D&D 3.5, Beginner's Review!

[Suikun]

NOTE: by "Beginner's Review", I mean to say that this is from a D&D beginner's prospective, not that this is a beginner's review in the sense that I'm new to the... style?

Well, for those of you who were "following" me for some strange reason, what with my promises of doing the reviews for various classes of WoW, as I did with the priest, I'm sorry to say: that shit ain't gonna happen. I've quit WoW out of sheer boredom (guild broke up, and there was really nothing left for me to do... except the usual grind of dalies, and those just aren't as fun if you don't have something to reward you for your excruciating efforts), and needless to say, I'm not about to run back, especially not to run a whole line of fan-wank about what classes are what. Sorry, but I'm an impatient jackass who doesn't have the initiative to finish what he started. Besides, reading articles on WoWwiki will be much more entertaining and less.... ambiguous? Biased? Shitty? than mine would ever be.

So, finding myself with uncomfortable amounts of free time, even with the new and exciting world of college surrounding me, I've turned to more traditional methods of entertainment; namely Dungeons and Dragons.

Now I know there is much controversy over what's the "best version of D&D", and being a complete noob to the world of online RPG, having only a base knowledge of things from my stint with WoW and other RPGs, along with knowing the names of dice (haha, silly d20...)I can't say that I can address this debate very well, if at all. So here goes nothing, a review on what I'm assuming is D&D 3.5, but keep in mind, I am a complete noob and might be completely wrong.

So my story starts with being a recovering MMO addict and... oh hell, forget a boring back-story, it's D&D and that game alone has enough back-stories to write another Tolkien-esque novel (No I wouldn't be surprised if there already is a D&D lore book outside the game manuals). Long story short: I expressed interest in learning to a friend of mine, found out he's been playing a long time and offered to teach/DM for us. I'm still curious as to which is correct, "DM" or "GM", but I guess that's just stupid semantics that nobody really cares about.

After a long bout of character creation confusion which consisted of copious amounts of clarification (woo, alliteration), my friend and I rolled a lawful-good Dwarven Fighter, and a chaotic-neutral Half-Elf Druid respectively. Coupled with a chaotic-neutral Half-Orc Barbarian with an obsession with trying to eat things, and a... true neutral bard who the DM played as an easy way to explain game mechanics as we went along, zaniness ensued, and I can easily say that in all my days of shameless forum roleplay and MMO-whore-ness, I've never had so much fun.

I recommend to anyone and everyone with an imagination to immediately find the nearest D&D player/group and join as fast as you can, because it is literally limitless what you can do in this game. To give a few examples, I stole pants from a couple having sex in a small town, simply for the idea of having "antler warmers", and my friend ended up killing me by trying to comically hit me with a fish he caught from a river. You don't get this kind of insanity anywhere but in the world of D&D. I've heard that 4.0 simplifies things so you have a severe lack of skills, while 3.5 gives you an overabundance of such skills (which is very true, I started, fresh out of the gates, with 24), but either way, it doesn't take away from the insane fun that you can make within the realms of the game just... because. So long as you have a fun-loving GM/DM, who is willing to bend the rules from time to time, plenty of imagination, and enough patience to get through the sometimes a bit tedious battle portions, then it's well worth whatever spare time you have.

Yes, it might be a whole bit about "not wanting to be a dice-rolling nerd, sitting around and pretending to be something", or the fear that your manly image will be damaged by the mere fact that you would dare do something other than lift weights, read Playboy and it's counterparts, or be beating the shit out of-... er... "asserting your dominance" over various others, but truth be told, some of the most masculine people I know of play D&D and love it because it allows you to assert your manliness in other areas of the cosmos... or whatever multi-verse, or... oh shut up. You get my point. D&D is for everyone who has the patience for it, and it's really not that bad. A battle will usually take maybe 10 minutes with a five-person party and three enemies, which tends to run pretty standard, but hey, it's still fairly fun and you'll be so distracted with the suspense of the die rolls to really care how much time it's taking, even though to an outsider it's painstakingly slow.

But... I feel as though if I talk much more I'm going to dissolve into inside jokes, fanboy-wank-dom and other bullshit that I'd really like to stay away from. Apologies that this review isn't more WoW stuff, but, I can't really stick with that one any longer. It was a good run of soul-sucking awkwardness, but it's time for me to pick up a real game. One like D&D.

~Sui

 

[Manifoldgodhead]

Just so you know, there are hundreds of books for game ideas. But sounds like you already got a good DM. Welcome to the best MMO ever created

 

[MrSnugglesworth]

If you need tips for DMing or just want a good laugh about D&D, just check out DM of the Rings by Shamus Young. This could be advertising, but it really gave me alot of tips, and insight into alot of D&D/Playing the game in funny ways.

 

[Alex_P]

Random comments:

I'm still curious as to which is correct, "DM" or "GM", but I guess that's just stupid semantics that nobody really cares about.

"DM" is the D&D-specific term. "GM" is the de-facto general one.

I've heard that 4.0 simplifies things so you have a severe lack of skills, while 3.5 gives you an overabundance of such skills (which is very true, I started, fresh out of the gates, with 24), but either way, it doesn't take away from the insane fun that you can make within the realms of the game just... because.

D&D 4 collects the skills into a smaller set of broader skills. So, for example, instead of climbing, jumping, and swimming, you might just have "athletics". Beyond the obvious benefit of simplicity, the main advantage of such an approach is that there are fewer "gaps": your new athletics skill broader skills often end up covering stuff that a set of narrower skills missed (e.g. using that athletics skill to sprint). The main disadvantage of shrinking skill lists is that it can have a homogenizing effect(*).

If you look beyond the size of the skill list, D&D 4 lets you do pretty much all the same stuff with skills that 3/3.5 did; if I recall correctly, the main exception is Craft, which doesn't really have its own fancy subsystem anymore(**).

The biggest weakness in D&D 3/3.5's skill system is the way half the character classes were practically locked out of it. A fighter gets very few skill points available to her and has a really shitty list of "class skills" (the ones you can raise efficiently) to boot.

I recommend to anyone and everyone with an imagination to immediately find the nearest D&D player/group and join as fast as you can, because it is literally limitless what you can do in this game.

I think the real measure of an RPG is not what it'll let you do but what it'll help you do. You can narrate anything in a pure-freeform game, after all. It's the way that a fiction-game constrains and channels your creativity that really defines it.

-- Alex
__________
* - I like broad but player-defined skills. Writing "Stygian Snake Magic" on your sheet and defining what that really means through consensus in play is a lot cooler and more flexible than having Spellcraft and Concentration and sifting through a hundred pages of canned spells.
** - That subsystem absolutely sucked. Slow, swingy, unrealistic, unthematic. Avoid mundane item-crafting in D&D 3.

 

[Wildrow12]

D&D: It's not just a game. It's a calling.

Remember to try out different Game Systems. You never know when you'll find one that will fit you just right.

Also, keep an eye out for genres you may want to explore in your rpgs. I would have never gone into Supers/Pulp Games if not for games like "Silver Age Sentinels" or "Daring Tales".

 

[mintfresh]

I know what you mean about it being near limitless in what you can do (providing your DM has some imagination). I remember when I played, and we were confronted by a troll, which my character (a halfling rogue) convinced it that rather than attacking us, it wanted to play the fun new game we'd devised, which involved rolling down a hill and off a cliff. Sometime later, we were returning from the crypt we'd been questing in, and that troll's mate turned up, rather angry. I tried to convince it of the same thing as the last one, but had to roll and extremely difficult check to see if it worked...it did! I think our DM was annoyed we cheated our way out of both encounters, but he was always fair in giving us options, even ones he hadn't thought of.