Why doesn't 3.5 make SENSE?

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I've been playing for a year and a half and I intend to continue -- it's my first high-level adventure coming up.

As a 3.x fan, let me say with all honesty, I apologize in advance for high-level play balance in 3.x. Go in to it with an open mind.

High-level play in 3.x is among the most likely triggers of dislike towards 3.x. WotC didn't put in as much thought and consideration for high-level play balance in 3.x as they did for low- and mid-level play.

 

[Xath]

Learning D&D 3.5 just makes me mad sometimes. It doesn't make any sense. 9th-level Shapechange gives you +28 to AC, SR 32 and myriad other benefits. 8th-level Shield of Law gives you +4 to AC and SR 25 conditionally. Why would anyone build a system like that?

Was it a committee design, where one person thought "+1 to attack when the moon is full" was a fun spell and another thought "immunity to magic and a pony"? Did someone sneak into one person's carefully crafted spreadsheet game of to-hits, AC, and saves and add a spell that said "Do anything you can imagine"? Did they write spells based on "things it would be cool to do with magic" instead of "things it would be possible to do in a game"? I cannot see why you would write a spell that would make you pull out a whole new character sheet every single turn unless you had no idea that the game included other players and a DM.

I just hate that this game, so full of math and logic and flavor that is totally on my wavelength, is based on thought patterns I can't even understand. What was wrong with these people?

This thread is walking a very precarious line. We don't tolerate edition bashing here, so watch your comments.

Noumenon, next time you have a problem with an edition, express yourself without taking pot shots against the writers.

- Xath
Moderator

 

[Snoweel]

As a 4e fan I will say that all the little asymmetries (read - imbalances) of 3.x were a feature, not a bug. They were something I loved about the game, and as a DM I had final say over what options were available to players.

I remember reading in one of the 3.x books that mechanical features shouldn't be balanced against roleplay features and I thoroughly disagreed. Maybe that's good advice for tournament play, or in a game where PCs are directly opposing each other in combat, but not in the type of game I'm interested in.

Just as in real life, where not all 'options' are balanced (smoking vs non-smoking, investing vs spending every paycheck, getting a tertiary education vs leaving high-school to work on building sites, etc) I don't think every character option in an RPG should be 100% balanced either.

The style of game the players and DM agree to can make mechanical balance a minor concern.

 

[S'mon]

The writers did eventually realise that Shapechange, Wildshape & Polymorph powers - any "crack out the monster manual" powers - did not work within the overarching 3.5e paradigm. Late-era 3.5e recommends banning the spells and severely nerfing the Druid power.

 

[Crothian]

I'm not a troll, I'm in a deep love-hate relationship with the game.

If this is true then you really want to change the way you are writing. Don't continue with an attack thread where you call people stupid. Use better language and make it a positive post that presents your issues with the game and asks how other people handle it.

 

[Noumenon]

What I hate isn't the game, it's feeling like the people who made it think so differently from me. The game is fun, like a lifetime of fun, and totally customizable if you don't like parts of it, and I have players who don't abuse any of this min-max stuff. I just feel offended -- kind of like you feel when, politically, someone does something totally alien to you, like voting to give [Group X] even more power or having a first-grader arrested for carrying nailclippers. It means everything about their worldview must be totally opposite from yours.

It's weird because Magic: the Gathering spells read so elegant, so expressive of a design philosophy I can totally understand, and D&D spells read so bizarre I can hardly believe they're meant to be that way. When both games are so fantasy-themed, math-based, and nerd-friendly, I wouldn't expect there to be much of a cultural gap at all, but there is.

I also read two of the 3.5 designers' blogs and they're not that different from me philosophically either -- just the end product is. (I kind of forgot I was actually referring to real people, Xath -- I wouldn't even have posted my rant in the comments on either of their blogs, because I know they didn't do it on purpose -- it just seems like someone did it on purpose!)

In the future when I get bugged by something like the game treating +2 damage as a big reward for playing a ranger and then handing out 10d6 damage fireballs, I'll say to myself,

"What's bothering you is just that the system design isn't motivating to a mathy person, but as long as you can make it motivating to your player, it doesn't matter. Don't think 'shapechange is broken,' think 'shapechange is your player's vehicle for doing eavesdropping tricks' -- make sure he has something to eavesdrop on." Or something -- I'll find a way to be mellow.

 

[Kerrick]

As a 3.x fan, let me say with all honesty, I apologize in advance for high-level play balance in 3.x. Go in to it with an open mind.

High-level play in 3.x is among the most likely triggers of dislike towards 3.x. WotC didn't put in as much thought and consideration for high-level play balance in 3.x as they did for low- and mid-level play.

This. 3.x borrows heavily from previous editions, where "balance" was something you noticed in passing, not something you adhered to with any sort of rigidity. It was also designed with the idea that 20th level was more or less "the end", so spells like shield of law, holy word, wish, shapechange, and meteor swarm were at the top of the heap.

The writers did eventually realise that Shapechange, Wildshape & Polymorph powers - any "crack out the monster manual" powers - did not work within the overarching 3.5e paradigm. Late-era 3.5e recommends banning the spells and severely nerfing the Druid power.

Part of the problem is that they based the spells on HD, not CR (which would have at least limited new forms to some sort of equal power level). The other part is that with the sheer number of monster books out there, any spell like that quickly becomes untenable.

My thoughts on the whole issue: 3.5 has problems, yeah, but I think the d20 system itself was a work of genius - it's modular, easily modified, and can support any game system. And really, it's just a handful of spells (in the core books) that are broken - it's easy to nerf/ban those and keep playing.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

Noumenon,

When you say, "the people who made it," you seem to be referring to the game designers as a monolithic group. You might feel better about it if you stop seeing them as a monolithic "them" that supposedly all work together to create the whole.

The truth is that D&D has been the product of 1,000s of people over the years. The brilliance in what Gygax and Arneson (RIP) put together is that they started something that many others could take and change to suit. Are you familiar with the long histories of Dragon and Dungeon magazine, where hundreds of authors contributed content which was then further changed and adapted? Are you aware of how many other RPGs, CCGs, video games, novels and movies were picked over for bits to use, all of which had different creators? Some of these people probably thought a lot like you. Some of them didn't. Some of them did their best to synthesize different concepts in a way that they liked.

Personally, there are many things I would do differently. I probably wouldn't have designed the wolf-in-sheeps-clothing, a carnivorous tree stump that has a fake bunny on top. I never really cared for the 3.5 weapon size rules. I prefer grapple to be a simple opposing check rather than a series of die rolls. Every single one of those ideas, though, was created by a different person over a different period of time going back to the 1970s. D&D is more of a body of work than it is a singular system.

If it doesn't make sense, that's because it isn't a monolithic work by a single author, or even a small group. Your can't expect it to be uniform or completely logical. Some of us actually like that about D&D, and it is one of the reasons why I'm less of a fan of version 4 -- it takes away some of the need to fiddle and force things into a plausible context. I also know that that is what some folks like about it, and that's fine.

 

[pawsplay]

What I hate isn't the game, it's feeling like the people who made it think so differently from me. The game is fun, like a lifetime of fun, and totally customizable if you don't like parts of it, and I have players who don't abuse any of this min-max stuff. I just feel offended -- kind of like you feel when, politically, someone does something totally alien to you, like voting to give [Group X] even more power or having a first-grader arrested for carrying nailclippers. It means everything about their worldview must be totally opposite from yours.

Perhaps you place too much value on your own ideas. I can understand being offended by a game design (I won't play a Savage Worlds because, due to exploding, d4s are better than d6s at some of the most common difficulty numbers), but I can't imagine becoming offended by a system because you dislike certain spells.

Pathfinder came up with an easy fix for Shapechange. I can offer another: limit it to a monster of the CR of your caster level, no natural armor bonus or skill bonus can exceed your caster level/2, and you get size-based Str and Dex mods (not the native abilities scores).

 

[DaveMage]

Pathfinder came up with an easy fix for Shapechange.

This is what I was going to suggest.

Just use the Pathfinder version.