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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8220473" data-attributes="member: 8461">A nineteen-year run is incredible in a hobby that's less than fifty years old. The 3.X game engine hit the sweet spot for a lot of people for a very long time (and continues to for a large number, I suspect).What I find interesting to note is that, for all the ways that Third Edition broke from its predecessors when it came out in the year 2000, its connection to earlier editions can still be very clearly seen in the Core Rules. While the differences are most obvious, when you compare 3.0 to 3.5, and look at what changed, a lot of the alterations are to remove aspects of the game that lingered from older editions and needed subsequent tweaking to fit with the new rules.For example, a few years ago at Gen Con, some of my gaming group overheard a snatch of conversation that they found hilarious and relayed to the rest of us later on. Specifically, they heard someone saying "that's as unbalanced as a 3.0 druid in a 3.5 campaign!" They've made that an in-group meme, and we all get a kick out of it, but when I asked them if they knew why someone would say that, none of them did.It was because in 3.0, a druid's animal companions were the result of casting an animal friendship spell - just like in previous editions - rather than being a class feature. Specifically, casting it got you any number of animal companions, so long as their total Hit Dice didn't exceed your caster level (non-adventuring druids got twice this amount). So you could have a small army of animals along with you, which could be all kinds of hard to run. And while Use Magic Device was a class-restricted skill in 3.0 (something that could be solved with a one-level dip into, if I recall correctly, bard or rogue), the ability to put that spell into a wand or scroll meant that anyone capable of using UMD could gain at least one or two free animal companions.That's a roundabout way of underlining that 3.X hit a sweet spot for a lot of people, in terms of still feeling like D&D while at the same time maximizing a great deal of potential utility in what it could do. It might not have been perfectly "balanced" in what it offered, but that created a great deal of mechanical freedom that was, I think, to its overall benefit. It was a great that way, and for me and my group, it's still our system of choice (via Pathfinder 1E).</blockquote>

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