D&D 3E/3.5 3.X Retrospective 19 Years in Production.

[Dannyalcatraz]

Whoa! New avatar, huh Dannyalcatraz? Nice!

Johnathan

Yes, and thanks!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In some meaningful senses, 3rd edition was the first truly new D&D game. There's a reason they dropped the "Advanced" from the front, and not solely because they were ending the (kinda-sorta fig leaf excuse) "separate Advanced and Basic lines" policy. 3rd edition really did mark the end of an era, arguably moreso than Gygax's departure fifteen years prior, because of the sheer number of up-front and under-the-hood changes.

And, as much as I openly rag on 3e and its descendants for their flaws, it's absolutely inarguable that it changed the face of tabletop roleplaying. The rules changes implied that consistency and some kind of transparency were now the name of the game; that you should be able to make different features and options work out reasonably well; that esoteric calculations (e.g. THAC0) or 2D-table memorization (attack matrices) were no longer needed, so anybody could get into it even if they weren't super math-inclined; indeed, that anybody could get into design if they wanted, what with the D20 boom; and that you really could in some limited sense "play the game" away from the table by preparing for how you would shape your character going forward.

Pretty much all of the above was really, really popular. But, as I've noted elsewhere (and can cross-post if people want), there are also some ways in which the very popularity of certain 3rd edition features stems from their being flawed, even though pretty much nobody explicitly wants flawed rules. (In brief, the primary one is that the alleged "JC Penney" effect applies pretty heavily to every game in the 3rd edition family, since nobody likes crufty crap, but most fans love the idea of finding a powerful combo or creating an advantage out of a normally bad option.) And that's sort of the paradox of the 3rd edition family: no brand-new game could ever match the dizzying variety of options (even if those options mostly just provide the same sorts of bonuses with different fluff), and almost any attempt to fix the actual issues (like some classes being crap or OP, or CR being a buggy mess that's almost never useful, etc.) is INCREDIBLY easy to misinterpret, intentionally or not, as an attack on something valued by fans.

Ultimately, I absolutely think D&D overall, and indeed even the TTRPG hobby, is better off because 3rd edition existed. But like any complex historical thing, it has a mix of really great and really bad things, and a significant number of people who won't (or can't) separate the two. We have already benefited (and will continue to benefit) from its positive side, that is inarguable. But the more frustrating parts cast a long shadow, and will likely linger on for many years to come.

 

[Garmorn]

There is one thing causes me to have a different outlook on 3x then most currently spouse. The way we games AD&D and the first year or so of 3x was completely different. Most of us old school players and DMs where quite use to ignoring any rule or not allowing any thing that we did not want. With all of the broken or contradicting rules and supplements we had to. I never used the weapon speed and/or armor to hit modifier tables form 1st edition. 3x might not have created the "Rule Lawyers" but the empowered them to a degree not seen before.

 

[teitan]

There is one thing causes me to have a different outlook on 3x then most currently spouse. The way we games AD&D and the first year or so of 3x was completely different. Most of us old school players and DMs where quite use to ignoring any rule or not allowing any thing that we did not want. With all of the broken or contradicting rules and supplements we had to. I never used the weapon speed and/or armor to hit modifier tables form 1st edition. 3x might not have created the "Rule Lawyers" but the empowered them to a degree not seen before.

Exactly. I now have a table rule of the DM’s ruling is final at the table and then after we can discuss the actual rules and adjust for later unless it means a character would die. You can bring up something and if it sounds reasonable I’ll go with it but I want to limit reaching for the rules as necessary.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There is one thing causes me to have a different outlook on 3x then most currently spouse. The way we games AD&D and the first year or so of 3x was completely different. Most of us old school players and DMs where quite use to ignoring any rule or not allowing any thing that we did not want. With all of the broken or contradicting rules and supplements we had to. I never used the weapon speed and/or armor to hit modifier tables form 1st edition. 3x might not have created the "Rule Lawyers" but the empowered them to a degree not seen before.

I really, truly don't think this was special to 3e. I think what actually was the culprit was, as noted, the fact that so many things changed. DMs couldn't necessarily trust their gut, knowing that things had changed. What do DMs do when they don't know the right answer? Stick to the rules as written, avoid creative interpretation, etc. The only real difference is that this attitude stuck around, rather than fading.

Because, believe it or not, you see something like this with the 3e to 4e change too. It's part of why many people struggle with it. They see a new set of rules and, all too often, assume they are perfectly ironclad, restrictive, closed-off. Simple example, I've had people straight-up say that, because a power is an attack, it cannot ever be used as anything other than an attack--even though 4e's designers openly talked about allowing (for example) a Sorcerer at-will used to set something on fire if that makes sense. The common response to unfamiliar rules really does seem to be defaulting to RAW arguments--and that leads to a culture of "there is a correct way to play the rules."

5e mostly worked around this by (a) making it incredibly front-and-center how ultra-dependent the game is on the DM, and (b) pretty much just copying what 3e did but with numbers tweaks (and a few nerfs to spellcasters). The combo of going incredibly far out of their way to emphasize it, to the point of (quite literally) "the rulebook is a suggestion" being a valid statement, and of sticking to "familiar"/"traditional"/"classic" (which again almost always meant "doing things the 3rd edition way") short-circuited some of the RAW-centric arguments. Of course, this then leads to its own set of....situations, which some would call "normal operating procedure" and others would call "issues."

 

[Garmorn]

I really, truly don't think this was special to 3e. I think what actually was the culprit was, as noted, the fact that so many things changed. DMs couldn't necessarily trust their gut, knowing that things had changed. What do DMs do when they don't know the right answer? Stick to the rules as written, avoid creative interpretation, etc. The only real difference is that this attitude stuck around, rather than fading.I agree with you on the amount of change. When added to the far larger number of rules, a very large amount of uncertainty was created for everyone. This was made worst by the pure number of options. The numerous books, (official and 3rd party) made game balance very difficult to maintain at the table. All this togather caused the damage done by/to 3.x.

I agree with you on the amount of change. When added to the far larger number of rules and options, a very large amount of uncertainty was created for everyone. This was made worst by the pure number of options. The numerous books, (official and 3rd party) made game balance very difficult to maintain at the table. All this together caused the damage done by/to 3.x.

 

[Alzrius]

I agree with you on the amount of change. When added to the far larger number of rules and options, a very large amount of uncertainty was created for everyone. This was made worst by the pure number of options. The numerous books, (official and 3rd party) made game balance very difficult to maintain at the table. All this together caused the damage done by/to 3.x.

I dunno, if you looked at the multiplicity of supplements for AD&D 2nd Edition, you could draw from a large number of them to create a truly broken character.

 

[Garmorn]

I dunno, if you looked at the multiplicity of supplements for AD&D 2nd Edition, you could draw from a large number of them to create a truly broken character.

True, I meant that all of it as a whole was what caused the inbalance and rule layering to be as bad as it got in 3.x. It was not one or the other, but the cumulative affect.

 

[embee]

It's easy to forget how parlous a state D&D was in when 3e came along.

TSR had gone broke and been bought out, it was years and years since 2e and the company had been shambling along creating vast amounts of content - some of which was undeniably excellent - but making losses on a bunch of it. Complete book of Gnomes? The novel line had propped up the corpse for a while but the sheer volume of books by people not called Salvatore had saturated the market and then they were losing money too. And then there were the wild ideas they threw money into to turn it all around. Dragon Dice. Spellfire. Players Option.

White Wolf had taken the RPG baton and was running with it, and TSR was being left way behind. You couldn't even find anyone to play in a D&D game at my university club in 1997. It was Werewolf, or Delta Green, or Ars Magica, or WFRP.

When WotC bought out D&D, the wailing and gnashing of teeth was awesome to behold. They'd turn it into a trading card game like Magic, the story was. You'd need to buy booster packs for magic items, or to play a ranger.

And then 3e came along. And it was [drumroll] a RPG. And it chucked out some serious sacred cows, like THAC0 and negative armour class, and death magic saving throws, so it's not like the designers were being overcautious. All of a sudden, feats were a thing. And skills were suddenly a thing. and dwarves could be wizards, and there were no racial level limits any more, and anyone could multiclass, and half-orcs were back, and metamagic was a thing. And the OGL - sure, it's not exactly a part of the system, but it came with the package and that was daring beyond belief and it changed the industry forever - and it was motivated by the genuine fact that D&D had damn near died with TSR and this was the 3e devs doing their damndest to make sure that never, ever happened again.

It's hard to overestimate how revolutionary 3e was - not from a game design point of view in general, though it DID clarify, systematise, and streamline a whole lot or messy legacy AD&Disms while actually giving players more choices in how to design characters. But in terms of actually keeping D&D a real functional live hobby, and even keeping fantasy gaming as a whole going when WoD and the whole modern paranormal thing was increasingly making the running. And it proved so popular it was still selling in truckloads when 4e came along, and its variant continued doing to after 4e came along.

It had problems, sure. It got bloated with supplements, sure, and the buff-stacking metagame and poor high-level maths really should have been caught in playtesting, but any system where player options proliferate to the VAST degree they did in 3/3.5, and which offers players so many character design choice points, is going to have scope for players to start up optimisation games. It's not like 3e invented min-maxing, though the sheer options it provided allowed the result of that to be more noticable, especially alongside the rise of the internet and forums like this or the old WotC boards, which allowed anyone with a 56.6k modem to dump all sorts of net optimisation builds on their poor unsuspecting GMs.

But i don't think it's even a slight exaggeration to say that 3e saved D&D as a hobby from the fate of, say, Avalon Hill wargames. And there's a hell of a lot of 3e in the DNA of 5e.

So a little bit of respect for the dear departed is in order i reckon. I played an awful lot of 3e, and had a great time, though i wouldn't go back to it if 5e was still an option. But in the context of the history of D&D, it was one of the greatest monumental successes, and deserves to be remembered as such.

Nailed it.

Did 1e and MERPS growing up but when I got to college, Vampire and Call of Cthulhu had just exploded. Factor in MtG and other card games and a little video game called Doom and D&D got pushed to a monthly 4 hour session.

And frankly, Dark Sun was the only thing weird and compelling enough to compete with the likes of a sprawling WoD campaign or Horror on the Orient Express.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I dunno, if you looked at the multiplicity of supplements for AD&D 2nd Edition, you could draw from a large number of them to create a truly broken character.

It was nowhere near as bad as 3.XE, as that link serves to illustrate. The sheer number of assumptions and optional rules and stuff the DM would have had to specifically authorize is huge - for example he's taking classes from two hard-incompatible settings, Dark Sun and the Forgotten Realms. He later takes other stuff from other incompatible settings like Lankhmar. That's not genuine charop, that's just lazy cheating. Genuine charop sticks within what is actually doable. Whereas with 3.XE you could break it with a relatively small amount of stuff, virtually all of which was treated as "default" stuff. Optional things just elevated the level of broken you could reach. Indeed it broke itself due to LFQW if your players were roughly equally competent to each other, by somewhere in the 9 to 12 range.

So it's not a helpful comparison for you point at all, given the cheating and so on.

The biggest flaw with 3E, for my group's money, though, was the anti-permissive design.

In 2E, if you wanted to do something non-standard, the DM usually worked it out as a single roll of some kind, and the rules advice seemed to suggest this. Very often it was an attack roll at -4. This was fine, and encouraged players to take risks, and do fun things and helped keep martials from being boring. Likewise there was no need for a grid and the AoO rules were limited to specific situations and oft-forgotten.

Not so 3E.

With 3E, there were rules for virtually everything, and what those rules amounted to was very often making multiple checks to perform would likely have been one roll in 3E, and quite possibly incurring multiple AoOs in the process. This gradually crushed the spirit of my group. Casters were also much more obviously overpowered (something PF totally failed to deal with) than 2E, and were increasingly OP from an earlier level. But it was the endless rules, often with relatively high DCs, or large penalties if you lacked a specific Feat, that really crushed them. I always find it ironic people complain about 4E not allowing stunts and so on, when it had a whole set of rules specifically allow stunts and so on (in the core books even!), and in fact making them borderline overpowered. 3E was the game that killed stunts.

But @humble minion makes a valid point, which is that 2E was pretty much in tatters when 3E came along. It had a rules system that was pretty much two decades out of date by 2000, and major changes needed to be made if D&D was played again, and for all that 3E had wrong with it (which was a LOT), if it hadn't happened, I doubt we'd be playing D&D today, or even spin-off games. That might not be a bad thing, but it'd definitely be a different thing.