D&D 3E/3.5 Why 3.5 Worked

[ccs]

Why 3.5 Worked

You want to know why? It's simple. Because out there in reality few actually played the game in all the awful ways you read about here online.

 

[Don Durito]

Why 3.5 Worked

You want to know why? It's simple. Because out there in reality few actually played the game in all the awful ways you read about here online.

Well yeah. Vast amounts of people moved on to other game systems before plumbing such depths.

 

[Catolias]

Well yeah. Vast amounts of people moved on to other game systems before plumbing such depths.

And there are a lot of neck beards who got off on finding that mechanical awesome pc they’d plot from zero to epic.

I once banned an actual player (fairly new to our group) for actually trying (and utterly failing) to pull the wool over my eyes and convince me that a pc having 10 levels of red wizard, a circle made up of lower level red wizard followers, levels in chosen of mystra, undeath, and reserves of strength all in combination on the same character wasnt broken. This was after he first suggested and was refused the option to build something along the lines of a more tame (but still titanically broken) pun pun type character.

Also, this is the honest thing about being DM. You have to make rulings and sometimes its not easy. I’ll admit for 3.5, determining what rules applied was a key thing to make a ruling on.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

And there are a lot of neck beards who got off on finding that mechanical awesome pc they’d plot from zero to epic.



Also, this is the honest thing about being DM. You have to make rulings and sometimes its not easy. I’ll admit for 3.5, determining what rules applied was a key thing to make a ruling on.

I agree. Id like to add a little contextual knowledge on how i view a situation like the one that happened. Because in his case i think it goes deeper than just rules and balance and powergaming.

Its a lot harder (and sometimes more necessary) call to be that guy who bans a player whole sale and not just some rules. You never know who might be upset by the decision. But sometimes you gotta. Provided its a game that everyone entered into with it in mind powergaming can even be fine. Trying to lie really insultingly stupid lies to the dm and the whole group though...(which is basically what shenanigans like that amount to)...thats something you should feel safe banning someone for right away. If they wont respect your group and if they will deceive like that, you dont want that kind of person around you.

If someone bold face tells you they arent building a god but they totally are building a god and its really obvious they dont respect you or your players intelligence or trust, ban them.

The fall out is far better than the fallout from letting it just happen would be.

 

[Umbran]

Well yeah. Vast amounts of people moved on to other game systems before plumbing such depths.

If that were true, we'd have seen "vast amounts" of sales of other games. But that didn't seem to happen.

Not everyone plays to optimize so much that they run into the issues mentioned above, and these people can play the game pretty much indefinitely.

 

[Quartz]

Prepping for a high level encounter, especially involving NPCs, took hours and hours

Bah. Jot down the basics, decide on the major spells (handwave lower-level spells), major items, and so on. Only if the NPC is going to be with the PCs for an extended time, and possibly played do you then go into the minutiae. Otherwise it's just not worth it. Or just steal a NPC from some source and change the name.

 

[Quartz]

That whole build thing? Unless it flowed organically, say from Fighter to Paladin to Divine Crusader, I don't recall seeing much of it in play except with pre-built characters and once they got into play, they grew organically.

 

[JeffB]

Well yeah. Vast amounts of people moved on to other game systems before plumbing such depths.

Troof.
Preach it.

 

[Gladius Legis]

Not everyone plays to optimize so much that they run into the issues mentioned above, and these people can play the game pretty much indefinitely.

It doesn't speak well for a game's design when it breaks apart with even moderate levels of optimization effort.

 

[Acolyte of Zothique]

After running 3.0 & 3.5 for 12 years, I assure you it was broken. From the DM side. Prepping for a high level encounter, especially involving NPCs, took hours and hours. Per encounter. Especially with the level of power creep that the large amount of books brought.

That's before the point that high level casters had everything casters did plus were better at doing what the martial characters did due to their self buffs. CoDzilla was real.

Oh yes, absolutely.

High level spell casters in 3.5 were like Kal-El and General Zod battling above Metropolis in 'Man of Steel' - you are playing a superheroes RPG instead of a fantasy RPG and godlike superheroes at that.
The breakpoint came around 9th level but really kicked off at 11th. If you were playing a martial character my experience was that you would be thinking 'WTF am I doing?' while watching your spell caster team mates rule the day. I experienced this from both DM and Player sides.

3.5 was broken, broken, broken.