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

[VHawkwinter]

Eh. By the time the game was in full swing, there were two kinds of PrCs: Setting-dedicated class add-ons, and specialization-representation PrCs. The first needed to be managed, but the latter were either balanced or they weren't; if they were, you shouldn't have needed to do anything special to justify access, and if they weren't they shouldn't have been in play anyway.

Yeah, that's fair. Just because my default is test based PrCs doesn't mean I could not be convinced to make an exception. It just means "tell me what you want and explain to me why it will neither clash with the setting nor cause problems at the table, and how it makes sense".

I'm open minded, but it's a "default to no outside this curated set, then talk to me if you want something special and I will listen".

 

[Blue]

I wrote my thoughts about 3.x in this thread back in 2020 and they've withstood the test of time. I wanted to just add a little bit of information.

My understanding is that with the hardcover-per-month, the bulk of the work was done by outside contractors. And books would be many months, if not regularly over a year, in the pipeline. The in-house team did the coordination, but every character option from book A wouldn't have a chance to be considered against books B, C, D, E, F, G, and H also in development to make sure that there weren't combinations that were unbalanced. And with the sheer amount of material, it means that a new book couldn't even have every option considered against every option the 24 books in the previous 2 years (to pick a number), much less actual playtesting that included all of the options. So a lot of power combos came through. Something that might be reasonable considered with the core books and the book it was published in but broken when combined with other books that came out. At the very least, power creep became an irresistible force if allowing all books.

 

[VHawkwinter]

My understanding is that with the hardcover-per-month, the bulk of the work was done by outside contractors. And books would be many months, if not regularly over a year, in the pipeline. The in-house team did the coordination, but every character option from book A wouldn't have a chance to be considered against books B, C, D, E, F, G, and H also in development to make sure that there weren't combinations that were unbalanced. And with the sheer amount of material, it means that a new book couldn't even have every option considered against every option the 24 books in the previous 2 years (to pick a number), much less actual playtesting that included all of the options. So a lot of power combos came through. Something that might be reasonable considered with the core books and the book it was published in but broken when combined with other books that came out. At the very least, power creep became an irresistible force if allowing all books.

Yep. That makes a ton of sense too. Most of the ones I like are by a small number of recurring designers / authors. I noticed a big quality drop off when they started bringing in more and more new names, I assumed it was high turnover or hiring too many new employees as a teenager, but contractors makes more sense now that you mention it.