What did you never like in 3e?

[StreamOfTheSky]

-Turn Undead rules (though controlling them as an evil cleric is solid awesome)
-Level Drain / Excessive ability damage (like the monstrous vermin that can gimp you with just one bad save roll)
-The game is nearly impossible without any casters in the party (considering they make up half the "standard party" perhaps this isn't a "flaw")
-Some of the changes from 3E to 3.5 like weapons rules, spotting rules, jump rules, I think reach...
-Importance of gear for character power, especially if you can't cast
-Spells like Knock that not only let you fill a role, but also auto-win at it
-Punishing fallen characters with a level loss. Often times IME PCs died by being...heroic.
-Full casting progression prestige classes. Partly it's the fault of the base classes for often offering nothing at higher levels beyond +1 caster level
-My friends being so content w/ 3E that they won't try Arcana Evolved

 

[Cryptos]

One thing I definitely didn't like was having to multiclass to access other skills, and one house rule I favored was class skill swapping: you could trade one of your existing class skills for another skill on a one-to-one basis, provided that it was worked into the character's background or role.

Vancian spellcasting is definitely another.

 

[Gothmog]

There was a lot, which is why we gave up 3.x after a few years. Some of the big problems my group had were:

- Focus on mastery of the rules, rather than mastery of playing the game
- Rules-opaqueness: I can't think of any session we played where we werent' referring to the books to clarify a rule at least 5+ times per game, and all of us knew the rules very well. Thats too much- the focus should be on playing, rather than fiddly bits with the rules.
- Prestige Classes- WAAAY too many prereqs to qualify for them without planning from 1st level (and a secondary pet peeve of people planning their PC from level 1-20 before even starting to play the game)
- Socerer class- I mean really, why? How are they so different from wizards?
- Druid being a shapeshifting monster with a traveling zoo following him
- Multiclassing- it was horrendously broken in 3.x
- Stupidly powerful caster classes, stupidly weak non-casters
- Iterative attacks
- Buffing out the wazoo
- ECL/LA
- CR
- VERY slow gameplay
- Magic items needing XP to make
- Treating monsters like characters in terms of statting-up. This resulted in a massive workload for the DM
- At high levels (10+), the d20 roll became irrelevant because bonuses were high enough for auto success or failure. The underlying math was basically wonky.
- Ability damage and having to recalculate everything when it happened
- AoOs
- Feats- a good idea, but badly implemented. 4e does a much better job with keeping feats managable without being cumbersome
- Fast leveling
- X-mas tree syndrome. Magic is fine in a D&D game, but do we need this much? Stat boost items were especially annoying.
- Domains- these pretty much insured every cleric was the same except for 2 spells. Spheres were MUCH better.
- Dungeonpunk
- REALLY craptacular art

 

[justanobody]

And I don't mean 'the math' or 'high level NPC creation'.

What were the quirks of 3e that always made you go 'huh'?

-Removal of THAC0 and reversing and removing all limits to AC.
-Feats
-magic item shops
-every damn thing giving some stat modifier
-saves made from former sub-ability scores and removal of saves as they were
-WotC mutilating AD&D, dropping the Advanced, and regurgitating it back out as something new like a stripper with new bossoms.

 

[Fifth Element]

-WotC mutilating AD&D, dropping the Advanced, and regurgitating it back out as something new like a stripper with new bossoms.

I think the OP was looking for more specific items, and less flamebait.

 

[justanobody]

I think the OP was looking for more specific items, and less flamebait.

Changing the name of a variant AD&D was something that should make people go "huh?".

 

[Fifth Element]

Changing the name of a variant AD&D was something that should make people go "huh?".

Keeping the name AD&D when there was no longer a plain D&D on the market would have been a very "huh?" decision.

 

[Andor]

Wow.

Is there anything that has been mentioned on this thread that somebody else didn't have the exact opposite reation too?

-Removal of THAC0 and reversing and removing all limits to AC.

Whoever put forth the idea to get rid of THAC0 should receive a Nobel Prize!

 

[justanobody]

Keeping the name AD&D when there was no longer a plain D&D on the market would have been a very "huh?" decision.

Doesn't matter one bit what is "on the market".

It wouldn't have confused people that later went to play D&D, as in a game prior to AD&D, and wonder what the hell they were looking at.

Wow.

Is there anything that has been mentioned on this thread that somebody else didn't have the exact opposite reaction too?

-Removal of THAC0 and reversing and removing all limits to AC.

Whoever put forth the idea to get rid of THAC0 should receive a Nobel Prize!

No, probably not. Just shows how diverse players are.

Was THAC0 your problem, or the AC limits?

 

[Lanefan]

It'd be easier for me to list off what I *did* like, out of a system I really didn't like very much at all despite playing it for 7+ years: (the DM made a silk purse game out of a sow's ear system)

- Sorcerers were good...that's how all casters should work; no more of this annoying spell-memorization business
- Monsters that could better challenge high-level and-or powerful parties
- Monsters that actually got their bonuses for strength etc.
- Some good ideas for new monsters - always room for more of those!
- Some of the new magic items were worthwhile

The things that really stuck in my craw, as opposed to merely annoying me:

- Constructs and undead having immunity to criticals; even though it's a construct, you shold still be able to hit the key bit that holds it together
- Harshly turn-based initiative with no room for reaction or simultaneous actions, leading to some ludicrous in-game situations e.g. two or more people cannot move together as a group while in combat
- Far-too-fast level advancement
- I'm not a fan of multiclassing in general, but how they handled multiclassing into or out of a caster class really was awful
- Rangers based on Drizz't rather than Aragorn
- Feats and prestige classes got completely out of hand both in number and power
- Magic items far too easy to make and far too hard to break
- Different ExP awards for people of different levels in the same party who did the same things in a given situation
- Far too much focus on the 4-character no-hench party vs. one big opponent
- Wands and potions being limited to only replicating spells...how dull
- Some generally poor thinking on spells and how they would work at the table (one easy example is polymorph: the only mistake they made was to give it range "touch" instead of range "self", but refusal to admit this error had lead instead to no polymorph in 4e at all; a pity)

Lanefan