Re:Dungeon Magazine
by smogcutter on Thursday January 14, 2021 @04:54PM
(#25783205)
That’s a good point about the 1st/3rd part split, I hadn’t really considered that.
I know that it’s not that you can’t buy a castle in 5e, and a big part of the game is grokking that the rules aren’t a list of what you can do, but how. But finding that section of the book as a kid was a real imagination kickstarter. Having it in there was just fun, even if the actual rule was clumsy and would’ve been better as a fleshed out supplement.
I really am a fan of 5e, and have been having a lot of fun running it. I wouldn’t go back to 3e (or AD&D for that matter, which was a little bit before my time), but the kitchen sink approach in 3e had a kind of charm that I could see people missing in the new, more coherent material.
3e was the first open core version (and the first version designed from the ground up at WotC, rather than pre-WotC TSR), and WotC learned a lot about the first/third-part split and what worked well in core/supplement split between 3e and 5e.
What they had for this in the core in 3e wasn’t really adequate for people who wanted rules for it (and there was a first-party supplement for it). By 5e, this kind of subsystem isn’t the kind of thing that they really do much in first-party supplements, but there is prominent third-party support leveraging the open-core nature of 5e (a feature it shares with 3e):
https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-follow...