D&D 3E/3.5 3rd Edition Revisited - Better play with the power of hindsight?

[AMP]

I'm not quite sure how best to respond to this. Has the collective wisdom really reached the stage of thinking 3rd edition was a badly designed game but we on EnWorld might still be able to rescue it into something playable?

Lots of people played it for a very long time, including me. I am still playing it, in as much as I'm still running Pathfinder 1st edition - including at high levels.

The best way not to break the game is to agree that you are not going to break the game. If everyone agrees to that in advance then it's not necessary to have a long list of banned rules. I think the only thing I banned outright was the Black Tentacles spell, and that was because of the sheer tedium of the 3.5 grapple rules when used against large groups (I'm happy to allow it in Pathfinder games since grapple works differently).

Its great strength is that characters are incredibly customisable, so you'll never run out of things to play.

From the DM's side, I think it is important not to be too caught up in the details. All the time spent making sure enemies have the correct number of feats, skill points etc. is time that you could have been spending coming up with awesome situations. And if the PCs are having too easy a time of it, give the monsters the Advanced template from Pathfinder i.e. +4 to all ability scores.

Your last 2 paragraphs hit the nail on the head. I dearly love being able to create stuff endlessly no matter what system, and 3rd lets them clunk right into place.

 

[Alzrius]

And if the PCs are having too easy a time of it, give the monsters the Advanced template from Pathfinder i.e. +4 to all ability scores.

Don't forget that it also grants a +2 natural armor bonus to AC.

That said, I prefer to simply maximize the monster's hit points (i.e. maximum hit points per die). It doesn't change things enough to be worth a CR increase, but it (usually) does give them a few extra rounds before they're taken out.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Maybe the negative and disappointing experiences many people seem to have made with the game are not because it is a bad tool, but because we tried to make it do things it was not meant for?

Sorry, but no. The biggest problems I had were absolutely structural; the progressive failure of the CR system and how manifestly tedious even relatively early post-10th level encounters were to run. I cannot see either of those being misapplication issues.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I never really viewed prestige classes as optional any more than I did multiclassing. Sure, I know technically rules as written they were optional, but I feel as though most DMs who would say no to such things would be pilloried. (With except to some prestige classes that were just ridiculous.) I liked the idea of prestige classes, but quickly grew to disfavor them as players often had to map out their plans for advancement many levels in advanced.

This was the problem with feat chains writ large.

 

[Charlaquin]

I liked the idea of prestige classes, but quickly grew to disfavor them as players often had to map out their plans for advancement many levels in advanced.

QFT!

I feel like the intent behind all the fiddly prestige class prerequisites was so that you’d have something to build towards. And in conjunction with the advice that the GM should be judicious about what prestige classes were available in their campaign, I imagine a game where you have to be trained by an appropriate NPC to gain a prestige class, and you have no way of knowing what prestige classes you might meet a trainer for in advance. Like, imagine you’re just playing a ranger, leveling organically, and you happen to come across an Arcane Archer NPC, who’s like “I can teach you to do what I do, but not until you’ve mastered the mundane use of a bow.” Now you’ve got the long-term goal of learning the prerequisite feats in order to qualify for it. That sounds really cool in theory, but the unfortunate reality is that most players are just going to look for a prestige class (or multiple prestige classes) they want and reverse-engineer the most efficient path to qualify for it/them at as low a level as possible. Hence the old saying, “how do you build a 1st level character? Build a 20th level character, then remove 19 levels from them.”

 

[Charlaquin]

A poster on the Giant in the Playground Forums, Emperor Tippy, postulated a "Tippyverse" where NPC's with the thought processes of players would create isolated city-states connected by teleportation circles, guarded by cost-efficient Shadesteel Golems, with all resources generated by things like Create Food And Water "traps" (the trap rules being ripe for abuse), and the main concern of the powers that be is preventing "scry and die" tactics from their rivals.

The rest of the world would be a wasteland full of horrible monsters and likely an active "wight-pocalypse" as the world would be overrun with undead that have the Create Spawn ability and don't need any sustenance.

Not gonna lie, that actually sounds like a pretty sick campaign setting though.

 

[DeadlyUematsu]

I think one of the better innovations to come out of The Gaming Den was the feat per level where they largely removed all of the feat prerequisites, condensed some things, and you got... a feat per character level. I believe a similar idea could be applied with Prestige Classes where you just get the class features of one atop your base class.

 

[AMP]

Not gonna lie, that actually sounds like a pretty sick campaign setting though.

I thought the exact same thing.

 

[DeadlyUematsu]

Sorry, but no. The biggest problems I had were absolutely structural; the progressive failure of the CR system and how manifestly tedious even relatively early post-10th level encounters were to run. I cannot see either of those being misapplication issues.

Agree that it didn't work it at all. It set so many bad expectations that just chucking it led to a more harmonious game. As for the post-10th level tedium, a lot of that has to do with tolerating bad behavior. I used to have a lot of house rules to help certain players pre-calculate stuff so they could just roll some dice and move on... and they still took their sweet time. Putting them on a timer was harsh but it was the only program that produced results.

 

[James Gasik]

Not gonna lie, that actually sounds like a pretty sick campaign setting though.

Strangely, most of the time the concept came up, people on that forum were posting about how such a setting couldn't possibly work or exist, as if somehow the very concept offended them.