]I am a looooonnnnngggg time D&D'er from the venerable Moldvay Bsic up to 3.5 (4E just ain't my cup of soup...I own the books to be a completist but I've not eeven read them let alone played them.) I ran a 1.5 year long 3.5 game with pretty much any sources available to the Players and as expected, it ballooned way out of balance and control, certainly partially my fault but I also blame to some extent the system/SRD as well.
In a manner of speaking, you could say I am still playing 3.0... in sort of the same way that in 1995 I was still playing 1e.
I believe that 3.0 is the superior system, in much the same way that 1e was the superior system to 1.5 - that is to say, post Unearthed Arcana 1e. And, for much the same reasons.
At the time, when I was playing 1e, I hadn't really recognized that. It took hindsight and reflection and reading during my phase where I had rejected D&D as a viable game platform to come to that conclusion. However, once I recognized where 1.5 had gone, where the math had gone wrong, then I was on the look out for it later and recognized it in 3.5
It's not that 3.0 is a perfect system - far from it - it's that 3.5 instead of fixing what was broken started fiddling with what wasn't, and like the Unearthed Arcana changes, 3.5 ended up being less well play tested, less well thought out, less playable, and less balanced than what had gone before. More isn't always better. It's not that more is bad, it's just that like a jenga tower, the more you add the more careful you have to be. By the end of 3.5's run, WotC had adopted the opposite philosophy - the more that we've released, the less careful they were. It ended in cascading and accelerating failure. In a sense 4e became necessary because 3.5 had forced them to reboot. They'd published too much ill thought out junk to continue in the same vein. They'd killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and then cooked it and ate it with a 4e that recognized that they'd got out of control but just didn't get it about so much else.
So, I've been playing 3.0 - more or less - pretty much the whole time. I never played with PrC's - well, except for a few short experiments that convinced me I'd been right. I pretty much never used any source material wholesale. Instead, I borrowed a smidgen here and a smidgen there from 3.5, Pathfinder, even lately 4e, trying to expand the material without kicking it over. Tap tap tap, like Gimli in the glittering caves of Algarond - at least, that's what I hope. With much much respect for the work of the 3rd edition designers, and no need to sell source books to keep the profitability going, I'm less constrained than the publishers are and therefore can afford to be more conservative... at least in some ways.
But yeah, if you had to ask me to sum it up, I'd say I was playing 3.25. Haste and Harm were obvious fixes, but if you start really catalogueing the changes between 3.5 and 3.0, you find that 90% of them - maybe more - where badly thought out and made the game worse rather than better. Really critical problems - fighter just being a dip class, pure spellcaster becoming both too powerful and too fiddly at high levels, skill system that was ultimately an afterthought, etc. - weren't addressed or when they were addressed were addressed in the wrong ways (making skills even simplier and more useless, addressing concept imbalance with an endless array of unbalanced PrC's, and really doing nothing to kick down high level spellcasters a notch).
So, yeah, I stayed... more or less... with 3.0 and stayed happy. Granted, I never do really high level gaming. I figure about 10th or 12th level its time to change games or change systems. But still, happy with 3.0... more or less except where I'm not.
