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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8220534" data-attributes="member: 6777737">At this point I see 3.x as something that had to happen in order for D&D to progress and, in some ways, for the hobby to progress. That's a little unfair because other games certainly have been quite popular, but if we think of D&D as just the fantasy TTRPG for dungeon adventuring, then I think it's true.The problem the 3e devs faced was that, although they had a huge amount of rules, they didn't know what rules they needed and what rules they didn't because, well, nobody played 1e/2e the way it was written. Plus the fact that the game slowly evolved between 1974 and 1978 by a variety of disparate individuals with different goals and different ideas. Every rule was it's own system, and every system felt like a house of cards.So, 3e's goal was, first and foremost, to systematize and formalize the game. To unify and clarify and codify. To describe and expand rather than limit. To introduce design where none had existed before. Once 3e was there, then at that point you could actually see what you really need to play the game. It turns out the scaling assumptions from AD&D completely broke 3e's class balance. It turns out that skills that do just one thing aren't very good. It turns out that monsters are pretty obnoxious if they're all as annoying to make as a PC. It turns out that there are a ton of things that, while cool to define, just work better when you let the DM make it up at the table. 3e was the first time the game had a real unified system that could be examined. It's the first version that was designed holistically from the ground up. That way we could see how bad the warts really were.</blockquote>

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