D&D 3E/3.5 3rd Edition Revisited - Better play with the power of hindsight?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

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Yeah, everyone who has read more than three 3rd edition books knows that this is not at all how the D&D product catalog evolved after the release of the Core Rulebooks. I'm going entirely by memory here, but the old 3rd edition website had index lists of all feats, PrCs, and spells that appeared in the official WotC 3rd edition rulebooks and supplements, and I am pretty sure the total list of PrCs was over 700. (Also over 1,000 feats.)
WotC was always in the money business, and money is made by selling books. And character options sell books. So as long as players were paying for it, they spewed out an endless stream of races, classes, prestige classes, items, and spells. As I remember it, PrCs were the main selling points of the dozen or so book specifically addressed to players. And of course 90% of them were complete shovelware junk that nobody remembers. But the remaining ones really fed the leviathan that was Character Optimization. In my perception, CharOps became the dominant aspect of the 3rd edition online culture and discourse. I agree that it was a very fun hobby where you can sink hundreds of hours into discovering new unintended combinations of abilities and items that were probably written by two people who had no awareness of each others' works. And it's something that you can argue about and defend in discussions much more so than the vague generalizations of how you prepare adventures. But that was playing with the rules of the game. It was not playing the game.

One thing to consider IMO is that 3E might have been the first edition to really fall so heavily under "digital scrutiny". It's not that powergaming, rules-lawyering and character optimization didn't happen before, or don't happen in other games. But it was maybe the first edition of D&D, and thus the first edition of a really, really big and succesful RPG franchise, to build an internet forum culture. It might be that the charOp development was mostly due to the game, but it could also be that charOp was just something that would always happen once players across the world could connect.

That said... It seems to me that D&D 3E was also a very "crunchy" game compared to D&D 5, so maybe that played a role. Monte Cook (one of the designers of 3E) once suggested that rewarding "system mastery" was a goal during the design - a feat like Toughness wasn't bad because they didn't know better, they put it in so people that figured out the system would know not to pick it and pick some of the stronger feats instead, making their character more powerful than that of someone that didn't know and just put it because they wanted more hit points and that was the only feat that did it. But still, this didn't seem so unique to D&D 3. I also played Shadowrun 3E, and while it was never as popular and big on the net (in my estimation), I know it had a lot of charOp potential, too.

What I definitely felt comparing 3E and 4E was that 3E was played a lot at home, when you were tinkering your multiclass, feat and prestige class options, spells, wild shape options, magic items and what not to make an optimized build that might use a pre-established routine of buff spells in the morning and at the start of combat to beat whatever would be thrown at them, while 4E felt that more decision-amking happened at the game table, when to decide who to stun, daze, weaken, push, slide, which group to blast, which power to sustain, which target to mark, which creature to put a target on for the rest of the team, who to lend an action to and whatever else your options were. But it still retained a fair amount of charOp mechanics, too.

 

[payn]

One thing to consider IMO is that 3E might have been the first edition to really fall so heavily under "digital scrutiny". It's not that powergaming, rules-lawyering and character optimization didn't happen before, or don't happen in other games. But it was maybe the first edition of D&D, and thus the first edition of a really, really big and succesful RPG franchise, to build an internet forum culture. It might be that the charOp development was mostly due to the game, but it could also be that charOp was just something that would always happen once players across the world could connect.

Yeap, also MMOs arose at the same time. Folks playing 24/7 in video games designed to be challenging for folks running the same content over and over again. This certainly drove charop internet culture.

That said... It seems to me that D&D 3E was also a very "crunchy" game compared to D&D 5, so maybe that played a role. Monte Cook (one of the designers of 3E) once suggested that rewarding "system mastery" was a goal during the design - a feat like Toughness wasn't bad because they didn't know better, they put it in so people that figured out the system would know not to pick it and pick some of the stronger feats instead, making their character more powerful than that of someone that didn't know and just put it because they wanted more hit points and that was the only feat that did it. But still, this didn't seem so unique to D&D 3. I also played Shadowrun 3E, and while it was never as popular and big on the net (in my estimation), I know it had a lot of charOp potential, too.

Yeah I think it goes well beyond the example in that combat feats competed with skill feats, which competed with social feats, which competed with crafting feats, etc... PF2 took one lesson and separated out the pools so they dont compete with each other. However, they did not learn the lesson as there are trap feats in every category now.

What I definitely felt comparing 3E and 4E was that 3E was played a lot at home, when you were tinkering your multiclass, feat and prestige class options, spells, wild shape options, magic items and what not to make an optimized build that might use a pre-established routine of buff spells in the morning and at the start of combat to beat whatever would be thrown at them, while 4E felt that more decision-amking happened at the game table, when to decide who to stun, daze, weaken, push, slide, which group to blast, which power to sustain, which target to mark, which creature to put a target on for the rest of the team, who to lend an action to and whatever else your options were. But it still retained a fair amount of charOp mechanics, too.

I often refer to this as strategy and tactics. 3E leans on the strategy in that you build your PC, select which items to take with you, choose which adventures to go on, and last but not least, engage the encounters when its advantageous to do so. Obviously, the players dont always align things which is where the game gets interesting. Tactics, on the other hand, happen during battle. Its the application of your skills and abilities that is what the game is designed to engage. 4E leaned heavily in this direction.

Now you can use tactics in 3E, but it wasn't designed as a necessary element. You can certainly strategize in 4E, but if you dont engage the tactical design, you will have a rough go of it. 5E eases up on both elements. You can lean in either direction and the game will be easier if you do, but its not required.

When viewing 3E/PF1 supplements, I try and view them from this lens. Many of them offer up more strategy elements as its what 3E is best at. However, you have things like book of nine swords that also adds tactical elements to the game if you are interested in pushing that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah I think it goes well beyond the example in that combat feats competed with skill feats, which competed with social feats, which competed with crafting feats, etc... PF2 took one lesson and separated out the pools so they dont compete with each other. However, they did not learn the lesson as there are trap feats in every category now.

I don't think its so much "didn't learn the lesson" as "weren't able to avoid it entirely", which is, honestly, an intrinsic risk of exception based design; since nothing is built to a common metric, bad assumptions can sneak in to individual design and not even be realized until something is out in the field for a while.

I often refer to this as strategy and tactics. 3E leans on the strategy in that you build your PC, select which items to take with you, choose which adventures to go on, and last but not least, engage the encounters when its advantageous to do so. Obviously, the players dont always align things which is where the game gets interesting. Tactics, on the other hand, happen during battle. Its the application of your skills and abilities that is what the game is designed to engage. 4E leaned heavily in this direction.

The problem with both of these (though I find it more tolerable at the tactical end, since it doesn't make the problem as consistently visible in most cases) is if you're going to care about these things at all, you've got two real choice; set the ceiling so it is still manageable, or make the floor so it isn't crippling. The former virtually mandates engaging with that level if you don't want to feel like the game is punishing (which can be super irritating to people who kind of don't want to have to lean into that), but the latter makes it all too easy to break the game. You can compress the ends, but at that point probably the decisions at each end don't matter much (which is an objection fans of PF1e have had for the strategic layer in PF2e, because while its hard to completely screw up there, its also hard to get an enormous amount out of it).

 

[payn]

I don't think its so much "didn't learn the lesson" as "weren't able to avoid it entirely", which is, honestly, an intrinsic risk of exception based design; since nothing is built to a common metric, bad assumptions can sneak in to individual design and not even be realized until something is out in the field for a while.

I think much of it is obvious. A feat that is cool, but will be useful once a campaign being in the pool with a feat that will be useful once a session isn't a great idea. Putting those two in a pool with a feat that is useful in every single encounter is a terrible idea.

The problem with both of these (though I find it more tolerable at the tactical end, since it doesn't make the problem as consistently visible in most cases) is if you're going to care about these things at all, you've got two real choice; set the ceiling so it is still manageable, or make the floor so it isn't crippling. The former virtually mandates engaging with that level if you don't want to feel like the game is punishing (which can be super irritating to people who kind of don't want to have to lean into that), but the latter makes it all too easy to break the game. You can compress the ends, but at that point probably the decisions at each end don't matter much (which is an objection fans of PF1e have had for the strategic layer in PF2e, because while its hard to completely screw up there, its also hard to get an enormous amount out of it).

I think thats because the "getting a lot out of it" comes from the tactical play in PF2, which is a 180 from the strategic play of PF1.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think much of it is obvious. A feat that is cool, but will be useful once a campaign being in the pool with a feat that will be useful once a session isn't a great idea. Putting those two in a pool with a feat that is useful in every single encounter is a terrible idea.

Yeah, but the gig is I doubt they do think its only useful once in a campaign when they write it. That's what I meant about "bad assumptions". You see that all the time where people see things frequently occur in games they play/GM that are, outside of that bubble, not particularly common. Its one of the chief causes of design errors IME.

I think thats because the "getting a lot out of it" comes from the tactical play in PF2, which is a 180 from the strategic play of PF1.

Oh, that too, but I suspect the people who were going to be used to cooking the books on the build/strategic layer would have ended up having a problem anyway if the game sort of required both. PF1e/D&D3e was the thing I mentioned earlier; since they didn't set the ceiling low, strategic play could, without strong effort on the GM's part, break the campaign. You heard about it all the time. As such, a fair number of people got used to just baking a cake up-front and then cruising though tactics. Even if they still could have done the first but needed to do the second its hard to see that they'd have liked it.

 

[Yora]

I was just writing up stat blocks for generic NPCs that use the races and equipment that exist in my setting, so that I can actually do random encounters with bandits or patrolling soldiers and the like.
And I noticed that the whole exercise of selecting feats is infinitely more easier and faster when you know the character you're making will only ever have those two feats you are picking now.

+2 to two skills, +2 to one save, or +1 to attacks with one weapon type have become far more attractive to me than anything else.
Sure, I'm making faceless goons that I want to be easy to run in larger numbers as GM and not a single PC I want to play for an entire campaign. But I think if I know from the start that my PC will never get that fourth feat at 9th level, then much of the big exercise of picking a number of feats that together synergize to one awesome attack seems to fall away. Same with combining class features from two or more classes, except the ones that are gained at very early class levels.

I wonder if that was how the designers of the PHB imagined the game to be mostly played when they did their playtesting?

Just some guys with big sticks, enjoying the moment. Not a monkey grip dual wielder in sight.

 

[Pedantic]

I was just writing up stat blocks for generic NPCs that use the races and equipment that exist in my setting, so that I can actually do random encounters with bandits or patrolling soldiers and the like.
And I noticed that the whole exercise of selecting feats is infinitely more easier and faster when you know the character you're making will only ever have those two feats you are picking now.

+2 to two skills, +2 to one save, or +1 to attacks with one weapon type have become far more attractive to me than anything else.
Sure, I'm making faceless goons that I want to be easy to run in larger numbers as GM and not a single PC I want to play for an entire campaign. But I think if I know from the start that my PC will never get that fourth feat at 9th level, then much of the big exercise of picking a number of feats that together synergize to one awesome attack seems to fall away. Same with combining class features from two or more classes, except the ones that are gained at very early class levels.

I wonder if that was how the designers of the PHB imagined the game to be mostly played when they did their playtesting?

Just some guys with big sticks, enjoying the moment. Not a monkey grip dual wielder in sight.

That is actually the intended use case of things like Toughness. I think the difficulty of selecting/using feats for NPCs is often overstated, but I do think a useful tool would be building out some kind of role-based feat template that stuck toward simple effects/number tweaks and was precalculated to hit dice/level.

You could obviously customize it, but being able to check the level and add the power attack ability and some flat bonuses to final numbers on your Frontline Fighter NPC would be convenient.

 

[amethal]

That is actually the intended use case of things like Toughness. I think the difficulty of selecting/using feats for NPCs is often overstated, but I do think a useful tool would be building out some kind of role-based feat template that stuck toward simple effects/number tweaks and was precalculated to hit dice/level.

One thing the 3.x Toughness feat had going for it was you could pick it more than once, so if you had a fairly straightforward monster with a lot of HD (and hence a lot of feats) but no feats left that you particularly wanted it to have, then you could fill up its remaining slots with Toughness. I think the T-Rex might have been an example of this.

Pathfinder, of course, took the Improved Toughness feat (+1 hp per HD) and renamed it Toughness, and you can only take it once. (They may have tweaked it a bit - I don't think Improved Toughness had the "minimum of +3" clause.)

 

[DeadlyUematsu]

One thing to consider IMO is that 3E might have been the first edition to really fall so heavily under "digital scrutiny". It's not that powergaming, rules-lawyering and character optimization didn't happen before, or don't happen in other games. But it was maybe the first edition of D&D, and thus the first edition of a really, really big and succesful RPG franchise, to build an internet forum culture. It might be that the charOp development was mostly due to the game, but it could also be that charOp was just something that would always happen once players across the world could connect.

Scholomance argued that the digital scrutiny was a major contributor. I disagree though. Character optimization was always a thing but, past a certain point, it was communally derided. That character optimization became not only acceptable but enshrined is a communal issue, technology being irrelevant.

That said... It seems to me that D&D 3E was also a very "crunchy" game compared to D&D 5, so maybe that played a role. Monte Cook (one of the designers of 3E) once suggested that rewarding "system mastery" was a goal during the design - a feat like Toughness wasn't bad because they didn't know better, they put it in so people that figured out the system would know not to pick it and pick some of the stronger feats instead, making their character more powerful than that of someone that didn't know and just put it because they wanted more hit points and that was the only feat that did it.

No. Monte Cook did not said that at all. Please refer to a more courteous explanation here.

What I definitely felt comparing 3E and 4E was that 3E was played a lot at home, when you were tinkering your multiclass, feat and prestige class options, spells, wild shape options, magic items and what not to make an optimized build that might use a pre-established routine of buff spells in the morning and at the start of combat to beat whatever would be thrown at them, while 4E felt that more decision-amking happened at the game table, when to decide who to stun, daze, weaken, push, slide, which group to blast, which power to sustain, which target to mark, which creature to put a target on for the rest of the team, who to lend an action to and whatever else your options were. But it still retained a fair amount of charOp mechanics, too.

Hero System/Champions has the same play-at-home issues but it largely sidesteps the problems by empowering the GM who can just say no to whatever torturous build a player proposes. With Hero System/Champions, the majority of players acknowledge GM authority and it's only the real dunderheads and migrants from modern D&D that seem to think that anything goes.

 

[Greg K]

Monte Cook (one of the designers of 3E) once suggested that rewarding "system mastery" was a goal during the design - a feat like Toughness wasn't bad because they didn't know better, they put it in so people that figured out the system would know not to pick it and pick some of the stronger feats instead, making their character more powerful than that of someone that didn't know and just put it because they wanted more hit points and that was the only feat that did it. But still, this didn't seem so unique to D&D 3. I also played Shadowrun 3E, and while it was never as popular and big on the net (in my estimation), I know it had a lot of charOp potential, too.

Actually, I believe that wrote Toughness was good for a low level one-shot or the elf wizard with low hit points due to con penalty (or was it that elf wizard in a low level one-shot?) and the problem was that they did not tell that to players.