D&D 3E/3.5 Why 3.5 Worked

[Maxperson]

She also was mostly just a very unique demon in 1e for the most part. I dont know if i agree its incomparable though.

No, she was explicitly a lesser goddess with all of the abilities that come along with a demon lord who is also a lesser god. In D3 the DM was given the option to ignore the abilities she had as a lesser goddess if they would be beyond the pale for the PC group, but at no point beyond the DM changing the rules was she ever anything but a goddess.

 

[Maxperson]

I didn't forget it, but it doesn't seem strictly comparable to a level-appropriate challenge like you could get from CR or EL or skill challenges. A level range for a whole adventure, and a specific level for a single encounter seem quite different claims of appropriateness.

CR in 3e was borked to high heaven. It was virtually meaningless. A PC group could defeat a creature 5 or 6 CR above them, then die to one 4 below them. It all depended on how creature offensive and defensive abilities matched up to PC offensive and defensive abilities. I ended up scrapping it very early into the edition and just looked at abilities vs abilities to determine whether an encounter was easy, moderate or hard.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

No, she was explicitly a lesser goddess with all of the abilities that come along with a demon lord who is also a lesser god. In D3 the DM was given the option to ignore the abilities she had as a lesser goddess if they would be beyond the pale for the PC group, but at no point beyond the DM changing the rules was she ever anything but a goddess.

I thought her first showing was as a demon and not a god in print...huh...

Ok.

 

[Celebrim]

CR in 3e was borked to high heaven. It was virtually meaningless.

Well, it wasn't completely meaningless. It suffered from being something that had to be estimated, and it wasn't always estimated well. But I would argue that it was better than the "Monster Level" system that proceeded it in most ways, and it was certainly more transparent. The one aspect of the older Monster Level system I preferred is that it had a more objective means of estimating CR.

A PC group could defeat a creature 5 or 6 CR above them, then die to one 4 below them. It all depended on how creature offensive and defensive abilities matched up to PC offensive and defensive abilities.

This is true, but it's one of those things that is both a negative and a positive. While it's true that different combinations of attacks and defenses could produce wildly different difficulties, that is something that goes back deep into D&D's history. Don't have a cleric? Undead that might be a pushover are difficult to deadly. Don't have a ranged attackers? Good luck with a dragon in an open area. Or consider a game like Nethack that is based on D&D. How tough is a poisonous monster? Well, do you have poison resistance? How tough is a cockatrice? Well, do you have reliable ranged attacks? Whether or not you have the right spell or the right defense for the situation determines whether you can face roll the creature or need to run away/get away fast.

The alternative though to having all that is a lack of tactical complexity. Remove all those edges and advantages which the party or the monster might have, and everything becomes a straight up damage race and the winner is the one that can simply burn through the opposition's stack of hit points the fastest. The result of that is a certain sameness that will get tiring in the long run.

I ended up scrapping it very early into the edition and just looked at abilities vs abilities to determine whether an encounter was easy, moderate or hard.

People in the thread asserted I needed to pay more attention to "suggested wealth by level" or carefully craft NPCs to threaten players. I didn't really. All I need to do is pay attention to what the party can or can't do. I don't really have to worry about being "too easy". Let the party face roll the opposition from time to time, just to get perspective on how powerful they've become. All I have to do is be careful to not throw something at them which isn't fair. In my experience, difficulty will come all on its own, when the party makes a bad choice or the dice have a run against them. I don't really have to push it that hard to make things challenging. Sooner or later they'll try to beat down something they should have kited or evaded, or separate the party, or put the squishy characters ahead of the meat shields, or try to kite something they should beat down, or fail a saving throw at the wrong time, or lose party cohesion, or panic, and then "moderate" difficulty becomes "hard" really quickly.

 

[Maxperson]

I thought her first showing was as a demon and not a god in print...huh...

Ok.

At the beginning of her stat block area she is called a Demon Lord. However, at the end it says, "As a lesser goddess, Lolth has certain attributes common to all divine beings. The DM may choose not to use these in this module, since a properly-played Lolth will easily destroy most Invaders. However, should these abilities be desired or needed for confrontations with a high-level party, the DM may include them in Lolth's abilities. Note that if these optional abilities are used, changes in Lolth's spell selection should be made."

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Well, it wasn't completely meaningless. It suffered from being something that had to be estimated, and it wasn't always estimated well. But I would argue that it was better than the "Monster Level" system that proceeded it in most ways, and it was certainly more transparent. The one aspect of the older Monster Level system I preferred is that it had a more objective means of estimating CR.



This is true, but it's one of those things that is both a negative and a positive. While it's true that different combinations of attacks and defenses could produce wildly different difficulties, that is something that goes back deep into D&D's history. Don't have a cleric? Undead that might be a pushover are difficult to deadly. Don't have a ranged attackers? Good luck with a dragon in an open area. Or consider a game like Nethack that is based on D&D. How tough is a poisonous monster? Well, do you have poison resistance? How tough is a cockatrice? Well, do you have reliable ranged attacks? Whether or not you have the right spell or the right defense for the situation determines whether you can face roll the creature or need to run away/get away fast.

The alternative though to having all that is a lack of tactical complexity. Remove all those edges and advantages which the party or the monster might have, and everything becomes a straight up damage race and the winner is the one that can simply burn through the opposition's stack of hit points the fastest. The result of that is a certain sameness that will get tiring in the long run.



People in the thread asserted I needed to pay more attention to "suggested wealth by level" or carefully craft NPCs to threaten players. I didn't really. All I need to do is pay attention to what the party can or can't do. I don't really have to worry about being "too easy". Let the party face roll the opposition from time to time, just to get perspective on how powerful they've become. All I have to do is be careful to not throw something at them which isn't fair. In my experience, difficulty will come all on its own, when the party makes a bad choice or the dice have a run against them. I don't really have to push it that hard to make things challenging. Sooner or later they'll try to beat down something they should have kited or evaded, or separate the party, or put the squishy characters ahead of the meat shields, or try to kite something they should beat down, or fail a saving throw at the wrong time, or lose party cohesion, or panic, and then "moderate" difficulty becomes "hard" really quickly.

I find that cr problems are basically an expanded version of the problems of LA estimation in many ways. Lotta similar issues. Some different. A lot of the same.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

At the beginning of her stat block area she is called a Demon Lord. However, at the end it says, "As a lesser goddess, Lolth has certain attributes common to all divine beings. The DM may choose not to use these in this module, since a properly-played Lolth will easily destroy most Invaders. However, should these abilities be desired or needed for confrontations with a high-level party, the DM may include them in Lolth's abilities. Note that if these optional abilities are used, changes in Lolth's spell selection should be made."

aha. thanks. I need to brush back up on that entry.

 

[Li Shenron]

The 3.0 edition worked for me. It was solidly designed, not as flexible as 5e but there was anyway room for your own stuff, even though it usually meant you had to pull some strings somewhere else in the system. Expanding 3.0 with supplementary material also worked for me up to when such material didn't fundamentally alter the CORE rules and thus remained mostly additive bits: that meant the early 5 "class-oriented splatbooks" and campaign settings books such as the FRCS and its first extras (Monsters/Magic of Faerun, Faiths & Pantheons). Despite the already sheer amount of extra feats, spells and prestige classes, it did not feel bloated yet at this point.

Then came 3.5 and it did NOT work for me. The CORE 3.5 was still ok, I've DMed it for a year and then went back to 3.0, which was better to my tastes, but I also continued playing 3.5 as a player. However, 3.5 supplements destroyed the edition for me. They attempted to do way too much just to keep selling at the established pace, and soon games were filled with naughty word characters with way too many players obsessed with "builds" rather than paying attention to the game's events. The fast publishing mills encouraged people to always think about what's next to buy, subtly suggesting that what you already had was always insufficient, and that the game constantly needed to be fixed or improved. But the vast majority of the non-core material did nothing useful or just messed up the game even more.

This meant for me that moving back to 3.0 also provided a safe harbor against further bloat and mess. Eventually I stopped playing 3.0 only because I stopped playing anything, for life reasons (the usual work, family & stuff). Before I did however, I admit that I definitely noticed how a few months off from DMing were enough to already lose the grip on certain rules, which is a sign that 3e was indeed probably a bit too demanding in terms of rules mastery. Finally, the arrival of 4e was a blessing in the wicked sense that I hated it so much that it made it very easy to pull the plug off D&D when I needed to, just long enough until 5e to be announced when time for hobbies was starting to reappear on the horizon.

 

[Don Durito]

I agree that 3.0 felt more like a toolkit and 3.5 felt like it was for the hardcore rules and build obsessives, but I don't know how much of that was just me and how much was the culture of play that developed (or how universal that was).

I do know that something seemed to change. I think a lot of it was the D20 glut and bubble exploding. I know that with early 3.0 we were pulling in a lot of 3rd party stuff especially the Scarred Lands material such as Relics and Rituals which may have been shaky rules wise, but added awesome flavour, and I was also making my own setting prestige classes and the like. There was the obvious awareness that a lot of this material was unbalanced (but so was the WOTC material). There was also the understanding that it was up to everyone to play fair and that the GM would overrule anything broken.

I found over time attitudes seemed to change. 3rd party material was increasingly frowned upon (and to be fair part of that was because so much of it was so bad), and there was increasing pressure to accept anything that was WotC. 3.5 seemed to ditch a lot of Greyhawk setting elements in the splat books - and this increasingly opened up the idea that prestige classes were less about cool directions to take your character in setting and more about ways to achieve the biggest powerups. At a certain point I started to find this distateful and drifted away from D&D until Castles and Crusades came out and gave me an alternative.

I wouldn't claim that this was a universal experience - but it was how I experienced it - and it wasn't completely divorced from what was happening in the rules.

 

[Fanaelialae]

And while 5e has somewhat simplified this, everything you talk about is still relevant particularly if you are playing a game with feats and magic items and thus complicating your balance issues. And to the extent that you can take short cuts, those short cut techniques have been around since 1e days. Probably the absolutely best short cut in both cases is simply having a stock character of appropriate level to serve as a template for any character minor enough you don't want to stat them out.

I responded to this post earlier, but I was on a break at work so it was a bit rushed. I wanted to address this point specifically now that I have the time.

It's very different in 5e because the monster creation rules have shortcuts baked in. Compare the MM archmage to a high level wizard, or the assassin to a mid level rogue. All of the fluff has been pared away, leaving just what you're likely to need.

Compare that to a 3e NPC stat block. Everything is there - all feats, skill points, and gear.

Yes, you can do the same thing that 5e does with 3e and simplify it. But 3e never lead by example in that direction. I'm sure there were multiple DMs to whom the thought never occurred (as was the case for me back in the day).


5e, in the books, acknowledges that parties with magic items and the like are above par and therefore may require more to challenge them. The encounter guidelines are set up such that they create a challenging encounter for an inexperienced group that is not optimized, without feats or multiclassing. If that isn't your party, then you can ratchet up the difficulty as needed. It simply sets a safe baseline that you can use. Unless you do something completely absurd, like seeing that encounter A is too easy and then making encounter B deadly x10, you have the leeway to feel out the party's strength without accidentally TPKing them.

Which is quite different from the 3e encounter guidelines that assumed moderately optimized characters with useful gear of WBL. Non-optimized characters without WBL gear were under perpetual threat of TPK if you used the guidelines.

IMO, one of these serves as a far better instructive tool to new DMs than the other. Experienced DMs can get by without them (though I find them useful as a sanity check on difficulty).


Sure, in the case of a throwaway fighter who is just going to show up in a single encounter, using (or modifying) a stock stat block is the way to go. Even I did that back in the day. But if it's the boss, you don't want to use a stock block. And frankly, because the bonuses in the block often weren't explained, unless you had the system committed to memory modifying the block could be almost as much work as creating whole cloth. If I change feat X for Y, which of the numbers in the block change and by how much? It often required quite a bit of reverse engineering to arrive at where all the numbers came from.

Compare that to the table in the 5e DMG that simply tells me the numbers to use for a given CR. I'm not kidding when I say that I'm pretty sure I can use that to create a creature more quickly from scratch than I could modify an existing stat block in 3e.


So, to restate my original point, while I don't doubt that there were DMs whose experiences differed from mine, I found 3e exhausting to run. Though an experienced DM could work around those issues endemic to 3e, an inexperienced DM was guided down a path of spiraling workload that could cause burnout.