Were you a 3.x hater when it was announced and are glad you made the switch?

[megamania]

When 3e was announced I was playing a 1e Greyhawk campaign. The DM bought the books at Gem Con and liked them. Told us he wanted to try it and if it worked, we would switch to it.

Have not looked back ever since............


3e didn't spoke me. It was a change.

4e bugs me only because I am still happy with 3e. 2e had a lot of problems which 3e addressed. I don't have any major issues with 3e and thus don't want to switch to 4e.

 

[an_idol_mind]

I hated the concept of 3e. I thought 2nd edition was the best the game could get. When 3e got previewed in Dragon Magazine, I was intrigued because a lot of the rules changes mirrored house rules I had already been working with. I ordered the Player's Handbook, and stopped hating it immediately. Not only had it fixed a lot of stuff I had house-ruled before, but it also reintroduced certain concepts from older editions I really liked, like the monk class and ability score modifiers being universal for each score. In about a month, I went from hating the concept of a new edition to embracing it completely.

 

[TerraDave]

did you design the poll so the results would look like that on purpose?

 

[drothgery]

I guess literally "I got it and liked it", but I wasn't a hater, so I ended up picking "Other" in the poll. The 3.0 previews looked like the game was going in a direction I wanted to go, and I wasn't in a tabletop game at the time, so I just picked up the books; I didn't find anybody to play with until a year or so later, when I moved.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I was happy playing OD&D until AD&D came along mere months after I started playing. I enjoyed AD&D even through incorporating Unearthed Arcana though we quickly dropped a large amount of those rules we tried out from it. I enjoyed 1E but had few reservations about switching to 2E as there were so many rules improvements. They'd dropped a few things I really missed (like monks) and I rapidly came to dislike the general tone of the writing and pointless changes (demons and devils renamed). Still and all I enjoyed playing 2E through endless splatbooks, and Skills and Powers, and right up until TSR killed the whole freakin' deal with their corporate stupidities.

At that point I EAGERLY awaited ANYTHING that would save the game from oblivion. By the time of WotC's announcement of 3E, even though I still enjoyed playing 2E, I was DONE with that system. I wanted changes. One of my biggest disappointments in 2E was the fact that they didn't have the testicular fortitude to change the things they damned well knew really needed changing from ground up. I posted as much online on a regular basis.

So, "Bought it and liked it" just doesn't cover it for me. I liked it from the moment I heard the word - sight unseen, and liked it more with each leak of actual information on what would become ENworld. Hell, I went to GenCon with money I really shouldn't have been spending because I was so excited at the prospect of a new edition. I attended all kinds of events with the designers to learn not just what the final product was but why they changed this or didn't change that and how they thought it all should work.

 

[Wombat]

When 3e came out, I had recently moved to a new town. I had not played D&D in many years, though I had been a continual gamer. Essentially somewhere around the time 1st edition AD&D came out, I left D&D behind me. And I had no real intention of picking up 3e, but a buddy of mine, who had a friend who worked at WotC, picked me up the core books as a Christmas gift.

In the new town I found a pretty good group of gamers, but they broke up in less than a year. When they broke up, I put out my shingle as GM for a wide variety of games ... and got no nibbles whatsoever. So I posted on one internet site that I'd be willing to run D&D 3e heavily modified and with a strong tongue-in-cheek riff and I literally had a twenty person waiting list within a week.

For the next couple of years I ran D&D 3e with various modifications, trying to bash it into a form that I liked. It wasn't a bad game, but it wasn't the game that I naturally loved. So I played around with wound points/vitality, spell points, no alignment, AU (yeah! Go, Monte!), and other bits and pieces. I liked my settings, but I was never entirely fond with the rules themselves.

Then I finally convinced my group to take the plunge and try something other than D&D.

When we heard that 4e was annouced, our collective opinion was, "Yeah? So?" Yes, by dint of effort and perseverence I had convinced the group that there are games other than D&D and that a change in editions of that game will have little to no impact on us.

So ... I was brought back to D&D by necessity, had some fun as long as I tinkered with it mightily, and now have Left The Fold again. Seems good.

 

[Valiant]

Greetings. You didn't have an option for my experiance, so I didn't vote. :\

I hadn't played D&D since about 84' (left after the sillyness of Dragonlance became the norm and 2E popped its ugly head). When WOTC first launched 3E I flipped the pages, liked it, purchased all the books and played. Then I realized very gradually all of its malignant problems (skills and feats bloat, loss of the archetypes, roling to determine anything, long prep work, difficult to run combat, too much record keeping etc. etc.) and no longer liked it.
So, 2 years ago I broke out the old books we started playing 1E, haven't looked back since.

Anyhow, to each there own, but it would have been nice if you included an option: Liked 3E at first, hated it later. I think the majority of people that don't like 3E gave it a shot and tried to like it before hating it (at least that was my experiance).

 

[Sunderstone]

I was psyched about 3rd edition before the release, I couldnt wait to play. 2nd edition definately needed a jump start.

As for 4E, no way. 3.5 is fine the way it is, and from what Im hearing about some of the changes being implemented, Im not looking forward to it at all. 3.5 is where Ill stay.

 

[Zendragon]

did you design the poll so the results would look like that on purpose?

Not what I was planning, but a cool effect none the less. The main reason for the poll was to see if the 2nd Grognards turned into 3.x Grognards after they actually checked it out. With all the ranting about 4th coming out, just wanted to see if people would actually give it a chance when it does come out.

 

[+5 Keyboard!]

I was very skeptical of it at first. I had the fortune of playin in a friend's game who jumped into it immediately, so I learned the system while running my own 2E game and had a chance to evaluate it. Once the Core Rule books were out, I bought everything and switched over after seeing the kinks worked out in my buddy's game. Once I started running, it was very clear that it was superior.

My gut feeling is that it will be the same way with 4E, but I won't make that jump until I've gotten my hard-earned dollars out of the 3.5 products I invested in first.