Droopy McCool
2015-12-15, 04:26 PM
Howdy everyone. I just wanted to get this out there and see if anyone could relate.
9 months ago, my 4 friends and I decided to start playing 3.5, but only one person had any experience; he played in a group for a couple of sessions at school. He decided to DM, because he said he knew enough just by watching his DM. We rolled up some characters, and started playing.
The DM used the same campaign he played in, so he could use what he had seen, and we played with him doing this for three levels. I have to say: We all had so much fun, and played constantly for a while. I decided to try my hand at DMing at this point, because he was out of ideas. Never before has there been a finer railroad built (I didn't understand the concept of collaborative storytelling). But that was a learning experience, and I've gotten much better at it. That's beside the point though.
Our first time party was my Paladin (Droopy McCool) who smote evil as often as he wanted, a Druid who couldn't speak but spoke through his intelligent warhorse companion (Emphatic Link kinda), a fairly standard Ranger, and a Rogue that would do anything to get one more piece of gold, so much so we had to keep him in check. I know that last one is just good RP, but you catch my drift. Needless to say, hilarity ensued every time we did anything.
After playing up to level 6 or so, most of us had actually read through all the core material and dozens of splat books. This is where the problem started.
We switched it up, the original DM running the game, but now everyone picked character classes based on cool (if not cheesy) abilities. And it felt... Lousy. There was no party synergy, no "family feel" to what we were doing. We went through the motions, "Let's go on this mission, beat the bad guy, buy more items, do the next one." All the magic of D&D had been lost.
After learning a ton about the rules and implementing them, our party turned into a Swashbuckler/Factotum (sheesh), a Fighter/Ninja, another Rogue (same player, not the same feel), and my Duskblade. All of a sudden, we were just moving on to the next mission, didn't really have interpersonal social interactions, and were more concerned with crunch than fluff. Obviously, we could have fixed some of that, but our semi-optimized builds didn't allow for much out-of-the-box action/RP. We were mercenaries, not adventurers.
Many character switches and missions later, we were running through a dungeon (of my design; I was DM) when they stopped to fight a bunch of orcs and some ogres. Somebody cast Entangle, and combat crawled for the next 30 minutes or so. It wasn't over, but my one friend stood up and yelled, "This is ****ing stupid! What the **** are we even doing anymore?!" and left.
I refer to it as "the day D&D died" for us, because most of the group was sick of what it had become. Each DM had tried to create a camaraderie in the group, but failed to do so. after a month without playing, I convinced everyone to give it another shot, and now we're playing a looser campaign type like our first time, but still with crunchy characters. It's more fun than we had been having, but it just doesn't even touch that first group of characters and their adventures.
I really just needed to get that off my chest. But I also would like everyone to share their stories, maybe a similar situation. I've noticed that most of the playground is obsessed with optimizing characters for effectiveness, so I'm intrigued.
McCool
9 months ago, my 4 friends and I decided to start playing 3.5, but only one person had any experience; he played in a group for a couple of sessions at school. He decided to DM, because he said he knew enough just by watching his DM. We rolled up some characters, and started playing.
The DM used the same campaign he played in, so he could use what he had seen, and we played with him doing this for three levels. I have to say: We all had so much fun, and played constantly for a while. I decided to try my hand at DMing at this point, because he was out of ideas. Never before has there been a finer railroad built (I didn't understand the concept of collaborative storytelling). But that was a learning experience, and I've gotten much better at it. That's beside the point though.
Our first time party was my Paladin (Droopy McCool) who smote evil as often as he wanted, a Druid who couldn't speak but spoke through his intelligent warhorse companion (Emphatic Link kinda), a fairly standard Ranger, and a Rogue that would do anything to get one more piece of gold, so much so we had to keep him in check. I know that last one is just good RP, but you catch my drift. Needless to say, hilarity ensued every time we did anything.
After playing up to level 6 or so, most of us had actually read through all the core material and dozens of splat books. This is where the problem started.
We switched it up, the original DM running the game, but now everyone picked character classes based on cool (if not cheesy) abilities. And it felt... Lousy. There was no party synergy, no "family feel" to what we were doing. We went through the motions, "Let's go on this mission, beat the bad guy, buy more items, do the next one." All the magic of D&D had been lost.
After learning a ton about the rules and implementing them, our party turned into a Swashbuckler/Factotum (sheesh), a Fighter/Ninja, another Rogue (same player, not the same feel), and my Duskblade. All of a sudden, we were just moving on to the next mission, didn't really have interpersonal social interactions, and were more concerned with crunch than fluff. Obviously, we could have fixed some of that, but our semi-optimized builds didn't allow for much out-of-the-box action/RP. We were mercenaries, not adventurers.
Many character switches and missions later, we were running through a dungeon (of my design; I was DM) when they stopped to fight a bunch of orcs and some ogres. Somebody cast Entangle, and combat crawled for the next 30 minutes or so. It wasn't over, but my one friend stood up and yelled, "This is ****ing stupid! What the **** are we even doing anymore?!" and left.
I refer to it as "the day D&D died" for us, because most of the group was sick of what it had become. Each DM had tried to create a camaraderie in the group, but failed to do so. after a month without playing, I convinced everyone to give it another shot, and now we're playing a looser campaign type like our first time, but still with crunchy characters. It's more fun than we had been having, but it just doesn't even touch that first group of characters and their adventures.
I really just needed to get that off my chest. But I also would like everyone to share their stories, maybe a similar situation. I've noticed that most of the playground is obsessed with optimizing characters for effectiveness, so I'm intrigued.
McCool