D&D 3E/3.5 3rd Edition Revisited - Better play with the power of hindsight?

[payn]

Speaking of which, I think a simple practice that should make the game more fun without needing any rules changes is to really limit the number of magic items that only give a fixed passive bonus to stats.

Ring of protection +1. Cloak of resistance +1. Gloves of Dexterity +2.

A player could forget to apply the modifier from such an item for the entire campaign and nobody would ever notice any difference. It increases the amount of bookkeeping while not affecting the fiction of the game. That's just character fine tuning. Not introducing new capabilities

When you hand out such items, make them have a big impact on stats.

Ring of protection +4. Belt of Giant's Strength +6.

This is a common misconception about how the 3E system works. Wealth by level tables indicate what pluses characters should have by which levels. The +1 does make a difference at level 3, and you are expected to have a +4 stat item by level 8-10 for example. So, in theory handing out a big item earlier or later instead can work, but there will likely be a lag period where the PC is stronger or weaker than intended for the system math.

But most of the time, it will be just better to simply concentrate on magic items that grant characters new abilities that they don't already have. Stuff that lets them do actions they could not otherwise do. That's magical.

A ring of minor fire resistance that absorbs 10 points of fire damage is not all bad. But with 20 or 30 points of reduction, you can get into all kinds of new shenanigans by walking straight into fire and laugh it off.

Agreed, there are many magic items that do just this. Its a shame they compete for the same wealth each PC gains as they level. However, you can build the +X items into the game and just give out cool magic items. Pathfinder did it with unchained.

 

[Yora]

As I see it, wealth by level and challenge rating are all suggestions by the designers of the system that are meant to provide guidance for the kind of adventures they assumed would be played.

Unfortunately, I was never able to infer the kind of play style they had in mind from the PHB and the DMG, and it seems pretty clear that the writer of the later splatbooks didn't concern themselves with any of that either.

To be completely blunt, I don't believe in balance. Because I don't believe that the GM should plot out which scenes are going to take place in the campaign, how the scenes play out, and what their outcome should be. What I am looking for in an RPG is that the GM sets up locations and populates them, and that it is up to the players to judge what they see, compare it to the capabilities they have, and make a decision how they want to interact with it.
I don't know what the party will get into a fight with. I don't know the composition of the party that would be in that encounter before the fight happens. I do not need the party to get a complete victor without casualties. And I don't need the party to be in any specific shape to go into further fights after that.
If the party gets into a fight with something that beats them up, forces them to retreat, takes them prisoner, or kills some of them, then that's what the players will have to deal with in the next scene. All that I need for the campaign to work is that the players don't get squashed before they have time to realize that they are outmatched or in serious danger and make an attempt to save themselves.

Challenge ratings help me to narrow down what pool of creatures I might draw from to populate a location and which ones I can ignore right away because there won't be much hope for the players to make an escape. I still have to read the whole creature description to get a feeling for how much telegraphing I need to do to avoid the players being completely surprised when they when they get a mighty smack in the face.

If the PCs have lower stats than some number cruncher once crunched, this only means to me that the party will have a slightly lower performance in combats overall. This means that the players will have to progress a bit slower and more cautious, but that would be in comparison to another hypothetical campaign that never got to be played.

 

[payn]

Ah, then a lot of these ideas that seem to go against 3E strength are starting to make sense.

 

[Voadam]

Speaking of which, I realized literally only yesterday what the purpose of the Multiclass XP penalty and Favored Classes was. What it does is to discourage players from dipping one or two levels in a class to collect their front loaded main abilities. Like 2 feats for 2 fighter levels, or 8+Int skill points for 1 rogue level, which you can all put into a single skill if you do it at a later point.
Elves are free to dip wizard, dwarves are free to dip fighter, and halflings are free to dip rogue. Which all seems appropriate to give each race as a whole more character and evoke their niche.
But I have to say, in the good 7 or 8 years that I had been casually hanging around Char Op subforums, I am pretty sure I have never seen anyone even mention that Multiclass XP penalties could be a factor. This was something that was in the rule, everyone saw once and thought it was stupid (because they didn't understood what it was supposed to do?), and immediately became common consensus to completely ignore for the entirety of the game's run.

I never saw it ignored. It was very easy to work within the rules and get lots of decent combinations for flavor or mechanics.

You also seem to miss a few multiclassing aspects by the RAW:

Anybody can play their favored class and dip anything including multiple dips within a two level spread.

Humans can dip any combo with a main class as much as they want so there is always an option to build with a no penalty dip. Lots of people play humans so lots can dip anything.

Dwarves can dip fighter, but also the reverse, dwarves can be a fighter and dip anything including dipping lots of classes. Fighter x/rogue 1/monk 1/ranger 1 is pretty decent in 3.0 giving sneak attack, evasion, good save bumps, and two weapon fighting which works well for your fighter chassis. It also allowed things like a dwarven fighter X who dips a level of wizard or sorcerer to use wands he buys in his plate mail armor which is a decent option for the cost of one fighter level, but cuts hard against the AD&D flavor view of dwarves as not wizards.

Anybody can dip one or two in a lot of classes and avoid the penalty. Fighter 2/Barbarian 2/Rogue 2/Ranger 2/plus a level of a caster to get wands to use in armor takes you to level 9 as a fairly decent core only martial combatant with some neat abilities and capabilities. Add in non core classes and you can go a long ways picking up dips through 20th level, with some combinations keeping full BAB.

That is a lot of dipping RAW with no penalty.

Anybody can be an AD&D multiclass where you split your levels evenly. This is usually a terrible idea for casters on a comparative power level thanks to caster level and saves and spell slots where a straight caster will outstrip them quickly, but decent for fighter rogue barbarian ranger mix type multiclass concepts.

Picking up the specific spread of levels of something for a multiclass penalty instead of comboing with a favored class or even split was not a big draw that I saw.

It did restrict dipping for non-humans to generally working with favored class stuff one way or the other, but no non-human race was really powerhouse enough that a powergamer wanted a specific non-human race dip combo that did not work with favored class. That left penalizing those who wanted non favored class multiclass dips, so elvish cleric rogues, dwarvish barbarian rogues, halfling fighter clerics, and only for dips instead of full even split multiclasses.

So if you want the powergaming synergistic monk wisdom AC bonus dip for your LN wildshaping druid, it is generally human only for the flexible favored class. Which for most powergaming design purposes is fine. Having that human option working for any dip combo allows a lot of dipping options.

It was also interesting that favored class gave no benefit to someone who was a single class character in their favored class and no penalty to someone who was single classed or evenly split in non-favored classes. The only general benefit was flexibility to go uneven in combo with a favored class which generally was mostly mechanically useful for the dipping options.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That argument always comes up. And did so back in the day all the time as well.

"If you don't like it, why do you play it?"

But to that my counterpoint has always been "Then what play instead?"

If we make a retroclone that is just like 3rd edition, except for one third of the content, then why not just play 3rd edition without one third of the content?

You're operating on the theory that I think the truncated retroclone is a particularly good idea, either. I think it tosses away one of the big potential virtues 3e had (the fact it didn't work well notwithstanding).

 

[DeadlyUematsu]

I think back in 3E/PF1 heyday, it was a pretty common complaint that folks wanted to use any source available for their PC. I do think a bit of that was true when 3E was D&D and later when PF1 was Pathfinder. I find now that players are much more willing to work with and ask GMs on what is available when starting a campaign.

There are still players want to use everything unfortunately.

 

[DeadlyUematsu]

Speaking of which, I think a simple practice that should make the game more fun without needing any rules changes is to really limit the number of magic items that only give a fixed passive bonus to stats.

Ring of protection +1. Cloak of resistance +1. Gloves of Dexterity +2.

A player could forget to apply the modifier from such an item for the entire campaign and nobody would ever notice any difference. It increases the amount of bookkeeping while not affecting the fiction of the game. That's just character fine tuning. Not introducing new capabilities

When you hand out such items, make them have a big impact on stats.

Ring of protection +4. Belt of Giant's Strength +6.

But most of the time, it will be just better to simply concentrate on magic items that grant characters new abilities that they don't already have. Stuff that lets them do actions they could not otherwise do. That's magical.

A ring of minor fire resistance that absorbs 10 points of fire damage is not all bad. But with 20 or 30 points of reduction, you can get into all kinds of new shenanigans by walking straight into fire and laugh it off.

An interesting idea. I imagine a campaign where a ring of protection just grants bonuses similar to AD&D (potentially a 5 ft. radius and/or a resistance bonus in addition to a deflection bonus) or a belt of giant's strength just grants the strength of an appropriate giant would be more interesting than the item treadmill we got.

 

[DeadlyUematsu]

This is a common misconception about how the 3E system works. Wealth by level tables indicate what pluses characters should have by which levels. The +1 does make a difference at level 3, and you are expected to have a +4 stat item by level 8-10 for example.

A +4 stat item around 8th to 10th level is absurd. That's 33% of a character's expected WBL at 10th level and for 8th/9th level, it's even worse. While it is affordable and characters played from 1st level end up with a fair amount of wealth over the WBL, it isn't an necessity and you'd probably get more value from 2 stat bonus items and/or an amulet of natural armor, vest of resistance, ring of protection, one of the few dozen utility items introduced in Magic Item Compendium, etc. than hyper-focusing on one stat to the exclusion of everything else.

Otherwise, your suggestion to bake in the items is solid advice as it does address some of the issues that classed NPCs have.

 

[amethal]

Best of luck with your revisiting the system. For me, 3.x/PF1 is the one edition that I would never want to play or DM again.

• Diagonal movement
• Ticking off individual boxes (and "half boxes" for untrained) skill proficiencies
• Grappling, tripping, disarming, swallow hole, and other combat maneuvers
• Flat-footed, touch, and regular ACs
• Magic item Christmas trees
• Buff smorgasbords before combats

In terms of Pathfinder (1st edition)

* I'm not sure how Pathfinder handles diagonal movement, since we use Theatre of the Mind
*That's not how skills work in Pathfinder (1 skill point = 1 skill rank, you get a flat +3 if it's a trained skill)
*Pathfinder changed how combat manoeuvres work, which greatly reduces the cognitive load on the GM - although stuff like feinting still has its own sub-system
*Pathfinder is the same; it's not an issue from the player side (write the numbers on your character sheet) and the Bestiaries give the GM numbers for all of the monsters, so it doesn't add to the GM's workload, and gives lots more tactical options (the heavily armoured tank might laugh at most encounters but won't fancy taking on a bunch of shadows)
*Pathfinder Unchained gives you an alternative "inherent bonus" system you can use instead
*I consider this to be a feature, not a bug, as it is part of the game's tactical element; I assume you are approaching this from the DMs perspective (if you don't like it as a player, then I guess you can just ... not do it?) in which case you can make sure the PCs don't always get time to prepare, or aren't always aware of the right thing to prepare, or blow a load of spell-slots against a weak opponent

I appreciate I'm biased (I enjoy playing Pathfinder) but from my perspective many of the issues people had with 3.5 were fixed by it.

The use of archetypes also largely removed the appeal of prestige classes, and allowed character customisation without the need to plan way in advance. The absence of archetypes is probably the main reason why I'd hate to go back to 3.5 (although the racial substitution levels did introduce that in a small way).

The second thing I really like about Pathfinder is traits, which allowed a further amount of customisation - if you really want your Fighter to have Use Magic Device as a class skill, then you can. Obviously, they are one more thing that can be abused, but that brings me back to the original point - if you don't want a broken game, then don't break it.

Now that it's officially "over", with no more "First Party" content being made, I've started looking at Pathfinder 1st edition as more of a toolbox, in which you select the elements you want to have in your games and exclude the rest. The GM is excited to run a "World of X" campaign, the players are attracted by the GM's enthusiasm, and come up with World of X characters. Anyone with "World of Y" character ideas will have to wait for the next campaign so see them in action.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

That's exactly the thing that draw me back after all those years. I had an idea for a setting and campaign forming, and very quickly realized that 3rd edition has all the things I need, (Partly because many parts were inspired by memories of 3rd edition books.)

Spoiler: Let me tell you about my campaign idea

Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Monsters of Faerûn, Manual of the Planes, Lords of Madness.

Reskinned high elves, grey elves, wood elves, half-elves, avariel, goliaths, and goblins for PCs.
(Ogers and ghouls as options to be introduced later.)

Bards, monks, paladins, and sorcerers are out.
Psions and wilders are in. (Only egoist, seer, and telepath psions.)

Hard level cap at 12th. 11th and 12th level NPCs play the role of epic level characters in the setting, with 6th level spells being these very rare miraculous powers.

Chitines, gnolls, grimlocks, quaggoths, skum as main wild humanoids.

Plane of Faerie as main otherworld, home of fey'ri, yuan-ti, and elementals.

Plane of Shadows takes on all the functions of the Astral Plane and Ethereal Plane.
It's the borderworld that conncets to the home plane of aboleths, doppelgangers, kraken, mind flayers, and tsochari.
No other outer planes or elemental planes; no outsider type creatures. (A few become fey instead.)

Psionics gets reflavored to be the Arcane abilities from Bloodborne.

Looks like fun.

I've been toying with a No-Core game idea for a while:

No core races except humans
No core classes
No core feats (unless a class feature of a noncore class)
No core spells (unless a class feature of a noncore class)
No magic items from DMG
No monsters from MMI

Magical Classes: Beguiler (PHB2), Dread Necromancer (HoH), Favored Soul [no wings](CD), Spirit Shaman (CD), Warlock (CAr)
Mundane Classes: Expert (UA), Knight (PHB2), Scout (CAd), Swashbuckler (CW)

It seems like it can guarantee a large degree of niche protection, while enforcing a strict magical/mundane divide unless the character multiclasses.