D&D General Why was 3.5 needed?

[Micah Sweet]

When millions play a game, some problem surfaces that looked OK on the planning table.
The skill system was too complicated with skills that had very little to differentiate, or very narrow utility. Seperate Listen and Spot, Move Silently and Hide, etc. They needed a fix.
We see the same in 5e. Small fixes that makes life easier, but which does not qualify as a new edition.

I actually liked the skill split, since it increases verisimilitude. Classes just needed more skill points (especially the fighter). Of course, Level Up's specialization system works better for me now anyway.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I'm fairly certain that someone high up at WotC said -- in later interviews -- that 3.5 was planned from before 3.0 was even released. It was always going to happen. WotC decided the only way they could justify buying TSR in the first place was to sell two editions worth of D&D books. 3.5 would've happened even if the design of 3.0 was perfect.

As it happened, 3.0 was far from perfect and 3.5 didn't go nearly far enough to correct some of the fundamental issues. Not really surprising on either side given how significant the 3.0 redesign was.

 

[Micah Sweet]

God yes. It's enough to make me want to ditch the Monk as a class; you can get out a spreadsheet and mathematically prove the Monk has serious design issues in any iteration, and you'll have people sticking fingers in their ears going "MONKS DESTROYED MY GAME NERF PLZ!".

There may have been a culture aspect to monk-hate as well, since the class never met the "trappings of medieval Europe" assumed standard.

 

[Corinnguard]

There may have been a culture aspect to monk-hate as well, since the class never met the "trappings of medieval Europe" assumed standard.

True. It's also because a Monk was basically a cloistered cleric in medieval Europe. If WoTC used this version of the Monk instead of the Wuxia-like Monk, would anyone have played it?

 

[GSHamster]

In my opinion, 3.5 was an experiment to see if WotC could upgrade some of the rules in place without "forcing" all the players to buy new books and invalidating the old books.

Sort of like what Magic: the Gathering does. Magic has upgraded and changed its rules several times in its history, sometimes significantly. However, the older cards are still playable and more or less do what they are designed to do.

So the same thing with 3.0 to 3.5. The rules were fixed a bit, but ideally people could still mostly play with their 3.0 books and maybe get a new 3.5 book eventually. The two versions could coexist.

However, the experiment failed. The player base saw 3.5 as basically a new edition, but not sweeping enough for a new edition, and felt that WotC was gouging them, forcing them to buy new books and trashing their existing collections. I think the lesson WotC learned is that you can't make major changes to an edition's rules, only add new things and tinker around the edges.

 

[see]

So, according to Monte Cook, the original, in-they-year-2000 plan for "3.5" was that, after a few years, they'd take all the errata that had been generated, update the core rulebooks with that errata, and issue the books with all-new art. This would mirror what they did with 2nd edition (the 1989 vs. 1994 versions of the PHB and DMG) and cause a sales bump.

3.5 as delivered went much farther than that on the rules, and didn't do that on the art. To my knowledge nobody with insider knowledge has coherently explained exactly what happened.

The true "breaking" changes (not mere revisions of what powers a class got when, or spell descriptions, or the like) were the rework of the weapon-and-size rules (particularly as they faced size S PC races) and the switch from the face/reach rules (where a large creature like a horse might take up a 5-by-10 area, two 5-foot battle mat squares) to the space/reach rules (where large creatures always took up 2x2 squares). The latter, combined with an increased emphasis on giving things in terms of battle mat squares, looks like an anticipation of the coming miniatures sales push.

 

[MGibster]

It actually had a large cooling effect, a lot of 3rd party publishers got burned holding 3.0 content suddenly people no longer wanted, and a fair number of players turned away who did not want to make the switch.

I felt as though the changes from 3.0 to 3.5 did not justify the purchase of a whole new core set of D&D rules so I opted out. I didn't buy anything from WotC until 5th edition in 2014.

 

[billd91]

Monte Cook's review of 3.5 can be found here, thanks to the internet archive: REVIEWS Monte Cook shares his thoughts

 

[Retreater]

Monte Cook's review of 3.5 can be found here, thanks to the internet archive: REVIEWS Monte Cook shares his thoughts

MC: "When we were designing 3.0, one of our guiding principles was, 'If you're going to make a change, make it clearly a change.' The reason for this guideline is that subtle changes are confusing. New editions shouldn't be any more confusing than necessary. Revisions shouldn't be confusing at all. Changing spell names, changing feat names, switching around the skills, and so on are subtle changes. Why are subtle changes bad, particularly for a revision? Because they trip players up and encourage bad decisions."

I guess we can infer what he thinks of OneD&D?

 

[Corinnguard]

"They're at it again? Didn't they learn from the last History check I asked them to make?"