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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack Daniel" data-source="post: 8451039" data-attributes="member: 694">I would have to say that my relationship with 3rd edition D&D is very "love–hate," in that I loved it right up until the day that I hated it.I started gaming seriously in the late 90s, so I was primed to be caught up in the hype over 3e's release (raise your hand if you remember checking this very website daily for info and leaks — and raise two if you were haphazardly kludging said leaks into your AD&D 2e games in the months before 3e came out). And to be whole-hog on board with the bandwagon of smug condescension aimed at any vocally <a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vaoBEg3tR0s/X4zI8wFe7_I/AAAAAAAAGI4/Od7Ro5egPUsjflqXSuDjia0tkyFdQ_vAwCLcBGAsYHQ/s898/1602978644381.jpg" target="_blank">apalled grognards</a>, shaking our collective heads at those poor, benighted holdouts who obviously didn't know what was good for their own gaming. There was no question about whose side I was on in the Y2K Edition War.Naturally, I snatched up the 3e core rulebooks as soon as they came out. And I bought all the splats that I could find and afford. I loved it all. I loved the crunchy tactical combat, I loved the complete and robust ruleset, I loved the vast and wide-open landscape of character-building options. And slowly… over time… these things conspired to wear me down. They burdened my soul. They abraded away my creativity and my love for the game.(To be fair, it wasn't precisely the 3e rules alone that did this. It was the combination of the 3e rules and the trad campaign style, which demands a constant and stressful balancing-act from the DM, who must at all times be both nimble and subtle in quietly tweaking the game-world to provide the players with both balanced challenge and engaging narrative — while the game system usually fights against you instead of helping.)I was generally positive toward v3.5 when it came out (even though I still, as then, can't stand the fact that it was dubbed "3.5" instead of a more accurate "3.1"). I bought those core books as soon as they were available too. And I mostly kept buying new hardcovers as they arrived… up to a point. Around the time the "class splats" were getting the hardcover treatment (because, e.g., a book like Sword & Fist was now totally deprecated and really needed to be replaced with something like Complete Warrior), that was when I started to feel splat-fatigue. And to long for a simpler game, a less bloated landscape of class options, and less in the way of flagrant departure from the formative 2nd edition feeling that I had known.(The 3.5 ranger was just the first inkling of that departure, and it rankled. I was very happy when 3e's version of Unearthed Arcana gave us the "prestige" versions of the paladin, ranger, and bard — this was an excellent excuse on my part to really pare down the list of character classes allowed in my campaigns, down to a nice and tight little list of core classes and an equally curated list of prestige classes — summarily exorcising all other PrCs, from every source and splat and setting, totally from my game for all time. It was an immense relief.)So, I mostly missed out on "late" 3.5. I never played with Incarnum or the Book of Nine Swords or the Tome of Magic. I admired the focused caster-classes (beguiler and healer and what-not) but never saw them in action. By 2006, I was basically done with the edition for good. I backtracked to my origins in fits and starts — converting a whole campaign, mid-stride, from 3.5 to Castles & Crusades to 2e to BXCMI (the edition that I had originally learned the game on, before taking up 2e) over a matter of maybe eight weeks. And then largely sticking with BXCMI (or as I still know and prefer to call it, red box/black box OD&D) ever since.If I were ever to run 3rd edition again — and I have, on occasion, felt the itch of nostalgia — it would be for one reason. To get through some of the 3e adventures that I never got to experience DMing previously, unconverted. I only ever ran groups all the way through The Sunless Citadel, The Forge of Fury, and the very beginnings of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and Red Hand of Doom. I'd like to try my hand at running the whole blue-cover Ashardalon saga, and to maybe get all the way through RttToEE (after running a group through the original ToEE) someday. Red Hand of Doom is probably much too "late three-point-fivey" for me to want to bother with it — which brings me to the point that I would definitely run 3.0 and not 3.5. Something about the 3.0 books just feels more right than the 3.5 books — like they have more "TSR DNA" in them, that got squeezed out with the juices in the 3.5 revision. (I often think of the TSR editions as an organic life-form, 3rd edition as a cyborg made from that life-form, 4th edition as a robot that replaced the last organic bits of the cyborg… and 5th edition as some horrible golem wearing a stitched-together skin-suit that it thinks will make people believe it's a friendly organic life-form again. Yes, I know this analogy won't win me any friends.) And even then, I'd probably have to make some tweaks to 3.0 to make it "playable" for me — at the very least, I wouldn't be awarding XP for winning combats and overcoming challenges. XP-for-treasure is just entirely too fundamental to how I understand D&D ought to work anymore.It would be interesting, I think, to see how the 3e system functions when totally divested of all the trad baggage (things like "DM as maestro Houdini storyteller" and "players ought to role-play, not roll-play") that early-2000s me had been saddled with.</blockquote>

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