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

[Vincent55]

I liked 3rd and even put some house rules that later were fixed the way i did it, some players didn't like the fixes like for haste and such, but to me, it was a good idea. Lots of crunches made making creatures a nightmare many times i just reskinned others to provide different challenges. You could make some very broken characters much like 2nd edition as well as the current version which is more like superheroes, with less struggle, unlike the versions of 2nd and lower. Each edition has had its flaws 3rd/3.5 had massive power creep and the creatures at times were hard to run due to so many things like feats, powers, and abilities was like running many NPC's at once. I think the current version has some good bones to it, but like many earlier ones still has its issues which could be fixed by bringing back some of the other rules to fill the gaps.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Boy, I really loved 3E. It was great to be able to see the math and have it explained by the designers for the first time, and have it mostly be logical in the way it fit together, rather than a collection of ad hoc rules in 1E and only slightly cleaned up ad hoc rules in 2E.

That said, the expectations that everything worked the same for PCs and NPCs eventually became a headache for me as a DM (if an NPC has a new ability, the game expects that the DM will sit down, work it all out according to the math, and have it theoretically available to the PCs in some fashion, and by the end, that extra homework really irritated me).

The notion that access to prestige classes largely comes down to in-game decisions by the DM effectively meant that any prestige class was assumed to be available to all player characters, or the DM was being a Scrooge, was also a pretty crappy thing to do to DMs. The fact that, in theory, nearly any character could get access to nearly any prestige class eventually, even if they had to do some crazy gyrations to qualify for the mechanical bits, really encouraged a lot of silliness.

I do love that the underlying math and chassis were cleaned up, and we continue to benefit from that, across the ttrpg space, as there's now an expectation, IMO, that games' math has been interrogated well before the public sees it. And, of course, corporate shenanigans notwithstanding, the open gaming concept has meant 10,000 flowers have bloomed (OK, some of them are ragweed) since then, which is also wonderful.

 

[hoffrg86]

A friend in our gaming group picked up the 3e PHB on release, we had a regular ad&d 2e/1e group at the time. We looked it over, and wasn't that impressed on initial read and didn't like how free[sloppy] the race/class mechanics were, the muddying of the archetypes and birth of the 'one-man-party'(esp. as the splatbooks were shoveled out en mass). We moved around to other systems/games/boardgames, Rifts, WOD, Magic the Gathers, SWd6, etc. etc. then our primary DM said around winter/spring 2001, he wanted to run 3rd, starting at 7th level.. we played into 3.5/Epic 30+ lvls.. and liked it better second time around, played for years and trialed the PF 1.0 playtest, but abandoned ultimately for Hack Master 4.0. around 2008/09.

..

flash forward to 2023, jumping off a 8/9 year stint in 5th, and into PF/3.5 game and just didn't care for it - gave it about 6mo, though i liked it better than 5th. I switched back to AD&D 2e[1e]

 

[Kannik]

When 3e was announced I was definitively excited (and followed all the news on this site's predecessor!), and I loved it when it came out. Played across multiple campaigns for 8ish years, and like all editions I have played I enjoyed myself aplenty.

Now 3e/3.5e sits at the bottom of the editions of (A)D&D I'd want to play.

 

[scruffygrognard]

I voted that I played it and wasn't impressed.

The reality is that I loved it at first but grew to find it tedious... especially when playing higher level characters.

 

[Yora]

The main thing that has given me a new interest in 3rd edition is that it provides you with mechanics to cover all the things that could happen in an AD&D campaign, without having to deal with the AD&D mechanics.

 

[CleverNickName]

The reality is that I loved it at first but grew to find it tedious... especially when playing higher level characters.

Yeah, I feel the same way. 3rd Edition (and later, 3.5E and Pathfinder) didn't really work for my group either once we got to Level 10...it was just too tedious at that point. I remember spending entire gaming sessions just to run one single battle scene, with players sometimes having to wait a half-hour or more between turns. And it didn't help to spend that time thinking of your next move, because by the time your next turn did come around, the battlefield had changed so completely that folks would scrap whatever plan they originally had and start all over.

If I ever run it again, I'd cap all characters at 9th level (35,000xp), and just award feats for every 10,000XP they gain above that.

• No spells of 5th level or higher
• No ten-level Prestige classes
• No triple-digit hit point totals
• Max of two attacks per round
• Only two ASIs across your character's entire career
• Total equipment value capped at ~36,000 gp
• No CR 13+ monsters

Sign me up.

I do miss a lot of things from 3E. I miss the monster templates, Level Adjustments, small-sized characters, racial bonuses/penalties, and Favored Classes, bonus spells and deities...it's a shame that these things weren't carried forward in 5E.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Sorry, what? PF did streamline skills, but there are still skill points and book keeping. Synergies were optional rule if i remember correctly. I know lots of people didn't use synergies rules.

Prestige classes in PF were a mixed bag, same as in D&D. Some are excellent, some just bad.

D&D and PF1 both had skill points, except PF1 streamlined skill points by making them independent of class.

In PF1 it did not matter which level you got skill points at, only how many you got mattered.

If you make a high level character in PF1 all you need to do is sum up how many skill points you get and then distribute them around, because the procedure of adding skill points is just, well, adding them up.

In D&D 3.0 and 3.5 the skill points are used to increase skill ranks on a per level basis, and the cost of a skill rank is different depending on which class you currently are when you spend them meaning that you cannot just compute the total sum of skill points you have to spend when you build your character.

I've basically forgotten which class has which class skills but let's assume Rogue has Acrobatics and Fighter has Climbing. If you level up 10 levels with rogue you get X skill points which can be spent on any skills, but you get a discount for class skills. Now assume you make a level 20 character with 10 levels of Rogue and 10 levels of Fighter. That gives you X + Y total skill points, where the X skill points can be spent more easily on Rogue skills and the Y skill points are better spent on Fighter skills.

It becomes even more complex when you add more classes and prestige classes into the build since you need to track each source of skill points separately.

This is less of an issue when you make characters starting at level 1, but it's still unnecessary.

 

[GrimCo]

I think you got that wrong. In 3.5 if a skill is on class skill list for any of classes of your multi class build, it's class skill for your character. So you add up all your skill points for all the levels, mark all class skills for all classes, and max rank is you character level + 3. What PF did is streamlined it in a sense that max rank=character level, class skills get +3 bonus, non class skills don't get bonuses, but both class and cross class skills cost same amount of points per rank. So no, in PF, your class (or classes) determine what skills get class skill bonus.

It's been over a decade when i last played, so i checked SRD for 3.5 on multiclass characters.

Skills​

If a skill is a class skill for any of a multiclass character’s classes, then character level determines a skill’s maximum rank. (The maximum rank for a class skill is 3 + character level.)

If a skill is not a class skill for any of a multiclass character’s classes, the maximum rank for that skill is one-half the maximum for a class skill.

SRD Multiclass characters

 

[billd91]

I think you got that wrong. In 3.5 if a skill is on class skill list for any of classes of your multi class build, it's class skill for your character. So you add up all your skill points for all the levels, mark all class skills for all classes, and max rank is you character level + 3. What PF did is streamlined it in a sense that max rank=character level, class skills get +3 bonus, non class skills don't get bonuses, but both class and cross class skills cost same amount of points per rank. So no, in PF, your class (or classes) determine what skills get class skill bonus.

Multiclassing may change the maximum ranks in a skill, but it doesn't change how you spend the skill points when you level up. If you invest a point in a skill that's a class skill for the class you're leveling up, you buy one rank, but if you invest in a cross class skill for that class, it buys a half-rank. And that's true even if you are multiclassed and the skill you're buying a rank in is a class skill for one of your other classes. If you're leveling up as a fighter this time, putting a point in Knowledge: Arcana is gonna buy you just a half-rank even if your other class is wizard where it's a class skill.

I understand where they were coming from with the 3e rules. They were working from the idea that the development resources you gain for one class may not be efficiently realized if you devote them to one of your other classes. That was something also in Middle Earth Role Playing game (and probably the rest of the ICE system) where classes got different resources for different types of skills and had to pay a premium price if they wanted to spend them outside of their normal lanes - such as spending a weapon skill resource on a subterfuge skill. It may have been a bit stronger in the simulation realm, but it made playing the game mechanic harder to deal with.

Pathfinder 1 tosses that distinction out the window and simplifies the whole thing. And I think that was a good decision.