Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

For the past five weeks, Katt, Greg, Scott, Tim, Ryan, and I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons on Friday nights. Ryan and I have played on and off for a number of years, starting with Second Edition and moving through 3.0 and 3.5 before arriving at our current campaign using the 4.0 ruleset. What I’ve noticed over the years is that the game has become much more accessible to a common audience. To really know how to play Second Edition D&D, you needed to have tables and rulebooks pretty much memorized. Arcane ways of displaying statistics (anyone remember 18/xx Strength scores?) and a really clunky combat system (THAC0? Negative armor class?) made it next to impossible to sit down and understand anything if you’d never played before.

Things got much better in 3.0 and 3.5, where the old systems were tossed out and rebuilt to be much easier to understand. Every action in the game turned in to a check; one would roll a d20 plus some sort of modifer based on your skills and stats). Keeping track of your abilities was still a pain though. How does one keep track of a power with “X uses per day” when the flow of time in the game world and the real world is so different?

4.0 fixed that problem, although the changes drew outcries from D&D “purists” that claimed the game had been “WoWified” (a derogatory reference to Blizzard Entertainment’s popular World of Warcraft). The game’s focus shifted to streamline things; instead of tracking individual powers, everything was reclassified as “at-will” (infinite uses), “encounter” (once per battle), or “daily” (once in between extended rests). In addition, the list of skills (formerly enormous) was pared down. Things like Spot and Listen (skills that few people took) were combined in to skills like Perception. Not only did this grant one’s character access to a larger range of skills, it made performing skill checks (comparing one’s ability to do something with its difficulty class, a number representing how hard it is to succeed at something) much easier.

So far, I’m enjoying the revised system immensely (as the one running the adventures!). It’s far easier to keep track of player and monster statuses in combat, and I don’t have to spend time running all sorts of confusing calculations just to see if Katt’s arrows hit the goblin in the corner of the room. My players seem to be enjoying it too; the less they have to focus on the “metagame” (keeping track of the game in order to play it), the more energy they can devote to thinking out their actions and role-playing their characters.

If you’ve played Dungeons and Dragons (or any other tabletop RPG), what sorts of experiences have you had between editions?