D&D 3E/3.5 3.X Retrospective 19 Years in Production.

[Teemu]

3rd edition was the first RPG that I ran as a GM, and 3.0 ultimately was the game that got me into the hobby. A couple of years ago I finished a 3.5 campaign from levels 1-14. It was fun because I finally implemented all these variant rules and restricted classes to reasonable tiers, but I'd say that it was probably the last 3rd edition D&D campaign I'll ever run. I think I've had my share. The last levels were quite the chore to prepare for.

Keeping classes within tiers 3 and 4 did work to retain inter-party balance though, all the way to level 14, so that was interesting to discover in practice.

 

[Zardnaar]

It's a hot broken mess that rewards system mastery, leading to a system mastery arms race.

I used to love it.

Can be I think the way to play 3E is don't go out of your way to break it.

Requires self control though.

 

[ccs]

3xPF1 can be as broken or not broken as your group chooses to allow it to be.
Had my Sunday group not torn itself apart player-wise over politics I'm sure I'd still either be running or playing PF1. Sadly....

In our 5e game? We have one guy who loves 3.5 Two of us have PF1 xp. Another only knows 5e.
Now & then the idea of PF is gently floated as I have a friend from the defunct Sunday game who, once the pandemic eases enough, will be looking for a game. He was also running a campaign when the group fell apart. And this campaign? It's perfectly suited to & was at a logically perfect point to add new players.
So if he were to join the Thur. group.... He could DM for awhile & give me a break.
Me? I'm all for PF1
The other players? One is definitely down for it. One can likely be persuaded.

The other guy? He objects to PF1 on the grounds that "That system is broken!" This from the the 3.5 fan.... ??

 

[Stormonu]

As @payn noted there were enough people who played and enjoyed high level 3E, I just wasn't one of them.

It does take some self-restraint to keep from breaking things in 3E/PF1, I've done it a couple of times without trying and had some players who were dogged determined to do so in my game. Luckily I was able to keep it from spinning too far out of control and let the players still have fun, but when it got to about 13th level, it was clear it was time to retire the current game and move on to a new campaign.

 

[Bacon Bits]

At this point I see 3.x as something that had to happen in order for D&D to progress and, in some ways, for the hobby to progress. That's a little unfair because other games certainly have been quite popular, but if we think of D&D as just the fantasy TTRPG for dungeon adventuring, then I think it's true.

The problem the 3e devs faced was that, although they had a huge amount of rules, they didn't know what rules they needed and what rules they didn't because, well, nobody played 1e/2e the way it was written. Plus the fact that the game slowly evolved between 1974 and 1978 by a variety of disparate individuals with different goals and different ideas. Every rule was it's own system, and every system felt like a house of cards.

So, 3e's goal was, first and foremost, to systematize and formalize the game. To unify and clarify and codify. To describe and expand rather than limit. To introduce design where none had existed before. Once 3e was there, then at that point you could actually see what you really need to play the game. It turns out the scaling assumptions from AD&D completely broke 3e's class balance. It turns out that skills that do just one thing aren't very good. It turns out that monsters are pretty obnoxious if they're all as annoying to make as a PC. It turns out that there are a ton of things that, while cool to define, just work better when you let the DM make it up at the table. 3e was the first time the game had a real unified system that could be examined. It's the first version that was designed holistically from the ground up. That way we could see how bad the warts really were.

 

[cbwjm]

At this point I see 3.x as something that had to happen in order for D&D to progress and, in some ways, for the hobby to progress. That's a little unfair because other games certainly have been quite popular, but if we think of D&D as just the fantasy TTRPG for dungeon adventuring, then I think it's true.

I feel the exact same way about 4e.

 

[GreyLord]

Just a correction...

It's 1974-2000 for the old D&D line. Just like PF was backwards compatible with 3e, all AD&D 2e was backwards compatible all the way back to the original D&D.

That's 26 years, or 25 years if you just count until 1999.

If you include the more recent releases in 2012 and the PDF support, it's even longer.

Just a note on length.

On that note though, PF1e is STILL supported and being printed. It's decreased a LOT in how many are purchasing the books (if Amazon is any indicator), but the books are still available (in their new smaller, paperback form, of which I have most of them). This would seem to show that when August of this year rolls around, even if no new material is being produced by Paizo directly, new products (the paperbacks) have been arriving and the system is still ACTIVE making it having been around for 21 years.

Don't mourn or grieve yet, it's still alive and kicking. No need for memorials or graves yet.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I feel the exact same way about 4e.

I think 3e could have forked to either 4e or 5e, but I also think that both a 4e-like and a 5e-like system had to happen. I think 6e will be mostly 5e-like, but I'm really hoping that they'll make more 4e style monsters. (Truthfully, though, I expect the overriding aspects of 6e will be how online-connected it is, not changes to the system.) I don't think 4e makes a great version of D&D, but I do think some aspects should be incorporated into D&D (monster design, primarily).

4e is exactly what I'd expect to happen when you take a single character skirmish combat game and try to turn it into a TTRPG with no real alterations on what the character abilities were. Honestly, I'd like to see a 4e style game still continue to exist alongside D&D. It's a great game for people who want high depth tactical combat, and it's one that I think would benefit from a real revision and cleanup (not to mention better online resources). I think essentials was the wrong direction, as it felt like it was trying to bring back people who didn't like the new system and just turned off the people who did like it.

Maybe that system is PF2 -- I don't know, I loaned by PF2 book to a friend in March 2020 and I haven't seen him since then, although my first take was that the game spent 5-6 levels too many getting you to what felt like a minimum viable character -- but there's a lot to like about 4e as a game, just not with the D&D branding. It's like an M. Night Shayamalan movie. The movies are fairy tales with happy endings, but some idiot keeps marketing them as horror thrillers. The movies aren't bad (well, some of them certainly are) they're just drawing in the wrong audiences expecting the wrong movie.

 

[cbwjm]

I think 3e could have forked to either 4e or 5e, but I also think that both a 4e-like and a 5e-like system had to happen. I think 6e will be mostly 5e-like, but I'm really hoping that they'll make more 4e style monsters. (Truthfully, though, I expect the overriding aspects of 6e will be how online-connected it is, not changes to the system.) I don't think 4e makes a great version of D&D, but I do think some aspects should be incorporated into D&D (monster design, primarily).

4e is exactly what I'd expect to happen when you take a single character skirmish combat game and try to turn it into a TTRPG with no real alterations on what the character abilities were. Honestly, I'd like to see a 4e style game still continue to exist alongside D&D. It's a great game for people who want high depth tactical combat, and it's one that I think would benefit from a real revision and cleanup (not to mention better online resources). I think essentials was the wrong direction, as it felt like it was trying to bring back people who didn't like the new system and just turned off the people who did like it.

Maybe that system is PF2 -- I don't know, I loaned by PF2 book to a friend in March 2020 and I haven't seen him since then, although my first take was that the game spent 5-6 levels too many getting you to what felt like a minimum viable character -- but there's a lot to like about 4e as a game, just not with the D&D branding. It's like an M. Night Shayamalan movie. The movies are fairy tales with happy endings, but some idiot keeps marketing them as horror thrillers. The movies aren't bad (well, some of them certainly are) they're just drawing in the wrong audiences expecting the wrong movie.

4e definitely had some great ideas, some kind of ended up in 5e, others which I think would have been good to keep for 5e were left out, things like tougher 1st level PCs and healing surges.

I actually think that if they had started with essentials, 4e would have gone on for longer. When I finally got around to looking at the 4e essentials fighter for instance I wondered why they didn't start with it.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Just a correction...

It's 1974-2000 for the old D&D line. Just like PF was backwards compatible with 3e, all AD&D 2e was backwards compatible all the way back to the original D&D.

I keep seeing this statement made and I just don't agree. White box OD&D is patently incompatible with Basic D&D, and those are both incompatible with AD&D. If you have a straight up White Box Fighting Man, his Str only affects how quickly he earns experience. That's it. A Basic D&D Fighter only has d8 HD and gets no percentile strength.

The games used the same Monster Manual. That's all. The games are otherwise not compatible. You could run 1e and 2e AD&D characters in the same party, but you wouldn't want to vary that much and there was never really a reason to do so.