[OSSR] Y2K edition: D&D, Player's Handbook.

[Dean]

Is it just me or did Tussock's last post make no sense.

I wouldn't go that far, but many parts of this thread are reminding me of how fundamentally parts of my worldview differ from Tussock's worldview.

That's the kindest way to put that this review is like a senior citizen with dementia explaining the internet.

That's because this review is a man with dementia explaining D&D

[icyshadowlord]

To me it seems more like he's comparing 2e with 3e for the most part, and trying to be sort of neutral about it.

[erik]

To me it seems more like he's comparing 2e with 3e for the most part, and trying to be sort of neutral about it.

Maybe that's part of why it reads so poorly. Like it is written for someone familiar with 2e but slept through the last 14 years. Add on some misconceptions and oddities and a few inside jokes for people with more expertise on the subject than the author (i.e. someone familiar with 3e) and it just leaves me wondering who this is for.

It is akin to shitty game guides that expected you to already be better at the game than the author and able to devise better strategies and thus not benefit dfrom the guide, or be newbies who would read the guide just be lost because it fails to be on a sensible level.

If I wasn't already familiar with 3e then this would be wordsalad. But since I am it bears nothing useful including some misconceptions.

[Windjammer]

For the record, I enjoy the review so far and look forward to its continuation.
I understand there are some grievances with the author, but after a post or two the trolling gets pretty old.

[OgreBattle]

This means Windjammer has a Lawful alignment compared to Eric, Icy, and Dean's Chaotic leanings.

[tussock]

Oh, hey, did I mention I'm doing this in the voice of someone from Y2K? Except for the red bits? When I remember? 3.0 is a weird little 3-year period when D&D was played by more people than any other time by a wide margin, the tabletop RPG market reached its greatest peak, with more producers making more books on more shelf space in more retail outlets than any other time, much bigger than the early 80's.

People made good money with stuff like d20 Traveller and d20 Cthulhu and d20 Munchkin and d20 Paranoia. It was huge, there was three local shops mostly sold RPGs for a city of 100k. D&D was a giant. The numbers playing today are tiny by comparison.


I think it's interesting to consider what everyone was thinking. Why did 3e work for people? How was it really played? What got almost all the old players back in the game, with a buzz that encouraged so many more to join in? And why did it die so quickly?

It was already on the way down when 3.5 hit the stands in 2003, and so far as I can tell that just made things worse. Yeah, it's 14 years ago, it's an OSSR, and the online arguments from the time are in arcane formats that aren't easily searched. So a bunch of this is very old memories and rereading the damn books.

I got into building a bunch of parties to get my head around the old 3.0 skills. Fucking half-ranks and multiclass bullshit reminds me of my problems with the thing. Even an all-human Druid/Ranger/Wizard/Rogue party isn't covering much over half of the play space it contains. They're an interesting set when you dig a bit, and it explained some foggy old memories. This being 3e D&D, that all takes a long-ass time.

[tussock]

AD&D had a mishmash of d20 roll-under stat checks and non-weapon proficiencies (NWPs), percentile thief skills, a few d6 or d8 rolls for this and that, and the biggest question people asked in games when trying something non-standard was "what do I roll?", followed by "high or low?". People don't like to will their die to roll high when it should be rolling low, they'd have to share the responsibility for failure then.

3e made the skill system use the same rules as the new attack system. 1d20+mods, roll high, compare to target number. Easy as.


SKILLS
CHAPTER 4



But of course, that wasn't near enough for a skill system, so they added a couple wrinkles for multiple target numbers (fail by 5, succeed by X, etc.), advantage outside combat (take-10), repeated checks without penalty for failure (if allowed on per-skill basis, take-20), no standard progression (max ranks, cross-class max ranks), a bigger pool to spend at 1st level (x4), various formulae and tables for finding your actual result if it wasn't a binary outcome, tables of cumulative modifiers unique to each skill, multiple rules for combined action, using different stats, and so on.

That's on top of the bonus stacking complexity and opposed checks of the slowest parts of the combat system. 3e skills are super fucking complicated, and not really the same system as combat at all, but at least you don't have to ask what die to roll and the marketing department can tell you how simple it is to add a number to a d20.


Most characters get around two or three skill points per level. Many get just one. Given that the skills cover all the old Thief skills, almost all of the NWPs, and also a bunch of old free class or kit features and also things that used to be pure roleplaying but now you have to buy: that's just not enough. A literal conversion needs +3 per level over that, 5/level or 7/level for most classes, maybe even 13/level for Rogues.



The thing with these ~50 skills, they're not really the same deal. That's Lidda famously blowing herself up because you need a lot of ranks in Use Magic Device to do much of anything. The first pic is Jozan climbing a rocky crag in armour because you can just fucking do that, as it's only DC 10, so you take 10 and up you go (if he'd put the shield on his back, he wouldn't have needed the "assist"). Pick up +10 climb (say, because you're strong and not first level any more) and you've finished it, that's basically all there is to do. It never actually lets you climb your enemies for combat bonuses or anything.

Most skills "top out" at +15 depending on if you're taking 10 vs DC 25 or taking 20 vs DC 35, or using in combat vs DC 15. Most of what you could do lives around there. Pretty common on your top stat by 7th or 8th level.

The opposed skills are an endless point sink by comparison. Not even sure why they introduced the notion, rather than just letting people earn surprise now and then by character skill and player manipulation of circumstance, or bluff the odd guard (like they will anyway, because none of them have Sense Motive).

The stealth system is basically a giant mess, where the actual skill rules (which do not work) and the way they're used elsewhere in play descriptions (as a personal save vs surprise against opponents taking 10) are completely at odds. The surprise system itself barely uses them, because if you just stand behind something and don't move you automatically get surprise. Unless you don't. Uck.

Not to mention the spells and items. To emulate even the softest fantasy stories through the skill system you need huge bonuses, +30 for Jump and +30 for Bluff, +20 to hide and move silently, all make you feel bad for putting points in your skills. I mean, you can get by alright with +5 to the first two, but still.

The skill list over the years was first expanded further for Psionics and little other bits, and since then has been truncated. Third parties for 3.0 gave people skill sets you could buy for reduced cost, 3.5 cut out the less used ones — folding them into others. Pathfinder folded up more of them into an uglier mess. I think the system in general would have been better with either much more skill points per level or a much bigger pool (~24 points for everyone) at 1st level, but keep the variety of places to put them.

Oh, and Fighters only have 6 class skills. Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Jump, Ride, and Swim. In AD&D they'd have also had the equivalent options of a couple Knowledge skills, Perform, Profession, Wilderness Lore, and Use Rope. Twice as many. Not to mention the social skills everyone had by virtue of their non-existence. 3e Fighters run out of things to usefully spend points on, even without high Intelligence. It's insulting! Later editions fixed that, at least.

---

I didn't mention cross-class skills. Half ranks, max rank (level+3)/2 which is actually two and a half ranks at 2nd level. There is nothing good to say there. Pathfinder's +3 for being in-class is just so superior.

[radthemad4]

Are you planning on doing 3.5 and Pathfinder next?

[tussock]

I could do a quick "what changed" for 3.5 at the end of this, which is where it's just enough to nerf everything that sort of worked for non-casters (while incorporating most of the coming powerups for casters), but Pathfinder has this "wall of noise" effect on me where I want to just turn it off.

I'd rather take another look at the old 3.0 splatbooks. They basically fixed a bunch of the problems in 3.0, really quickly too. They were clearly listening to customer feedback about what was useless and what people where playing out in the real world and trying to make that work. It was all inflationary like usual, but pretty well directed. Also, full of crazy in a way that the core isn't.

---

Addendum to skills: people did figure out they only needed +5 (or whatever) in various places and just stick 2 skill points in to get it. The lack of points and difficulty of coverage made people use their points very precisely. That sort of detail in turn got people complaining about needing skill ranks rather than the final bonus (the bit you actually use in the game) to qualify for prestige classes. Dissociated mechanics rearing it's head: there's no in-game way to see ranks, but in the game people are accepting you for some club based on your ranks.

[tussock]

The division of utility talked up in 3e previews was that instead of splitting the purchase mechanics along a combat to non-combat line, they had split them by needing a roll (skills) and being fixed benefit (feats). There's really no power or utility separation or anything in the basic 3e design. So some characters could be all combat, and others could suck instead.

FEATS
CHAPTER 5

Good combat tricks (or supposedly so) from D&D's past that became skills got a high DC (25 to tumble through an opponent's square, or activate out-of-class magic items, trivial for a Rogue who can take-10 in combat from 10th level, almost impossible for anyone else) ... while certain (supposedly) good combat tricks that became feats got a prerequisite chain full of useless crap as a way of forcing a "cost" on it instead (easy enough for Fighter-dips to buy, pretty tough for anyone else at any level you'd care about).

On top of that, feats often have stat requirements. Typically a 13, because that's a very common roll which otherwise does nothing better than a 12, though sometimes a 17 because fuck you for wanting things. Also Base Attack Bonus or Caster Level or Spell Level requirements which pushed a handful of them out to mid level seemingly at random.

Characters get feats every three levels, plus 1 at first, plus one for human, plus bonus feats by class, between 3 and 8 by 6th level. Whirlwind Attack epitomises their balance scheme, requiring four other feats, Dex 13, Int 13, BAB +4 (effectively +5, usually +6 because getting a feat at both 4th and 5th level is tricky), and then to use it you need to not move in the round, which means all your targets have already had a chance to hit you.

That's a lot of "balance". It's the sort of effect you wouldn't use all that much as a level 6 Fighter even if it was free, focus fire being strictly better and massively safer, and here they've built up that giant cost structure. Great Cleave is a pretty poor feat and it's generally better than that for where you'd actually use it. The weird trick you can pull with Whirlwind Attack and Great Cleave (all 8 feats by 6th level Fighter), with a bag of rats to give near-unlimited cleave attacks against any opponent? They banned it in errata almost immediately.

On the magic side, Quicken Spell needs two other feats, and putting the spell in a slot four levels higher. Which is weird, because there's a 3rd level spell gives you, effectively, quickened spells for one round per level for free. Haste. You will know it. It's not unusual to have feats that are much worse than a low level spell effect, the same as skills, though at least they normally stack.


And then there's the real feats that people take. Give you extra attacks in combat at a trivial cost (Cleave, Rapid Shot, Improved Trip, Combat Reflexes, Two-Weapon Fighting for Rogues), flat bonuses to the things you care about every fight (Spell Focus +2, Improved Initiative +4), and things to act as common force multipliers (Spirited Charge, Empower Spell, Craft Wand). Players zero in on those very quickly, with the odd exception of people building a giant untyped bonus stack to get off the RNG somewhere the game can't quite handle.


The main reason to take the rest is some Prestige Classes needs you to have the bad feats that go nowhere (Toughness at 3 hp, Endurance at +4 to things you never do, Spell Focus on a school with no attack spells). As a cost to cover the class being better than you. The designers later described it as opening up more options, which is true but also less good that having genuine options. Some, like Heighten Spell, seem to be there purely to confirm you can't do that without the feat, not that you ever would want to do that, they're just making sure you know.

Also, later feat chains try to incorporate some of the less-cared-for options. Mostly the feat bloat from later books means you pile even more feats into whatever action you're optimising for, and then spam that action forever and ever and ever. Which drove the 4e design paradigm of making people spam five moves of doom as being better by comparison.


Feat selection is probably the most fun part of 3e character building, or monster modification, or NPC design. You can sort of pick feats first and arrange everything else to maximise the benefit of them. You've got to arrange your stats right, take the right classes at the right level with the right class options, squeeze all the right prerequisite feats into your limited slots on time, and then for a couple levels you've got something quite nice as a result, that won't suck too badly later. Not really great, because feats weren't ever intended to do a whole hell of a lot for you, just open up a few more options, but there is power to be had anyway.

I mean, not real power, because all the extra attacks in the world don't compare well with being Polymorphed into a creature with 6 base attacks, the strength of a Giant, and skin harder than steel (and this is 3.0 so you can just do that). But you can be a strikingly better character than one without them.

---

And that's the story of 3e in a nutshell. There's ~70 feats and ~300 spells. Find some awesome combo with a huge feat stack, maybe a prestige class or two, get your warrior killing the odd thing in rare and difficult circumstances, and they instantly nerf it. Find a spell that gives you even better at virtually no cost at the same time and they piss about for eight years doing basically nothing about it at all. Eventually they put out feats that were a tiny bit better for warrior types at high level, at the same time Wizards had Shapechange.

There's a pretty good design structure to feats, they just don't really let you do anything with it. These days they let you do even less with them. 4e feats are only the most useless crap from 3e.

[tussock]

Roight. Stop being a lazy bastard, tussock. Edit: That's weird, I thought I'd posted the description chapter? So this is 7, and 6 will be ... somewhere on the PC I suppose.

EQUIPMENT
CHAPTER 7

The low-level-gear chapter shows you your starting cash (should you start at 1st level and not use the pre-packaged gear set that comes with each class), about 120gp on another brown page where people kept not seeing it, which lets you afford Scale Armour and a Large Shield if you wish (AC 16, max 19), plus your weapons, some things needed for some of the skills, and all that other junk the system barely supports any more because the skill system has mostly replaced it.

I mean, there's a DC for finding traps, rules for walking into them without finding them (or failing to find them badly enough), but you poke it with a 10'-pole and the game is entirely silent on the matter. I think the rule is you use the pole to make search checks at 10'.

The prices and tech available are roughly suited to late 14th century Europe. ~1390. Anachronistic things like plate armour, greatswords, spyglasses, and naphtha incendiary grenades alchemist's fire are ludicrously expensive. Everything lines up pretty well with the post-plague era, given the weight of silver they throw around as costs and wages, except weapons are about ten times too expensive, and party dresses are far too cheap.

Salt being the same price as Silver by weight is historically accurate, as is Pepper being worth it's weight in Gold (though they undervalue Gold again for decimalisation).

3e weapons contain a minor math flaw, that they gave more critical hits to swashbuckling style rapiers and cutlasses, but those things then favour having huge strength with certain feats and magic, and the sort of people should use them for story reasons are better off with a greatsword. Of course, everyone's better off with a greatsword, but you know what I mean.


That's right, it's Y2K and crits are now official. Roll high and you "threaten" a crit, hit again and you succeed at it. They're like bonus attacks only you have to attack the same target, and not all types of damage carry over. Rogues care less for crits than Fighters (again, the Rogue-type weapons do better at them, it's just wrong).

I think they're much more fun as free bonus attacks, with a few tweaks to encourage stereotype play, quick characters using rapiers and such, the combat chapter could have done with more of the same, so a Quisarme (below) should have a 19-20 crit that gives you a trip attack.

The heavy lance is awesome. Obviously it's supposed to be one-handed on horseback, but the rules don't actually say that. Heaps of people use it two-handed for crazy stacking multipliers on horseback, and one-handed on foot for a reach weapon with a shield. There's clumsy little unstated assumptions like that in a few places.

The weapons lose their damage shift vs Large critters, mostly stealing a damage source from warrior classes (yet again). There's no 1d4+1 type damage expressions, though you can have 2d4 or 2d6, I don't know why, the flat modifiers all work the same for crits anyway, but they are proud of it.
They still just have small PCs using the smaller weapons, rather than the 3.5/PF inanity of small longswords. What the fuck was the point in taking away the damage bonus vs Large creatures again? To save from having two damage numbers? Admittedly, the lack of unique names for Giant's and Pixie's weapons didn't look good, though they should have just used Huge sword (10', 3d6), Gargantuan sword (18', 4d6), and Colossal sword (30', 6d6). Intermediaries at 2d8/3d8/4d8 as needed.

A bunch of weapons still have situational modifiers to various attack options, or work better with certain feats and skills, or need a bunch of feats to support them, and so you see a bit of variety of weapon choice in dedicated Fighters in particular. For the most part though, there's only a handful of weapons off the table that are clearly best, and that's what everyone uses, same as always.


The low-level armour table says people with high Dex have the same AC as people with normal Dex, they just pay less for their armour and move faster in it. This is just another way to punish people for playing warriors. It was here my house rules for 3e started, fuck that noise, 3e encumbrance rules alone are hard enough on armour, and magic armour still shouldn't encumber you at all, it's a fucking class feature of people who need to move.

The rest of the gear is for meeting in pubs, travelling to the dungeon from the pub, moving around in the dungeon, and travelling back to the pub. There's very little support for anything else, not that there ever really has been.

Lastly is the 2nd level gear, hand grenades, damage for bows, spells you can get cast on you in town (which is all of them, they didn't even try to balance that, and the price is huge if you let PCs sell spells (and thus no one ever does)), +1 to hit with your weapons, and slightly less terrible armour. It's what you use before you get the DMG items that you really want, which in 3e could be quite a while.


Oh, right. Exotic weapons. Check out the size of that Spiked Chain, you'd pull a ferry with it. Not to mention the axes. Players almost universally hate on exotics. Usenet does not like spiked chains and dire flails particularly, as they're crazy like a 3-piece-rod but also sharp and thus you would kill yourself faster than you could kill your enemy. Maybe true, and I have to agree on principle as the real world has meteor hammers and kasuri-gama to be exotic with, but this is Y2K and that fancy new star wars movie 15 years ago had a guy with a double light-sabre, so it's awkward double weapons abounding, and anyone says otherwise just isn't down with the kids these days.

[tussock]

One of the best changes in d20, from any perspective, was switching alignment from a proscriptive system (how people have to act to maintain their alignment) to a descriptive one (which alignment people have based on their "typical" actions).

DESCRIPTION
CHAPTER SIX

The following passage reflect perhaps the best display of that change.

Alignment is a tool for developing your character's identity. It is not a straitjacket for restricting your character. Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies, so two lawful good characters can be quite different from each other. In addition, few people are completely consistent. A lawful good character may have a greedy streak, occaisionally tempting him to take something or hoard something he has even if it's not the lawful or good thing to do. People are also not consistent from day to day. Good characters can lose their tempers, neutral characters can be inspired to perform noble acts, and so on.

The following two pages devote themselves to detailed descriptions of alignment norms, and because p87 is one of the ones with a brown background and line art under the text, a lot of people never even read it. Thus was born another few years in the never-ending alignment debate on r.g.f.d back in the day, where one side would talk in flowing prose about 3e's wonderfully liberating descriptive alignment system, and the other would tell them to fuck off because it's no such thing and the very first bit says

Choosing an alignment for your character means stating your intent to play that character a certain way. If your character acts in a way more appropriate to another alignment, the DM may decide that your character's alignment has changed to match her actions.

Only it took people years to exchange actual quotes and figure out what the other side was missing. That second one's tucked above a table in a run-on section about how some creatures or classes are always a certain alignment and cannot change.

The actual rule seems to be: write "Nuetral" as your alignment and do whatever the fuck you want, really. Apparently Switzerland is awesome this time of year.

The alignments themselves are relatively well done. Same old overlapping bins of notions that barely belong together in the first place, but "Crazy" chaotics are specifically called out as bullshit and replaced with Libertarianism (which is funny, when you think about it), Good alignments repeatedly called out as "zealots", and Evil ones as "dangerous".

As I mentioned, this book was written when Bill Clinton was president, religiously motivated freedom fighters were still the good guys, and deliberately killing a few non-combatants for some greater goal dropped you strait in the Evil bin. The idea that Germany was acting like a bunch of Nazis to break up the Balkans seemed somewhat far-fetched. By 2008 in 4e, Lawful Evil and Chaotic Good both got scrubbed. After all, you can't be calling that shit in Iraq "Good" just because they're fighting a Lawful Evil foreign oppression which doesn't even count civilian deaths.

Some lawful evil villains have particular taboos, such as not killing in cold blood (but having underlings do it) or not letting children come to harm (if it can be helped).

By 2014 in 5e, the alignments are all back to very thin bullshit, with CG "following their conscience", CN "following their whims", and CE to "act with arbitrary violence". You can almost see the country of origin losing it's moral compass over the years.


Then there's the Gods, from Greyhawk, because 3e decided a light default setting was just plain better than the 2nd edition deliberate blandness, and they may as well use Greyhawk because they were a total bunch of grognards. Though the Gods are pretty weird from a Greyhawk perspective, with the 5 PHB racial chiefs rather than (or in addition to, with Ehlonna) the old Greyhawk ones, and 14 others seemingly picked at random to give each good and neutral alignment a couple, plus one for each evil.

But I mean, they missed Incabulos (NE, disasters), Istus (N, fate), Rao (NG, peace), Beory (NN, mother), Ulaa (LG, shorties), and Wastri (NE, bigotry). Who the fuck cares about Fharlangan or Obad-Hai? Beory doesn't, that's for damn sure.

Hell, why not Muamman Duathal (AKA, Marthammor Duin) rather than Moradin? PC Dwarves are supposed to be wanderers, after all. Meh, things making sense, why would they?


Also the stuff that, to my eye, actually brings a character alive. Gets them off the sheet and in my head. Not the stupid name, personality, and background stuff: but sex, height, and weight. A character suddenly being a 4'10", 125lb woman is alive, and I become rather determined to find out more by throwing them at Orcs for a while and seeing how that works out for them.

The odd one does get a little PTSD, thousand yard stare, night terrors. Shit happens. IMO, background is how you choose to remember your first few adventures: life was a breeze before the dungeon crawls. Oh, how they crawl. You might outrun the dwarf, but how can you outrun the screams? Would we have both made it, if I'd turned back, or both died? He'd have saved me. He already had. Character.

For 3e, your weight is finally a function of your height, though it's probably the most calculator-needy thing in the book, 13x7 isn't everyone's cup of tea. The age table is crap again: 1st edition age table forever, something worth gaming.


Finally, CUSTOMIZING YOUR CHARACTER. Dun, dun, duuun.
It recommends you make up your own mix-and-match racial package (dwarf living in human society), custom classes (want more skills? Different class features? Take them! MTP!), new skills, and customing naming everything (pointing out that Katanas are just Masterwork Bastard Swords now, rather than better than everything ever, which is very Y2K).


Which brings us to the equipment chapter, similar time, next whenever, here on tgdmb.

[Windjammer]

One of the best changes in d20, from any perspective, was switching alignment from a proscriptive system (how people have to act to maintain their alignment) to a descriptive one (which alignment people have based on their "typical" actions).

DESCRIPTION
CHAPTER SIX

The following passage reflect perhaps the best display of that change.

Alignment is a tool for developing your character's identity. It is not a straitjacket for restricting your character. Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies, so two lawful good characters can be quite different from each other. In addition, few people are completely consistent. A lawful good character may have a greedy streak, occaisionally tempting him to take something or hoard something he has even if it's not the lawful or good thing to do. People are also not consistent from day to day. Good characters can lose their tempers, neutral characters can be inspired to perform noble acts, and so on.

I've seen that argument - from 2e to 3e - being made before, and I think it overlooks that the change in how to approach and think about alignment antedates D&D 3.0. From the revised Player's Handbook for AD&D 2nd edition, published in 1995:

The character's alignment is a guide to his basic moral and ethical attitudes toward others, society, good, evil, and the forces of the universe in general. Use the chosen alignment as a guide to provide a clearer idea of how the character will handle moral dilemmas. Always consider alignment as a tool, not a straitjacket that restricts the character. Although alignment defines general attitudes, it certainly doesn't prevent a character from changing his beliefs, acting irrationally, or behaving out of character.

(...)

Playing the Character's Alignment
Aside from a few minimal restrictions required for some character classes, a player is free to choose whatever alignment he wants for his character. However, before rushing off and selecting an alignment, there are a few things to consider.
First, alignment is an aid to role-playing and should be used that way. Don't choose an alignment that will be hard to role play or that won't be fun. A player who chooses an unappealing alignment probably will wind up playing a different alignment anyway. In that case, he might as well have chosen the second alignment to begin with. A player who thinks that lawful good characters are boring goody-two-shoes who don't get to have any fun should play a chaotic good character instead. On the other hand, a player who thinks that properly role-playing a heroic, lawful good fighter would be an interesting challenge is encouraged to try it. No one should be afraid to stretch his imagination. Remember, selecting an alignment is a way of saying, "My character is going to act like a person who believes this." Second, the game revolves around cooperation among everyone in the group. The character who tries to go it alone or gets everyone angry at him is likely to have a short career. Always consider the alignments of other characters in the group.

[ACOS]

Windjammer, fix your tags.

[Windjammer]

Windjammer, fix your tags.

Done (it was one long quote to begin with, however).

[tussock]

2nd edition may not prevent you from acting out of character, neither does 1st edition, but it does have the DM keep a secret track of where your alignment "really is" and then fuck you over for drifting too far from the ever-shifting mental goalpost of where you think it is.

Not just the rules for XP loss (double XP for the next level gain, and all XP toward that lost for something stupid like changing back, because the DM says you really are Chaotic Neutral instead of Chaotic Good now, despite thinking you were Chaotic Good last week and nothing really changing, or just no XP for you because :trollface: ), but also denial of healing magic, shunning by former allies, and other general in-game fuckery.

There will be times when the DM, especially if he is clever a giant cock, creates situations to test the character's resolve and ethics. But finding the right course of action within the character's alignment is part of the fun and challenge of role-playing.

My correction for truth.

The penalty for changing alignment in 3e is DMs discuss with you any problems they're seeing, and if you agree to a change there is no penalty at all. Paladins explicitly gain a bunch of stuff around their code to bring back some of the old fuckery, but even it is much gentler than anything in 2nd edition, with a nice prize for giving up on it.

Now, a good many people who played 2nd edition rightly ignored that shit and treated it much like 3e treats it. It's just the game absorbing a very common house rule into the core (3e is full of common house-rules for AD&D). That's probably why you think it wasn't a big change. But it was.