I've been seeing all sorts of blog posts, YouTube videos, and memes re-examining Third Edition D&D, and especially 3.0 as compared to 3.5. Having played some d20 Modern with my son over the past year or so, and having dived into an aborted attempt at a d20 Star Wars game on RPOL (and currently into a Saga Edition Star Wars game on RPOL), I'm not really feeling the 3E nostalgia. Those games have reminded me of just how needlessly cumbersome the skill/feat system is in d20 games, and the limits of a "roll d20" for any task resolution is still with us in 5E today.
But there seem to be a lot of gamers who started on 3E, or started on 2E but found their jam with 3E who are feeling that nostalgia. It does make sense. It's been almost 24 years since the game was released, 21 since the 3.5 revision.
I've even had some people tell me that 3E is old school D&D.
Personally, I think "old school" is more about play style than age, but I may be biased.
Is it time to lump 3E, and the resulting d20 system boom games, in with the "old school" banner? Make it part of the OSR? Or is it "old school but not OSR"?
Peanut gallery, sound off in the comments!
I've always been of the opinion that D&D 3E was a victim of its fanbase, and was a perfectly good game if you could avoid the rules lawyers....I still have a nearly complete collection in my closet of 3E/3.5. That said, it's very hard to find a group for that edition when most newer games find 5E to be borderline too difficult to parse out. 3rd edition is a mind-blower to them. Either way....it's Old School now, but not (to me) OSR, which lies with (for me, again) AD&D 1E and 2E, the editions I cut my teeth on.
ReplyDeleteOh Sweet Baby Jesus. Must we?
ReplyDeleteIs it an older edition? At this point in time, and compared to the current edition, yes. Is it "old school"? I would say no, because Old School (at least to me) is not about the chronological age of the rule set, but a particular era in the history of RPGs, and the general ethos of that era.
ReplyDeleteAs an historian, I obsess about periodization. (Science also loves to categorize the various divisions of time, as shown by the minute distinctions in the geological epochs, eras and periods). I therefore propose that 3e and Pathfinder belong to the Middle School, before the New School of 4e and the Late school of 5e. Of course, I lack the tiktok and youtube presence to propagate this idea :(
ReplyDeleteNo. For me the cut-off point is when Gary Gygax left TSR in Oct. 1986.
ReplyDeleteConsidering 5E is essentially a hack of 3E/d20, I'd say we definitely should not include it with the Old School - it's still the rules engine running the game today.
ReplyDeleteNo, D&D 3.x and later are definitely not OSR. If they were, I'd have never found the OSR, because I found the OSR while trying to make sense of D&D 3.x's proud nails.
ReplyDeleteI didn't start RPGs in earnest until college, which was right around when WotC released D&D 3e. I consider it to be my first real game, and I approached it on its own terms, as it was written. But the designers were all AD&D players, so they did not. There were a lot of holdovers that weren't understood or explained, and a lot of design choices that seemed indirect. But worse, there was a lot that was left unsaid. It looked like it had all the tools you need to make it work -- Tables! Percentages! -- but it's not clear how they thought you'd use some of them or why they were included.
At some point, I saw the AD&D Player's Option, Combat and Tactics rules online and realized that it was almost identical to the combat system for D&D 3.x. That was when I realised that those 3e designers probably saw themselves as "punching up" AD&D, not making a new, self- enclosed game. I started looking back at older editions to fill in the gaps. That's what lead me eventually to the OSR.
D&D 3.x often devolved into the very different fun of design puzzles, such as designing magic items, or tailoring a level 20 Frankenstein character to break the game in exotic ways just to prove you can. Or, if you take a perverse joy in the joinery of the system, I could write 11 pages on how they clearly cared enough to _almost_ make the rules physical with respect to size (read: square-cube law) and Strength. None of which is the fun of actually playing D&D.