D&D General Why was 3.5 needed?

[kunadam]

When millions play a game, some problem surfaces that looked OK on the planning table.
The skill system was too complicated with skills that had very little to differentiate, or very narrow utility. Seperate Listen and Spot, Move Silently and Hide, etc. They needed a fix.
We see the same in 5e. Small fixes that makes life easier, but which does not qualify as a new edition.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

As an example of the flaws of 3e's skill system, not only did it have the oft-mocked Use Rope skill that survived into 3.5e, it also had the amazingly useless "Innuendo" skill.

Which was Wisdom-based. And exclusively served the purpose of letting players encode secret double meanings into their words.

Even though the Bluff skill already existed.

 

[Vaalingrade]

So that we could get to late-stage 3.5, the basic building blocks for the Good One.

 

[TwoSix]

3.0 could have been hit with a truly substantial overhaul and been republished as 3.5e--nerfing spellcasting hard because it's stupidly overpowered in all 3e-derived games, making feats actually good, rewriting the Fighter and Monk classes, fixing the deep flaws of the skill system, etc. But it wasn't, and I'm not sure WotC was actually interested in doing that level of overhaul.

To be fair, a lot of the flaws in the 3.X system weren't as obvious in the 2002-3 timeframe. There was a general awareness of them in the CharOp communities, but it definitely had not become the conventional wisdom then. The only general agreement was that ranger was weak and haste was too strong.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To be fair, a lot of the flaws in the 3.X system weren't as obvious in the 2002-3 timeframe. There was a general awareness of them in the CharOp communities, but it definitely had not become the conventional wisdom then. The only general agreement was that ranger was weak and haste was too strong.

I'm pretty sure that by that point people had figured out that Fighters being driven by feats was weaksauce and Monks were nowhere near as strong as they'd appeared on paper.

 

[Stormonu]

Interesting. I always thought 1st Edition Pathfinder as being D&D 3.75 because it mostly kept what was in 3.5 and threw in some new material for the races and classes to use.

Oh, yeah - I think just about everyone refers to PF1 as 3.75 (even me), but those second round of books encoded a lot of changes to the underlying system.

Also, it's easy to look back at the 3.0 series now and see how rickety the underlying system was/is. At the time it pushed through as much change as the old timers would tolerate without screaming about their sacred cows being slaughtered (me being one who pushed back some of the changes, especially in those 2007 books). It really took playing 5E for me to look back at those books and go "Ick! What were we thinking?"

 

[TwoSix]

I'm pretty sure that by that point people had figured out that Fighters being driven by feats was weaksauce and Monks were nowhere near as strong as they'd appeared on paper.

You'd be surprised how many "monks are too strong!" threads there were even in 2003.

 

[Micah Sweet]

To sell core books and pre-painted plastic miniatures.

Yeah, to me at least it really was a, "we want more money" issue.

 

[James Gasik]

You'd be surprised how many "monks are too strong!" threads there were even in 2003.

God yes. It's enough to make me want to ditch the Monk as a class; you can get out a spreadsheet and mathematically prove the Monk has serious design issues in any iteration, and you'll have people sticking fingers in their ears going "MONKS DESTROYED MY GAME NERF PLZ!".

 

[Micah Sweet]

"Need" is always a tricky concept with game design.

That said, 3.0 did in fact have some glaring weaknesses that needed to be addressed, ones that would have been hard to fix purely through errata--they ran a bit too deep for that. Unfortunately, a lot of the changes were only for relatively small, superficial fixes, rather than overhauling the serious issues with the system.

3.0 could have been hit with a truly substantial overhaul and been republished as 3.5e--nerfing spellcasting hard because it's stupidly overpowered in all 3e-derived games, making feats actually good, rewriting the Fighter and Monk classes, fixing the deep flaws of the skill system, etc. But it wasn't, and I'm not sure WotC was actually interested in doing that level of overhaul.

I remain unconvinced they have ever been interested in doing that level of overhaul, outside 4e.