1 year of 3.5e...How has the conversion gone?

After one year of 3.5, what do you think of the new rules?

  • Vastly Superior to 3.0! I can't believe how horrible and broken 3.0 was!

    Votes: 16 4.0%
  • Better than 3.0! Things are better balanced and generally more playable.

    Votes: 234 58.2%
  • Neutral. Some rules are an improvement, others are detrimental.

    Votes: 105 26.1%
  • Worse than 3.0. Most rule changes were unnecessary and poorly thought out.

    Votes: 22 5.5%
  • Terrible! 3.$ has really screwed up D&D!

    Votes: 9 2.2%
  • Other, please explain.

    Votes: 16 4.0%


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some changes were good (like the changes made to the Ranger and Monk class) others were bad (Pokemounts ?!?! )

All in all I'm happy with 3.5
 


Overall the rules are better. I am still bitter about it though. At the very least, they could have included new art in the books.
 
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I voted Neutral.

There were good changes. Harm/Heal was fixed, a lot more and better spells. A lot of ambiguities in wordings were cleared up. Folding seldom-used skills like Intuit Direction and Innuendo into more useful skills. The 3.5 Monk is vastly better, and Sorcerers are more useful too.

There were some changes I abhorred. The Paladin's summonable PokeMount: Horse, I choose you! Eliminating Polymorph Other in favor of "Baleful Polymorph", those weapon size rules, silvered weapons are now "alchemical silver" and just metallic silver won't hurt creatures.

Some changes I was neutral on, like Damage Reduction changes, and making all creatures take up a square space (seemed like it was put there just for ease of making tie-in video games).

The problem is, that I think the change came way too fast, and was in some ways too subtle. I have a lot of friends who aren't "dedicated" gamers, they might play a game every so often, and aren't strangers to gaming, but they don't play every week or read internet message boards or memorize a lot of rules. They still have their 3e PHB, and have run into frustration when they go to play in a 3.5 game and their book is wrong.

I fear WotC will try and force a 4e on us in another year or two, and hopelessly fragment the gaming public between 3 popular editions of D&D, and a lot of players will just stick with 3.x (or some house-rule hybrid of 3.0, 3.5, and their favorite house rules and variants). The uniformity that was a selling point of 3e, putting everyone back on the same page, will be completely lost. Every 3 or 4 years is just too soon for a complete new version of the core books, they had a nice cycle going of once every decade, which was working well.

At least when 3e came along, just about everybody admitted 2e's day had come and gone. It was clunky and outdated compared to other games of the time, with nonsensical, arbitrary rules that drove more people away then they attracted "Why can't my Dwarf be a Wizard, and why can't he give up magic later in life to become a cleric?". 3e was still chugging along happily when 3.5 came out, it had it's flaws and bugs, but nowhere near as bad as 2e. 3.0 seemed like a long-needed natural evolution, 3.5 seemed more like a bug-fix that was used as a chance to put in a lot of arbitrary changes.
 



I voted "mostly good". I'm glad it created an excuse to actually write a balanced psionics system.

As for Monkey Grip, there's only two things I can say about it. Bloody. Stupid.
 

I thought I was in the 'neutral' camp, but I recently faced the prospect of a 3.0 game. Then I realized how much of 3.5 I simply *required* to be happy.
 

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