Compare character sheets for a moment. Hand a 2e player a 3e character sheet and he cannot read it. He will have absolutely no idea where any of the numbers come from.
This is precisely the opposite of my experience. I played 2e off of other people's books; the first book I owned was the 3.0 MM. And I basically learned the rules from it. There was not a lot of explanation in there, but everything was so intuitive I actually figured out where the modifiers came from and what most of the terms meant. Most of my group similarly had an easy time and created and played 3e characters right out of the box with no effort.
Even in Chargen, nothing is the same. The proficiency system in 2e is replaced by 3e skills which work entirely differently and are generated entirely differently. Never minding the lack of weapon skills. Feats are completely new in 3e and did not exist at all in 2e. Virtually every spell works differently in 3e than it did in 2e since the area of effect rules are completely different. Combat isn't even in the same ballpark.
I pretty much agree with this. But in most cases, the 3e rules were exactly what one would expect. The skill system for example, was new, but it left all of us asking why things didn't always work this way. After all, it's the same fundamental mechanic that 2e uses for attack rolls, only with the math not backwards and a choice of where to put your points. Feats were likewise new, but an obvious extension of NWPs.
2e had no need for miniatures. 3e is based heavily on the grid.
Don't get this. I've only used a grid occasionally. Culturally, I associate it more with 2e, though I can see how some people might find one helpful to track AoOs. To me, 4e is the one that is based on the grid, with all the movement related powers and speeds expressed in squares.
Never minding special maneuvers like disarm or grapple.
Yep, those are confusing.
Adventure writing is very different.
Never having written one, I wouldn't know.
The only real difference is 4e added powers. Skills, stats, everything else is the same. A 3e player can look at a 4e character sheet and understand it without reading any of the rule books.
Given how much information is in the powers, and how difficult they are to read, I struggled with it. The recharge mechanism is tough to comprehend; the only things that give you uses per day are mostly monster abilities and a few class abilities. Do I understand what the phrase "once per day" literally means? Sure. Do I know how to use such an ability in play or value it during character creation? No. The writing of the powers themselves also has a lot of new jargon and formatting conventions that I'm sure are fine once you get used to them but are really imposing for non-initiates.
The primary difference between 3e and 4e is flavour. 4e changed a LOT of the flavour. Totally agree there. But mechanically? 3e and 4e are most definitely d20 games.
Don't strongly disagree with any of this, but I still think the learning curve is much lower for 2e-3e.
The whole "back to the dungeon" approach. Strongly gamist with a flavouring of sim on top.
I'm not sure where that phrase comes from. I only ever ran one very small dungeon in 3e. It seemed poorly suited to the concept (either that or our group is). Nor do I see a ton of it in the books. Dungeonscape was one of the last 3.5 releases; I don't see a huge amount of support for creating dungeon-style environments before that; some very basic stuff in the DMG and you could maybe use the SBG for that and pull a few traps out of the rogue splatbooks.
To me, the entire 2e-3e transition is summarized as this:
In 2e, I always took "Obscure Knowledge" (an NWP IIRC). I liked the idea of being not just smart but full of practical knowledge. But really, that ability mostly consisted of saying to the DM "I use my obscure knowledge" and him arbitrarily deciding whether I had anything useful in my head. Maybe rolling one undifferentiated die.
In 3.0, you had a Knowledge skill with subspecialties. You had a number that scaled, and you chose how to invest in it. You had none, some, or maxed, and your skill depended on whether it was a class skill. DCs scaled in the same way. There were clear examples for what a DC in a particular knowledge skill meant. There were circumstance modifiers. Ultimately, the DM still decided what you knew, but the rules covered this topic with much more granularity, while using the same d20 we already owned.
And sure enough, my players have probably rolled more Knowledge checks than attack rolls during my time DMing.
Different? Very. Problematically so? Definitely not.
