wingsandsword
Legend
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.2. The old culture around D&D 3.5 is gone, and people who I am gaming with make builds for fun that are interesting or for story reasons, and not because they are min/maxing to hell and back;
Internet Forum culture was the weak point of D&D 3e.
You hear so many complaints about it. You know what, those complaints pretty much started online, and people complained about it online, and people complained about it in the real world because people complained about it online.
3e is a very well written, very well balanced game. . .that JUST HAPPENED to come out as internet message boards were becoming really, really popular.
If you played 3e with the same general mindset that I saw people play 2e with, it worked really, REALLY well.
Didn't help that WotC was heavily promoting their own message boards, which were a toxic cesspool for D&D culture, at the time. I remember going to Gen Con in the 3.5e era with WotC promoting their message boards just as heavily as any book they were trying to sell, trying to get everyone on there. . .when that place was a major source of the problem with the player culture of that edition.
From what I saw, if people weren't part of online forum culture related to D&D, they really enjoyed 3e and it played and ran vastly better than 1e or 2e. The problems came from people who read forum stuff and saw min-max/charop stuff on forums and wanted to do it in real life, or heard ideas like "you must do X to play a Y" etc, or how things that never happened at their table became things they'd complain about because they heard they were happening.