D&D 3E/3.5 Edition Experience - Did/Do you Play 3rd Edtion D&D? How Was/Is it?

[teitan]

I see some websites will discuss AD&D2e as the “forgotten edition” but to me. It’s 3.0. No one talks about it but when you go back and look at reactions to 3.5 when it originally launched a LOT of people were very unhappy. People complained about the ranger sure (people complain about it in every edition as far I can tell anyway), and people didn’t like the changes in 3.5 for the most part. I did a look back and a lot were complaining about the nerf to buffs and several of the small changes that happened. Most were saying they were going to grab the ranger from the SRD and call it good. Monte posted a review that had people riled up (no longer available) but was filled with valid points about how it changed the game. But a year or so later and it was forgotten. I remember buying 3.5 clearly and for a bit the last handful of years I thought I was misremembering the disdain for the release (not the game itself) but how it was put out and how much it changed.

I think the short stretch and increased popularity made the original 3e get forgotten. It was the shortest lived edition. I also think until 5e it was the last edition that was still recognizable as a grognard D&D to an extent. It changed a lot from 1&2e but it really was a clean up.

one thing about 3e that started getting to me and it kind of carries into 4e was the over reliance on feats. They were cool and all but with the shift from 3e to 3.5 and the emphasis placed on feats it seemed more “no you can’t unless you have the feat” for almost everything and not by design but because they would eventually put out a feat for maneuver a or maneuver b and it would be something simple like tripping people. 3e didn’t really have that problem but it was probably coming.

I’ve been pretty negative in this thread. I did super enjoy 3e and 3.5 for a long time. My burn out was super quick. Like 4 months I went from “favorite edition” to oMG give me 4e already. I would say, comfortable that 3e and 3.5 are tied for my second favorite and AD&D ties with it though I am loving Swords & Wizardry. 3e cleaned it up, streamlined the bloat the 2e had become and kept the flavor of priests and specialist wizards really well.

 

[haakon1]

My favorite edition. All these years, I run it with the 3.5e PHB, without the unnecessary classes & species, and stopping around 12th level. I still it’s the best version of the original AD&D, which I never got jaded on.

 

[teitan]

Well you all done did it and got Mrs. Teitan all riled up. I ordered a set of 3.0 core books plus a MM2 and FRCS. She’s gonna get you all! Horrible people!

 

[billd91]

I see some websites will discuss AD&D2e as the “forgotten edition” but to me. It’s 3.0. No one talks about it but when you go back and look at reactions to 3.5 when it originally launched a LOT of people were very unhappy. People complained about the ranger sure (people complain about it in every edition as far I can tell anyway), and people didn’t like the changes in 3.5 for the most part. I did a look back and a lot were complaining about the nerf to buffs and several of the small changes that happened. Most were saying they were going to grab the ranger from the SRD and call it good. Monte posted a review that had people riled up (no longer available) but was filled with valid points about how it changed the game. But a year or so later and it was forgotten. I remember buying 3.5 clearly and for a bit the last handful of years I thought I was misremembering the disdain for the release (not the game itself) but how it was put out and how much it changed.

There were some really, really important fixes in 3.5 - the ranger, the bard, the Harm spell. But there were also a lot of changes that just seemed like mission creep and were largely unnecessary even if they did continue regularizing aspects of the game.

The nerf to buffs - a lot of buffs had those coming because they had emerged as dominating strategies. How many spell casters tied up their resources in stat buffing spells? With the right metamagic, they had gotten out of control and needed pruning back - though I might agree that 1 minute/level was pruning them back too much.

 

[Erdric Dragin]

To this day I still think this edition is far superior. It did have issues that needed to clean up and I believe Paizo's Pathfinder did a great job of making 3.5 even better and more fun and versatile (hence the misnomer of calling Pathfinder D&D 3.75).

I do DM with 5e but only with complete tabletop newbs. As in, they have zero experience with RPGs entirely, even video game ones. After they get good experience with the game, I immediately chuck them into my 3.5/PF hybrid game.

 

[Flamestrike]

3rd was a lot of fun. It definitely let me indulge my inner power gamer, that's for sure. Between kits, and equipment, and prestige classes, and all the splat in general, there was a ton of room to play the optimization game.

That is 3.P in a nutshell. That's the game.

They're systems that require obscene levels of system mastery. Hundreds of trap options; classes that dont do what they advertise themselves as doing (hello Monk), yawning gaps in power levels and bloat everywhere.

The actual game was developing system mastery and crawling over splat books and crunching together builds. Trawling through thousands of feats and traits and PrCs and spells and items to slap together some obscene 'build' and show off your system mastery with some OP combination of abilities.

Anyone that has ever sat down at a table with a CRB Fighter, CRB Monk and an Archivist/ Crusader/ Warblade/ Sword Sage/ Ruby Knight Vindicator with Persistent Spells galore spamming Wraithstrike and an Incantatrix/ Ultimate Magus/ Wizard or whatever immune to Daze and spamming Celerity spells or whatever has seen this; the game is played (and won) at the System mastery stage.

The end result is players would be hopelessly outclassed by others at the table (making the DMs job impossible, and the game not fun). You needed a table where everyone had the same levels of system mastery for the game to function and for players to play in the same game.

What I like about 5E is there arent any trap options. There might be some that are 'suboptimal' (like TWF for example) but not total traps. You can sit down and create a character, and unless you're intentionally trying to cripple yourself, you can play the game without there being yawning gaps between the abilities of different characters depending on the player in questions mastery of the system. There is very little buyers remorse about choosing to play the 'wrong' class (a trap class) as well.

 

[Flamestrike]

Honestly; the only way to play it is to limit every PC to CRB + 1, treat ToB as a Core rule book, and nix casters down to 5E slots per day (more at low level, less at high level) or some other nerf to reign them in a bit at high levels.

That leaves you with a slightly more balanced game between martials and casters, leaves in all the options for your players to mess with, but also eases your job at knowing all the splat, and stops 99 percent of the broken builds out there.

 

[Garyda]

And at the time, every month or so, we'd get a "hey, I just picked up this new Complete xxx and I wanna use Feat yyy from it." or "the YYY book is out, I think I want to rrebuild my character into ridiculously overpowered PrC zzz - you need to design a rebuild quest."

Try designing a campaign for a bunch of hundredth level charaters out of the original three dinky little books. There have always been power players. There are always going to be characters hunting for an edge and that includes the real world as well as the fantasy learn to deal with them. No is a word that can be hard to say to some people but for some people it is essential if you are going to retain your sanity.

 

[atanakar]

To this day I still think this edition is far superior. It did have issues that needed to clean up and I believe Paizo's Pathfinder did a great job of making 3.5 even better and more fun and versatile (hence the misnomer of calling Pathfinder D&D 3.75).

I do DM with 5e but only with complete tabletop newbs. As in, they have zero experience with RPGs entirely, even video game ones. After they get good experience with the game, I immediately chuck them into my 3.5/PF hybrid game.

Experiences vary. My current group of players started with Pathfinder 1e. They felt the system was too crunchy. They switched to D&D 5e with me as a DM. I have a feeling we will be playing an even more streamlined system in the future.

 

[Blue]

There is no one answer I have for this.

When 3.0 first came out, I fell in love with it. Hard. My favorite system even with the years of great adventures I played in AD&D 2nd.

When I finally ended the last 3.5 camapign I was running (well into the 4e era), I hated the system with a passion. High level prep as a DM was so intensive. So much player crunch and PrCs meant that PCs were so much more powerful than if they were straight PHHB classes. Building foes by the rules took so much time. I had to do ridiculous amounts of prep. Characters were not balanced against each other as different players had different amounts of system mastery. There were rules for everything - but they were scattered across books. I could rememebr there was an actual rule and waste 5 minutes looking for it just to make a ruling for now to move on - learned after wasting 20 minutes looking too many times. And some of the new crunch would stealth change rules. Like if a feat now allowed a character to do X, that kinda means a character couldn't do X without the feat, even if I would normally have given them a chance.

On the player side I needed to plan out my character to high level before starting play. Because I wanted features from PrCs A and B, and to get the requisites I needed to take PrC C and feats 1, 2 and 3. Oh, if I'm this race I can take a replacement level for that class which gives me some other requisite I need. I needed to watch the order to get max ranks of skills by particular times to I could pick up the feats at the levels they were offered because otherwise I'd be three levels behind in meeting my prerequisites. Oh no, I need a higher INT to get the skills by the right time because they are cross-class which mean I need to rearrange my ability scores. The group I was with would raise the bar and if you didn't work out powerful characters you'd be left behind and couldn't contribute meaningfully to what the DM was putting out to challenge the rest.

I literally vowed to never run it again. Which is nothing but bravado, but still - I felt the need.

So 3.0 with core only was an amazing step forward. 3.5 core is likely the same thing. Adding in a few splat books might be okay. My loathing of the system was love twisted by a player-crunch-every-month hardcover book to buy and incorporate.