D&D 3.x 3rd Edition Revisited - Better play with the power of hindsight?

[Emerikol]

My experience is that it's important to be up-front about what is and isn't allowed in a given game. I'll write a campaign prospectus for a game I plan to run.

If the deal is "no prestige classes" or "these travel/movement spells don't exist" then players who sign on for the game can accept that. The friction, IME, comes from a sense of "I am altering the deal" surprises.

Maybe I'm lucky not to get the sort of player who says, "But this is official material! You must allow it!"

This could have been written by me. The prospectus is perhaps the most important first step in any campaign. Even if you are following only the official rules, your interpretations should be listed if there is any debate.

I haven't been as lucky but I weaned my players away from that way of thinking early on so now I don't have those issues.

 

[Mannahnin]

Yeah, 3.X, especially early 3.0 had some odd design choice for PrCs. Look at the Oozemaster for example, it is a 5/10 PrC meant for spellcasters, but no spellcaster is going to give up five caster levels. I would either just make it a full casting PrC or remove the casting requirement altogether and make it more of a PrC aimed at martials, most of the abilities are something that a martial character would make better use of anyways and the tenth level capstone ability changes your type to Ooze which makes you immune to crits which a martial character can make better use of than a spellcaster.

Yeah. Spellcaster aimed PrCs in general had to give out something pretty compelling if they wanted you to sell down one or more casting levels to take it, and few of them did.

The flipside, of course, is that you're supposed to give up something pretty important to get PrC levels, and casters generally have very little to sacrifice except casting levels.

The root cause of this was that the 3e designers didn't forsee PrCs being such a big sales tool. And best way to fix it would be to break down casting into more isolated components so that you could change some without killing the whole base class. But those changes would have been pretty major, so they never happened.

Yup.

It's funny, though, in retrospect realizing that since casters got so nutty at higher levels, perhaps prestige classes which slowed down spellcasting advancement might have made for a better game experience if they were widely (read: universally) used.

Of course, it's totally counter-intuitive to players to handicap their characters, but it might be an interesting concept if a group adopted it intentionally ahead of time - similar but a lesser version of agreeing to use the Epic 6 conventions. It could work similarly to 5E subclasses, where at a certain level (like 3 or 6) you have to pick a prestige class representing the special variety of your magic or magical tradition, which adds a bunch of flavor/uniqueness/interesting abilities but slows down the pure casting advancement.

I think 3e did a lot of things right but not everything. If I had to play exactly by the rules, I'd play 3e if I had to play a D&D game.

For me I want a 3e infrastructure with a 1e flavor and sensibility. I hated PRCs and banned those immediately when the game came out. I am going to create my own game one day. I also will go back to slow advancement.

Of course the Thief-Acrobat and Bard in 1E (and arguably the Knight/Avenger, Druid and Mystic in BECMI) were the closest things to Prestige Classes prior to 3E. So in that way 3E PrCs do add some 1E feel.

I do think there were too many of them and I hated how the prerequisites forced players to pre-plan their builds so they could qualify ASAP. I also think they're way cooler if they're tied into the setting (the first one I used in 3.0 was the Knight of the Great Kingdom) and they're things the players can discover and the characters can earn access to, as opposed to just being a giant menu of mechanical options.

 

[nevin]

Now that I'm older and 3rd is an not the new stuff. My groups just want to play. I think this issue was mainly a big thing (in my world at least). Only when the new stuff was coming out. People get excited for new stuff and want the new shiny smell. I understand it. My games have suffered it. But 3rd is a pretty good game if you prune the weeds.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yup.

It's funny, though, in retrospect realizing that since casters got so nutty at higher levels, perhaps prestige classes which slowed down spellcasting advancement might have made for a better game experience if they were widely (read: universally) used.

Yeah, they'd have had to been made essentially mandatory; perhaps in a version of the system that did something like the D20 Modern approach.

I do think there were too many of them and I hated how the prerequisites forced players to pre-plan their builds so they could qualify ASAP. I also think they're way cooler if they're tied into the setting (the first one I used in 3.0 was the Knight of the Great Kingdom) and they're things the players can discover and the characters can earn access to, as opposed to just being a giant menu of mechanical options.

I understand the position, but I just can't help but think PrCs that supported play-concepts that the core classes were never going to do had a place. The classic was the knife fighter; in the basic 3e/3.5 rules that was never going to be a choice that didn't look substandard, so having a PrC to buff it up seemed perfectly legitimate and didn't seem to mandate any particular setting to justify it. There are other similar things that exist as kind of general tropes but don't work usefully with the RAW.

 

[Alzrius]

I understand the position, but I just can't help but think PrCs that supported play-concepts that the core classes were never going to do had a place. The classic was the knife fighter; in the basic 3e/3.5 rules that was never going to be a choice that didn't look substandard, so having a PrC to buff it up seemed perfectly legitimate and didn't seem to mandate any particular setting to justify it.

<laughs in mystic theurge>

 

[Thomas Shey]

Now that I'm older and 3rd is an not the new stuff. My groups just want to play. I think this issue was mainly a big thing (in my world at least). Only when the new stuff was coming out. People get excited for new stuff and want the new shiny smell. I understand it. My games have suffered it. But 3rd is a pretty good game if you prune the weeds.

I still say, over and above any of my general issues with the D&D sphere, it broke pretty heavily in numerous places past about 12th level.

 

[Thomas Shey]

<laughs in mystic theurge>

That was more a case of papering over the fact the multiclassing system didn't work worth a darn as soon as a spellcaster was in the mix, and wizard/cleric ones were a particularly stark case of this.

 

[nevin]

I still say, over and above any of my general issues with the D&D sphere, it broke pretty heavily in numerous places past about 12th level.

If you stick to the rules yep. After 12ish the DM has to give up on encounter levels and be able to plan based on what they know their party can actually do. You can't use any of the encounter guidelines after that point. It just becomes almost anime rocket tag. But it can be fun if the DM can do that kind of game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If you stick to the rules yep. After 12ish the DM has to give up on encounter levels and be able to plan based on what they know their party can actually do. You can't use any of the encounter guidelines after that point. It just becomes almost anime rocket tag. But it can be fun if the DM can do that kind of game.

CR was one of the places, but others were just things like the progressive ability toward alpha-striking, and at the GM end, simply managing a lot of the higher level monsters that got progressively busier (as I note when this comes up, I found this out the hard way when using a high level wizard and a pair of nearly as high level fighters as his bodyguards as opponents, but the same problem would have come up with a lot of demons and dragons).

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

"Slow advancement" has been mentioned earlier.

My preferred xp award system, not just for 3.5e but also for other games that use experience points, is for end-of-session awards rather than "so many xp for defeating the orcs, so many xp for getting past the trap, so many xp for boiling the anthill..." And I keep the xp awards flat, rather than increasing them as the PCs gain levels/increase in power.

For 3.5e, I do 1000-1500 xp at the end of each session (5-6 hours), which gives fast advancement at low level (if I don't just start the PCs at a higher level) and slower, decelerating advancement at higher levels.

The standard-official way of "You need more xp to gain a level as you go up in level, but you also get more xp per encounter and per session as you go up in level" strikes me as just being wonky.