3e: Dwarf and Elf Overload

Sometimes I just walk into my garage where my 3rd edition books are resting, and grab a book at random, to see ‘hey, I wonder what weird thing in 3rd edition I could talk about.’ This is a fun edition to talk about because I can both get things wrong (like metamagic stacking) and be righter than the people who want to correct me (because they’ve been playing Pathfinder so long they don’t realise they’ve pickled their brains reading anything but mechanical information).

Anyway, I think that the Elves and Dwarves of the Forgotten Realms’ Player’s Guide 3rd edition suck arse and now I’m taking you along for a ride to talk about it. This is one of the most expensive books in its category for its time and what it offers is incredibly unsatisfying, and I say this as someone who wants to anchor himself in the world. There’s a horrifying mess of complicated cross references, but the bulk of the information in this book is stuff for making elves or dwarves that are from Faerun.

And I think those options suck.

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https://press.invincible.ink/3e-dwarf-and-elf-overload/

#DnD3e

System: #Gassenhunde möchte ein „schnelles Rollenspiel“-Erlebnis ermöglichen. Mein Eindruck ist, das geht auf! Das Spiel nutzt eine einheitliche Würfelpool-Mechanik die um Elemente ergänzt werden, die ich vor allem mit Videogames und jüngeren #dnd Editionen und Varianten kenne (v.a #DnD3E und 4e, #Pathfinder): Prestigeklassen, (De-)Buffs, Markieren-und-Auslösen Mechanik… 4/n

3e: The Best Liars

Ah, diplomacy.

Common discourse around Dungeons & Dragons (especially 3rd edition) is that it’s a tactical combat system with nothing else going on. Certainly, it lacks the sophisticated mechanical depth of who-cares to represent non-combat operations.

That judgment is unfair, because it’s not like Dungeons & Dragon’s (3rd edition) skill system is nonexistant. What it is is extremely silly, with some skills that are meant to represent tangible, measurable and clear things, like jump, some skills that were meant to represent an oppositional element like sense motive, and some that were meant to represent a huge waste of skill points, like scry.

Don’t worry, they got rid of scry.

Anyway, there are two skills that are fantastic for enabling player fantasy and then completely failing to deliver on it, and those skills are bluff and diplomacy. You look at those skills on the character sheet and immediately think of how they relate to it. Hey, there’s bluff, that’s cool, bluffing people is cool. And there’s diplomacy, that’s how you say fancy that you’re not going to be an asshole to someone, right? Hey, that’s great. Immediately, players are engaged with conceiving of ways of being that result in a character archetype in their mind, and it’s not hard to go from there to ‘I now care about understanding how to interact with people.’

Such skills are good stuff, and the question that comes after it is, hey, how good a job do I have to do with them? What’s a really good diplomacy or bluff look like? What kind of character can be great at diplomacy or bluff?

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https://press.invincible.ink/3e-the-best-liars/

#DnD3e

Kann ich einer absoluten Anfänger-Gruppe ein komplett übermächtigen Gegner vorwerfen, den sie aber easy umgehen/fliehen können?

Ich überlege einen "Orcwart" (CR 20 MM2 D&D3.5) zu benutzen im aller aller ersten Abenteuer einer unerfahrenen Gruppe. Ich würde die Kreatur noch in ihrer Bewegung einschränken, damit sie nicht hinterher läuft, sie soll nur die Wartlings droppen.

Sollten sich die Charaktere aber da hin wagen reicht ein Hieb und sie sind hinüber.

#pnpde #pathfinder #dnd3e #pf1e #rpg

I wonder what underwater civilizations' names for the "animal buffs" are. There's plenty of diversity in life under the sea, so it seems like it shouldn't be hard to come up with alternate names. There's no reason why merfolk and sahuagin would name spells after land animals and inland birds, after all.

#DnD35e #DnD35 #DnD3 #pf1 #pf1e #DnD3e

3e: Prestige Domains

When talking about ‘3rd edition’ D&D there’s often a consensus assumption that we’re talking about the system that served as bedrock for Pathfinder and was the game that existed about four days before the introduction of 4th edition (the best edition). But that’s not literally true; that edition was 3.5. While 3.5 was probably the lion’s share of that that number, the two systems had some pretty remarkable incompatibilities, not the least of which being the ways that 3.5 were broken were in many cases a byproduct of trying to fix the ways that 3e were completely cracked.

That is to say, 3e wizards were more obviously more powerful.

Still, wizards weren’t the only ways things were in 3e more busted and in need of a sort of systemic enema. Fighters were weaker, can you believe it? So were Barbarians and bards were ghastly. This doesn’t mean that everything in the edition was broken, of course; there were in fact some things that constituted what I will go out on a limb and describe as ‘a pretty cool idea,’ and then add the caveat, ‘if implemented well.’

It’s in that basket that I’d like to point to 3e’s book Defenders of the Faith and its comically mismatched area of wonky weirdness that is Prestige Domains.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/3e-prestige-domains/

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3e: Prestigious Gender

3rd Edition D&D did, ostensibly, avoid much deliberately and exclusionary gendered language of the fantasy genre from its forebears, which is a little like saying that a rainstorm is less wet than a cyclone. And bear in mind, I am not throwing stones here: it sure is good to have reduced the amount of naked misogyny and ridiculous and unnecessary gendering that persisted across the landscape of an earlier version of the fandom, and I am glad that we then made better and better versions of the same.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/3e-prestigious-gender/

#DnD3e

This arrived today. I'm keen to give it a read. #DnD #DnD3e #DungeonsAndDragons #TTRPG

3.5e: The Prestige Classes of the Complete Warrior

The Complete Warrior was a book of all time. All the Complete books had their virtues and their vices, but the Complete Warrior was one of the first attempts by the designers in the lifespan of 3.5 to try and introduce some juice to the least powerful part of the game that was also, fundamentally, the most vital and popular. People love their human fighters, they love swords and they love archery and they love doing the cool fantasy things that wizards don’t do.

The Complete Warrior was a book that brought with it tools for the non-spellcaster, and how good or bad a job it did of it notwithstanding, one of the things it brought was a host of prestige classes. A prestige class is something like a Paragon path, but more retrictive and harder to implement. You need to fulfill requirements to get into it, and then each one gives you powers or benefits at irregular intervals.

I thought it’d be fun to look at them.

And then I found there were 30 of them.

Be pretty silly to look at all 30 of them, right? Pretty silly to take all these dusty archaic game pieces and one-by-one them to a general audience and discuss their design limitations or the idea of class fantasy, right?

Have to be a bit of a goober for that?

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/3-5e-the-prestige-classes-of-the-complete-warrior/

#DnD3e

3e: Backwards, on Rocket Skates

A few months ago I saw this artwork, on Tumblr, described as:

Deemed “impractical to the point of idiocy”, the “Wand Cannon” was later used to devastating effect against the very wizards that had dismissed it.

Sketchbot9000

Art by Sketchbot9000

I, at the time, said something to the effect of ‘oh yeah, this is a thing you could do in 3rd edition.’

Let’s talk about it.

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https://press.invincible.ink/3e-backwards-on-rocket-skates/

#DnD3e

One of my best friends is re-starting her 3e PBEM after a 13.5 year hiatus. Rereading old emails from the games beginning 16.5 years ago revealed this line describing my gnome bard maxing out his alchemy skill.*

“Wizards. Harumph. Wizards are people who dabble in things they don't understand. I, my dear, am an Alchemist. I know exactly why I'm on fire.”

*yes, alchemy. This is 3.0, so it’s a distinct skill.

#DnD #pbem #Dnd3e

3e: Alignment Is Invisible

The entire alignment system is sick from the top to the bottom and racist too.

Content Warning: I’m going to talk smack about not just Dungeons & Dragons’ morality system in 3rd edition, but also, in the process, talk some smack about Christians, and more specifically the Jehovah’s Witnesses. If you’re not here for that, you should find yourself a door.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/3e-alignment-is-invisible/

#DnD3e

This glorious horde of (mostly complete) chaos doggos was going to come howling out of #Mystara Broken Lands. One box of #frostgrave gnolls, one #dnd3e Chainmail demonic gnoll adept, and two huge wolf dudes in … late 90s BDSM leather??? Well, I guess that’s… nah. I got nothing. They’ll get more hit dice. The little guys started out with hyena and dingo colourations but I got bored and just started doing dog and wolf colours.

Had a read of this beauty today. Some great #DnD3e content in this one. News spells, various spellbooks, prestige classes, and much more! The production value is excellent. Great inspiration for any edition of #DnD you play. #DungeonsAndDragons #TTRPG

3e: Magical Rings

Rings. Simple circles of metal, worn on the fingers or toes or sometimes in the ears, these delicate pieces of human artistry are some of the earliest examples of creative expression we know can last beyond our lives, and therefore, serve as some of the most iconic examples of the way we use our signifiers to craft narratives of our lives. The promise ring, the engagement ring, the wedding ring, which are of course, all the same thing but companies want us to gild that lily forever, rings serve as a circle present in so many stories to symbolise a bonding, a binding, an eternity that we commit to in our lives and that we can only hold up as long as we continue to believe in that which the ring symbolises. Every ring can be called a ring of power, because it is the belief in stories we imbue in the ring that serves to give it that power.

And as any good item with significance, Dungeons & Dragons decided to start jamming a mechanical system onto them.

[…]

https://press.invincible.ink/3e-magical-rings/

#DnD3e

I took some time today to sort out my #DnD3e #SoloRPG campaign. I'm starting it up again after a break. The characters are mostly 4th level after about 2 years of adventuring. More dungeon crawling coming their way! #DungeonsAndDragons #TTRPG #DnD

New Blog Post! This one is how to use Prestige Classes from #DnD3e for #WorldBuilding - even if you don't play that edition of #DnD! 

Complete with example from my own campaign world. 

https://yumdm.com/dnd-prestige-classes-worldbuilding-tool/

#DungeonsAndDragons #TTRPG

3e: The Halflings of Races of the Wild

There has always been a relentless need for the business of Dungeons & Dragons to publish, to publish, to keep publishing. It is a hungry beast, an endless maw that wants new things, new ideas, new constant iteration and it turns these words into products that you can buy, from season to season, edition to edition. This is a nihilistic and eerie way to be as a game but also, counterpoint to that, it is a wealthy buffet of new books to get to look at and enjoy. Basically, wow, this is a bad way to do things but also the results are kinda fun.

Relentless growth, capitalism bad, you know all this, but this isn’t about the ridiculous way that Dungeons & Dragons gets made. Well, not really, it kind of is but it’s actually about the way that 3rd edition’s love of structured sets of book hash-tag-content filling led to the strange attempt to rebrand Halflings midway through the life of 3.5th edition as one of the Races of the Wild.

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https://press.invincible.ink/3e-the-halflings-of-races-of-the-wild/

#DnD3e

3e: The Nemuranai System

Alright, in Oriental Adventures’ expanded 3e books –

Wait wait wait don’t go, hang on.

Content Warning: This is going to discuss some books that are, very simply, quite Orientalist, in the classical Edward Said sense. Not nakedly racist in a slursy way, just racist in how it simplifies cultures in the names of telling a particular form of story. If you don’t wanna mess around with that, y’know, probably want to avoid it.

https://press.invincible.ink/the-nemuranai-system/

#DnD3e

3e: Kythons

Where the creeping edges of reality ripple and shimmer, where foul and dark powers reach into the world to try and plant their foul fingertips there, there lay hallmarks and signs. There is a chance your world has tasted them, the chance that they have been left there, at some point by some errant and cruel source, and therefore, the only opportunity you have now is to wage war on their very existence, or to abandon your world, knowing it is a matter of time before the ultimate predatory violence bursts forth from some forgotten earthen womb, and renders all that you considered a civilisation into the same, cyclical, eternal pereptuum of feasting.

Content Warning: This article is going to be about a creepy monster from 3rd edition, D&D, and involve discussing some of the details of its source book, the Book of Vile Darkness. The art gets gory and bloody after here.

[…]

#DnD3e

https://press.invincible.ink/3e-kythons/