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[Tawa]

Wait... Shouldn't my ramming the door been none-lethal damage? Or did I really hit it that hard?

Did I not indicate that?

I had intended to indicate that.

Whoops.

I think that "locked stone doors in a party with no skillmonkey" is going into my list of Stuff To Annoy Players With list.

[Flying Dice]

That only works until the BSF-equivalent gets an adamantine weapon, though.

[Tawa]

It still makes a good obstacle for low-level characters. The thing is more resilient than your average boss monster, and can hurt your players more, to boot.

[flame99]

Plot twist: Stone door is the BBEG

[PrivateNomad]

Plot twist: Stone door is the BBEG

A sentient stone door boss.

[Flying Dice]

Not even that. The final battle is a series of increasingly imposing doors in a long, slowly-widening hallway. Reverse matryoshka doors, if you will.

[Tawa]

If anybody ever brought this up on 4chan or the like, I think that this would become a minor meme for a small while.

Dungeons of Doom? Pffft. DOORS OF DOOM is where it's at.

[PrivateNomad]

If anybody ever brought this up on 4chan or the like, I think that this would become a minor meme for a small while.

Dungeons of Doom? Pffft. DOORS OF DOOM is where it's at.

topkek

[TD1]

Can someone tell me the major differences in checks and the like (Basic stuff) between 4e and 3.5? I think I might suffer from not knowing :/

[Tawa]

Powers are not a thing, only spells. Spell-less classes usually sucked, so Wizards made stuff like the Spellthief and Swordsage to remedy that. I recommend one of those types if you ever plan to play a melee character.

Skills are more numerous. I noted that you only have one "knowledge" skill; you remember Arcana and Nature and stuff? Those are subsets of Knowledge.

Hit point totals are, as a rule, lower. Hit Dice are, effectively, used as the general term for "level", especially for things with no class levels like monsters.

Instead of all-or nothing skill training, you assign skill points (determined by your class and Int modifier) to your skills as you see fit, with a cap based on your character level.

I found out a lot of this stuff when I browsed the SRD and made a character for another game; later, I DM'd my own game and was forced to read basically the whole thing when players did stuff I needed rules on. By all means, run your own game if you like hands-on learning.

[Flying Dice]

To be fair, you can have pretty good campaigns with martial classes without delving into the ToB if you're either playing low-magic or low-leveled. Properly specced CaDs are always going to be broken, but you can easily spec them to not be hyper-optimal, and arcane casters don't come into their own until higher levels. That, and martial classes are always going to be better sources of consistent direct damage than any non-CaDzilla caster, though meleelocks and Mailman-style sorcerers can be really nasty in the right hands.

3.5 is where the whole "Linear fighters, quadratic wizards" concept comes from. People just tend to get hung up on the 20th level paradigm of "Properly specced wizard is GOD, properly specced fighter can hit things really hard until they die or break." while ignoring the 1st level paradigm of "Properly specced wizard contributes fewer actions than they have fingers each day and dies if they are hit by a stiff breeze, properly specced fighter hits things until they die or break." Meanwhile the CaDzilla are doing both, often more safely and better than either, with the exception of high-level wizard shenanigans.

But yeah, what Tawa said about reading the books. It's both fun and educational!

[Nerjin]

The thing is that I, personally, don't like being able to do EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD... Which is why Fighter is one of my favorite classes [alongside support Cleric (Sacha)]... But hey, y'know, I find that 4e is just boring personally if I can comment on that. It's way to complex in some ways and way to dumbed down in others. I want to be a fighter to hit things... I don't want to keep track of six hundred slightly different ways to hit things.

[Tawa]

I think the best example of a 4e screwup was "DURR... CLANG!"

That one rogue skill where you make your opponents attack themselves, intended to be used as redirection-flavored crowd control, but because you can use it on singular enemies and stuff, it's presumably instead employing short-range mind control and forcing the enemies to attack themselves (even though that's often impossible, like a beholder biting itself.)

There's also PHB page 42, the complete removal of Vancian magic, making all the classes basically the same, and all those "fail three saves and die" instead of "save or die" things intended to remove the (already generally low) death rate entirely.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, I disliked a lot about 4e myself, which is why I never really got into trying it. For all the problems and imbalanced features in 3.5e, it has a hell of a lot of spirit to it. And honestly, I'd rather have a bunch of bizarre, exploitable quirks in a system than a system which is apparently aimed at being as bland as possible by making everyone the same and removing most of the risk.

Granted, 4e is probably a better system to introduce hesitant newbies to the genre (especially if they're more interested in roleplay than rollplay), but 3.5e/Pathfinder is much more dynamic. And, I think, the fundamental strangeness of it is a big part of why it's such a great storytelling tool; you wouldn't get something like the Tale of an Industrious Rogue, Los Tiburon, Sir Bearington, or even stuff like the SCS campaign archives out of a system set up to be as fair, balanced, and easygoing as possible. 

[Harbingerjm]

Wait... Shouldn't my ramming the door been none-lethal damage? Or did I really hit it that hard?

Did I not indicate that?
I had intended to indicate that.
Whoops.
I think that "locked stone doors in a party with no skillmonkey" is going into my list of Stuff To Annoy Players With list.

They're actually really easy to deal with; even if nobody brings along a crowbar or ram, which someone really should have, if Nerjin had attacked the door with weapons instead of deciding to attempt to shoulder-barge it in he would have cut through it far faster, and without taking damage himself.

I found out a lot of this stuff when I browsed the SRD and made a character for another game; later, I DM'd my own game and was forced to read basically the whole thing when players did stuff I needed rules on. By all means, run your own game if you like hands-on learning.

I would suggest that anyone who hasn't and wants to play/DM sit down and read the Player Handbook; all of it. Then the DMG, also all of it. Also the MiC and the Complete series.

To be fair, you can have pretty good campaigns with martial classes without delving into the ToB if you're either playing low-magic or low-leveled. Properly specced CaDs are always going to be broken, but you can easily spec them to not be hyper-optimal, and arcane casters don't come into their own until higher levels. That, and martial classes are always going to be better sources of consistent direct damage than any non-CaDzilla caster, though meleelocks and Mailman-style sorcerers can be really nasty in the right hands.

3.5 is where the whole "Linear fighters, quadratic wizards" concept comes from. People just tend to get hung up on the 20th level paradigm of "Properly specced wizard is GOD, properly specced fighter can hit things really hard until they die or break." while ignoring the 1st level paradigm of "Properly specced wizard contributes fewer actions than they have fingers each day and dies if they are hit by a stiff breeze, properly specced fighter hits things until they die or break." Meanwhile the CaDzilla are doing both, often more safely and better than either, with the exception of high-level wizard shenanigans.

First, you mean CoDzilla, not CaDzilla. Cleric/Druid multiclass is not exactly my idea of broken. Also, Druid in particular is extremely easy to make OP even by accident.
Regarding low-level arcanes, they are in fact quite capable of overshadowing mundanes; Bards and other non-standard arcanes aside, Wizards and Sorcs are quite capable of ending an encounter per spell, including those from the wands and scrolls that they really should have, while sitting back and plinking away with a crossbow (or bow, for elf) is an entirely valid combat tactic for just about anyone at low levels, and they aren't significantly more fragile than, say, a rogue; quite possibly less, even, since they can afford to put a fair number of points in Con since they're fairly SAD. Also, yes, fighters get all the attacks they could ever want... and far, far more, because you generally don't get that many encounters a day, and 3.5 encounters tend to be short. Casters, meanwhile, have far better ways of bypassing the Action Economy, including Familiars and Summons, which is far, far more valuable.

The thing is that I, personally, don't like being able to do EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD... Which is why Fighter is one of my favorite classes [alongside support Cleric (Sacha)]... But hey, y'know, I find that 4e is just boring personally if I can comment on that. It's way to complex in some ways and way to dumbed down in others. I want to be a fighter to hit things... I don't want to keep track of six hundred slightly different ways to hit things.

An entirely valid viewpoint; the issue is that a base fighter has the opposite approach, being able to do almost nothing, since they have terrible skill points, generally poor int, bad class skills (they don't even have Balance or Tumble!), needs to spend a lot of its WBL on basic boost items rather than the fun stuff, and really, really needs a way to get pounce or some other "full attack after moving" equivalent.