D&D 3E/3.5 Why 3.5 Worked

[Blue]

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.

Congratulations. Your solutions are either (a) move away from how they design foes in 3.x and use the techniques that they introduced in 4e and continued in 5e to get away from 3.x foe design or (b) just reuse something that someone else already put the work in.

Thank you, you provided a great example of how foe design was broken and how it's been fixed. I know you didn't intend to support my point, but you strongly have.

 

[Anoth]

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.

That’s not broken. Those are... options. Options. Options. You do not have to use everything. Some people like that kind of play. Others do not.

 

[Tony Vargas]

That’s not broken. Those are... options. Options. Options. You do not have to use everything. Some people like that kind of play. Others do not.

The expression "CoDzilla" was coined as a counterpoint to just that sort of excuse.
You could get about as game-breaking as you liked with just the Tier 1 classes in the PH.

 

[generic]

The conclusion: It didn't work.

That's why...

/ducks

 

[Anoth]

Amazing how many people played these games so long that are broken. And Paizo managed another several years with this broken game.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Amazing how many people played these games so long that are broken. And Paizo managed another several years with this broken game.

Hey, you could leverage the broken...

 

[Blue]

Amazing how many people played these games so long that are broken. And Paizo managed another several years with this broken game.

Broken does not mean that it wasn't the best thing that was out there for D&D-like games at the time.

Broken does not mean that it didn't work in many circumstances - say low to mid level play limited to core material. (High level play casters still could break it.)

Broken does not mean that players and DMs couldn't put in extra effort to use the parts that worked, house rule those that they needed but didn't, and ignore the rest to play a good game.

 

[Don Durito]

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.

The D20 bubble burst.. Companies like Green Ronin or Monngoose that began by supplementing D20 went away and made their own systems. The OSR movement began*. WOTC released their own edition. (And while 4E is often considered a failure - Pathfinder was considered a success because it's sales rivalled 4E - which would seem to indicate that it wouldn't have sold enough by WOTC standards either).

The D&D audience fractured.

*And while the OSR movment probably only siphoned off a small amount of actual players - it took with it a huge degree of the actual creative energy.

 

[Catolias]

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.

And now (maybe more than back in the day) using 3.5 character generators make it soooo much easier

 

[Quartz]

Congratulations. Your solutions are either (a) move away from how they design foes in 3.x and use the techniques that they introduced in 4e and continued in 5e to get away from 3.x foe design or (b) just reuse something that someone else already put the work in.

And your problem is? You don't need to go through the full character generation process for a throwaway opponent, but you can if you want to.