D&D 3E/3.5 4E Ruined My Love For 3.5

[TwinBahamut]

Posters who talk about hating D&D v3.5 really make me shake my head in bewilderment.

What have they been doing here on the boards for the past several years? Ranting about their undying hatred of the game? If so, I haven't seen it.

Maybe they just all joined up here to talk about D&D after the 4e announcement....

I don't see what is so bewildering about it...

I never quite liked 3E, even long before the 4E announcement. In fact, there were some things about the game I never liked from the very first time I read the books. However, I liked the RPG experience, and 3E was still much better than anything else I ever saw. As such, I tended to swallow my dislike and just played the game, trying to make the best of it (though, because of the difficulty of DMing, I never ran even a small fraction of the games I would have liked to).

When 4E was announced, it suddenly became a real alternative to playing 3E. Disliking elements of something that you enjoy is one thing when there are no alternatives,
but when there is an alternative that appears to have all of the good elements and none of the bad ones, then that dislike can quickly change in nature. At the very least, the sudden introduction of an alternative can make you realize things about your own likes and dislikes that you have never really thought about before.

I don't think there is anything irrational at all in someone who played a lot of 3E over the last several years turning around and saying that they want something better.

 

[pukunui]

Well, I really wasn't talking about the WotC boards; you're right in that I have no experience with them. I was referring mostly to ENWorld.

I figured as much. You should've seen them ... They're mostly dead now but back before last August, they were overflowing with threads titled "X, Y, or Z is teh brokenzorz!!!11".

In any case, I just find it hard to believe that so many people would "hate" D&D v3.5 and yet still play it and that it would remain the most popular RPG in the world.

Doesn't make much sense to me....

Makes sense to me. I think for a lot of people their "hate" was either unrealized or else it manifested itself in less obvious ways. Without something seemingly better to compare 3.5 to, they just stuck with 3.5 because that seemed like the best system out there at the time and because all of their friends were playing it. In my particular case, before the 4e announcement, my group and I were already becoming fairly disillusioned with 3.5 but we stuck with it because we weren't really interested in learning a whole new gaming system. You could say that we're going to have to learn a new system with 4e, but a) it's only partially a new system (it's still d20) and b) 4e is exciting (which makes us want to learn it) whereas 3.5, when compared to what 4e is promising us, has become nothing but a chore.

I think there were probably a lot of 3.5 players out there who played the game with various degrees of disatisfcation; the release of 4e probably crystallized a lot of those complaints.

This is what I was trying to say ... only you've said it much more succinctly than I have.

To give another example from my experience: in the two years that I had been playing and DMing 3.5 prior to the announcement of 4e, I ended up making so many houserules in an attempt to "fix" 3.5 that we might as well have been playing a completely different game anyway ...

When 4E was announced, it suddenly became a real alternative to playing 3E. Disliking elements of something that you enjoy is one thing when there are no alternatives, but when there is an alternative that appears to have all of the good elements and none of the bad ones, then that dislike can quickly change in nature. At the very least, the sudden introduction of an alternative can make you realize things about your own likes and dislikes that you have never really thought about before.

This is also what I've been trying to say put more succinctly than how I said it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

In any case, I just find it hard to believe that so many people would "hate" D&D v3.5 and yet still play it and that it would remain the most popular RPG in the world.

The big answer is that D&D is the name in gaming. Its name is virtually synonymous with the hobby, especially from the outside.

After that, a big part of that comes down to "with whom do you game?" And since D&D is the 800lb gorilla of gaming, its the game most people will have played.

Personally, I own about 60+ RPGs (down from a peak of over 100), of which I've only been able to play a couple dozen.

And since the advent of 3.X, I can't find anything but D&D games. Or more accurately, the gamers with whom I currently game refuse to play anything but.

That means that despite my personally broad gaming preferences, everyone around me is buying D&D products...so must I, if I wish to keep up.

(Then again, I'm kind of of the group librarian, so I'd be buying the stuff anyway.)

Add to that the pressure on smaller RPG publishers to put out a D20 version of their game- even if its not a good fit for their game- to get a piece of the HUGE 3.X/D20 pie and you simply have a marketing juggernaught.

 

[phil500]

I have no doubt I'll feel the same way in 8 years... But we'll get a one or two year period where no one has fully figured out all the problems.

i dont think you will feel the same in 8 years. in 4E they focused on the underlying math, and made a deliberate effort to fix it.

there will be synergies, sure. but i think they have minimized the number of times a DM has to just houserule veto things.

the more options the player has, the more abusable the system is. just like in oblivion. if 4E limits options, i think that can be positive.

 

[pogre]

My situation may be odd/rare.

I'm not completely convinced 4E is the game for me.

But - for some illogical reason - I now have zero desire to play or DM 3E.

My two groups are going to give 4E a fair shake. If it doesn't work, we won't be going back to 3E or any of its 452 derivatives. We'll be doing a whole new system or doing a complete homebrew.

Which is really, really hard for me to understand...because until all the 4E stuff started coming in, I wasn't completely "done" with 3E (though my frustrations as a DM had grown close to the breaking point, esp. with higher level play).

Weird.

Wis

It may be weird, but I'm right there with you! I still am running a 3.5 campaign and I am not as down on the rules as you this point, but - following the conclusion of the campaign we are trying a 4e campaign. If we like it, we will stick with it. However, if we don't like it as much as 3.5 we will rpobably move on to a totally different system.

 

[Gizmoduck5000]

Well, I really wasn't talking about the WotC boards; you're right in that I have no experience with them. I was referring mostly to ENWorld.

In any case, I just find it hard to believe that so many people would "hate" D&D v3.5 and yet still play it and that it would remain the most popular RPG in the world.

Doesn't make much sense to me....

It's the most popular RPG in the world until June, when 4E will inevitably supplant 3.5 upon that thrown.

I myself, started playing and running 3.5 but quickly grew to loathe and detest the game. I had, in fact, completely given up on D&D altogether when one of my gaming pals clued me in on the announcement of 4E which I have been watching closely ever since.

I find myself excited about D&D once more, just like I was back in the old days of AD&D. Because, it's just plain better.

 

[pukunui]

To give another example from my experience: in the two years that I had been playing and DMing 3.5 prior to the announcement of 4e, I ended up making so many houserules in an attempt to "fix" 3.5 that we might as well have been playing a completely different game anyway ...

I just want to elaborate on this point a bit. By the time 4e was announced, I had only been playing 3.5 for just over a year and in that span of time I had already compiled a long list of the houserules and variants (mostly from Unearthed Arcana) that I felt were necessary to make the game merely palatable let alone fun. When 4e was announced, my initial reaction was "Oh man! But I've only just bought into 3.5!" but after a few months had gone by and I saw the direction WotC was going in with the new edition, I got more and more excited. Not only was 4e looking more like the D&D I remembered from my teenage 2e days, but it was also incorporating into the core many of the houserules I had put in place for my 3.5 game. I can totally understand why some people don't like 4e. I can totally understand why some people regard 3.5 as the ultimate D&D experience. I can even understand why some people simply don't want to buy into 4e because they've already spent a lot of money on 3.5. I've read all the arguments from the people who say 4e isn't for them and they're all perfectly justified. However, in my case, I feel like 4e was written specifically for me. I am that much in the center of WotC's target market that it would be very silly of me indeed not to buy into the new edition. Yes, there are a few things I don't like, but nothing's perfect. 4e is much more the kind of D&D I want to play than 3.5 could ever be.

 

[CleverNickName]

4e is much more the kind of D&D I want to play than 3.5 could ever be.

It's hard for me to say this, since I haven't seen the books yet. Come July, I'll know exactly what "kind of D&D" this new 4th Edition is going to be, and whether or not it is better than the kind I already love.

 

[Cadfan]

To be honest, I don't want to run 4e either. I want to play it.

The only game I want to run is Feng Shui.

Inevitably, I'll end up running both. Maybe someday in the far future I will get to be a player.

 

[Andre]

For me, I have no hatred of 3.x, but a great deal of frustration - it has such potential, but it's just too much freaking work.

We tried to make it simpler. We ignored certain rules that caused problems, such as polymorph, and avoided others, such lycanthropes (try designing a 5th level fighter werewolf - all three forms). We tried house rules, but the system is so interconnected, changing one thing ripples throughout. For example, try taking out alignment. It seems easy, until you start looking at spells, and creature abilties, and classes, and...you get the idea. So you end up adding more house rules to cover all the ripples, and house rules for those ripples, and so on. Meanwhile, published material - which should save time and effort - has to be adapted to the house rules. After a time, the whole mess just collapses under its own weight.

It got so bad, that no one in my group was willing to GM 3.x. Every one of us has GM'd in the past and enjoys doing so. Yet no one wanted to GM 3.x. In fact, we decided that when we next have time for gaming, we're going to play Champions - it's not just more flexible, it's just plain easier. I never thought I would find an RPG harder than Hero...(though to be fair, Hero plays easily (IMO), it just the prep work that can get tedious)

I finally concluded that the only way to make 3.x significantly simpler and easier is to design a completely new system - which kind of defeats the whole purpose.