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Luck, for me, is not a primary factor. In my experience, the deeper problem is that the TTRPG community is so atomized that it lacks even baseline shared standards, with the result that all kinds of unproductive behavior are tolerated when they should count heavily against a player. Ghosting is...

I've tinkered with the idea of treating prestige classes as 5e subclasses in that you start acquiring the class features (so no spell progression unless it's native) of one starting at 6th level. I imagine it wouldn't be that popular since I excluded PrCs that were obviously powergrabs from the...

Ah, I guess I'll find a way to point out a recurrent problem then.

In recent weeks, I've decided to crack open my 3.0e PHB and started addressing the foundational problems at their very beginning. It's more extensive than my previous set of house rules, drawing on the reasonable design of Szatany's Ultimate Classes extensively. So far... 1) I gave the fighter...

A word of advice: I had a similar discussion with Maxperson in another thread and I realized I was wasting time when it became apparent that my experience meant squat to them.

You’re not wrong. At a surface level, 3.5e should not punish a DM for lacking encyclopedic rules knowledge. But there is a certain segment of its fanbase that makes the edition actively less attractive to DM. The game can be curated, yes, but that only works if players accept curation and...

So, catching up with the thread, here is how I would put it: the problem with the supplement treadmill does not stop at power creep or the mere necessity of system mastery. There is role creep as well. Core already had broken, invasive full casters such as the druid, but the supplement line made...

It rewarded system mastery but based on what was actually published, it falls more into the bucket of a supplemental treadmill than an intentional puzzle. So optimizers come ahead in largely unexpected ways (Rainbow Brite trumping over Fireball Man) due to the lack of coherent vision of what...

Can't fault you for that. Based on the timeline of Orcus (the original 4E prototype), they were well into evacuating the 3.5e space by 2006 which is definitely reflected in the products they made for 2006 and 2007.

Agreed. When I wrote a ban list for 3.0e, it was considerably smaller than my ban list for 3.5e.

Pretty much my understanding. If you internalize that context, you can run 3.5e without issue because you know that whatever is in the books is very much subject to ordinary judgment.

The splatbooks definitely had power creep. Core was already unbalanced and while there was material to help patch CORE issues, it also tacked on spells, items, and prestige classes that were unhelpful.

It does drive away a lot of people, and I still think it’s worth it. Filtering hard gave me a stable group that is now nearing its ninth year, wrapping up its third campaign, and preparing for a fourth. Everyone at that table wants an immersion-heavy, roleplay-heavy experience, and when problems...

It is a player issue in the immediate sense. However... it would be silly to pretend 3E, in its design and marketing, was neutral. The edition gave min-maxers enormous room to operate and the surrounding community developed a substantial optimization culture around it. So yes, people can do this...

When Dragon Magazine initially switched over to 3.0e, it became littered with all of these optimization suggestions (I think) titled Power Plays. It was an immediate reversal from what came before that it is easy to conclude the optimization focus was a part of the marketing/adoption strategy.

It is not. I ran a year-long 3.5e campaign back in 2022. Established as a "class tier 3-4" campaign with very little additional house rules for balancing and the like, players had to make do without clerics, wizards, druids, etc. What were the side conversations like? Players wanting to play...

It's a solvable problem especially with experience. You simply must filter hard. Actions and behavior that seem innocuous at first are often indicators of big problems down the road. Asks that the time of the game change before they've even joined? Pass. Doesn't follow directions? Pass...

DMs are the main determinant of whether a campaign will finish in a clean and final manner but I would be misleading if I didn't state that some play groups just suck the enthusiasm of running a campaign down the drain so much and so fast that even a properly hastened finish isn't even a concern.

To answer the thread topic, I don't miss 3.5e as I am actively playing in a campaign. I even finished a 5 year campaign of 247 sessions last year. What I do miss, as a DM, is not having to second-guess and remove players at a drop at a hat. The pool of players is thin and a lot of those who are...

Answering for myself, as a DM, the build straight up has several points of contention. 1) (Personally) contentious multi-classing involving BOTH monk and paladin (it's not the legality but the intent of dipping several front-loaded classes for optimization purposes; at this point, narrative...