When I first encountered Dungeons and Dragons in 1979 I opened a box containing a sheet of numbers. These were to be cut out and placed upside down on the table and acted as a multisided dice. The main dungeon was the B1 dungeon and the whole was designed to introduce a new player to the game. I can remember filling the textbook with anotations in order to help me grasp so many different concepts. Every term and associated numerical value was a strange concept from armour class and hit points to levels both of characters and dungeons themselves. I can remember my disappointment that the eponymous dragon didn’t actually appear in the game. (Far too powerful for the likes of mere 1st levelers).

When the 2nd edition of the game came out I was dubious. I had bought all the books for the first version and was already moaning about the silliness of the Fiend Folio and the superfluous Wilderness Guide. I could sense the unease with which TSR had realised that they had produced the perfect product that, like the ladderless stocking, did not need any further expense once it had been bought. The 2nd edition came across as a fevered attempt to get all the punters to rebuy everything they already owned. The huge problem with the 2nd edition books where that, despite the claims that "…you discover that it’s easier to find rules during your gaming sessions and that everything seems to make more sense…" rules and tables were in fact scattered all over the place and the graphics with some exceptions were dire. A good excuse to bring out a dungeon master’s screen with all the tables in one place (getting the punters to spend more money).
Ostensibly it was the same game with a vastly improved psionics system and a very stupid unarmed combat system. As a product, the 2nd edition reached its peak with the Oriental Adventures that lifted the game to prosaic heights.

So what of the 3rd edition. The 2nd edition worked fine. Many, many hours have been spent creating vast epics and sagas under the system and it was flexible enough to allow the dungeon master free reign over the multiverse. True, there were clumsy concepts ensconced within it, but by enlarge it worked fine. So why a new system? It certainly makes more money initially from all those punters that buy yet another version of the same product because it is new and shiny.
The overhaul does make sense. The use of the 20 sided dice for most things makes sense. The new armour class system is obviously a good idea and the skills, that almost borrow something from the Call of Cthulhu game, allow the characters to develop in a richer way. What was my first impression? To be blunt, it was the way the books are written. I have had to read and reread so many areas within the book that if I were encountering the game for the first time I would have thrown it away in dispair.

For example:"Move-equivalent actions take the place of movement in a standard action or take the place of an entire partial action. Taking such an action counts as moving your speed." 
And further down the page: "Usually you don’t elect to take a partial action; the condition you are in or a decision you have made (usually a ready action) mandates its use."

Yes, these sentences do make sense, but as sentences they do nothing but confound. The books are littered with similar examples where long winded sentences rattle on with comma after comma until the reader is lost in a tangle of disconnected prose. I believe that the whole book should be reviewed in terms of grammer and in terms of how rule information is delivered so it does not come across as some sort of enigmatic riddle. There are so many cases (such as the section on Action in Combat) where the text could be simpler and clearer. Sounds like a silly gripe, but when the problem is book-wide, then it can be a big problem.

We continue to use the 2nd edition system and I continue to browse the 3rd edition until it makes some sort of sense.

Simon Todd