3.X attempted a lot of serious clean-up, succeeding at most of it, so those advancements can't be discounted. Even ideas that didn't exactly work like CR and types for spells and monsters were a step in the right direction.OgreBattle wrote:So what exactly would be an improvement on 2e that's not "play 3.X"K wrote:The first problem is that high-level play was something that required a lot of imagination and cleverness to make fun because the rules did a hamfisted job of properly defining the problem of players interacting with the high-level environment* and the second problem is that the Old School movement is a bunch of hacks with no imagination or design skills who are aping the games of their betters.WiserOdin032402 wrote:And yet I haven't seen many products from the OSR movement that actually want to re-create the high level experience. In fact, I haven't seen any products that really have a 'high level' in mind. It's all level 6 forever, as far as the eye can see.
I mean, I've read and even bought a few 2e clones, but aside from some more interesting art, none are an improvement to 2e.
*Bad high-level play was shit like dungeons where none of your dungeon-bypassing spells like teleport or passwall worked. Essentially, negating high-level abilities instead of accounting for them.
The ideas that were lost in the bath water include "magic items being non-fungible, so we don't have to Greyhawk everything and we actually keep items for more than a few levels", "Fighters being the wielders of some of the most powerful items", "monsters having write-ups that told you how to write them into adventures", and "why make a skill check for Woodworking when you can just make stuff with wood". Even slightly fiddly ideas like kits made low-level play a lot more fun in 2e.
The flavor of 2e also ran to the extremes of flavor like printing lists of ingredients for a lich potion, rolling up random prostitute attributes, or exhaustive lists of random jewelry. Honestly, even very creative people love when some of the effort of making flavorful shit has been offloaded onto the printed material because it can be used as inspiration.
So there was a fork in the road of 2e to 3e, and games like Dungeon Crawl Classics do a subpar job of figuring out what that would have looked like if some core 2e ideas had been kept, but they fail by mostly focusing on the cruel and arbitrary nature of 2e. (That being said, my Collector's Edition of the base Dungeon Crawl Classics was bought because its a leatherbound art object that pleases me to see on my shelf).