a cleric could easily be a better fighter than figher, and have little need to cast anything in the middle of combat.
Specialist priests were there to counter this: it was rare for a cleric to have a whole bunch of spheres, and not all of them could wear heavy armor either.

>you were never going to get it.
Unless you held onto it or managed to find a copy when you were at least a level higher than you were.

>Unless you held onto it
Isn't the spell scroll consumed whether you learn the spell or not?

>Yes, but you needed pretty great ability score rolls for this - far less than guaranteed even with 4d6-drop-lowest, let alone 3d6-in-order we tended to use.

That may be the difference in our experiences, the groups where I had campaigns running to high levels never used anything weaker than 4d6-drop-lowest. Plus there was a tendency of characters with really bad stats dying and being replaced before level 4.

>Not until level 5.

Well, of course at low levels instadeath traps ruined everyone's day. Then fighters kept suffering from them even at high levels, while wizards and, to an extent, clerics, didn't.

>Pathfinder,

It is literally 3.X but even fiddlier.

>4e,

4E is only good if you really, really like the very process of moving tokens across the 5-ft. square grid, and adding up lots of minor modifiers. Making a game catering to CharOp boards crowd was a bad idea to start with, and they did not even succeed in their catering.

>5e,

Can't even emulate Conan or Aragorn gracefully, never mind any character more powerful.

You can, however, in 3.pf have tier 2, or 3, or 4 casters and martials in the same party. The wizard being among the strongest classes and the fighter being among the weakest is an issue, but there are other options available for balanced parties.

More importantly, at the highest levels in 2e, fighters were accesories. Even just hiring bodies to be put in a magic users way was a sufficient replacement.

It all comes largely as a symptom of favoritism from early designers and the ease of making spells but the difficulty of actually balancing them, and a lot of sacred cows. Thankfully, that seems to have changed in 4e on, though we do still see echoes of it.

But, you're right in that 2e does have a lot 3e lacks, though the reverse could also be said. I don't think much more needs to be said on the matter.

>That may be the difference in our experiences, the groups where I had campaigns running to high levels never used anything weaker than 4d6-drop-lowest.
I think 4d6 was more common even back then, but even then it doesn't automatically allow you to play a paladin.

>Plus there was a tendency of characters with really bad stats dying and being replaced before level 4.
That part's certainly different from my experiences: in our games, stats had very little to do with when you died. I've had really low-stat wretches survive a whole campaign where that awesomely-rolled multiclass elfman was killed a few sessions in.

>Well, of course at low levels instadeath traps ruined everyone's day. Then fighters kept suffering from them even at high levels, while wizards and, to an extent, clerics, didn't.
Fighters had the fastest saving throw progression, which helped a lot. Usually it was the thieves who suffered, whenever they failed to notice something. And a poorly placed green slime could still fuck up any of them at about equal levels.

>Making a game catering to CharOp boards
Pretty sure every game since 3e has been like that, barring maybe 5e.

Yes, but spell books aren't. Spell books are also much faster, because learning a spell from a scroll is treated as double-speed research.

>Spell books are also much faster, because learning a spell from a scroll is treated as double-speed research.
Actually, I don't think there's a single bit of true mechanics regarding learning from spell book. We just took it to mean as double-speed research, like with the scrolls.

>Then fighters kept suffering from them even at high levels,
>not driving sheep before you through the dungeon
>not tossing foes' corpses into areas you believe are trapped
>not knocking holes in the walls and throwing the rubble about
It's like you don't even Robilar.

Why would you need to research a spell from a spell book? It's already in a 'this is how you memorise and cast this' form, as opposed to a scroll's 'this is already mostly cast, say cheese to make it go' form.

The DMG says you can just copy them (as long as you make your roll to understand wtf you're looking at).

Myth: Anything contrary to this image
Truth: This image, unironically

Different wizard's book, with different handwriting and strange margins and possibly subtle arcane traps and curses, and new little inventions and innovations and shortcuts.

It's like trying to decipher the code of a different programmer. It's going to take you a while and even in the end you might miss something.

Veeky Forums has a pretty minor subversion fetish compared to the kind of "my elves are new and fresh because they're steampunk desert barbarians" bullshit you find in the blogosphere.

That's some intense butthurt coming from you.
I guess grognards really are just only good at grumbling.

True fact, but the difference is 'Humans are all Classes'

No matter what I play in 5e, a bonus feat and two 16s are better than anything else any race can possibly offer (except maybe, MAYBE gnome, because advantage vs WIS/INT/CHA spell saves is pretty fucking amazing)

>who arbitrarily increases the numbers to keep up the challenge
if you've got a shit DM, yes
tfw my dm is a shit dm
>mfw those fucking DCs set for the starship pilot with a +34 in his piloting skill
>for basic fucking maneuvers

But all creativity is ultimately modifying that which already exists