D&D 3E/3.5 Edition Experience - Did/Do you Play 3rd Edtion D&D? How Was/Is it?

[Son of the Serpent]

@Son of the Serpent Thanks for clarifying your position; this is exactly the kind of nuance and detail I was hoping everyone would engage in. See, I actually prefer the "overly basic answers" on surveys, because it encourages people to chime in with comments, which generates further discussion. And I didn't pick the question or the responses willy-nilly either, as you pointed out. I phrased the question and responses deliberately to make it hard to establish "best" and "worst" and "favorite" arguments. I've been around this board enough to know where that train of thought stops. ;-)

AHHHHHH

I see. That actually makes a lot of sense. Thankyou. I see the point of that now.

 

[Umbran]

Just like the statement "trump is the best united states president" is factually true in a technical sense ...

Mod Note:
Could you please refrain from referring to highly divisive real-world political figures in your examples in the future? You are, like it or not, engaging emotions that have nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and do not serve to make the discussion better.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Sure

 

[Minigiant]

are you talking about modern cultural/political sensibilities or something else. Since im making a custom edition who's main influence is 3.x i would want to know if its "something else". Could be a flaw i would want to avoid that i havent noticed.

If you answer thx. I appreciate it.

I mean in game design.
The Late 90 early 00s was a time were game design in all media shifted heavily from "what the game designer feels" to "what the potential audience wants". This is because of the rise of the internent. Video games could be patched. Table games could be errataed. TCGs got regular bans. Designers could be interviewed and emailed and tweetted for their opinions.

3ewent from 3.0 to 3.5 to 4.0 because the community as a whole could come together and state what they lked or didn't. And designers would get feedback faster and more accurately. So printing "just what you want" started to not fly. And this was the infancy of these ideas.

 

[Prakriti]

My least favorite part about 3E is the distressed/textured page backgrounds. Makes reading the books difficult.

I'm currently reading 2E's Faiths & Avatars, which suffers from the same problem.

 

[Ogre Mage]

I played it and enjoyed it. Prior to 5E it was my favorite edition of the game. At the time (2001) I thought it was a big improvement over 2E from a game mechanics/crunch standpoint. Confusing stuff like THAC0 and negative armor class was gone. Now if someone had AC 20 it meant you needed to roll (including your bonuses) a 20 to hit them, what a concept.

Plus, I had always played clerics and they were powerful in a way they had never been before.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I mean in game design.
The Late 90 early 00s was a time were game design in all media shifted heavily from "what the game designer feels" to "what the potential audience wants". This is because of the rise of the internent. Video games could be patched. Table games could be errataed. TCGs got regular bans. Designers could be interviewed and emailed and tweetted for their opinions.

3ewent from 3.0 to 3.5 to 4.0 because the community as a whole could come together and state what they lked or didn't. And designers would get feedback faster and more accurately. So printing "just what you want" started to not fly. And this was the infancy of these ideas.

This is actually a serious confidence booster for me.

Ive been focusing on making my custom E as easy to add or remove elements to make it YOUR group's game as much as possible while maintaining the integrity of function without making a crazy amount of piggy back functions.

You're making me feel like im on the right track!

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I played it and enjoyed it. Prior to 5E it was my favorite edition of the game. At the time (2001) I thought it was a big improvement over 2E from a game mechanics/crunch standpoint. Confusing stuff like THAC0 and negative armor class was gone. Now if someone had AC 20 it meant you needed to roll (including your bonuses) a 20 to him them, what a concept.

Plus, I had always played clerics and they were powerful in a way they had never been before.

Cleric of war with fly=teeth with wings in that edition

Fun stuff

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

The OGL absolutely changed the face of gaming. Without it, we probably wouldn't have seen Pathfinder, maybe not even the OSR. It absolutely encouraged a DIY approach that persists to this day in the indie gaming field. If anything, I think that the OGL is the most important legacy of 3e.

On the meta-side, I really appreciated the OGL. It's a nice motivator to put creations "out there", and while it enabled a lot of garbage, it also dramatically opened up exposure for a lot of creative minds who might otherwise never have seen the light of day. That was hugely important for the hobby, imo.

 

[Yonner]

I switched to 3e when it was released. While we loved 2e, the new edition really cleaned everything up, codified everything, and was a joy to run and play.

We loved 3/3.5, especially for the first years. As it aged we came to love it less, though never to the point of dislike.