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

[Son of the Serpent]

@Son of the Serpent Thanks for clarifying your position; this is exactly the kind of nuance and detail I was hoping everyone would engage in. See, I actually prefer the "overly basic answers" on surveys, because it encourages people to chime in with comments, which generates further discussion. And I didn't pick the question or the responses willy-nilly either, as you pointed out. I phrased the question and responses deliberately to make it hard to establish "best" and "worst" and "favorite" arguments. I've been around this board enough to know where that train of thought stops. ;-)

AHHHHHH

I see. That actually makes a lot of sense. Thankyou. I see the point of that now.

 

[Umbran]

Just like the statement "trump is the best united states president" is factually true in a technical sense ...

Mod Note:
Could you please refrain from referring to highly divisive real-world political figures in your examples in the future? You are, like it or not, engaging emotions that have nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and do not serve to make the discussion better.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Sure

 

[Minigiant]

are you talking about modern cultural/political sensibilities or something else. Since im making a custom edition who's main influence is 3.x i would want to know if its "something else". Could be a flaw i would want to avoid that i havent noticed.

If you answer thx. I appreciate it.

I mean in game design.
The Late 90 early 00s was a time were game design in all media shifted heavily from "what the game designer feels" to "what the potential audience wants". This is because of the rise of the internent. Video games could be patched. Table games could be errataed. TCGs got regular bans. Designers could be interviewed and emailed and tweetted for their opinions.

3ewent from 3.0 to 3.5 to 4.0 because the community as a whole could come together and state what they lked or didn't. And designers would get feedback faster and more accurately. So printing "just what you want" started to not fly. And this was the infancy of these ideas.

 

[Prakriti]

My least favorite part about 3E is the distressed/textured page backgrounds. Makes reading the books difficult.

I'm currently reading 2E's Faiths & Avatars, which suffers from the same problem.

 

[Ogre Mage]

I played it and enjoyed it. Prior to 5E it was my favorite edition of the game. At the time (2001) I thought it was a big improvement over 2E from a game mechanics/crunch standpoint. Confusing stuff like THAC0 and negative armor class was gone. Now if someone had AC 20 it meant you needed to roll (including your bonuses) a 20 to hit them, what a concept.

Plus, I had always played clerics and they were powerful in a way they had never been before.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I mean in game design.
The Late 90 early 00s was a time were game design in all media shifted heavily from "what the game designer feels" to "what the potential audience wants". This is because of the rise of the internent. Video games could be patched. Table games could be errataed. TCGs got regular bans. Designers could be interviewed and emailed and tweetted for their opinions.

3ewent from 3.0 to 3.5 to 4.0 because the community as a whole could come together and state what they lked or didn't. And designers would get feedback faster and more accurately. So printing "just what you want" started to not fly. And this was the infancy of these ideas.

This is actually a serious confidence booster for me.

Ive been focusing on making my custom E as easy to add or remove elements to make it YOUR group's game as much as possible while maintaining the integrity of function without making a crazy amount of piggy back functions.

You're making me feel like im on the right track!

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I played it and enjoyed it. Prior to 5E it was my favorite edition of the game. At the time (2001) I thought it was a big improvement over 2E from a game mechanics/crunch standpoint. Confusing stuff like THAC0 and negative armor class was gone. Now if someone had AC 20 it meant you needed to roll (including your bonuses) a 20 to him them, what a concept.

Plus, I had always played clerics and they were powerful in a way they had never been before.

Cleric of war with fly=teeth with wings in that edition

Fun stuff

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

The OGL absolutely changed the face of gaming. Without it, we probably wouldn't have seen Pathfinder, maybe not even the OSR. It absolutely encouraged a DIY approach that persists to this day in the indie gaming field. If anything, I think that the OGL is the most important legacy of 3e.

On the meta-side, I really appreciated the OGL. It's a nice motivator to put creations "out there", and while it enabled a lot of garbage, it also dramatically opened up exposure for a lot of creative minds who might otherwise never have seen the light of day. That was hugely important for the hobby, imo.

 

[Yonner]

I switched to 3e when it was released. While we loved 2e, the new edition really cleaned everything up, codified everything, and was a joy to run and play.

We loved 3/3.5, especially for the first years. As it aged we came to love it less, though never to the point of dislike.

 

[billd91]

Hard agree. So much of the "customization" of 3.X was just a flat, boring, numerical buff. Oh goodie, the numbers go up until I win, hooray. Unfortunately, too much of that carried over to later editions.

Hey, flat, boring, numerical stuff has its place. You can make the selection, add its effects to the character sheet, and then not have to worry about it again. Great for GMs who have a lot of NPCs/monster in play, great for pre-gen characters at convention games, and great for players who have trouble remembering all of the conditional stuff that occasionally comes up in play. It all goes back to Monte Cook's Ivory Tower game design article - understanding the context of when feats and other choices are particularly useful.

 

[billd91]

When we started playing 3e, I was converting 1e and 2e adventures to see how the new edition handled them. And while I was often changing monster numbers because of the newer encounter assumptions and adjusting XP awards downward to match level-up assumptions, 3e handled most of them really well. We knew we had a winner and that campaign turned out to be a blast.

As the edition progressed, there were emergent problems. Easy magic item creation and the magic economy was a big one. While I think it was all designed with the best of intentions, it was easily the most significant change in the game as far as its downstream impact. And not in a good way, I think.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Third edition was a fine system. At the very least, it gave us a thoughtful and consistent language for describing a fantasy world. Gone were the days of random fiat stats; now our numbers actually came from somewhere, and really meant something. By far, it's the best edition for describing a consistent world that makes sense.

Unfortunately, as with so many things, the math just doesn't hold up on the high end. There were too many avenues of advancement (BAB, ability bonus, enhancement-to-ability bonus, class-based bonus, multiple item-based bonuses). If you get +1 every few levels, and you get those from a wide variety of sources, then the difference between a character with several sources of strong advancement and a character with fewer sources at a reduced rate, quickly grows beyond the scope of the die. After a few levels, it's too easy for some characters to Always Hit or Never Be Hit or Never Have Their Spells Resisted. They really needed tighter control over their math.

 

[humble minion]

It was the first edition i played seriously, and I loved it. As other have said, the system and the maths was fundamentally broken at high levels with stat blocks reaching multiple pages in length and huge bonuses generally making dice rolls irrelevant, but at lower levels is was a revolutionarily (sp?) clean and clear way to play. Feats were a giant leap forward, replacing thac0 with a to-hit bonus made the thing about 900% more beginner-friendly, and monster classes and templates blew my mind.

It did suffer from supplement bloat later on, and the sheer proliferation of feats, spells, and prestige classes fostered an optimisation culture that i didn't particularly like, but a solid GM can squelch that. I did like that there was so many character customisation choice points, and you could really sculpt your character to your vision (even though a lot of the time those choices were about how to best meet the prerequisites for one's target prestige class...). From limited experience so far i think 5e is a much faster and more robust system, but it does seem that you've made all the decisions you're going to make about character design by level 3, and i do wish there was more scope there.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Third edition was a fine system. At the very least, it gave us a thoughtful and consistent language for describing a fantasy world. Gone were the days of random fiat stats; now our numbers actually came from somewhere, and really meant something. By far, it's the best edition for describing a consistent world that makes sense.

Unfortunately, as with so many things, the math just doesn't hold up on the high end. There were too many avenues of advancement (BAB, ability bonus, enhancement-to-ability bonus, class-based bonus, multiple item-based bonuses). If you get +1 every few levels, and you get those from a wide variety of sources, then the difference between a character with several sources of strong advancement and a character with fewer sources at a reduced rate, quickly grows beyond the scope of the die. After a few levels, it's too easy for some characters to Always Hit or Never Be Hit or Never Have Their Spells Resisted. They really needed tighter control over their math.

This is exactly one of the reasons my system is breaking levels apart
You can still be a wizard a rogue or a druid
But its not on your character sheet class section
Because that doesnt exist anymore
I dont like the idea that class is a tangible thing (feels like that sometimes in d&d) instead of being an abstract concept
Irl, what makes a doctor? Are there clearly defined class levels? Nah. Dont think so.
But 3.x i think gives us a very good window into how to proceed. A good protoype example is explored in some of the ways things can be built that are out lined in the savage species book. But thats really prototypical. Still 3.x gave a lot of good insight into things like that. If everything is gained in piecemeal bits you dont really get classes with this weird escape velocity acheiving climb to end up in orbit. I think granularity really tamps down on this effect where some classes just have a capacity to raid the pantry so quick. 3.x had some of that but it also had things like the following:

Little bit of dragon wrought kobold here
Be chosen of mystra for a little while
A little psion there
Ooo lets take a little cleric here
Red wizard of thay for 10 levels
Paladin just long enough to get leadership (or even acquire the feat somehow without using a class directly)

Hey dm, im gonna pick a fight with father limmick because his name bothers me like the word moist does

 

[Son of the Serpent]

right now the vote is what i would interpret as 63% strictly positive

31 votes seem strictly positive
5 votes seem neutral
13 seem strictly negative

The votes for a palindrome!

Cool!

 

[CleverNickName]

@Son of the Serpent: It's also interesting that this is the first and only edition of the game to get a "I'm playing it right now and so far, I don't like it" response.

 

[Tonguez]

I didnt like 2e and left DnD to play GURPS and other stuff, I was looking at a d100 system with base stats 2d10 but when the D20 system came out it brought me back into the DnD fold (and lead me to Enworld). I like the OGL as it gave us Spycraft, M&M and Pathfinder and I’m still playing Pathfinder which is improved 3.75e so yep, enjoyed it.

Didnt like 4e so left stayed with PF and stuff, then looked at Fate Accelerate and loved it.
I havent played very much 5e yet

 

[Son of the Serpent]

@Son of the Serpent: It's also interesting that this is the first and only edition of the game to get a "I'm playing it right now and so far, I don't like it" response.

Wait really? This is the only one?

...weird...

I dont find it surprising that sich a vote would be cast.

But i find it quite strange its not been cast for any other edition. That feels like it requires some sort of explanation.

Whoever it is that is giving an edition they dont like at the moment a solid chance, you're a trooper.

Edit:

I went ahead and looked it up. Its @J-H

J-H you are a trooper. Could i ask you what particularly you dislike about it? Id be curious to know. You're unique lol.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I am still running 2 3.5 play by post games. I like 3.5 OK, but am fully converted to 5e moving forward at is faster and simpler to play & DM, as well as being more balanced and less mechanistic. So my poll vote is "I've played it, and I don't like it [relative to 5e]*"

*You can do a lot of stuff in 3.5 that you can't do in 5e. It's a goldmine for character concepts. Unfortunately, actually playing with all that stuff ends up a lot less fun to play/run due to complexity and imbalance between the tiers.

My apologies. I see now (from doing a thread search) that you actually already explained.

Thankyou for your in put. I apologize for possibly bugging you.