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

[Fanaelialae]

I voted that I played it and wasn't impressed one way or the other, but that's actually not the case (just the option that I felt was closest to the truth).

I followed the pre-release in Dragon magazine with great excitement, and started playing it as soon as it was released. I loved it. I thought it was brilliant.

As time went on, however, it began to encourage seriously bad habits in myself and other gamers at my table. Particularly power gaming. Now, we were never a table that was vehemently anti-power-gaming or any such thing. But RP and actual characterization was also important to us. And without noticing, the power gaming took a strong priority at the table over time.

I think that a big part of this was that the game was designed to encourage optimization. An unoptimized character was practically guaranteed to die, as we saw many, many times. You can't play a dead character (in our games raise dead and similar magics often had limited availability), so therefore the numbers were prioritized and the character was often shoehorned to fit those numbers.

It took a long time to recognize that this was happening, and when I finally did I realized that I hated the system and the type of gamer it had encouraged me to become. When I discussed it with the other gamers at my table, the sentiments were similar.

As a result, about 2 years prior to the release of 4e, we started using various homebrew systems of our own design. We wouldn't return to D&D until 4e. Even today, the thought of playing 3e or a derivative thereof leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak.

Hence my response. When I started playing 3e, and for years thereafter, I absolutely loved it. However, over time I grew to hate it (which is a strong word, but honestly back then I did). I wouldn't say I hate it anymore. I think it was brilliant and revolutionary in many ways. I don't think 5e would be what it is today without 3e. I just have absolutely zero desire to ever play it again.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

I'm an old 3.5 fan. Like many I was fairly burned out on the sheer volume of content and choice, although for me by 2007-2008 it was the heavy focus on the player base in the min/max game that killed it. As a DM I could only keep up with that kind of player so much. Switched to 4E, liked it but found it too narrow in design to support more organic or "realistic" stories and then defected to Pathfinder. Stuck with Pathfinder until D&D 5E. 5E was better....but it was almost too simple, and condensing all damage into large troves of hit points was tiresome and boring. Jumped to Pathfinder 2E when it came out, and enjoying that system but it has design elements that left me wondering if maybe I'd prefer trying 3.5 again (for the liberating feeling that I remembered from the first few years). Recollected the core books, started a new campaign this year, and having a blast. Playing 3.5 in 2021 is great because of these reasons:
1. The game is done; I can collect old tomes as needed, but no new stuff is on the horizon; the game is "complete";
2. The old culture around D&D 3.5 is gone, and people who I am gaming with make builds for fun that are interesting or for story reasons, and not because they are min/maxing to hell and back;
3. The vast level of customizable options and flexibility solve all the restriction issues I have with 5E and PF2E. The enormous amount of support content in existence, both in print and online, means I as DM can fill out statblocks or mod existing content to save time.

So indeed, the game I've personally had the most fun running this year is D&D 3.5, and it's the only system I am obsessing over right now. I seriously never thought I'd type those words even just 8 years ago, and my 2008 self would think I was mad!

 

[billd91]

2. The old culture around D&D 3.5 is gone, and people who I am gaming with make builds for fun that are interesting or for story reasons, and not because they are min/maxing to hell and back;

That's an interesting observation about the old culture being largely gone. I hope it keeps holding true for your game group.

 

[Scribe]

Its still probably my 'system of choice'. Not perfect, but it has aspects that I dont think you get out of 5e to the same degree.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

That's an interesting observation about the old culture being largely gone. I hope it keeps holding true for your game group.

I bet it still exists, as I can dig through forums and find discussion on builds and such, but locally at least the only 3.5 edition groups I am aware of are like my own....running the game because its the engine most flexible for the job. No one in my current group, for example, has played 3.5 before now, and only a couple of my players have experience with Pathfinder 1E.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

Didn't really get to play that much; played more Pathfinder 1e, for how much they're similar. I liked what I read, but I'm not sure how much that manifested in play.

 

[Alzrius]

Didn't really get to play that much; played more Pathfinder 1e, for how much they're similar. I liked what I read, but I'm not sure how much that manifested in play.

Looking back now, it's interesting to consider some of the adjustments that 3.5 put into play later in its lifespan that didn't make it into Pathfinder 1E (most likely because said adjustments never got added to the 3.5 SRD).

For instance, the Magic Item Compendium re-balanced the pricing on a lot of non-standard items, as well as adding a great way of changing out the functionality of magic weapons and armor with augment crystals. Plus the subtle (and somewhat poorly written) rule in appendix 2 which changed the costs associated with adding resistance bonuses to saves, deflection bonuses to AC, (enhancements to) natural armor bonuses to AC, and enhancement bonuses to ability scores (aka the third-through-sixth bullet points on the list of "Big Six" magic items) onto extant magic items.

It's really a shame how today, that book is known for how much errata it needed, and how the premium reprint was advertised as incorporating that errata when it actually didn't.

Another one was the Battle Blessing feat in Complete Champion, which gave paladin spellcasting a modest boost by making all paladin spells with a full-round action casting time take only a standard action, and all paladin spells that required a standard action to cast take only a swift action. It didn't fix the fundamental problems associated with paladin spellcasting (which Pathfinder tried to address in their own way), but it at least made it so that using those spells in combat didn't come at the cost of doing something more effective, such as attacking.

Little things like that cropped up quite a bit when you started looking for them, and it was sad to see that Pathfinder wasn't able to incorporate them.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[CleverNickName]

I'm an old 3.5 fan. Like many I was fairly burned out on the sheer volume of content and choice, although for me by 2007-2008 it was the heavy focus on the player base in the min/max game that killed it. As a DM I could only keep up with that kind of player so much. Switched to 4E, liked it but found it too narrow in design to support more organic or "realistic" stories and then defected to Pathfinder. Stuck with Pathfinder until D&D 5E. 5E was better....but it was almost too simple, and condensing all damage into large troves of hit points was tiresome and boring. Jumped to Pathfinder 2E when it came out, and enjoying that system but it has design elements that left me wondering if maybe I'd prefer trying 3.5 again (for the liberating feeling that I remembered from the first few years). Recollected the core books, started a new campaign this year, and having a blast. Playing 3.5 in 2021 is great because of these reasons:
1. The game is done; I can collect old tomes as needed, but no new stuff is on the horizon; the game is "complete";
2. The old culture around D&D 3.5 is gone, and people who I am gaming with make builds for fun that are interesting or for story reasons, and not because they are min/maxing to hell and back;
3. The vast level of customizable options and flexibility solve all the restriction issues I have with 5E and PF2E. The enormous amount of support content in existence, both in print and online, means I as DM can fill out statblocks or mod existing content to save time.

So indeed, the game I've personally had the most fun running this year is D&D 3.5, and it's the only system I am obsessing over right now. I seriously never thought I'd type those words even just 8 years ago, and my 2008 self would think I was mad!

This was the post I needed to read today, Dr. F. You just might have inspired me to write my first 3.5E adventure in years.

 

[TwoSix]

Looking back now, it's interesting to consider some of the adjustments that 3.5 put into play later in its lifespan that didn't make it into Pathfinder 1E (most likely because said adjustments never got added to the 3.5 SRD).

I've said this before, but late-era 3.5 (2005-2007) is considerably more interesting and flexible than PHB based 3.5. There's some great class design with limited full casters like beguilers, the fighting classes in Book of Nine Swords, and some of the weird utility options like totemists and dragon shaman. Not to mention the awesome customizability of Magic Item Compendium, or the sheer convenience of the Spell Compendium.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I would have to say that my relationship with 3rd edition D&D is very "love–hate," in that I loved it right up until the day that I hated it.

I started gaming seriously in the late 90s, so I was primed to be caught up in the hype over 3e's release (raise your hand if you remember checking this very website daily for info and leaks — and raise two if you were haphazardly kludging said leaks into your AD&D 2e games in the months before 3e came out). And to be whole-hog on board with the bandwagon of smug condescension aimed at any vocally apalled grognards, shaking our collective heads at those poor, benighted holdouts who obviously didn't know what was good for their own gaming. There was no question about whose side I was on in the Y2K Edition War.

Naturally, I snatched up the 3e core rulebooks as soon as they came out. And I bought all the splats that I could find and afford. I loved it all. I loved the crunchy tactical combat, I loved the complete and robust ruleset, I loved the vast and wide-open landscape of character-building options. And slowly… over time… these things conspired to wear me down. They burdened my soul. They abraded away my creativity and my love for the game.

(To be fair, it wasn't precisely the 3e rules alone that did this. It was the combination of the 3e rules and the trad campaign style, which demands a constant and stressful balancing-act from the DM, who must at all times be both nimble and subtle in quietly tweaking the game-world to provide the players with both balanced challenge and engaging narrative — while the game system usually fights against you instead of helping.)

I was generally positive toward v3.5 when it came out (even though I still, as then, can't stand the fact that it was dubbed "3.5" instead of a more accurate "3.1"). I bought those core books as soon as they were available too. And I mostly kept buying new hardcovers as they arrived… up to a point. Around the time the "class splats" were getting the hardcover treatment (because, e.g., a book like Sword & Fist was now totally deprecated and really needed to be replaced with something like Complete Warrior), that was when I started to feel splat-fatigue. And to long for a simpler game, a less bloated landscape of class options, and less in the way of flagrant departure from the formative 2nd edition feeling that I had known.

(The 3.5 ranger was just the first inkling of that departure, and it rankled. I was very happy when 3e's version of Unearthed Arcana gave us the "prestige" versions of the paladin, ranger, and bard — this was an excellent excuse on my part to really pare down the list of character classes allowed in my campaigns, down to a nice and tight little list of core classes and an equally curated list of prestige classes — summarily exorcising all other PrCs, from every source and splat and setting, totally from my game for all time. It was an immense relief.)

So, I mostly missed out on "late" 3.5. I never played with Incarnum or the Book of Nine Swords or the Tome of Magic. I admired the focused caster-classes (beguiler and healer and what-not) but never saw them in action. By 2006, I was basically done with the edition for good. I backtracked to my origins in fits and starts — converting a whole campaign, mid-stride, from 3.5 to Castles & Crusades to 2e to BXCMI (the edition that I had originally learned the game on, before taking up 2e) over a matter of maybe eight weeks. And then largely sticking with BXCMI (or as I still know and prefer to call it, red box/black box OD&D) ever since.

If I were ever to run 3rd edition again — and I have, on occasion, felt the itch of nostalgia — it would be for one reason. To get through some of the 3e adventures that I never got to experience DMing previously, unconverted. I only ever ran groups all the way through The Sunless Citadel, The Forge of Fury, and the very beginnings of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and Red Hand of Doom. I'd like to try my hand at running the whole blue-cover Ashardalon saga, and to maybe get all the way through RttToEE (after running a group through the original ToEE) someday. Red Hand of Doom is probably much too "late three-point-fivey" for me to want to bother with it — which brings me to the point that I would definitely run 3.0 and not 3.5. Something about the 3.0 books just feels more right than the 3.5 books — like they have more "TSR DNA" in them, that got squeezed out with the juices in the 3.5 revision. (I often think of the TSR editions as an organic life-form, 3rd edition as a cyborg made from that life-form, 4th edition as a robot that replaced the last organic bits of the cyborg… and 5th edition as some horrible golem wearing a stitched-together skin-suit that it thinks will make people believe it's a friendly organic life-form again. Yes, I know this analogy won't win me any friends.) And even then, I'd probably have to make some tweaks to 3.0 to make it "playable" for me — at the very least, I wouldn't be awarding XP for winning combats and overcoming challenges. XP-for-treasure is just entirely too fundamental to how I understand D&D ought to work anymore.

It would be interesting, I think, to see how the 3e system functions when totally divested of all the trad baggage (things like "DM as maestro Houdini storyteller" and "players ought to role-play, not roll-play") that early-2000s me had been saddled with.