Dungeons and Dragons and Table Top Gaming

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

No kidding. Sounds quite cool. Found this brief article sharing some of the aspects of it.

It was worth buying just to read the source and get the illustrations. I had been a fan of https://killsixbilliondemons.com/ anyway, and his creativity in this world was similarly way out there.

His new mini game that is basically Warhammer but with heavy metal undead warriors is also pretty sweet.

[Ser Lany]

We are set to begin on Roll20 tomorrow.  It's taken me all week to be able to get it set up properly, but now that I know how, should only be a few minutes in the future. I did buy the book and the cheaper membership so I could have all the maps already done and the dynamic lighting effect.  This takes a huge amount of stress off of me. I love the maps!

One of the guys is really unhappy about the change, but I had to tell him that I really need this, but I agreed to the last Saturday of the month being in person (although one guy will likely have to skype in or something most of the time-new baby coming soon) What I really think he'll miss is the free lunch.  Because we play at 1 pm, I always do lunch, often something from the Heroes Feast cookbook. I shouldn't be such a cynic, but I am the only host.

As fat as the game itself goes, we completed Call of the Netherdeep with the best possible outcome, but it was a close call.  In the end it took some dreams from the gods to remind the characters of a few things, since winning depended a lot on roll play and they do very little of it. (Reminding the cleric he has the ability to see what is behind the words people say (do insight checks!  can't remember the last time anyone did one of those) and reminding them of all the situations they resolved-which they had identified as therapy)

Some how the rogue/pirate is now dating an angel.  Not sure how that happened, but since the goddess is pleased with her newest convert, she is allowing it (from almost no roleplay to lots of it) The paladin also converted to a new goddess.  It was surprising for both of them.

For the next chapter in their quest to reach level 20, I've moved the Dungeon of the Mad Mage to Exandria and our adventurers will be replacing the crew that started exploring them on behalf of the Colbot Sol, thus allowing me to just drop them into level 14 of the Dungeon. Wish us luck.

[Toth]

The difference in tone between campaigns and the involved players is pretty interesting. In the convention one-shots I was at, the focus seems to have been a lot on solving that one problem we were presented with, with almost no ability to roleplay any situation (I guess not helped by the DM in the second one shutting down any attempt to make persuasion checks). The Star Wars campaign I joined meanwhile is very focused on Empire-building. The players are all driven by amassing resources to get a bigger ship, to crew it, to amass more resources to get an even bigger ship. It feels very much like playing the Star Wars Interworlds Mod for X4. The roleplaying at most happens during the shopping episodes, but otherwise it's just getting from one combat encounter to another.

Now yesterday I for some insane reason decided it would be fun to join one of the one-shot campaigns occasionally hosted on a fanfiction discord I am subscribed to. The difference was quite stark, with everyone immediately coming up with a name, backstory and personality for their character made up on the fly and acting it out in the campaign. Admittedly, I myself hope I didn't push myself too much into the foreground because my character was oddly perfect for most of the situations. It was a van Hellsing style monster hunter campaign in a foggy little town haunted by a demon... and I thought it would be amusing to make my character an artificer based on Egon Spengler. He aced all the investigation and crafting checks (of which there was a surprising amount of), but then in the final fight was badly mauled to near death because I missed the penultimate crossbow shot at the monster... in a pretty embarrassing fight because we all rolled terribly and the DM had to make sure the monster just kills one of us at a time so that we make it to a second combat round... not to mention the two instances before where we completely fumbled an interrogation of a key witness where asking the exact question we needed to ask and that he would have answered failed critically somehow and the other where we found the lair of the monster and failed to see the fucking door... In both instances she fudged the situation a bit and allowed us to make a second attempt by doing a very similar, but slightly altered check. Which I guess makes sense to move the campaign along, though I was already trying to think of alternative ways to solve the situation. The dice god hated us.

[baxus]

I bought some Free League's LotR RPG adapted for D&D 5E books. They've already arrived at my friend's in Vienna, now all that's left is to wait for him to get to Belgrade. It is a drag, but it's still better than having to deal with Serbian customs. If you think you know what Hell is, try explaining Kickstarter to Serbian customs officer and why you don't have a receipt as such for what you're getting in the mail.

[Rhom]

I just saw an article that Lego is about to release a Dungeons and Dragons set.

Quote

There’s a tower, a bridge, a tavern with a removable roof, and yes — both a dungeon and a dragon.

Lego also included six minifig adventurers for the big red lad — “Cinderhowl” — to terrorize: an orc rogue, elf wizard, dwarf cleric, gnome fighter, Dragonborn bard, and a human with an anime-protagonist haircut.

The set also comes with some other iconic D&D monsters. Some, like the skeleton mob and the two myconids (mushroom people, basically), look like minifigs. Others, like the owl bear, displacer beast, beholder, and gelatinous cube, are brick-built, with the latter letting you encase at least part of a victim inside a not-so-gooey prison.

What I like best is that these figurines can serve an additional purpose: Lego is also releasing an adventure book that you can play along with using the set. The book will be available to Lego Insiders from April 1st as a physical paperback or a free digital download and will also be available on D&D Beyond alongside character sheets and digital dice.

As I've said, I'm not even a DnD player; but there's a part of me that would love to have this to put on my shelves amongst my collection of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance books!

[Kalbear]

We use lego figures as the minis for our D&D game. It's pretty awesome! 

[horangi]

Same here back in the day.  The old castles standard sets from the 80s were D&D themed in all but name. 

[Werthead]

I can't find out old dedicated wargaming thread, so I thought this might be of interest here.

Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 co-creator Rick Priestly (who was in charge of the lore, the writing and most of the rules) on the creation and early history of Warhammer 40,000 and Games Workshop (he has another two videos on the history of fantasy Warhammer on the same channel).

 

[Werthead]

I revised my Forgotten Realms "nations" series, adding a second wiki-style map to every article to show where each nation actually is on the continent. Helps with the big-picture idea of the setting.

[Relic]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I revised my Forgotten Realms "nations" series, adding a second wiki-style map to every article to show where each nation actually is on the continent. Helps with the big-picture idea of the setting.

That's cool, however

Eberron >>>>> Faerun. It's like SW vs WoT or something. As a campaign setting I feel like Eberron offers so many options and allows you to build a campaign that's high fantasy, steam punk, or even magitech. By far my favorite setting in 5e.

Edited March 31 by Relic

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Relic said:

That's cool, however

Eberron >>>>> Faerun. It's like SW vs WoT or something. As a campaign setting I feel like Eberron offers so many options and allows you to build a campaign that's high fantasy, steam punk, or even magitech. By far my favorite setting in 5e.

I like Eberron, but it has the same issue as Golarion and a bunch of other settings: it was clearly designed by a dude as a "roleplaying setting." It has some contrived worldbuilding elements that feel artificial, though often cool (warforged are badass, and Sharn is a great creation).

Forgotten Realms was created by an eight-year-old kid as a setting for his home bonkers stories in the 1960s and then fleshed out over twenty years before D&D got anywhere near it. At its best in those early years it was a chaotic mess which felt like anything was possible in.

But, you are right about 5E. Forgotten Realms got fucked over at the end of 3E in 2008 and they've never fully turned it around since then (Honor Among Thieves and BG3 both feel like successes in spite of the mess they made of the world, not because of it).

In fact, I think the 5E Eberron book is not only the best but also possibly the only competent setting sourcebook they've put out for all of 5E's existence, and Keith Baker has done great work in fleshing it out via his DM's Guild content. His recent announcement he's retiring from doing that suggests some kind of problem behind the scenes with WotC (the attitude of the current D&D design team to canon and continuity in official settings might have something to do with that).

[IlyaP]

On 4/1/2024 at 7:19 AM, Werthead said:

But, you are right about 5E. Forgotten Realms got fucked over at the end of 3E in 2008 and they've never fully turned it around since then (Honor Among Thieves and BG3 both feel like successes in spite of the mess they made of the world, not because of it).

What happened at the end of 3E?

[Kalbear]

4 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

What happened at the end of 3E?

I'm gonna guess it's basically this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1XRFJDOEMWZ5M/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewpnt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0786949244#R1XRFJDOEMWZ5M

[IlyaP]

I know there was also the spellplague thing, and that apparently caused a lot of lore changes along the way? 

Can't remember who it was, maybe someone here, but at some point in the course of the last year, I recall having heard a discussion where people were musing on the previous iterations of D&D. From what I recall of the discussion, it went something like this (in no particular order, just what's trapped in my memory): 

1. 3rd edition added kits and made multiclassing more logical, and eliminated THAC0, changed the artwork up a bit, and started building out Aber-Toril and multiverse/wildspace lore in a bit more detail. 
2. 4th edition was a bold narrative experiment but made too many changes that players either found confusing or unexpected. (I almost never hear anyone discuss 4th edition - it's almost like it doesn't exist in the minds of many, or has simply been forgotten.) This led to Pathfinder finding success and GURPS having a sudden spike in interest. 
3. 2nd Edition is "crunchy" (whatever that is meant to suggest) and full of clear class rules and guidelines but lapses in logic (who can wear what kind of armor, cantrips aren't infinitely reusable, etc.), but is still felt by some to be the classic go-to (I think nostalgia plays a part here, though I can't fault the art, which I do find somewhat charming, and reminiscent of classic Larry Elmore paintings.)
4. 5th edition is the most accessible, but had to deal with retconning/resolving 4th edition changes, which has caused some consternation among DMs/players, which has led to a resurgence in homebrewing 3E or heavily modifying 2E to escape the weirdness of whatever happened from 4E onwards.

Mind you, I've not paid attention to the wider TTRPG community at large, and trying to make sense of it all always leaves me feeling slightly overwhelmed and confused. (And sure I can explain how multi-classing is different from dual-classing, and found success in explaining that one's like having two semi-related side hustles whereas one's like having a total career change.)

 

[Durckad]

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I know there was also the spellplague thing, and that apparently caused a lot of lore changes along the way? 

Each edition of D&D has brought lore and rule changes along with it. Mostly it's an excuse to sell more books, or it least it was, I have no idea how well D&D books sell now, but they sold pretty good back in the day. But also it's an excuse to rationalise away any changes in the canon or rules.

For example, the switch to 2e eliminated a few classes from the core roster (assassin and monk were the two primary ones that were removed, though I believe they returned later on) and the Time of Troubles radically shook up the status quo of Faerun with several deities getting killed, Bane, Myrkul, Bhaal being some of the primary deaths, though Mystra was killed as well and a mortal took her place, becoming the new Mystra. Several new deities rose to power in those places, namely Kelemvor, the aforementioned Mystra 2.0, Iyachtu Xvim, and Cyric.

3e brought back Bane at the expense of his son, Xvim, and I believe he also took back some of the portfolios he lost to Cyric, which is good, because Cyric absolutely fucking sucks. The Shade Empire returned and started causing some trouble in the North signaling a potential return of the Netherese Empire, or at least a wannabe Netherese Empire. I'm sure there's more but those are the big ones.

I noped out of 4e so all I know about the changeover there was that there was the Spellplague, which I'm assuming was used to describe the rules changes in 4e and that almost no one likes the Spellplague or the changes to Faerun. 

5e retconned away most of the changes during 4e but 5e hasn't released a big, Campaign Setting book so I have no idea where things stand now with the setting and I can't be arsed to hunt down details as I only kinda like Faerun as a setting. Plus I don't run my games in the setting.

Quote

3rd edition added kits and made multiclassing more logical, and eliminated THAC0, changed the artwork up a bit, and started building out Aber-Toril and multiverse/wildspace lore in a bit more detail. 

Kits became prestige classes and they function much differently but fill a slightly similar niche and yes, Thaco is a thing of the past, thank the gods. I'll be honest, I love some of the artwork for 3e, but yes, it's not the classic fantasy style of Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, or Keith Parkinson. I recall people on forums describing it as "dungeon punk" but whatever, I liked it, but it is a stylistic shift.

I don't believe wildspace was ever canonically brought up in 3e as Spelljammer was very much a dead setting during that time, but Toril was removed from the Great Wheel during 3e and was given its own, separate cosmology. The Great Tree I think it was called? In prior editions, movement between the various campaign settings was possible but difficult, but in 3e it was still technically possible but much, more difficult and up to the DM as to whether it's allowed. 

Quote

4th edition was a bold narrative experiment but made too many changes that players either found confusing or unexpected. (I almost never hear anyone discuss 4th edition - it's almost like it doesn't exist in the minds of many, or has simply been forgotten.) This led to Pathfinder finding success and GURPS having a sudden spike in interest. 

4e is almost directly responsible for the creation of Pathfinder, but it's not so simple as the rules changes forced Paizo to make Pathfinder, it's a bit more complicated than that. Mainly, WotC and Hasbro majorly fucked up, surprise, surprise. Not only did they launch 4e without an explicit GL or SRD, they tried to entice 3rd party publishers to jump aboard with vague promises that "yeah, everything will be good. We won't fuck with you guys. Promise." Paizo didn't want to tie their future to a game system that didn't have any legal documentation written up yet, plus, I'm assuming they weren't big fans of the direction WotC was taking the game or at least the snippets they had seen. There was also the fact that WotC had just recently pulled the licences of Dungeon and Dragon Mag from them, forcing them to start up their Adventure Paths and writing up the Golarion setting. I'm assuming that didn't help in their decision making process.

I also recall, though not with 100% veracity, that there was a bit of a leak of the new, potential OGL documentation at the time and that it was much more restrictive that what had existed under 3e and that basically forced Paizo, and other 3rd party publishers, to jump off from 4e. Combine that with the massive changes, not only in the rules but in the lore and how the game played, and 4e was divisive to say the least and lacking much of the 3rd party support that 3e/3.5 had at the time. 

I'll be honest, I never played 4e. I remember the lead up to its release, I bought the core books, read through them and went "Nope." It does have its fans but they're certainly not very numerous and it's probably the least consequential of any edition of D&D, except for some few, specific rules and bits of lore that survived into 5e.

Quote

2nd Edition is "crunchy" (whatever that is meant to suggest) and full of clear class rules and guidelines but lapses in logic (who can wear what kind of armor, cantrips aren't infinitely reusable, etc.), but is still felt by some to be the classic go-to (I think nostalgia plays a part here, though I can't fault the art, which I do find somewhat charming, and reminiscent of classic Larry Elmore paintings.)

Most of those lapses in logic and weird rules are directly inherited from 1e. 2e and 1e are not that different, the core of the game is still much the same between the two, albeit with some modifications (the removal of some classes and races from the core of the game, for example), but yes 2e had level limits on non-human characters, class restrictions (no dwarf wizards!), class prerequisites (you had to roll really well to play a paladin or ranger), multiclassing was limited to non-humans and to certain class combinations. It's honestly a deeply silly system and is just begging you to homebrew many of these restrictions away because they really only exist for gamist reasons (humans suck compared to other races so let's balance them by arbitrarily restricting access to certain classes! Simple!) and don't make any real sense.

Compared to 1e, 2e is, eventually, a more "crunchy" (ie rules focused) game with the release of various sourcebooks like the "Complete" series of handbooks and "Skills and Powers" that introduced kits and other optional rules that greatly enhanced the customization of characters. I did once own a copy of The Complete Psionics Handbook and man, that was an interesting system. It didn't cohere at all with the existing 2e rules but it was full of so many weird and bonkers powers and I only understood about 20% of it so of course I allowed it in one my games. I am very, very sad that I no longer have that and several other 2e books that I collected at the time. 

2e also introduced some of the best campaign settings of the game, namely Dark Sun, Planescape, Spelljammer, and a couple of others (Red Steel, Zakhara(?), Maztica, etc). 2e had too many goddamn settings, so many in fact that they just started cannibalizing and fragmenting their own player base but there was no doubt that there was some true creativity there. Honestly, if you ignore the rules, 2e was the best. It had some rich and flavorful campaign settings that were well-written and unique. Too bad many of them are languishing and have been largely untouched for years, if not decades.

Quote

5th edition is the most accessible, but had to deal with retconning/resolving 4th edition changes, which has caused some consternation among DMs/players, which has led to a resurgence in homebrewing 3E or heavily modifying 2E to escape the weirdness of whatever happened from 4E onwards.

Yeah, this is pretty much spot-on. 5e is in almost every way, a reactionary repudiation of 4e, a return to the roots of D&D. It takes the core framework of 3e, some of the more popular rules from 4e, and the game philosophy ofc 1e/2e and smashes it into a mostly coherent whole. It's far less rules intensive than 3e or 4e and it has fewer options and customization for players to dig into for their characters. But on the other side of the coin, it's much simpler to pick up and play (and DM) than those two editions.

On paper, 1e/2e are similarly easy to pick up and play as the core of those games offer almost 0 ability to customize your character, no skill points to allocate or feats to choose, just roll stats, pick a race, and pick a class, roll hp and go. The big hurdle is just wrapping your brain around how the systems work as 1e/2e are very much not intuitive (roll high for this, roll low for that, roll a d20 here, roll a d10 here, roll a percentile here, etc).

That lack of options and customization has meant that 3e/3.5/PF still has a pretty large niche in the D&D community that 5e will probably never be able to win over due to its differing focus. Same for 1e/2e and even 4e, I assume, has its small group of fans and players still out there, happily ignoring 5e and whatever bear traps Hasbro/WotC is busy stamping their feet into.

Hopefully this is coherent and helpful as I may have had a glass of wine while writing this. Any grammatical errors are certainly not due to my own inability to type.

[Relic]

4e had some great ideas, especially skills challenges.

https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-L3dYW-IFahTdYhpPtyH

A fair bit of the resistance to it had to do with the people spending hundreds of dollars on 3rd edition, only to have it replaced with 3.5 (which was great but bloated) just a few years later. So having 4e come along 5 years after 3.5 was just a bad idea. 

[Ser Lany]

I am so glad I missed all that. We had our AD&D 1e  books from the  80's and used those to teach the kids to play. 

The older two might have had some 4e play, but by time they wanted me to play again it was all 5e. Spawn 3 has only known 5e, which I guess is a good thing.

The oldest is more into the story books and lore, the middle one into the campaigns and the youngest into creative play with basically 5e rules.

I'm most like the middle one. I used to read all the books, back in the 80's, maybe early 90's but not much since then, so I missed a lot of the changes there too.

[Durckad]

10 hours ago, Relic said:

4e had some great ideas, especially skills challenges.

https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-L3dYW-IFahTdYhpPtyH

Oh yeah, 4e is definitely not bereft of good ideas. I'm quite fond of Minions (or at least the idea of them) and the Bloodied condition (and certain abilities on monsters and characters triggering off of it).

Quote

A fair bit of the resistance to it had to do with the people spending hundreds of dollars on 3rd edition, only to have it replaced with 3.5 (which was great but bloated) just a few years later. So having 4e come along 5 years after 3.5 was just a bad idea. 

Yep, I forgot to mention that, but that was certainly an issue with 4e as well. Honestly makes me wonder how 4e would have done if WotC hadn't shot themselves continually in the foot leading up to and including the release. Would the massive change in rules have been enough to sink it by itself or was it just a conglomerate of ALL of the issues working together that led to it being received so dismally? 

4 hours ago, Ser Lany said:

I'm most like the middle one. I used to read all the books, back in the 80's, maybe early 90's but not much since then, so I missed a lot of the changes there too.

The changes are honestly NOT that important unless you're a lore fiend or fan of a certain campaign setting or you're just a big nerd with too much time on their hands (ie me). Even then you can enjoy, say, Forgotten Realms without knowing the messy history details behind the releases of 2e, 3e, and 4e. The biggest issue there is that there's no big campaign setting book for 5e so you'd likely need to rely on older releases for information. The 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Book is a fantastic sourcebook... if you can get your hands on it as it's, as you can imagine, been out of print for some time now.

The 2e Campaign Setting books are just as good (generally) but even harder to track down.

[Werthead]

18 hours ago, IlyaP said:

What happened at the end of 3E?

They destroyed the Forgotten Realms setting, just flat-out blew up the entire continent and left if this scattered morass of broken-up islands and landmasses, then moved the timeline forward 100 years (instantly killing every non-magic-using, non-elf NPC, or made them really old overnight) and interrupted all the in-progress storylines. To be fair, some of those were crap, so no great loss, but others were pretty good.

For 5E they very quickly undid all of that and the continent became whole again and the whole thing was brushed under the carpet. There's a reason very little of this is mentioned in Baldur's Gate III.

17 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I know there was also the spellplague thing, and that apparently caused a lot of lore changes along the way? 

Can't remember who it was, maybe someone here, but at some point in the course of the last year, I recall having heard a discussion where people were musing on the previous iterations of D&D. From what I recall of the discussion, it went something like this (in no particular order, just what's trapped in my memory): 

2E added kits.

3E converted kits into Prestige Classes, but they were generally not well-playtested and could get very broken very quickly. 3E did eliminate THAC0, which was introduced in 1E and codified in the PHB in 2E.

3E I think is probably the best-regarded edition overall because its mantra is to give the players options, options and more options, and this continued into Pathfinder 1st Edition. That became problematic as there ended up being too many options for any sane DM to keep track of and some option combos were very OP (grappling rules are also insane in 3E, despite better versions existing both before and since). 3E is good but it's a lot. Maths creep was also a big problem: powerful monsters could have a thousand hitpoints (!) and players and monsters could end up juggling bonuses in the several dozen range.

5E is effectively a heavily-streamlined - too streamlined, to some - version of 3E with Advantage/Disadvantage as the big new mechanic replacing a lot of the maths bonus. The biggest weakness in 5E is removing the Skill system from 3E; although it was another layer of complexity, it gave players powerful tools especially for non-combat roleplaying.

3E was generally regarded as a roleplaying game, 5E is sometimes regarded as a miniatures wargame with a sheen of roleplaying on top. Maybe a little harsh, but there's some truth in that (miniatures were optional in 1E, rarely seen in 2E with a distinct miniatures ruleset developed instead, optional again in 3E and all but necessary in 4E and 5E).

3E also treated NPCs and PCs on the same axis, so if you want to run your games on the basis that PCs are not anyone special outside of answering the call to adventure, you can do so. 4E and 5E basically treaty your players like superheroes, they have something in them that makes them inherently superior beings in 5E. You can run a gritty, low-magic campaign in 3E but not really in 5E (there's been attempts but they have to change so much about 5E it's arguably not the same game any more). Notably, there was an excellent, official ASoIaF RPG using the 3E rules, but it's not really doable in 5E. But on the plus side, 5E means you don't spend as much time creating NPCs as players creating PCs, which was always annoying.

4E was rushed and released long before it was oven-ready (the original launch window was envisaged as around 2011-12, and they had to put it out the door in 2008), and seems to have been based partially on a D&D ruleset for board games the team were developing. 4E basically made everyone the same class: fighters had magic-like special abilities, wizards had attack-like, "at will" powers, so everything was a thin reskin of everything else, lacking a lot of flavour. They also used MMORPG terminology for everything, it was really off-putting. But some of their ideas, especially for tactical combat, were pretty good. 13th Age is apparently the "final form" of 4E, developed by the same team with more time under their belt, and is comprehensively superior in every way.

12 hours ago, Durckad said:

Each edition of D&D has brought lore and rule changes along with it. Mostly it's an excuse to sell more books, or it least it was, I have no idea how well D&D books sell now, but they sold pretty good back in the day. But also it's an excuse to rationalise away any changes in the canon or rules.

5E has sold a lot better than any edition since 1E (2E sales were poor, 4E were apocalyptic and 3E started well but fell off a cliff when 3.5E came out, as people thought they were taking the piss), and maybe slightly better than that, but it's not run off into the distance. I think this is the key problem Hasbro/WotC had with profitability, 5E is being played by more people than any edition before, but the books are not selling like they think they should be (since the 5E rules are available free online, more or less).

11 hours ago, Relic said:

4e had some great ideas, especially skills challenges.

https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-L3dYW-IFahTdYhpPtyH

A fair bit of the resistance to it had to do with the people spending hundreds of dollars on 3rd edition, only to have it replaced with 3.5 (which was great but bloated) just a few years later. So having 4e come along 5 years after 3.5 was just a bad idea. 

Monte Cooke, who co-developed 3E, has said that their plan was to release a major revision to 3E in 2005 or 2006, and 4E would follow in 2011 or 2012, roughly paralleling the timeline of 1E and 2E. They agreed that although some TTRPGs had to produce a new edition every 3-5 years, D&D could not do the same thing, they had to commit for the long haul.

3E sales were apparently insane in the first year (most of the 800,000 copies of the 3.0E PHB were sold in the first 12 months) but then fell off in Year 2, which he and everyone else who had worked in the industry fully expected, but Hasbro panicked and demanded they bring forward the revised version, despite everyone telling them that was a bad idea. Cooke quit (not just over that, but that didn't help) before 3.5 came out in 2003, just three years after 3E itself. WotC were roasted for that, especially when the books came out and they were just very mild revisions of the original.

3.5E's PHB only ever sold 300,000 copies, maybe slightly less, so the exercise failed. Not only that, but there has been speculation it hurt D&D's overall sales because people felt it was a cash-grab (i.e. if they'd stuck with 3.0E for longer, they'd have sold more than another 300,000 copies in another five years). That also led to them commissioning 4E way ahead of schedule so it came out in 2008, leaving 3E overall with sales of about 1.1 million PHBs. That's only a third of 1E and way, way less than the impression WotC gave at the time of it being a massive mega-success story. These figures only came to light recently.

Some 3rd party licensees from the time said if they'd known the real figures, they'd have never jumped on the 3E/d20 bandwagon of converting other systems to it, as it ended up mostly not being worth it (Pinnacle Entertainment only narrowly skimmed being made bankrupt by it).

48 minutes ago, Durckad said:

The changes are honestly NOT that important unless you're a lore fiend or fan of a certain campaign setting or you're just a big nerd with too much time on their hands (ie me). Even then you can enjoy, say, Forgotten Realms without knowing the messy history details behind the releases of 2e, 3e, and 4e. The biggest issue there is that there's no big campaign setting book for 5e so you'd likely need to rely on older releases for information. The 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Book is a fantastic sourcebook... if you can get your hands on it as it's, as you can imagine, been out of print for some time now.

The 2e Campaign Setting books are just as good (generally) but even harder to track down.

You can get them all on DM's Guild. The 3E setting book is a work of art, aside from the maps (that shrank Faerûn by 20% in 3E with no explanation for no real reason; it got better in 5E).

Edited April 2 by Werthead

[Durckad]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

2E added kits.

3E converted kits into Prestige Classes, but they were generally not well-playtested and could get very broken very quickly. 3E did eliminate THAC0, which was introduced in 1E and codified in the PHB in 2E.

Well, this was true of kits as well. Many were notoriously unbalanced or were only balanced through odd roleplaying restrictions or requirements. If there's one thing 2e and 3e have in common, it's the pure crap shoot of quality in the optional rules content that was being released throughout the editions. The bigger problem with 3e was that there was just so much of it being released. Almost every book that wasn't a setting sourcebook was prioritized around releasing more and more rules content and, like you said, so much of it was clearly not that well balanced. Add in all the 3rd party content and a poor DM could be swimming in crap feats and prestige classes. 

Even Pathfinder 1e fell victim to this content treadmill, although IMO, it was even worse here as every new release seemed to up the scale of power compared to the previous releases.

Quote

3E was generally regarded as a roleplaying game, 5E is sometimes regarded as a miniatures wargame with a sheen of roleplaying on top. Maybe a little harsh, but there's some truth in that (miniatures were optional in 1E, rarely seen in 2E with a distinct miniatures ruleset developed instead, optional again in 3E and all but necessary in 4E and 5E).

I don't think that's really correct at all.

3e and 3.5e were both criticized quite a bit at the time for being too miniatures focused and for basically requiring a battle mat (or grid) and miniatures to "play properly." Several examples of combat rules in the core books even utilize both grids and miniatures to explain their function in play. Multiple rules in 3e also require knowledge of specific placement and distance of your character against monsters or NPC's, namely flanking, Attacks of Opportunity, diagonal movement, and 5-foot steps. You could certainly play 3e without miniatures and a battle mat, but, 3.5 especially,  practically assumed that you had access to and were using both during play. Whereas with earlier editions, miniatures were simply a part of the game that you could use or ignore if you didn't want to use them, 3e very much started the focus on utilizing miniatures being a key part of the game much to the chagrin of players and DM's who did not want to use them.

4e was even more blatant and if there is a version of the game that was truly miniatures focused, it was 4e, to the point that distances in the books were changed to squares rather than utilizing feet.

5e is, like you said, very simplified and streamlined down from 3e and 4e. Flanking is now an optional rule, 5-ft steps no longer exist as a thing, and attacks of opportunity are greatly, greatly simplified, and since everything is basically boiled down to advantage/disadvantage now, characters have far less reason to utilize terrain or specific placement on the battlefield to stack bonuses during combat, ala 3e.

So while I would agree that 3e, 4e, and 5e all have emphasized a greater reliance on the utilization of miniatures during play, to say that 5e is just a "miniatures wargame with a sheen of roleplaying" is both insulting and requires a very skewed view of the progression of the game over the past 25 years. Even 4e, I would argue, is still a roleplaying game, even if it is probably the closest to being a straight miniatures based wargame with its emphasis on balanced combat and grid-based play. 3e itself was frequently referred to as being a "roll-playing" game back in the day for its over reliance on rules-as-written gameplay, miniatures-focused combat, and boiling role-playing down to simple skill checks. I didn't agree with it then and I certainly don't now.

Quote

3.5E's PHB only ever sold 300,000 copies, maybe slightly less, so the exercise failed. Not only that, but there has been speculation it hurt D&D's overall sales because people felt it was a cash-grab (i.e. if they'd stuck with 3.0E for longer, they'd have sold more than another 300,000 copies in another five years). That also led to them commissioning 4E way ahead of schedule so it came out in 2008, leaving 3E overall with sales of about 1.1 million PHBs. That's only a third of 1E and way, way less than the impression WotC gave at the time of it being a massive mega-success story. These figures only came to light recently.

While I can understand and sympathize with the desire to name 3.5 a cash grab (because some of the push to put it out so early absolutely was) it did clean up and improve quite a bit of the rules at the time. I would happily play 3.5 today if given the chance (though I think I would prefer Core PF1 or PF2 instead) but I'm not so sure about original 3e. 3.5 was definitely a needed release at some point.

Quote

Some 3rd party licensees from the time said if they'd known the real figures, they'd have never jumped on the 3E/d20 bandwagon of converting other systems to it, as it ended up mostly not being worth it (Pinnacle Entertainment only narrowly skimmed being made bankrupt by it).

The amount of absolute glut of material, either 3rd party or official, during the 3e era was absolutely insane. So many releases that consisted of nothing more than monster books or books full of feats and prestige classes. The market during that time was very thoroughly over-saturated even before 3.5 IMO. Some great stuff, some real dreck, but a lot of pure meh.

Quote

You can get them all on DM's Guild. The 3E setting book is a work of art, aside from the maps (that shrank Faerûn by 20% in 3E with no explanation for no real reason; it got better in 5E).

Oh yeah, you definitely can but I'm not a big fan of the scanned .pdf copies of older books. The scan quality of some is not great sometimes and I don't find them enjoyable to read beyond being useful for casually referencing. I would much prefer having a physical copy, but of course, YMMV on that.