D&D 3.x I miss 3.5 edition

[neceros]

I really miss 3.5. I bought enormous amount of books, and I have fond memories of it despite its downfalls. I know it's not perfect especially after level 10 or so. But I don't mind that. A high level character should be overwhelmingly strong in my opinion.

I've not played a character very high in 5th ed yet, so i can't say how it feels, but it doesn't seem like it would be terrible powerful. Is it? Do you guys have experience with the level 15+ 5e characters?

 

[delericho]

I had a huge amount of fun with 3.x... but I don't think I'd ever go back now. 5e is just a better fit for what I want to do now - I'm too casual a gamer to want to go back. (That said, I know at least one gamer for whom 5e is just too simple, and the heaviest crunchy parts of 3e were just about enough.)

In 5e we hit 10th level a couple of times, but never more than that. And it was fine throughout. (That said, in all my time playing D&D across almost every edition, I can count on one hand the number of times we got to 15th level. Even getting above 10th was very rare, though I do need a second hand to have enough fingers. So I wouldn't claim to be an expert in how any of the editions work at those levels.)

 

[Cergorach]

There's nothing stopping you from playing 3.5e, you could even go to Pathfinder 1e, which is close to the same...

In 5e 2024 your character becomes a Swiss army knife, unless you build very specifically for it, your character is less of a one-shot glass cannon. And where 3.5e was more of a stacking bonuses game, in 5e 2024 the stacking of bonuses is extremely limited by design. But on the flip side in 5e 2024 you have more combos that 'hook' into each other instead of combos stacking. In fighting game comparison, 3.5e you make a combo to do one massive blow, while in 5e 2024 you're more likely to be 'juggling' your opponent.

There are things I miss about 3.5e, but many things I'm not missing at all. Things I don't miss: The overwhelming amount of player facing content that people assumed was available to choose from, all the feats, the prestige classes, spells, etc. From a DMs perspective, it was overwhelming to plan for. And imbalanced enough that folks doing the min/maxing would be so far ahead of 'normal' players that the power discrepancy would be a problem. And designing challenging 'boss' battles was an absolute pain! With all the stacking bonuses and penalties, durations, effects, etc. I needed a computer program to keep track of everything with high level 3.5e combat, with 5e 2024 that seems less of a problem, but at this time our primary method of play is via VTT...

Things I do miss: More official monster options, more magic items, templates, building rules for NPCs (levels) and monsters. I understand why 5e went with the 3 attuned item limit and toned down the power of many items (in the bonuses department), but I sometimes still miss the magic item Christmas trees (players). 5e feels less fleshed out regarding rules for certain subsystems or has made very abstract simple rules which lack flavor imho.

But overall I still prefer 5e 2024 over 3.5e in the rules department, things like more monster and NPC options I can work around. And if some rules (like bastions) are a bit to abstract for my tastes, I will go to a level that's appropriate for the campaign and my players. I did learn something very important from 3.5e: My very first 5e campaign as a DM had one rule: Only options from the PHB, the DM will be the one who will introduce additional options, so don't expect all the options from further expansions to become available by default.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

I'm sticking with 3.5e. I do heavily curate it, with a blanket-ban on 'prestige' classes and a "must be approved by the DM (me)" rule for any feats or spells outside of the core. And a white-list of "PCs must be one of the eight core PC races."

3.5e has flaws, and I've written rants about them. But 3.0 and 3.5e brought me back to D&D, and when I looked at PF1, PF2, 4e, 5e, etc. I decided against moving on to any of them.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I really miss 3.5. I bought enormous amount of books, and I have fond memories of it despite its downfalls. I know it's not perfect especially after level 10 or so. But I don't mind that. A high level character should be overwhelmingly strong in my opinion.

3.5Ed- and its 3.X progeny- quickly became and remain my favorite iteration of D&D. The enormous variety of character options was key to that.

Before it, I’d played D&D since 1977-78, in multiple cities in CO, KS and TX, and with more groups than I can remember. I won’t exaggerate and say I played EVERY race & class combo in the prior editions, but I definitely tried most of the stereotypes and some others besides. (Especially when 2Ed’s Player’s Options & the softcover books were released.)

While I played several iconic legacy builds from past editions in 3.5Ed, it let me try characters that simply weren’t possible before, doing things that weren’t possible before. After a certain point, I barely played a PC that would be easily retrofitted into one of the older iterations.

4Ed opened up a few concepts that weren’t easily modeled in 3.5Ed, but largely seemed more restrictive than it (or 2Ed PO) was. Still, some things were definitely improved, IMHO, like the Warlock class.

 

[WitchyD]

While it's not my preferred edition, 3e was my first exposure to D&D and I too get a little nostalgic for it. Things like the chart of actions that do or don't provoke an attack of opportunity keep me from wanting to run it, though. Instead I just consume bits of fiction based on the ruleset, like Order of the Stick.

 

[Alzrius]

I really miss 3.5. I bought enormous amount of books, and I have fond memories of it despite its downfalls.

I continued collecting 3.5 books after the edition ended; to date, I'm missing only a couple of the Fantastic Locations supplements, and one or two of the Dragonlance adventures.

Likewise, I'm personally of the opinion that its "downfalls" are overblown, particularly in online discourse which very often analyzes things at a theoretical level without looking at the actual course of play around the table. It's not a simple game by any measure, particularly at the higher levels, but it's not supposed to be. Complaints like "my 20th-level character was completely ruined by one mordenkainen's disjunction" are issues of people not properly engaging with the game far more than they are "evidence" that the system breaks down at that level.

 

[Richards]

My gaming group opted to remain with 3.5 despite the several new editions that have come out since: we're still enjoying 3.5, I have enough source material to keep me gaming in 3.5 for the rest of my natural lifespan, and we really haven't seen any reason to change. I'm now running my fourth 20-level 3.5 campaign and my son is DMing his fourth 3.5 campaign as well. Plus we had a 9th campaign that one of our players ran us through that made it to about 15th level before folding.

Johnathan

 

[Blue]

I really miss 3.5. I bought enormous amount of books, and I have fond memories of it despite its downfalls. I know it's not perfect especially after level 10 or so. But I don't mind that. A high level character should be overwhelmingly strong in my opinion.

But regardless of power level, it requires a challenge to be fun as a game.

I swore off 3.5 after running it for years. Too much power creep, too much investment of time in mechanical prep to be able to consistently provide challenge and fun to those overwhelmingly strong characters -- including when the party varied WILDLY in power. Where I needed to provide reasonable challenge and equal spotlight opportunities to characters in the high teens of levels when one is a single classed monk and the other a heavily multi/prestige classed pure caster, when they weren't even on the same continent of power level.

So saying that a high level character should be overwhelmingly strong is at best half a statement when critiquing a system, because a character doesn't act in isolation. They need to have equal spotlight time in terms of mechanical abilities with other characters, regardless of the system mastery of the player.

And the GM needs not to be burdened with undue mechanical time-intensive prep to challenge them, such as the "monsters are build like PCs" which is conceptually a great idea and in practice a load of garbage as creating a single high level character over years of play, and creating multiple high-level characters for each encounter in a session are very different blocks of time.

 

[Tonguez]

yeah I agree that 3.5e was the best version of DnD except Pathfinder

of course I mainly play FATE and similar rules lite narrative first games now, but I do appreciate 3.5e and beleive that it is better than 5x