On Sat, 24 Jan 2004, Rowan wrote:
> My apologies. Birthrightonline is 2e (which I cannot stomach), not
> RoE. RoE does look interesting, and it may be the only 3e possibility
> out there (though I dearly hope that Night of Fire gets restarted).
> However, there are a LOT of different rules and house rules in RoE.
Its been a while since Ive played in a BR PBEM, but I`ve got to say –
how exactly does the underlying RPG system matter at all? Do you really
go on adventure actions that often? In my experience, PBEM BR is best
when it uses only domain rules, with as little reference to individual
character stats as possible. I find it difficult to imagine 2e vs. 3e
having much of an effect on the domain scale, especially in a PBEM.
As for house rules, they come naturally with the territory. Finding a BR
DM anywhere without lots of house rules is almost impossible, since the
original rules left a whole lot of things wide open to interpretation –
and specific decisions about such things (I will not at this point mention
by name any of the many ancient debates) need to be made in order to play.
And once you`ve made all the necessary clarifications, you start to make
what you consider “fixes” (because there do seem to be rather a lot of
goofs or false leads, and there is great disagreement about what counts as
such, of course), and by then who can resist the temptation to add
whatever other things they think would be fun? =)
> The great advance of 3e over 2e DnD was how the system was streamlined
> and made simple yet flexible.
Which is essentially invisible at the domain scale of play. Literally the
only PHB-scale information about a character actually necessary to play
the domain game is class and level. That`s it. Yes, 2e and 3e have
different rules on what combinations are allowed to whom, but almost every
rule change (e.g., whether better armor means a negative AC or a positive
one) important to dungeon-crawling gameplay is totally irrelevant to
domain-ruling gameplay. War Cards, if you use them, do allow spellcasters
to cast certain specific spells, but since at that scale there is no
difference between fireball and lightning bolt, nor between cloudkill and
prismatic spray, the changes made to the spell lists are not very
important either – but I`ve never known a PBEM that let the players run
the war card battles from round to round. That would take way too much
time and too many back-and-forth messages.
> While the 3e system format still bears some huge inherent handicaps
> that will always lead to mass proliferation of things like classes,
> feats and spells, it was overall much easier to understand and balance
> well than 2e was.
Again, this is pretty much moot for domain rulership. Neither standard
Cleave nor the latest Super-Cool Neato Peachy Keen Cleave have any
important (nor really even measurable) effect on battles with 5,000
men-at-arms per side.
> All reasons why I can never go back to 2e (and hence, birthrightonline).
Again I must question whether any of the changes in the adventuring party
ruleset can even be noticed at the domain scale. Give the 2e PBEMs a
chance – they really cant be all that different. There just isnt that
much that was “2e” about the parts of BR readily gameable by email.
Ryan Caveney