D&D 3E/3.5 Edition Experience - Did/Do you Play 3rd Edtion D&D? How Was/Is it?

[Stormonu]

By 3E’s announcement, I was ready to jump away from the rotting, bloated corpse of 2E Product and T$R antics and welcome 3E (honestly, I’d moved to playing World of Darkness and other “modern” RPGs of the day). I dove head-first into 3E, bought everything I could get my hands on, including a score of 3rd party products. I even published some material (on RPGNow/DrivethuRPG) for the game. Had a great time with the system.

However, looking back after having experienced even more RPGs and 5E, I don’t think I’d ever go back to that version. Oddly enough, I’d be more likely to kick up a 2E game than a 3E game.

 

[rabindranath72]

I started with the Red Box back in the day, and "updated" to 2e when it came out, and that's the version I played most, but I had the bad idea of buying and using the Player's Option books, which destroyed our campaign pretty quickly and left a bad taste in our mouths. We liked the idea of the PO stuff, but the execution left a lot to be desired. So when 3e came out, I bought the core books, and we played it for a long time. Never moved to 3.5 as we didn't find the changes worth the paper they were written on, and to make things worse, most of them further distanced the game from the AD&D roots we still loved (Pokemon paladins?!) Even in the 2e days, I only used the core books, and it was the same with 3.0, so we never experienced any of the issues which have been widely reported; we weren't power gamers, we weren't out to "break the system"; we brought with us the playstyle of BECMI and AD&D, and for this, 3.0 worked very well.
In fact, I am about to start a 3.0 campaign with my son and daughter (11 and 6 y.o.)!

 

[Marc_C]

Can't say I played much of 3.0 or 3.5. I did a few home-brew campaigns but they crashed due to scheduling conflicts. I didn't buy the plethora of books either. Just the 3 core with extra monster manuals. Never have enough critters!

For me 3e was more about the d20 OGL. We played Star Wars (1e,2e), Star Wars SAGA and d20 Modern much more than we played D&D. Multi-classing 3e style makes more sense, to me, in a Modern or Future campaign than it does in a Pseudo-medieval-fantasy world.

WoTC should be doing a 5e sci-fi generic game like Starfinder. Let the GMs and players decide which kind of campaign they want to play.

 

[Gorg]

I played 3E quite a bit- it was responsible for getting me back into D&D, after a long hiatus! It also elevated my DMing skills quite a bit.

Overall, I very much enjoyed it. Also invested a ton of money into buying stuff for it, lol. (I will NEVER run out of new adventures to run, or new monsters or ideas to bring) It was my favorite iteration of the game so far.

Some likes:
-Blew the doors wide open on character creation! Some classic classes returned, Sorcerers added, more racial options. Arbitrary limits eliminated! And done so elegantly too- lets just make humans cooler, and we won't HAVE to limit the others! Multi-classing now available to all, and with more options. Feats added. Prestige classes added.

AND:

They actually made clerics cool! No more cookie cutter battle medics that double as "undead begone!". You had real choices to make your cleric your own. Loved the idea of domains! Spontaneous casting meant you could actually prepare spells OTHER than cure x wounds, as a matter of course lol.

- Spell casters. No more "one pump chump" low level casters. 0 level spells now actually added something to the game. A new alternate take on arcane casters in the Sorcerer. More cohesive system for partial casters. And plenty of new (to me anyway) spells.

-D20 system. tied all the disparate systems together in a simple, straitforward way.

-OGL. Nice- open it up to other publishers to make content for the game.

Modules/adventures. The official adventures published by WoTC stepped it up a few notches. There were some real classics!

Some dislikes:

- crunchy!! If you don't use minis, be ready for long, drawn out combats with plenty of confusion and rules arguments...

-power creep. The power level of even a newbie party was considerably higher than in previous editions- requiring much more difficult encounters to keep up the challenge level. Which, in turn, accelerated the rate at which XP was earned. This actually became a fun challenge for me- amping up adventures to challenge my players, without handing out xp and loot like it was candy.

- the "look" The new dungeonpunk aesthetic was not for me.

I'd still play it today, if a game were offered or someone wanted me to run one.

I'm really likin a lot of what they did with 5th ed, though, and would prefer to play that.

 

[Mort]

I played 3e from the day it came out and ran a campaign from 1st to 20th level.
For the most part, I liked it a lot.

But there were some serious warts:

1. After low levels, casters were way too dominant. This was both because spells started REALLY eclipsing martial abilities and because Item crafting was easy and plentiful - especially scrolls which hugely added to casters versatility. At later levels casters stepped on too many toes.

2. As the levels increased DM prep got more and more onerous. I was DMing a weekly game for most of 3e (wow did I have a lot more time back then!) and the increased prep time was really noticeable. This stemmed from treating monsters as PCs so increased levels etc. Sure there were ways to shorten prep and cheat on builds, but it was a huge amount of time.

By the time 3e turned over to 4e, I was pretty burned out on DMing.

I would play in a 3e game (though I prefer 5e), but, other than a low level 1 shot or so, I wouldn't go back to running a 3e game.

 

[Wolfskin]

I enjoyed 3E when it came out but eventually 3.5 became to difficult to GM, especially at higher levels. I still believe 3.0 did a pretty good job of trying to hang on to the "essence" of 1E despite the new mechanics. If it had kept the numbers a little lower like 5E, I think it would have worked better.

I had the exact same experience. It started out great but from 3.5 it started to be all work and no fun running the game.

 

[Mort]

I had the exact same experience. It started out great but from 3.5 it started to be all work and no fun running the game.

This seems to be pretty common. mid/high level 3e/3.5 was rough to prep and run (especially if you had players who weren't great with keeping track of modifiers so you had to step in- there were just SO MANY).

 

[humble minion]

keeping track of modifiers

I'd forgotten about that. Circumstance, enhancement, synergy, flanking, competence, concealment, dodge, armour, natural armour, uuurrrggh.

I ran a 3.5e game that faded out at 15th level, and even though my players were never hardcore minmaxers or particularly keen on playing the layered buff game, I still remember it with unfondness.

I could still be convinced to play/DM a 3.5e game if the group absolutely refused to consider 5e, but I wouldn't take it above 7th-9th level or so. The maths hasn't collapsed under its own weight by that stage.

 

[rabindranath72]

Spellcasters never dominated my games, for two reasons:
1- random encounters; the DMG (at least the 3.0 version) was pretty explicit about the role that random encounters play in the game. With random encounters, the DM controls the pace of resources expenditure, not the players. For the same reason, the "15 minutes work day" was never an issue. It had never been an issue with BECMI and AD&D, it wasn't an issue with 3.0 (I was in fact pretty baffled when much later I read people had this "problem" at their table, and even more baffled when one of the reasons for the design of 4e was to solve this "problem". Much as I liked 4e, it always seemed more like a solution in search of a problem.) The variety of encounters' EL (again, per DMG) was also fundamental; nowhere in the book is written that all encounters must be balanced; in fact, only 50% of the encounters should be at the same EL as the party. Table 4-2 has been my best friend. In fact, using Table 4-2 guidelines, encounters difficulty was consistently skewed against the party. I think I handed my players' PC's assess on a plate way more with 3e than with BECMI and AD&D.

2- I used the Power Components variant, both for spells AND magic item creation. This meant a larger gold expenditure (20x the XP cost) if the power component could even be found; but most of the time, these components required special quests to find (scenario hooks!), consultation with sages (i.e. more gold spent), divinations etc. With this rule in place, creating magic items wasn't too dissimilar than what happened with BECMI and AD&D; with the advantage that the 3e rules gave the DM plenty more guidelines than the previous games. Since my players came from BECMI and AD&D, they didn't flinch at the harsh requirements.

In short, we played 3e much like the previous versions of the game; and I think I read somewhere that the designers didn't really expect it to be played differently.

 

[Wicked Woodpecker]

Basically only version of D&D I've ever played (and so far only game I DMed, though this was probably poor choice, damn this math).
We're in a middle of two longer campaign - another DM is really really good in counting so for him is rather relaxing experience overall, and it goes way way smothly.

We were from the get go rather uninterested in weird shenanigans of 4E, and most of team found 5e too simplistic.
I generally like a philosophy of design, and unified set of rules for whole reality - as I have strong simulationist bone, nevertheless levels of accounting should be seriously trimmed down.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I played 2 sessions of it. I was warned by the other players not to play a Fighter, which is what I wanted to play, since it was apparently one of the hardest classes to build correctly. That seemed weird to me. I'd played a few sessions of 2e as a Fighter, and it was my preferred class in Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment, and weren't those D&D-based?

So I played a cleric. They told me to just pick a lot of Cure spells, but as I poked through the pile of books the DM had for me, I found a spell called Holy Storm, which does 2d6 damage per round to evil creatures, no save. A quick eyeballing of the math confirmed this was by far the most powerful thing I could potentially do. I don't remember what level we were, but it's a 3rd-level spell, so we must have been at least 5th level, so it was potentially 10d6 of damage.

We proceeded to cheese our way through a good portion of the DM's dungeon by opening a door, casting Holy Storm, slamming it shut, and having the Fighter hold the door shut as everything inside died. I'm pretty sure we killed the dungeon boss that way, too. It was funny, but boring.

I didn't form a strong opinion of the game based on that experience. After two sessions, the DM moved. I found out much later that 3.5 had a reputation for clever players being able to break things by getting cheesy with expansions, so I figured my experience was hardly atypical.

 

[Gorg]

I'd forgotten about that. Circumstance, enhancement, synergy, flanking, competence, concealment, dodge, armour, natural armour, uuurrrggh.

I ran a 3.5e game that faded out at 15th level, and even though my players were never hardcore minmaxers or particularly keen on playing the layered buff game, I still remember it with unfondness.

I could still be convinced to play/DM a 3.5e game if the group absolutely refused to consider 5e, but I wouldn't take it above 7th-9th level or so. The maths hasn't collapsed under its own weight by that stage.

Ha! this reminds me of an experience I had with a group I met off a bulletin board in the game store. It was a homebrew setting, and I was playing a Cleric of Ehlonna, with the Sun and Good domains. This encounter took place at sea, we spotted an enemy ship full of meanies and nasties closing us fast. The DM gave us 5 rounds to prepare for the fight to come.

That was his first mistake.

I'd never really gotten the chance to buff up like this, and so I went for it. Divine Favor, Divine power, Bless, I forget what else- but I ended up being a melee juggernaught, lol. The resulting fight was considerably easier than he'd intended... He was a good DM, just new to 3E- and underestimated how much a spellcaster could power up, if given the time to prepare.

Later on, in the adventure, with our feet on dry land again. We ran into a group of ghouls, in what was most certainly supposed to be a tough, climactic encounter.

Mistake #2. Forgetting about my cleric's Sun domain power: Greater turning.

POOF!! I rolled high, he rolled low. All of the ghouls turned to dust... Fight over as soon as it began, lol.

He wasn't too happy, but took it like a good sport, and remembered for next time.

It was one of the big take-away DM lessons for 3E: Control the tempo. Giving players too much warning and lots of time to prepare, can result in some serious curb stompings. Also, attrition is your friend! As is letting your NPC's/Monsters use their brains for more than just a place to rest their hat.

AND, Bone up on your player's characters. Know about special abilities, how they work; what goodies they have; which spells they've prepared etc. Helps avoid mid game surprises, and helps you design encounters and challenges that actually test your party. Lull em into a false sense of security with encounters with weaker, dumber minions/ meat shields. Then introduce them to the smart ones! That OH SHI$!!! look in their eyes is priceless!!

"Hey, hobgoblins are supposed to be a disciplined, martial race, skilled in the art of war, right? Well, you waded through all their neighbors (aka burgler alarms), killed a few hobgob guards- then left. What do you think they were doing while you returned to town for a cold one and some supplies??" (that was one REALLY fun session for me! )

It's all good- my players in that campaign included my regular DM- who has pulled every dirty trick in the book on us in the past. I just said: " You taught me well, didn't you?"

 

[haakon1]

I played 3E quite a bit- it was responsible for getting me back into D&D, after a long hiatus! It also elevated my DMing skills quite a bit.

Overall, I very much enjoyed it. Also invested a ton of money into buying stuff for it, lol. (I will NEVER run out of new adventures to run, or new monsters or ideas to bring) It was my favorite iteration of the game so far.

Some likes:
-Blew the doors wide open on character creation! Some classic classes returned, Sorcerers added, more racial options. Arbitrary limits eliminated! And done so elegantly too- lets just make humans cooler, and we won't HAVE to limit the others! Multi-classing now available to all, and with more options. Feats added. Prestige classes added.

AND:

They actually made clerics cool! No more cookie cutter battle medics that double as "undead begone!". You had real choices to make your cleric your own. Loved the idea of domains! Spontaneous casting meant you could actually prepare spells OTHER than cure x wounds, as a matter of course lol.

- Spell casters. No more "one pump chump" low level casters. 0 level spells now actually added something to the game. A new alternate take on arcane casters in the Sorcerer. More cohesive system for partial casters. And plenty of new (to me anyway) spells.

-D20 system. tied all the disparate systems together in a simple, straitforward way.

-OGL. Nice- open it up to other publishers to make content for the game.

Modules/adventures. The official adventures published by WoTC stepped it up a few notches. There were some real classics!

Some dislikes:

- crunchy!! If you don't use minis, be ready for long, drawn out combats with plenty of confusion and rules arguments...

-power creep. The power level of even a newbie party was considerably higher than in previous editions- requiring much more difficult encounters to keep up the challenge level. Which, in turn, accelerated the rate at which XP was earned. This actually became a fun challenge for me- amping up adventures to challenge my players, without handing out xp and loot like it was candy.

- the "look" The new dungeonpunk aesthetic was not for me.

I'd still play it today, if a game were offered or someone wanted me to run one.

I'm really likin a lot of what they did with 5th ed, though, and would prefer to play that.

Great review of 3/3.5/early PF. 3.5 is still what I run (love it to bits), but you’re right on the flaws.

 

[haakon1]

Spellcasters never dominated my games, for two reasons:
1- random encounters; the DMG (at least the 3.0 version) was pretty explicit about the role that random encounters play in the game. With random encounters, the DM controls the pace of resources expenditure, not the players. For the same reason, the "15 minutes work day" was never an issue.


In short, we played 3e much like the previous versions of the game

Yes, that‘s similar to my experience. As for “Fighters are too weak compared to spellcasters”, that’s only if no one exploits the inherent crunchiness of mages. If they are the primary target for most intelligent attackers, who they use tactics like Charge, low to mid level mages aren’t that different from AD&D MU’s. As a 3e player, one of my favorite memories was my paladin beating the boss mage in “The Standing Stones” and taking him out before he got a spell off.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

3.x is my favorite iteration of the game, bar none. Probably because of its flexibility.

 

[haakon1]

3.x is my favorite iteration of the game, bar none. Probably because of its flexibility.

Sometimes I dream of WOTC supporting both 5e “D&D” and 3.5e “AD&D”.

 

[nevin]

Played it ran it a lot. Only problem i had with 3rd was fighting with players over splat books. I'm pretty loose in what ill allow or let players do but the worst one i remember was the barbarian handbook that would let a 1st level barbarian have a 10 hd warcat.

That being said I loved the fact that the supplements threw all kinds of stuff out and expected the DM to balance his own game. PF1 just annoys me. Its structure and rule set empower the rules lawers of the world. I think of it as D&D as the US government would have created it

 

[haakon1]

Have you tried PF2? Not sure how different it is from 3.5 or PF1.

I am currently playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker on XBox (and DMing two 3.5e campaign). The strangest thing in this version of PF is UNLIMITED 0-level spells, which slides too far for me from “world that‘s internally logical” to “game”. I wonder if that was just for the video game or it’s actually a feature in some version of PF?

I’ve only played PF1 at PaizoCon conventions and in this video game, so it felt to me like “same as 3.X”, but I wonder if expansion bloat messed it up, as seems to have happened to every edition.

 

[Voadam]

I am currently playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker on XBox (and DMing two 3.5e campaign). The strangest thing in this version of PF is UNLIMITED 0-level spells, which slides too far for me from “world that‘s internally logical” to “game”. I wonder if that was just for the video game or it’s actually a feature in some version of PF?

That is a standard feature of Pathfinder 1. Wizards and sorcerers generally have an option to throw d3 damage ray cantrips instead of using d6 light crossbows as they often did in 3.0 and 3.5, which felt like a thematic improvement to me. Pathfinder also swapped out the clerical 1 hp cure cantrip for a stabilize when at negative hp one to account for the change.

 

[Gladius Legis]

As for “Fighters are too weak compared to spellcasters”, that’s only if no one exploits the inherent crunchiness of mages.

So as long as spellcasters intentionally play or build their characters in a suboptimal manner, the system works?

Surely you don't see the inherent problem with that?