2nd Edition Vs. 3rd Edition

[RandomCasualty]

Mod Edit: Split off from the Gygax thread in order to keep it on topic. - fbmf

I don't think that Gygax's ideas are exactly all bad. There are a lot of good things about the previous editions.

-Polymorph wasn't insanely powerful
-monster stat blocks were a lot less complex, and so you could much easier create monsters and NPCs on the fly
-Less equipment dependency.
-Fighters weren't total ass compared to buffing clerics and wildshaped druids.

There are times I wish I was playing an older edition to fix some of these problems. 3rd edition is by far superior, but still I cannot help admire some of the features of older editions.

I mean I liked in the old edition how hit dice was the only thing that factored into creature attack bonuses. You didn't have to look at hit dice, then figure out the BaB progression based on creature type, then add the strength modifier to BaB, then factor in any bonuses from feats or equipment and then can finally write down a number. And this assumes you're just creating a monster, if you're creating an NPC, you've got to worry about classes, PrCs and builds and all that crap.

3rd edition is far from perfect, and some of the old ideas are still good. Of course, some of them, like demihuman level limits, are total ass.

I don't think that it's necessarily bad to believe some of those old ideas are still good.

Not every change that was made to 3.0 was a good one. In fact, in some cases the game has turned back to Gygaxian mechanics. FOr instance 3.0 haste was turned into a version of haste that looks a lot more like 2E haste.

[grey_muse]

I've had the same experience, RC; my players and I were talking at one point about how we missed the "good old days" of 2nd edition, when everyone wasn't so concerned about number crunching to build the best characters.

Of course, having gone back and looked at those books, it gave me the heebie jeebies. The game just doesn't work as well.

For the rest, I don't care so much. Gygax was a dick, Gygax is a dick. I remember his claim that he owned the terms "fighter", "magic user", "thief", and "cleric", which even in my youth struck me as pretty silly. But since I don't have to deal with Gygax personally, it doesn't matter one whit to me what he claims.

[rapanui]

Grey Muse:
"my players and I were talking at one point about how we missed the "good old days" of 2nd edition, when everyone wasn't so concerned about number crunching to build the best characters."

What game were you playing? The debates about how human dual classing was absolute shit compared to deihuman multiclassing still make me cringe ( I was on the dual class = ass side of thing BTW).

And a few months back, Frank showed me that a bard could make a more badass Evoker than an actual Evoker back in 2e.

[Username17]

Dual Class is ass?! Not hardly! The stat prereqs for Dual Classing were really high, but if you could do it, it was the best.

The reason Dual Classing is the best is because:

1> You got to get all your hit points out of good classes instead of hving to take half a piece of crap.

2> You could stop investing XP into a class after it stopped being efficient.

3> You were technically a single classed character when you were taking the warrior levels, so you qualified for weapon specializaton and/or kits.

I don't remember it really well, but the breakpoints for Fighter were like 4th and 7th or so. You'd start as a Fighter, go up to the breakpoint level and then be a spellcaster with weapon specialization and a grip of hit points.

Multiclassed characters were better at first level, because you got both 1st level ability sets for free. But at any arbitrary mount of XP, you could build an infinitely better dual classed character.

Which is the point. It's not that the game didn't encourage you to do math for power - it did. It was just that the math you had to do was so complicated and annoying that most peope couldn't do it. Saying that 2e (let alone AD&D, the one Gygax actually took full credit for) was devoid of the corruptions of 3e is laughable. It's like claiming that you can make embezzlement go away by not publishing the books.

Lack of transparency doesn't make things "not abusable" - it just makes it harder for other people to figure out that that is what you are doing.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

Well, there was a great deal less min/maxing in 2E, because of the lack of choices. If you were a fighter you were pretty much going to take weapon spec, and that was the extent of what you did. Then you just gained levels.

You didn't have PrCs or feats, and that right there takes away most of the min/maxing of fighters.

Spellcasters could sort of min/max though 2E didn't have a heck of a lot of great combos. Buff spells for instance seldom stacked with anything else. Shield for instance gave you a fixed AC, and wasn't further modified by worn armor or rings of protection or what not.

And of course magic items weren't bought or chosen by the PCs, they were assigned by the DM into treasure hoards that you had to find. And even if you could choose magic items, pretty much no bonuses actually stacked in 2E, so it lacked the "catch em all" mentality of 3E bonus types.

But while 2nd edition was muhc more difficult to min/max, that didn't really mean it was very well balanced. If you were lucky enough to roll an 18 percentile strength score, you'd totally dominate a fighter with 16 or 15. The role of the ability score in 2E was pretty much all powerful for a fighter type and it made for lots of imbalancing situations. But mainly 2E's lack of abuse came from the fact that abuse generally was something the DM had to allow you to do. If you didn't get a certain magic item or combo, you couldn't abuse it.

Overall 2nd edition was a kinda crappy game for PCs, but it was great to DM simply because it was alot easier to create encounters. It was a game where you could just roll up a bunch of 7th level fighters real easy, without worrying about feats or tons of magical gear. You could design effective obstacles in 2E without a heck of a lot of effort.

[The_Hanged_Man]

1110482044[/unixtime]]Dual Class is ass?! Not hardly!

Bah! Bah, I say!

RC, 2E and AD&D was much harder to balance as a DM than 3E. There were literally no guidelines for it, or at least guidelines that didn't just make you laugh out loud. Stuff like 200 orcs or 1 ancient red dragon were "9th level encounters,"* which meant you could put either in the "9th level of your dungeon" which was all that mattered. You just had to get a feel for it, developed over months of watching either PC's plowing through encounters, or PC's lining up for raise deads.

At least 3E had some reasonable guidelines that generally work. There's problems, no doubt, but CR and EL are very handy rules of thumb to start with, and let an inexperienced DM at least be in the right ballpark for an encounter.


*I don't remember if those were actually the same, but it was ricockulous stuff like that.

[RandomCasualty]

Well what I mean by creating encounters is actually creating up monsters and such.

Say for instance you wanted 6 10th level fighters. IN 2E this is relatively simple. Give them +1 swords and armor, weapon spec and you're done.

In 3E, you've got to assign them feats, possibly PrCs and magic items if you want them remotely competetive.

The time it takes to prepare in 3E is enormous compared to the preparation time in 2E. You could pretty much create encounters on the fly easily in 2E, in 3E, it's a very difficult process because you've got so many little things to assign. As a DM you really don't want to create monsters and NPCs the same way PCs create characters because ti's far too time consuming. You want rules-lite creation methods that generate you useful numbers to use in combat and a reasonable threat.

3E has a real tough time with that, because it forces the DM to min/max like a PC, and that takes a lot of time because you're talking several encounters, not just one character.

As a DM you don't particularly want metastats like ability scores for monsters. You want either independent stats or stats with one dependency (like 2E hit dice gets saves and THACO). In some cases I think it can actually be a good idea to have separate systems for PCs and monsters at least as far as deriving attack bonuses and what not.

[Maj]

It was just that the math you had to do was so complicated and annoying that most peope couldn't do it.

I played a 2E game several months ago with a guy who said he'd rather not switch to 3E because it was too easy to do the math and min/max. Apparently, he's rather upset about more stupid people being allowed to play the game now.

[Julia_of_Hillsdown]

I'm reading the 2E-books, and I'm glad I started playing in 3E. And I resent that guy's implication I'm stupid

[grey_muse]

My point wasn't that 2e or AD&D were balanced. They were probably far, far worse in terms of balance with the RAW. But they were also much less rulebound, or at least that was the feeling.

In 2e, for example, you might have a 5th level fighter, a 4th level wizard, and a 6th level rogue in the same party. You *didn't* have a Ftr 2/Barb 2/Hexblade 3 who had level dipped for optimal abilities, or anything equivalent.

It seemed like there was much more emphasis on flavor then; that's not to say you can't have that at all in 3.x, but the abusable nature of the rules makes it ineffective.

Also, the inherently "unbalanced" nature of the rules and the lack of an 'official' balancing system (like CR/LA or the gold cost for magic items, neither of which work) meant that it was entirely up to the DM to make things balanced. Which meant that it *could* suck, if you had a bad DM, but that's always a possibility. And if you had a good DM, it wasn't a problem.

Ultimately, though, it's the encyclopaedia array of rules in 3.x that everyone was a bit sick of.

[Neeek]

1110504438[/unixtime]]
Ultimately, though, it's the encyclopaedia array of rules in 3.x that everyone was a bit sick of.

Really? They'd have hated 2e then, since there were just as many rules, but they didn't all work together.

In 2e, it was very easy for a fighter with a high Str to just plain make the rest of the party pointless for the early levels, and everything but clerics and wizards were pointless at higher levels. At least the first part is no longer true.

[Username17]

You *didn't* have a Ftr 2/Barb 2/Hexblade 3 who had level dipped for optimal abilities, or anything equivalen

I personally think that people who level dipped into Fighter with a cavalier kit who then level dipped into Cleric with a Warpriest kit, who then went up the rest of their levels as Bards with a Swashbuckler kit to be astoundingly equivalent.

The Dual-Classing rules from 2e were way more complicated and open to "min/maxing" than the 3e multiclassing rules. At least now a character who maxes out the pre-epid XP chart only has 20 total levels to wory about. A well-built dual classed character might easily be looking at 60.

It seemed like there was much more emphasis on flavor then; that's not to say you can't have that at all in 3.x, but the abusable nature of the rules makes it ineffective.

No. That's pure fvcking nostalgia and has nothing to do with the truth. That statement wouldn't even know what AD&D looked like.

In AD&D there were good characters and there were bad characters. Ideally, you were supposed to play shitty characters sometimes and good characters sometimes. The concept was that the "powerful" characters were going to live and the "weak" characters were going to die. The way the XP system worked, characters who started over from 1st level caught up fast, so people were just supposed to make a crap tonne of characters and allow the cream to rise to the top.

It's not that AD&D was "not abusable". It's not even that you weren' supposed to abuse it. You were supposed to abuse the rules. The idea was that you weren't supposed to read the rules. You weren't supposed to talk about them on message boards, or even plan out your character along the way. You weren't supposed to really know what your character could do with his nxt level until you got it.

It's not that simulacrum wasn't an infinite loop - it was. The idea was that you were supposed to have to figure that out in game! And then, once you did, you won D&D until the DM killed your character with an arbitrarium bullet.

And what was the Gygax solution to that? The idea was that once a character had ruled the cosmos for a while with his Simulacrum army, he would retire the character or get killed by a wandering Tarrasque horde for no reason. And if anyother character tried to pull the same trick, the DM would just have the Tarrasque horde come rampaging in and nip it in the bud.



AD&D was way more abusable than 3e ever was. In 3e we actually have names for every infinite power loop. 3.5 has noticably more, but we have names for all of them too. AD&D didn't even bother to name them!

Ultimately, though, it's the encyclopaedia array of rules in 3.x that everyone was a bit sick of.

Because we really want to go back to the good old days of AD&D, when men were men, and women had a strength maximum that was .25 points lower than that. And every stat had its own special matrix to tell you what bonuses it gave to different things. And there was an entirely different game mechanic to deal wth everything - and some things got rolled against a d20, while other things were rolled agaisnt percentiles or even just added to 2d6.

If you think that 3e has more complicated and encyclopedic rules than AD&D, it's because you've forgotten all the stupid rules that AD&D had. AD&D had a pugilism chart that told you how much damage you did when punching people and it wasn't size dependent. Kobolds could totally own your ass if they just dropped the short swords and started in with the haymakers.

-Username17

[User3]

AD&D was hugely complex, if you played with all the actual rules. Most people dropped at least some of them -- weapon speed factors and weapon adjustments versus armor class were especially popular, in the sense of being ignored. And the unification of mechanics for virtually everything in 3.x has been one of the major steps forward.

Having said that, it's hard to argue that 3.x hasn't increased the degree of complexity exposed to the player. In 1st edition the player almost didn't need to know the rules at all -- the game mechanic things you got to actually pick for your character amounted to your starting equipment, what weapons you were proficient with, and what order your ability scores were in -- and that was it, unless you were a wizard or illusionist (which were separate classes back then) in which case you might get to pick one or two of your starting spells.

Later on, and then in 2nd edition from the start, they added things like nonweapon proficiencies, and of course 2E also had the cheerfully abusable "kits" and some other nonsense.

3E has much increased the available options not only at character creation but also in actual play -- things like attacks of opportunity; well-defined, semi-workable and therefore actually used rules for things like tripping, disarming, etc.; and so on and so forth. That's good in some ways, but the increase in options has carried with it a corresponding increase in the complexity that the player can actually see.

--d.

[Username17]

the game mechanic things you got to actually pick for your character amounted to your starting equipment, what weapons you were proficient with, and what order your ability scores were in

In AD&D you were not allowed to pick your weapon proficiencies (you were automatically proficient in everything on your class list). Also you did not choose the order your ability scores went in - that was an optional rule that was supposed to make characters more powerful and less "realistic".

Also remember that weapon lists were just that: lists. It was anyone's guess as to whether people would be proficient in a Khopesh if they found one. Most special weapons (such as the fvcking laser pistols from the X series modules) had special rules as to what classes could and could not use them - these lists also invariably were not comprehensive, so now you get to argue whether a Thief Acrobat or Cavalier counts as having proficiency with a weapon that Fighters are retroactively proficient in and Rangers are not...

-Username17

[User3]

1110514272[/unixtime]]
In AD&D you were not allowed to pick your weapon proficiencies (you were automatically proficient in everything on your class list).

This is not correct -- not in first edition, at least; I vaguely recall "Complete Warrior" for 2nd edition having rules for weapon groups and stuff. The whole weapon proficiency thing in 1e is deeply confusing, because first they have the table with the weapons on your class list, and then, some 15 pages later, in the equipment section, rather than the character generation section they have the rules on "weapon proficiencies" and how many you got.

Also you did not choose the order your ability scores went in - that was an optional rule that was supposed to make characters more powerful and less "realistic".

In White Box this is in fact the way it worked; when AD&D came out, of course, the PHB was published before the DMG, and so most people went on generating characters the same way. Then the DMG came out and Gygax specifically deprecated the 3d6 method and suggested the "classic 4". Not that most people paid any attention -- I still generated characters with 3d6 until well into high school, when I actually read the book.

Also remember that weapon lists were just that: lists. It was anyone's guess as to whether people would be proficient in a Khopesh if they found one.

Oh, god, I'm having flashbacks, and not pleasant ones, either. Weapon proficiencies were one of the greatest (by which I mean most aggravating) sadist DM tools ever invented -- I had one DM when I was younger who took great glee in distributing amazingly good magic weapons that happened to be things no one in the party had proficiency in.

--d.

[grey_muse]

1110513592[/unixtime]]
Having said that, it's hard to argue that 3.x hasn't increased the degree of complexity exposed to the player. In 1st edition the player almost didn't need to know the rules at all -- the game mechanic things you got to actually pick for your character amounted to your starting equipment, what weapons you were proficient with, and what order your ability scores were in -- and that was it, unless you were a wizard or illusionist (which were separate classes back then) in which case you might get to pick one or two of your starting spells.

--d.

I think that's really it. It wasn't that the rules were less complicated if you followed them all, it was that I never met anyone who followed them all. (Really, did anyone?)

So when you were trekking through arctic tundra, there were almost certainly rules for what the negative effects were, but it was much more likely that the DM would just make them up on the fly. That wouldn't fly in 3.x, because it's pretty clearly labelled in its section in the DMG exactly what those effects are.

So I guess my thesis, ultimately, is: "The simpler rules of 3.x allow for better rules comprehension, thus greater tendency toward rules lawyering, among players -- and so remove flexibility from the dungeon master's control."

I've heard plenty of stories of 1st and 2nd edition DM's who were basically dicks in the Gygaxian mould, and did their best to screw their players over. But I hear about that anyway in 3rd edition.

The rules were less abusable in earlier editions because they were more malleable. If a player tried to pull out some bizarre rule, the DM was likely to say, "That doesn't work in my game," and ignore whatever the rule was. Even though 'Rule Zero' is spelled out in the PHB, it just doesn't seem to happen in 3.x, probably precisely because the rule set is so much less baroque than the earlier editions.

And incidentally, I do occasionally have pleasant memories of rolling percentile for my strength score.

[Username17]

I think that's really it. It wasn't that the rules were less complicated if you followed them all, it was that I never met anyone who followed them all. (Really, did anyone?)

I'm too young to remember, but in the seventies and early eighties there were apparently people who at least attempted to play by all of the rules as written. And Gygax said that if you weren't one of those people you were a shamefully bad person.

This period I mostly get second hand from my father and his gaming buddies. I do remember playing over at Dave Hargrave's house - but I was in fact a little kid playing in the dirt and it was Ted who was actually running his Elf. Hargrave was a total dick as well. Between him and Gygax we really get most of the "Don't do this as DM" rules that we cling to today.

You know, stuff like "Don't let people roll up the character they want to play and then immediately kill their character and tear up the sheet instead of talking it out with the player." and "Don't use your position as Dungeon Master to attempt to extort sexual favors out of your players." and so on and so forth. Those asshats really led by counter-example to a phenominal degree.

-Username17

[rapanui]

Grey Muse said:
"The simpler rules of 3.x allow for better rules comprehension, thus greater tendency toward rules lawyering, among players -- and so remove flexibility from the dungeon master's control."

Yes, which is precisely why 99.9999% of the gaming populace prefer 3e. And why so many of us decided to hate 3.5.

And no, I never played a single session of 2e where all the rules were followed. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say that not even 50% of the rules were followed.

And I may have prematurely dismissed dual classing. Imoen in BG2 was a very good character.

[Murtak]

So I guess my thesis, ultimately, is: "The simpler rules of 3.x allow for better rules comprehension, thus greater tendency toward rules lawyering, among players -- and so remove flexibility from the dungeon master's control."

So in other words 2nd edition is better if your players are dumb assholes? Why would you even want to play with people who like to abuse rules but at the same time are too dumb to figure out at least some of the broken parts of 2nd edition?

The rules were less abusable in earlier editions because they were more malleable. If a player tried to pull out some bizarre rule, the DM was likely to say, "That doesn't work in my game," and ignore whatever the rule was.

Ok, so 2nd edition is better if your DM feels the need to point out 20 other crappy rules to ban rules abuse in his games.

Put the two together and we can see that you are claiming that "2nd edition is better for insecure DMs playing with dumb, rule-abusing players".

[RandomCasualty]

1110508863[/unixtime]]
AD&D was way more abusable than 3e ever was. In 3e we actually have names for every infinite power loop. 3.5 has noticably more, but we have names for all of them too. AD&D didn't even bother to name them!

I'd have to strongly disagree here.

3.5 or 3.0 is much more abuseable. You could mass simulacrums in 3.0 just like you could in 2E. And pretty much the majority of cheese from 2E got worse or stayed the same in 3.0. And 3.0 brought with it a huge amount of new cheese. Polymorph abuses being number 1 on that list. Infinite gold was game breaking in 3E, and dealable in 2E. And lets not forget all those infinite power loops. You'd never see something like the hulking hurler back in the 2E days.

Sure, siome kits were powerful but at the very least you only got a single kit, unless you were lucky enough to have uber dual classing stats, but few people actually had those.

2E had its flaws but if you're going by just pure power combos, 3E beats it for abusive combos anyday.

[User3]

1110521070[/unixtime]]
It wasn't that the rules were less complicated if you followed them all, it was that I never met anyone who followed them all. (Really, did anyone?)

I once played a 1st edition game in which the DM followed, or claimed to follow, every single rule with the exception of weapon type adjustments versus armor class. (And also not counting those instances in which the actual rules contradicted each other, e.g., there are two contradictory rules for how magic armor affects your movement rate.) He actually knew them, too. It was somewhat frightening.

It was also probably the most enjoyable campaign I've ever played in. I attribute this much more to the DM and the players involved than to the rules we were using, though.

--d.

[The_Hanged_Man]

1110555765[/unixtime]]

1110508863[/unixtime]]
AD&D was way more abusable than 3e ever was. In 3e we actually have names for every infinite power loop. 3.5 has noticably more, but we have names for all of them too. AD&D didn't even bother to name them!

I'd have to strongly disagree here.

3.5 or 3.0 is much more abuseable. You could mass simulacrums in 3.0 just like you could in 2E. And pretty much the majority of cheese from 2E got worse or stayed the same in 3.0. And 3.0 brought with it a huge amount of new cheese. Polymorph abuses being number 1 on that list. Infinite gold was game breaking in 3E, and dealable in 2E. And lets not forget all those infinite power loops. You'd never see something like the hulking hurler back in the 2E days.

Sure, siome kits were powerful but at the very least you only got a single kit, unless you were lucky enough to have uber dual classing stats, but few people actually had those.

2E had its flaws but if you're going by just pure power combos, 3E beats it for abusive combos anyday.

Did you even play AD&D? It was ridiculously easy to break the game.

Fireballs didn't have a cap, and levels went on theoretically forever. You could do an (infinite)*d6 burst, w/ a radius of . . . the galaxy, and make yourself immune to fire. And happily clear out entire dungeons.

Or Wish? If you were a better lawyer that your DM, Wish destroyed teh game. Either the DM gave you your wish, and you had Ultimate Power. Or the DM messed w/ your wish unfairly, and the game was destroyed b/c the DM was an asshat.

Or Psionics? You could just keep rolling characters until you got Body Weaponry with those free +5 swords, when nobody else could even get a potion of Cure Light Wounds w/o begging a Magic User for someting.

And that's not even tjeeze. That's just playing the game using simple mechanics.

[RandomCasualty]

1110563967[/unixtime]]
Fireballs didn't have a cap, and levels went on theoretically forever. You could do an (infinite)*d6 burst, w/ a radius of . . . the galaxy, and make yourself immune to fire. And happily clear out entire dungeons.

Huh? Yeah if you were level 1000... and if you're that high, you *should* be able to clear out dungeons with a fireball. Really so what if 20th level wizards threw 20d6 fireballs.

But really levels in 1E practically never got above 15. Fireball wasn't really terribly dangerous because people ended up always making thier saves and there was no way to artifically pumping your caster level.

Or Wish? If you were a better lawyer that your DM, Wish destroyed teh game. Either the DM gave you your wish, and you had Ultimate Power. Or the DM messed w/ your wish unfairly, and the game was destroyed b/c the DM was an asshat.

getting greedy and having your wish twisted is a staple of stories involving wishes. When you make outrageous wishes, they're supposed to get twisted. That's how pretty much all wish stories end up.

Or Psionics? You could just keep rolling characters until you got Body Weaponry with those free +5 swords, when nobody else could even get a potion of Cure Light Wounds w/o begging a Magic User for someting.

If I recall correctly you had to get really lucky in 1E to get psionics as a PC, like a 3% chance or something. Then you had to be lucky enough to roll body weaponry as your random wild talent. So this abuse happened what? like 0.05% of the time?

And even if someone did have a +5 sword, so what? That's chump change compared to the wish and the word, the hulking hurler, the hive build or even just a pure blaster artificer build. Hell, any 10th level cleric can get a +10 damage weapon wtih spikes, and that doesn't require any long shot roll with all odds against you.

And that's not even tjeeze. That's just playing the game using simple mechanics.

Yeah, I'm not saying it was perfect, I'm just saying I could list way more abuseable 3E cheese than what you just listed. When you compare the 2E and 1E pile of cheese it will be dwarfed by the gargantuan pile of 3E cheese.

[User3]

I find myself splitting the difference here. Fireball in 1e was a good spell, as opposed to the unmitigated suck it is in 3.x, but it was hardly the be all and end all of combat. It was good. You'd look forward to it, you'd use when you got it, and you'd keep using it until you started fighting stuff that was immune to fire. But if you failed to learn Fireball -- and remember, if you failed to learn it, you could never learn it ever unless you could raise your Int score, which was just shy of impossible -- that didn't mean that your useful career as a wizard was over. There was plenty of other stuff that was also good.

Psionics were deeply wacky, but were also a (clearly labeled!) optional rule. A lot of the really stupid stuff in 1e came from optional rules and then the expansion rules in Unearthed Arcana, etc. Of course, there was also plenty that was integral to the core game.

Gygax and company inveighed pretty heavily about getting to very high levels -- I remember reading an essay suggesting that you were supposed to get to 9th level in about a year, and then start gaining at most a level or two a year, and that therefore nobody should reach 20th level in less than five years -- and then footnoted that neither Blackmoor (then six years old) and Greyhawk (then five) had PCs of above 15th level. Of course, once you got to about 10th level you were supposed to be starting your own country, rather than wandering around bashing monsters, so a certain slowdown was to be expected.

--d.

[User3]

Oh, about psionics, I guess.

The chance you had in 1e of having psionics was based on your stats (if you had high Int, Wis, and Cha you were more likely to get them). It varied from as low as 0% (if none of those stats were above ... 12?) to as high as around 10 1/2% (if you had 18s in all three stats). You then got a random roll for how many psionic points you had, affected again by your stats, and then a random roll for how many attack and defense modes, and another random roll for how many talents you had, and then random rolls for which they were. Some of the talents were unspeakably awesome (you could cure wounds, as many hit points as you had psionic points to spend, or instantly channel away energy damage, or travel the planes or turn into a red dragon). Some of them were incredibly suck (you could set stuff on fire by looking at it, or go without food and water for a while).

The funny thing was, if you rolled really badly on your psionic points roll, you could actually end up sorry you had them at all, since psionics fighting psionics sucked much, much more than psionics fighting non-psionics. On the other hand, if you rolled the right talent and had access to enough spheres of annihilation you could eventually gain every psionic power there was . It was a massive crapshoot all the way around, but a lot of the game was like that.

--d.