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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions, OSR, & D&D Variants
Are You Still Playing D&D 3.0?
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<blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 8113136" data-attributes="member: 14159"><p>I'll pretty much agree with all this.</p><p></p><p>I think they definitely rushed 3.5 out way early. 3.5 seemed like two things smushed together:</p><p>1. Bugfixes to fix problems that emerged when many people were playing it in a way that was very unlike how it was playtested or how 2e was played. . .a powergame mentality of absurdly optimized "builds" and ridiculous nitpicking of wording that I never saw before 3e, and I didn't see much at actual game tables but read a lot about online.</p><p></p><p>2. Various small incremental fixes and improvements in ways they thought the game could be improved.</p><p></p><p>Ultimately, the problem was that 3.5 was different enough you really needed to buy all the core books over again (I didn't buy them until 2005, I waited 2 years because I was grumpy on that point). There was enough similarity that you could re-use a decent amount of classes/feats/spells etc. often with only minimal if any changes, but there was still the learning curve of having to re-learn the whole game over again because of so many little technical changes.</p><p></p><p>. . .and coming around and announcing a completely incompatible and radically different 4e only 4 years after the released of 3.5e is why I walked away from anything to do with WotC for over a decade, when it seemed they couldn't go more than 3 or 4 years without completely rewriting the rules of D&D to sell more core books. While it didn't affect me personally, I'd expect that revoking the d20 STL and basically destroying the entire 3rd party D&D support ecosystem that had been built up over the preceding 7 years burned a lot of people too.</p><p></p><p>D&D 3.x is commercially "dead", in that it's been discontinued for over a decade, but it's still quite viable as a game. I hate it when people here try to talk about how D&D has "evolved past" 3.x or that 3.x was somehow unplayable. . .I certainly remember many years on this website where people certainly didn't say those things. I also like that there's so much raw material out there for 3.x in the OGL. Between 3e, 3.5e, Unearthed Arcana, and d20 Modern (and Urban Arcana and Menace Manual, both of which had a LOT of SRD material released), there's raw material there to make pretty much any game you'd want. I know there's little to no new 3.x 3rd party material being made either, but again, there's enough already released to last lifetimes, and if someone wanted to commercially release new material based on 3.x, then they certainly could.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="wingsandsword, post: 8113136, member: 14159"] I'll pretty much agree with all this. I think they definitely rushed 3.5 out way early. 3.5 seemed like two things smushed together: 1. Bugfixes to fix problems that emerged when many people were playing it in a way that was very unlike how it was playtested or how 2e was played. . .a powergame mentality of absurdly optimized "builds" and ridiculous nitpicking of wording that I never saw before 3e, and I didn't see much at actual game tables but read a lot about online. 2. Various small incremental fixes and improvements in ways they thought the game could be improved. Ultimately, the problem was that 3.5 was different enough you really needed to buy all the core books over again (I didn't buy them until 2005, I waited 2 years because I was grumpy on that point). There was enough similarity that you could re-use a decent amount of classes/feats/spells etc. often with only minimal if any changes, but there was still the learning curve of having to re-learn the whole game over again because of so many little technical changes. . . .and coming around and announcing a completely incompatible and radically different 4e only 4 years after the released of 3.5e is why I walked away from anything to do with WotC for over a decade, when it seemed they couldn't go more than 3 or 4 years without completely rewriting the rules of D&D to sell more core books. While it didn't affect me personally, I'd expect that revoking the d20 STL and basically destroying the entire 3rd party D&D support ecosystem that had been built up over the preceding 7 years burned a lot of people too. D&D 3.x is commercially "dead", in that it's been discontinued for over a decade, but it's still quite viable as a game. I hate it when people here try to talk about how D&D has "evolved past" 3.x or that 3.x was somehow unplayable. . .I certainly remember many years on this website where people certainly didn't say those things. I also like that there's so much raw material out there for 3.x in the OGL. Between 3e, 3.5e, Unearthed Arcana, and d20 Modern (and Urban Arcana and Menace Manual, both of which had a LOT of SRD material released), there's raw material there to make pretty much any game you'd want. I know there's little to no new 3.x 3rd party material being made either, but again, there's enough already released to last lifetimes, and if someone wanted to commercially release new material based on 3.x, then they certainly could. [/QUOTE]
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