Post/Author/DateTime

Post

#1 Zardnaar Feb 21, 2009 14:12:42

Over the years DS has been one of my favourite settings along with FR and later I quite liked the Eberron CS book in 3.5 as well. Anyway some thoughts on various issues in the editions. 2nd Ed. The original DS setting material. I still love most of the product but mechanically it was a mess and wasn't exactly balenced. I don't mind a slight difference in power but aot of races were just better than humans for example, the Gladiator was better than the Fighter and Clerics sucked although they got better depending on what splat books you had. The setting material also wasn't known for internal consistency and I'm not a fan of the Prism Pentad series of books. 3.0/3.5. SOme of the best games of D&D I ever played were under 3rd ed rules. However the rules were very broken even at relativly low levels and some of the classes weren't very well designed even when compared to other PHB classes. At higher level spell casters and psions were the nuts and could literally dominate combat. Think of a core rules Druid using natural spell feat shapechanged into something flying wearing wild armor and summoning up various dire critters with augment summoning feat. Or a Cleric casting Divine Power maybe combined with other buff spells and shopwing Mr Fighter how its really done. Also apart from broken spells and the like (Psionics) opur games usually crashed and burned due to the DM (me) thinking F this as it takes several hours to design reasonably simple encounters. Think statting out a Dragon or high level Rogue or Spellcaster or adding a template to a creature or adding a template to a summoned creature. or using Atas.orgs rules to make a Dragon or somehting similar and I won't mention the epic spellcaster feat which is blatantly awful along with most of the Epic Level Handbook which is a mechanical mess. I had to use alot of houserules to make 3.5 work as such and even they only tended to put a patch on some of the worst abuses of the system. However 3.5 is very modular and its easy to plug in new rules and errata. If one could fix the spell system (Pathfinder RPG maybe) I think it would still be a great system. 4th Ed I kinda like 4th ed but it doesn't quite feel right. Essentially its a tatical minis game rather than D&D. However it potentially may be the best D&D version yet but its lacks alot of htings. The skill system is reasonably good and I'm a big fan of the rituals as well, while I don't like the power based combat system to much. I did like Star Wars Saga alot which seems to be a nice hybrid of 3.5 and 4th ed combining the best aspects of both. It also has the D&D magic system ripped out which seems to make it work. For Darksun I'm gonna stick with a heavily houseruled 3.5 or Pathfinder system as there is to much work required to convert to 4th ed DS. Even desiging something simple like a Psion class is alot more work than 3.5 where you could design a class in 3-4 pages instead of 15 or so for 4th ed. I'm not totally prepared to throw 3.5 out when 4th ed wasn't exactly what I wanted which was something similar to SW Saga with a fixed magic system (Vancian system with at wills/reserve feats and non broken spells).