5e, 3e and else

Well, I played my first 5e game yesterday. I ordered the 5e Player's Handbook (the old one, not the one that's available for pre-order.) I got it pretty cheap, or I wouldn't have. I also was motivated—many years after it's relevant probably, to finally order the 3.5 PHB and DMG. I'm still salty more than twenty years after the fact that they issued revised editions so soon after I just bought the original 3e books, so I refused to buy them when they were current, and I just used the SRD. I did buy the Monster Manual, mostly because I like monsters so much. I also did eventually make my peace with the 3e > 3.5 conversion, because 3.5 was a marginally better game, and many of the books that followed in its wake were significantly better than what had come earlier (Although I wouldn't have replaced my Psionics Handbook with the Expanded Psionics Handbook if I hadn't gotten it for extremely cheap. But it, along with Complete Psionic is just miles and miles above the original 3e Psionics Handbook.) I've actually been having fun recently going back over a lot of my 3e books, since I've found most of them and dug them out of the big plastic bin in the garage where they're sitting. I don't really have a great place to put them in our temporary rental house, but since we'll likely be here for two years, I can't just not have any of my books either. Still haven't found a great solution to that conundrum...

Anyway, I had recently (kind of) finished reading the official Drow of the Underdark book, which was published relatively late in the 3e life cycle; I believe it was released in 2007 and 4e was announced at GenCon that same year, and was out by 2008. Upon finishing it, I picked up Green Ronin's Advanced Race Codex: Drow which was a 3.5 update of their earlier Plot & Poison: A Guide to Drow. I thought it would be interesting to see the third party supplement from early in the edition's lifecycle next to the official product from late in the product's life cycle, but I found that it wasn't maybe as interesting as I expected it to be. I think I'd forgotten a little too much what both products were actually like. I also kind of had forgotten all about the infamous "crunch vs fluff" debates that raged on both the internet, and apparently in the offices of Wizards of the Coast too.

My thought, before I remembered what it was like, was that the Green Ronin book would be freer, because it was third party, to do more interesting things, and that the WotC book would be pretty lacking in surprises or anything really super interesting, in favor of playing it safe. That's... sorta true, as it turns out. Drow of the Underdark is more or less what you'd expect, but it manages nonetheless to be a pretty high quality sourcebook anyway. Advanced Race Codex: Drow does some interesting stuff, especially in the first third to half of the book, but then gets bogged down in creating one mechanical gimmick after another. A lot of books from this era did that; in part because 3e was a very crunchy game with a lot of mechanics, game designers often thought that subtle variations on existing mechanics were really clever and interesting. (Spoiler alert: they're actually not. Especially now in retrospect.)

Curiously, for a time when Paizo picked up the 3e mantle and created "3.75" as Pathfinder was kind of called, they managed to avoid this trap... at least somewhat... by focusing on how to make the game more flexible, adding all kinds of a la carte options to modify and customize classes, etc. to get your interpretation of the archetype more easily without having to do cumbersome and fiddly multiclassing or turning to homebrew/third party solutions. But not entirely. And "clever" mechanical gimmicks were ubiquitous in their adventures, sadly. A straightforward appearing module with a classic theme would be, you'd expect, immune from some of this nonsense, but it turned out to not exactly be the case. And when they weren't even necessarily doing traditional stuff, they really had weirdos out there; like layering on multiple templates to already esoteric subraces, etc. Shackled City was kind of a mess that way. Third Edition was a game that I enjoyed for a long time, but by the time I was done with it, I was thoroughly unimpressed with mechanical gimmickry, mechanical complexity, rules-heaviness, or anything else along those lines. I was done with D&D, pretty much for good. Even now, I'm only playing 5e because that's what people are playing here in my new area with my new group, and the experience is kind of deju vu; we spent an entire 3½-4 hour session in what was essentially a single extended combat sequence, and way too much time flipping through books to see how rules were supposed to work. 

I guess all of the talk about 5e being simpler and streamlined compared to 3e isn't really true. Sure; monster stat blocks are clearly shorter, but from an actual play perspective, it felt... basically the same. Sigh.

I had enough fun playing 3e that I doubt I'd want to quit, but it is a little disappointing that the system isn't, y'know, really much better, if at all, than the one that it was trying to ape again. It's quite clear, and many have pointed this out but now I can confirm it because I got the t-shirt too, that after the debacle of 4e and Pathfinder literally outselling it at several points between 2011-2014, that their mandate was "make 3e again, but make it just barely different enough that people will buy the new books instead of the old ones, and make it just simpler enough that it's simpler than Pathfinder." Meanwhile, the OSR had grown tremendously during that era. It's still small compared to the "official" market, and has become pretty fragmented and fractious in its own right, but the people who were lost to the OSR are probably mostly lost for good.

And then there's guys like me. I appreciate many aspects of the OSR, especially it's focus on streamlined mechanics and a faster pace, but I also appreciate the willingness of the non-OSR to walk away from dumb ideas and paradigms about what the game is like. There are a lot of good innovations in D&D since 1985, and people who literally don't understand why a unified mechanic is a good thing have nothing in common with my tastes. For instance. So, I almost need to take an OSR chassis, and heavily modify it to be more role-playing friendly, get rid of any hint of "dungeon-crawling", a terrible word for a tedious activity, and just otherwise kind of fix the things that the early 80s evolution into "conventional trad play" didn't fix. 3e and above ironically fixed many of them while making many others of them objectively worse.