Saturday night was some birthday stuff followed by a bad decision on my part to introduce the apprentices to 3rd Edition. After 3 hours of working on characters they were finally ready and my tolerance was shot. I like Basic/Expert D&D for speed of play, and I like 4th Edition now for the richness of play, and I'm not sure I have much left for 3E, at least not when it comes to teaching character generation to 3 kids at once. Since we do have the characters I may give an actual adventure a whirl but sheesh, that was a beating.
The one good thing that came out of it was that I spent some time digging through my pile of Scarred Lands material and discovered my old notes and hexmaps and just all of those paper documents you accrue in a long campaign. It really brought back how much I put into that one and it also reminded me how much that world is worth the effort. It didn; make me want to break out 3E all that bad though.
So Sunday we played another session of the Temple of Elemental Evil 4E campaign. I'll have a write-up later but it went well. They're close to finishing up the Moathouse now so soon we'll be able to move on to Nulb and then finally the Temple itself.
Then I watched the Super Bowl - not a bad weekend. More on the specifics of some of this stuff later in the week.
Happy Birthday. Sounds like a great weekend. I would if the kids will have an opinion on which edition they prefer after they've played through 3E. Just curious.
ReplyDeleteWell right now they're kind of with me - Basic is cool for getting a lot of exploring and fighting done in a short period of time, while 4E gives you more to do at the expense of time.
ReplyDeleteThey're a little spoiled with 4E as the character generator is pretty stout and lets you consider a multitude of options, both mechanically and flavorfully, while you're working up the character. Basic doesn't need one - we roll those by hand. I didn't have one for 3E so they were trying to build them by hand and it's a lot more involved than Basic. Plus it was late and we were all tired. To salvage some of that time I'm looking at 3E character generators and thinking that might get the mechanical stuff out of the way so we can actually play next time.
Oh and they're scared of AD&D - small print, less art, arcane language - I'm not getting any takers on that one yet.