A long and winding road...

[Mallus]

My group's long and winding road wound a little bit further on. After putting the 13th level 3.5e game I ran on hiatus for a year (and playing a 4e campaign instead) we recently went back to it -- after converting everything to Mutants and Masterminds 2e (with help from the new fantasy sourcebook, Warriors and Warlocks).

I'd happily play in a 3.5e campaign. I'm just not going to run one anytime soon, if ever, again.

 

[Doug McCrae]

But if I may be so gauche, I would say that your relationships with various editions could be like relationships with significant others. For some people, 3e is the girlfriend you realize you didn't appreciate like she deserved at the time, and only dating someone else makes you realize that. For others, it's like the girl you have no regrets about, who just wasn't the one. And for some, they talk about it like it's the psycho ex that you have no idea why they were dating in the first place.

At least it's not a food metaphor. That's something.

 

[Cadfan]

That's why I really don't understand folks who previously played 3e and now don't care for it*. Maybe my style is inclusive, but they're not all that different to me.

Somewhere along the road to 4e, I realized that my friends do all of our non combat stuff as essentially ad libbed roleplaying with the occasional skill roll, meaning that we could do it just the same in almost any game system published. It was in combat that we really used the rules. And I've disliked 3e's combat rules for some time.

So whether I enjoy dipping back in to 3e to make someone else happy, or whether I refuse, tends to depend on what sort of game they want to run. If I can get away with making and playing a skill heavy character with a bunch of weird utility abilities I can't easily get in 4e (winged template shadowdancer/monk, something like that), then I'll have fun. Otherwise I won't.

 

[Barastrondo]

At least it's not a food metaphor. That's something.

Grr... argh... everyone eats, dangit! And the food metaphor is one of the few places where you can actually talk about matters of personal taste with the appropriate perspective! They may be ever-present, but nothing has been proven to work better!

Okay, sorry, I'm done now.

 

[Mallus]

And the food metaphor is one of the few places where you can actually talk about matters of personal taste with the appropriate perspective!

There's a good reason why the generic food metaphor is generic!

 

[kitsune9]

Anyway, the point of this thread is to ask: has anyone else taken such a winding, meandering path back to 3.5?

Actually, probably for me, the rpg system would have to be Vampire/Werewolf. I really wanted to play these games, got to play them, didn't like them (namely because of the GM and other players), but am curious on getting back to them. I think if I maybe run a game my experience will be greatly different.

 

[Agamon]

It would be quite a winding path for me back to 3.5e. Not only did I give it up in frustration, I like 4e and have 5 or 6 other games I really want to play. And if I somehow got into a 3e game, I'd rather gouge my own eyes out than play over 10th level.

 

[radferth]

I had sworn off 3.x for earlier versions, but have just started DMing a Pathfinder campaign. Partially because I am taking over for an existing DM (even though I am running a new campaign) and the group had been using 3.5 and the Pathfinder beta, and partially because I wanted to see if Pathfinder's tweaks have helped any of my complaints about 3.x. My guess is they haven't, but I'm giving it my best shot.

 

[Noumenon]

The class imbalance was even more glaringly obvious

I played two 3.5 games at Gen Con. This happened in both of them:

Wizard: "Fireball. 80 points of damage between all targets."

Rogue: "I shoot my bow and hit once. Roll a 1. 3 damage."

This isn't a problem in my home 3.5 game right now but I think my players are afraid to play wizards because they hose my encounters so much.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Imagine the reactions of people going back to 4e after trying 5e!

It's true that as the games themselves get better, it's easier to cross back and forth. I'd have some reservations about going back to 2e, but I'm very happy with 3e, and I'm OK with 4e. I'll gladly mine 2e material for fluff and ideas, though. The 2e books beat both 3e and 4e as far as raw awesome ideas go, by and large.

I'm sure 1e has it's appeals, too, but dungeon survival has never been a big appeal for me, so I'd likely do 1e only under awesome DM's.

This is part of why, IMO, the edition treadmill is kind of fundamentally unsustainable: the less people who hate playing the game, the harder it is to make something that improves on that.

Give me a year or two and I may well qualify under the OP's "lured back to 3e" idea. For now, I'm OK giving 4e a whirl, and having a pretty decent time despite my struggles with the system.