Over the weekend I was in a bookstore. Now this is by no means an uncommon occurence as I typically spend several hours in bookstores every week, rummaging around in the stacks looking for the elusive perfect book to read. What was uncommon was that, riding the wave of an excellent gaming session last weekend, I was in the gaming section for the first time in months. What I saw was rather like stepping into a time machine set to take me back to five years ago.
I don’t really have anything against second edition AD&D really. The Baldur’s Gate series is still one of my favorite video game series of all time—a franchise that has racked up over two hundred dollars of my hard-earned cash. Some of my favorite gaming sessions were spent with my first real gaming group, rolling our dice, calculating THAC0, and playing with some of my favorite characters I ever rolled 4d6 for.
Having said all that, I readily admit that I was absolutely thrilled with third edition came out. My clerics could now wield swords. My elven characters could “dual-class” all to hell, and my human fighter now had a legitimate way to become a ranger in mid-career. I took to the system like a fish to water, learning to love the new mechanics (especially the spiffy keen skills system) and no-subtraction-required combat.
The best thing that 3e ever did, however, was unify the gaming community. You see, in the time that I’ve been a gamer, I’ve never met a group that played straight-up AD&D second edition. There seemed to be some sort of itch that each group needed to scratch. There were the kits from the class specific splat books. There was the whole Combat and Tactics character system. There were house rules out the wazoo. The likelihood that you could take your favorite character and play a pickup session with another gaming group was essentially nil. The advent of 3e, however, made it very likely that you could take your character and play him at any other gaming session. As a DM, adding new folks to your gaming group was never easier because you could just tell the new players that anything within the Players Handbook was fair game.
Of course, there was some degree of branching that took place in those first few years after 3e really started to take off. The class-specific books reared their ugly heads again—though for the most part they confined themselves to new prestige classes and spells rather than wide sweeping rule changes and options. Different campaign settings added more feats, spells, and prestige classes. A few of the additions were ill-considered and broken, but by and large, the additions worked within the 3e system.
While my gaming group hasn’t fully converted over to the new 3.5 edition of D&D, my first explorations of the differences have been mostly positive. It appears that, on the whole, Wizards of the Coast has corrected the obviously broken spells and game mechanics, fixing the haste spell and giving a better-designed ranger class as just two examples.
I’ve been out of gaming mode for quite some time now. I honestly just haven’t been all that interested in any form of gaming beyond video games. My subscription to Dragon has lapsed. I haven’t hung around the Wizards message boards for months now. I haven’t even glanced at the latest gaming books to arrive at the local bookstores. As a result, a quick look at Unearthed Arcana on the new releases shelf took me by complete surprise.
If you’re unfamiliar with Unearthed Arcana, a basic summary is that it offers an optional rule change for just about every foundation rule in D&D 3.5. Don’t like the way the specialist wizards are done? Try one of the new specialist mages that completely change the development of the class. Want to play an elf but can’t decide on a class? Just skip classes and level up as a paragon. Want to play a paladin of a different alignment? Perhaps a paladin of slaughter will be right up your alley. Perhaps you’d like to really min-max your character by collection more feats by adding flaws to your character. Thumbing through the book, I was struck by how much like Combat and Tactics this book really was.
Moving over to the gaming section proper, I discovered a book called Complete Warrior and saw in the future releases that there was a Complete Divine on the way. The similarity to the previous second edition “complete” series had me checking my watch to make sure that it was, in fact, still 2004.
I had always thought of the various kits and player options from second edition as being an attempt to “fix” various problems within the base rules. I have yet to encounter a character idea that I couldn’t express using just the content of the 3e Player’s Handbook. Though different feat combinations, skill choices, and free multi-classing, I can represent nearly any fantasy character using only the base character classes and races. The ability to take different prestige classes offers me even more options for character design. Books like Unearthed Arcana offer no or little play benefit with a terrible cost attached—the Balkanization of D&D.
“Yeah, I’d love to game with you guys! I’ll bring in my half-elf paragon, with levels in paladin of tyranny and invoker with innate energy substitution. I’m thinking progressing toward the prestige class version of ranger.”
I understand that Wizards of the Coast is just a corporation trying to sell books to make profits for their shareholders, but there was a wonderful simplicity to just gaming with the core rule books.