I've recently been going again through the old 3rd edition books Manual of the Planes, Expanded Psionics Handbook, and Lords of Madness looking for ideas for a campaign concept I am entertaining. There's a bunch of really interesting content in those books, and it occurred to me that I don't know any other game or even edition of D&D that would let you replicate many of those without very extensive rewriting. Pathfinder 1st edition maybe, but that's still mostly the same game. And that in turn had me opening up to at least entertaining the idea that perhaps 3rd edition might be a game that actually plays decently well if you run it the right way.
I first started to be interested in RPG just a few weeks before 3rd edition came out, and so I actually waited that long to get the new books right on release as the very first game system I would try to learn. I stuck to it exclusively through its entire run and then to Pathfinder for another two or three years. I think I had close to every single 3rd edition book that was released for at least a while before I resold about half of them. (Except for the Prestige Class, spells, and items books.) I've also been a lot on the Giant In the Playground forum and RPG.net (before it went mad). So unlike with all the original OSR discussions where I only had other people's words to go with, with 3rd edition I lived through it all myself.
While I was all in on all of that at the time, I've seen first hand all the stupid nonsense about the reception of, and culture around that game, which at the end of it convinced me that 3rd edition was a complete mess and the d20 system a really terrible engine for "Roleplaying™" Games. (Yes, I partook generously in that OSR stuff that became popular at the time.)
But considering now how the game would play in practice now that I have some 15 more years as GM under my belt with a far broader horizon of what games and campaigns can be, I've actually been a bit appalled at how I remember myself running this game (and Pathfinder) in the 2000s. Man, I was really bad. But so seems to have been everyone else I've encountered in the common discourse around the game back in those days.
I don't really have much of a thesis here on what exactly 3rd edition did wrong and what about it was actually really bad design. But I have developed a hypothesis over this month that perhaps the way I have seen 3rd edition played, and heard it self-reported being played by other people, and the general sense of disappointment I've seen about it in recent years, might not actually be primarily the fault of the game rules as they are designed, but by the way we tried to use them.
Maybe the negative and disappointing experiences many people seem to have made with the game are not because it is a bad tool, but because we tried to make it do things it was not meant for?
One thing that I find to be very noticeable with 3rd edition in hindsight is that there seems to be a very considerable disconnect between the people who designed the main rules set of the game, and the people who actually wrote the majority of supplements over the game's seven year run. Manifested very strikingly here at the introduction to Prestige Classes in the
Dungeon Master's Guide:
View attachment 341693
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.
Okay, rhetoric ramblings aside, my current interest is in re-reading, re-examining, and researching the actually written mechanics of the three Core Rulebooks and separating it from what players in the 2000s thought the game to be or wished the game to be, and what the publisher found to be the most efficient way to sell books. Was 3rd edition a hot mess? Yes. But was it a badly designed game system from the start or did the problem lie with how the game was received?
For a very long time, D&D 3rd edition was widely regarded as the game that can do any kind of fantasy campaign that you could think of. (And even non-fantasy games with the many d20 spin-off game systems.) But I think this can very unequivocally dismissed as wrong. I think pretty much everyone now agrees that no game system is a good for any imaginable campaign. Any good system is still only good at the one thing it is made for.
What I am wondering now is, what kind of adventures, campaigns, and play style is D&D 3rd edition actually best at? What part of the rules seem to have been widely misunderstood or misapplied? And what small tweaks might make a major positive difference?
