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

[VHawkwinter]

Similar. For me it’s AD&D 1e adventure compatibility; Greyhawk compatibility; the ability to pull in anything I want from across AD&D, 2e, Basic, PF1, d20 3rd party stuff, and to a lesser extent 5e; and yes “simulationist” feel.

3.x without the splat bloat (never allowed in games I played in or DM) and CharOp (never seen it, only heard about it here) feels like an actual world to me.

What do you consider "without splat bloat"? A curated subset, or PHB only?

 

[VHawkwinter]

Sure, but Pun-Pun was really an issue of a problematic core spell (polymorph self) turning every monster book into a possible player-facing splat. That wasn't an issue with specified player-focused splat material.


Yes, Nightsticks and Divine Metamagic were problematic, no question. (Although the class that benefited from it the most by far was the PHB cleric.) Splat certainly isn't immune from problematic material. But as you said, the fact that later splat classes were more isolated from the large pool of material that was designed to further bolster the core classes helped keep them from rampant problematic synergies.

It also helped that the classes that were the most challenging for 3.5 balance were the caster classes, and later designed caster classes moved more of their power budget into bespoke class features (which don't scale with PrCs) and out of the core spellcasting feature (which does scale with PrCs).

Polymorph is one way, Master of Many Forms will also do it, and I've heard of a few other ways to turn into a Sarrukh to start the Punpun chain over the years. (Not that I would allow it, but there has been more than one way to get it started that I've heard of, not all PHB based).

 

[haakon1]

What do you consider "without splat bloat"? A curated subset, or PHB only?

Close to what you have, I think. From 3.5e:

PHB
DMG
MM, FF, and selected monsters from later MM’s and even other editions if I as DM want it or it’s in a module I’m using.
Living Greyhawk Gazetteer
Legends & Lore (selected pantheons)

A few rules from other books or homebrewed.

• From Unearthed Arcana, caster levels stack within Divine or Arcane multiclassing.
• From the 3e Fighter splatbook, Warmaster of the Furyondian War College for a fighter from Furyondy.
• From NetBook of Feats, about 3-4 feats I approved across 5 different groups over the years. My favorite was approving a fest for one-handed use of a longspear with a shield, based on illustrations from “Warfare in the Ancient World” showing it really happened - “simulationist” rule approval.
• Very few homebrew things. Military Scout Ranger class without spellcasting, favored enemy, or companion animal, using some concepts from PF1. Feat allowing Turning charges for group healing, also influenced by a PF1 rule.

 

[Thomas Shey]

We only got as far as 15th level or so, and that was way too busy. I can't imagine hitting 20th.

Yeah, high-level play remains an issue in most editions. I am increasingly inclined to think that the high-level domain game of AD&D was a smarter move than I thought at the time.

I dunno, I still say in terms of management, it wasn't that it was high level it was that everything had to be represented with separate, individualized class features or feats. I know of games that play in the same power levels as 4e or 3e D&D that are much easier to manage than those were simply because all the higher powered elements were extensions of the lower, rather than Yet One More New Ability.

 

[VHawkwinter]

Close to what you have, I think. From 3.5e:

PHB
DMG
MM, FF, and selected monsters from later MM’s and even other editions if I as DM want it or it’s in a module I’m using.
Living Greyhawk Gazetteer
Legends & Lore (selected pantheons)

A few rules from other books or homebrewed.

• From Unearthed Arcana, caster levels stack within Divine or Arcane multiclassing.
• From the 3e Fighter splatbook, Warmaster of the Furyondian War College for a fighter from Furyondy.
• From NetBook of Feats, about 3-4 feats I approved across 5 different groups over the years. My favorite was approving a fest for one-handed use of a longspear with a shield, based on illustrations from “Warfare in the Ancient World” showing it really happened - “simulationist” rule approval.
• Very few homebrew things. Military Scout Ranger class without spellcasting, favored enemy, or companion animal, using some concepts from PF1. Feat allowing Turning charges for group healing, also influenced by a PF1 rule.

Significantly more limited than my setup back in the day, but similar philosophy.
D&D 3.x - Edition Experience - Did/Do you Play 3rd Edtion D&D? How Was/Is it?

Since FR Flavour is a lot of why I'm running it I tended to try to incorporate FR stuff when it wasn't horrible, and fix it if it was not something I would allow as-is but it was fixable. I've been known to do spot conversions of AD&D stuff on occasion too, but not super often.

These days I would be inclined to backport more PF1 stuff and do more homebrewing of the core rulebook to rebalance things, but I'm most of the way into building a custom point buy d20 system for my own setting, so my comfort at designing stuff for it has gone up a lot from say 2010.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Yep. Nothing wrong with that preference, but it doesn't give me what I want from D&D, that's a different game, and not one I'm really interested in.

I want D&D for 2e setting book compatibility, Forgotten Realms compatibility (as in, you could rebuild at least most of the characters from the FR novels published over the first 20 years of FR novel publication and have their capabilities), and pretty "simulationist" game mechanics. Late 3e splats and 4e give me none of that.

Interesting because other than the Realms (and I much prefer Eberron) I find 4e works best for most of those.

First re simulationist mechanics I find hit points drown everything else. They are a mechanic commonly interacted with (as in multiple times every fight) that ensure that there is no amount of damage you can take from getting hit that you can't recover in the time it takes an athlete to recover fatigue - and there is no amount of harm that will slow you. The only way hit points can work as simulationist is if what you are simulating is something like a Hollywood action movie - and 4e is the only edition to genuinely commit here. (Late 3.5 and late 5e also veers that way - but "gritty" AD&D where a trap can cut your hand off but an ogre hitting you with a club never breaks your arm or ribs not so much)

Second 2e setting books are sometimes barely even compatible with 2e. Planescape needed to tie itself in knots with e.g. modifiers for magic weapons relative to the original plane - and Dark Sun is worse. Preserving and Defiling should be acts not entirely separate classes. 4e of course handled this almost effortlessly.

 

[VHawkwinter]

Interesting because other than the Realms (and I much prefer Eberron) I find 4e works best for most of those.

My biggest attachment to the D&D franchise is FR Novels. To a lesser extent Planescape and Spelljammer, and an even lesser extent than that Ravenloft.

First re simulationist mechanics I find hit points drown everything else. They are a mechanic commonly interacted with (as in multiple times every fight) that ensure that there is no amount of damage you can take from getting hit that you can't recover in the time it takes an athlete to recover fatigue - and there is no amount of harm that will slow you.

Yes, Hit Points have always grated on me for D&D for that reason. It's not describing a setting where training involves making yourself supernaturally durable. I haven't come up with a good houserule for that that doesn't break the rest of the game - I would definitely prefer some kind of "GURPS Forgotten Realms" with 2e style spellcasting and an indepth magic item building system, but that doesn't really exist.

The only way hit points can work as simulationist is if what you are simulating is something like a Hollywood action movie - and 4e is the only edition to genuinely commit here. (Late 3.5 and late 5e also veers that way - but "gritty" AD&D where a trap can cut your hand off but an ogre hitting you with a club never breaks your arm or ribs not so much)

I think it also works for fiction approaching DBZ or Chinese Cultivation fiction, where leveling up explicitly means developing levels of supernatural durability. But I agree it's a poor fit for the world described in the D&D setting books, adventures, and novels.

I have not come up with a great way to fix that. I considered minimum and maximum HP ranges by creature size category - with combat that looks more like RM or RQ or GURPS, and maybe specific magical defenses or hit parrying / dodging resources you exhaust to dodge would-be hits or something. Never finalized something good there though.

But sure. D&D for me HP are a big black mark against evwry edition of D&D. Absolutely. I would rather something closer to RQ or perhaps RM combat. But theres no need to make it worse by piling MMOesque Encounter Power cooldowns on top.

Many of the x/day abilities in 3e (the ones where it doesnt make obvious inworld sense why it would have x uses which recharge after a night's rest) also grate on me. There's not any edition of D&D out there that checks all the boxes of what I want from an RPG (which would make it play something between GURPS 4e (out of combat) and RuneQuest 6 (in combat), with the prebuilt content and magic for FR, Planescape, and Spelljammer, and with some gameplay expansion subsystems that I've not encountered better versions of than in old 3e splats). But 3e comes the closest, and some of that is because of 3pp stuff that I haven't found a better equivalent to for any other game - like Book of Strongholds and Dynasties for building projects (fortresses, guild halls, whatever).

Second 2e setting books are sometimes barely even compatible with 2e. Planescape needed to tie itself in knots with e.g. modifiers for magic weapons relative to the original plane - and Dark Sun is worse. Preserving and Defiling should be acts not entirely separate classes. 4e of course handled this almost effortlessly.

Even if I were not put off by 4e's boardgamey mechanics and "everything is a skill challenge" gameplay outside of combat (where my campaign will take place ~50-67% of the time) - 4e opted to not convert most of the content that I would want, and much of what it did convert is wildly different. If I need the stats for (some creature), maybe 4e has it maybe it doesn't, which I expect would often leave me converting it or reskinning something and converting the special abilities the thing is supposed to have - rewriting all the monsters. Basically all of them got converted to 3e by 2008 though. If it turns out we need it playable? In 3e that's no problem, in 4e that's a bigger headache. And that goes for monsters, but it also goes for playable species. And magics shown in the sourcebooks and novels.
The amount of effort it would take me to run a game of D&D I would be satisfied with in 4e is more than if I were to try to convert 2e style spellcasting with the core and FR spells and schools and lists; as well as magic items - to GURPS. If I'm ever going to that degree of effort converting content anyways, I may as well go all the way to a better system rather than feel chained to D&D.

But I know 4e players are big on 'just reskin something, getting noticeable details right doesn't matter' - so I won't be terribly surprised if you're bewildered at the idea that a shortage of /correct/ prebuilt content would be something I would consider a big barrier to satisfaction with 4e (likewise on wanting indepth out of combat gameplay. 4e fans generally don't care about that at all, nevermind having it as a high priority).

TL; DR:
No, "If you tolerate some thinga you dont like when running / playing 3e, you should discard all the parts of it that you do like (including the prebuilt mechanical content for 2/3 of the settings you like) and replace them with more things you really don't like" - is just not a compelling argument. "I don't enjoy the things you do so I prefer this other game and don't care that it lacks the things that made you like the previous edition" is fine. I'm not telling you you can't like 4e. But telling me to pick a game that's significantly further from the type of RPG gameplay I enjoy / find good, and ita best to discard the things I like in 3e, for a different game thats lacking most of the content from the D&D settings I enjoy while claiming it will do what I like better - makes 0 sense.

Show me where 4e became something closer than 3e to being like GURPS noncombat (maybe augmented with the noncombat stuff I can find better versions of in 3e than in GURPS) + RQ6 Combat (or maybe RM4 Combat), with some kind of universal fatique system for physical exhaustion (maybe like SR4e), with AD&D magic and creatures (esp FR and Planescape content) prebuilt relatively close to how they would have shown up in older sources so they're at least as recognizable as when they show up in the fiction, and I will acknowledge 4e as doing 3e but better, rather than it being "Nearly every bad game design idea from 3e, but with none of the good stuff, albeit yes with pretty balanced player classes in combat".

 

[haakon1]

Not the main topic, but I only did 4e (and 5e) as a player, not a DM. AD&D and 3x inspired me to DM.

A major memory for me of 4e is that our DM bought POG like colored poker chips to go under the minis to indicate the conditions applied to them. We didn’t get super high in level, but some characters would have like 4 chips under them in a fight.

I didn’t like that “stacking conditions” style of play. It felt like CharOp/min-max in actual play. That can happen in any edition, but playing with the same group across 3e, 3.5e, 4e, 5e2014, and 5e2024, it seemed most prevalent in 4e.

(I also don’t like that aspect, and barrelmancy, in BG3. “Skilled play” meaning systems mastery to find lawyerly loopholes to exploit the rules is less fun for me than AD&D style “skilled play” of interacting with the environment, NPC’s, and using your abilities in unforeseen ways.)

 

[VHawkwinter]

I also don’t like that aspect, and barrelmancy, in BG3.

Barrelmancy? I haven't played BG3.

“Skilled play” meaning systems mastery to find lawyerly loopholes to exploit the rules is less fun for me than AD&D style “skilled play” of interacting with the environment, NPC’s, and using your abilities in unforeseen ways.)

Gotcha. I also prefer the latter. The former feels like a different kind of game. I like Taskmaster (the comedy show) but it's not what I want from an RPG.

 

[TwoSix]

Polymorph is one way, Master of Many Forms will also do it, and I've heard of a few other ways to turn into a Sarrukh to start the Punpun chain over the years. (Not that I would allow it, but there has been more than one way to get it started that I've heard of, not all PHB based).

I mean, I don't know of a way to access a monster stat block as a player in 3.5 that isn't derived from gaining access to polymorph self or a related effect somehow, generally through spellcasting, class feature, magic item creation, etc.

The core issue is having access to monster abilities as a player at all, which is something allowed directly by the PHB through spells.