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Jackolantern wrote:To me, the last version of D&D was 2nd Edition. Version 3.0+ is all garbage IMHO. That is the "Wizards of the Coast" era D&D, where it was rehauled from the ground up to force players to buy miniatures, more books, and who knows what else. What was once a game that could be played, and played well with only a $20 book has now become a hobby that is more on par with the costs to play the Warhammer miniatures game (hundreds of dollars or more).

They also changed the rules to be more of a "power gamer" rule set. Everything has a rule and character development is so bloated. Honestly, the first time I read through the 3.0 rules, I saw right through it. The rules are designed to do a couple of things:

1. Encourage people to buy more books.
2. Encourage people to buy their own books, since every player is now going to need full use of their own all the time, so no sharing.
3. And the biggest: WotC wanted to establish the "D20" D&D system to license out to computer games. Therefore, it is quite easy to see that the D&D new rulesets play like a pen'n'paper computer game. Back in the 1st and 2nd editions, it was the other way around. D&D was its own thing, and computer games tried their best to mimic it without much success. Now the D&D player's manual reads like a video game design document. It completely stifles imagination and creativity, and encourages rule-heavy sessions where dice take the place of narrative and DMing.

MAruz wrote:

Jackolantern wrote:To me, the last version of D&D was 2nd Edition. Version 3.0+ is all garbage IMHO. That is the "Wizards of the Coast" era D&D, where it was rehauled from the ground up to force players to buy miniatures, more books, and who knows what else. What was once a game that could be played, and played well with only a $20 book has now become a hobby that is more on par with the costs to play the Warhammer miniatures game (hundreds of dollars or more).

They also changed the rules to be more of a "power gamer" rule set. Everything has a rule and character development is so bloated. Honestly, the first time I read through the 3.0 rules, I saw right through it. The rules are designed to do a couple of things:

1. Encourage people to buy more books.
2. Encourage people to buy their own books, since every player is now going to need full use of their own all the time, so no sharing.
3. And the biggest: WotC wanted to establish the "D20" D&D system to license out to computer games. Therefore, it is quite easy to see that the D&D new rulesets play like a pen'n'paper computer game. Back in the 1st and 2nd editions, it was the other way around. D&D was its own thing, and computer games tried their best to mimic it without much success. Now the D&D player's manual reads like a video game design document. It completely stifles imagination and creativity, and encourages rule-heavy sessions where dice take the place of narrative and DMing.

I've just briefly touched 2nd ed, but IMO 3.5 is quite fun, while that is not true for 4th ed. It sure felt like a cookie cutter character, with only 2 or 3 options (this might of course change with more books, but at least 3.5 ed players handbook had allot more to offer than the 4th ed players handbook has), where often just one of them actually had some appeal. 4th ed is not something I want to explore further, I'll stick to 3.5.

Not only the rules, but if you look into the Forgotten Realms setting changes for the 4th ed transition, they've ruined much of the intriguing aspects of it, like Thay for example. Not a wizards domain anymore, but that of the undead...

hallsofvallhalla wrote:4th edition says, you can do it but how fast is your processor?

To me 4th edition is taking a PC game and putting it on paper. It was a big step backwards. They ruled the game to death.

Kirbie wrote:

hallsofvallhalla wrote:4th edition says, you can do it but how fast is your processor?

To me 4th edition is taking a PC game and putting it on paper. It was a big step backwards. They ruled the game to death.

i totally agree. We played it for 6 months before the broke up. I did not like it. There just something about your character sheet and the books being in a pdf file that took the fun out it.