D&D 3.x I miss 3.5 edition

[Dannyalcatraz]

While I eventually warmed up to 4Ed somewhat, part of my initial negative reaction to it was how many things in the later stages of 3.5Ed that were simply abandoned. One of the biggest ones was the Reserve Feats. They weren’t perfect, but I really felt they were a nice expansion of the mechanics for spellcasters.

(Now, there’s obvious mechanical reasons why Reserve Feats didn’t port across the editions, but that’s not the point.)

There were other 3.5Ed feats I liked that I thought added a lot of flavor & flexibility to the game- Bloodlines, Heritage, Devotions, etc.- that disappeared in 4Ed that had become major tools in my character designs.

 

[neceros]

4e felt too much like an mmo

 

[kigmatzomat]

I ran 3e 1st-23rd level and played 5e 7th-20th level.

I prefer the overall granularity of 3e and would happily go back. Oddly, all the attempts at setting bounding boxes seems to have made getting the encounter's right even more difficult. The 3e CR system was imperfect, but imo once you figured out your player's "handicap" and adjusted the CR accordingly, it was fine.

I will say if I ever do get the chance of running 3e, I will use 5e spell progressions + Tome of Battle because I think at that point martials and casters may be balanced.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

I miss the era. I miss the wild west feel of publishing and eventually the wheat separating from the chaff. We got some really solid 3rd party material in terms of mechanics as settings. I'm thinking specifically of Necromancer Games / Frog God Games and Malhavoc Press' Diamond Throne, Arcana Unearthed Arcana Evolved and Ptolus.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I miss the era. I miss the wild west feel of publishing and eventually the wheat separating from the chaff. We got some really solid 3rd party material in terms of mechanics as settings. I'm thinking specifically of Necromancer Games / Frog God Games and Malhavoc Press' Diamond Throne, Arcana Unearthed Arcana Evolved and Ptolus.

Two of my favorite 3rd party products for 3/3.5Ed were Book of the Righteous and Hyperconscious.

 

[Marc17]

3.x/PF is pretty much what I want out of D&D idea wise. Trouble is that the designers just didn't have the chops to come up with good system for those ideas in my mind. I'd love to run a game, try and fix the tier system and put some thought into how skills are used and run. I just don't think I could find a long term group willing to do that really.

 

[el-remmen]

I played 3.xE for 16+ years from when it first came out (2000 to 2016). I was not into all the 3.5 changes, so I just added what I liked from 3.5 but kept along with the 3.0 chassis (with the caveat that I house rule every version of D&D I play from Day One and never look back). I never even bothered getting the 3.5 Monster Manual or DMG. When I started running 5E in 2019 (after a 3 years D&D gap), I ended up grandfathering a few 3.xE things and my homebrew rules hack (Vanity Frankenstein 5E) incorporates even more (and a couple of 5E 2024 and Level Up A5E things too).

In the end, I found 3.xE to be a little to granular/crunchy for my tastes but 5E not quite granular enough (and Level Up A5E more granular in ways I didn't like), so I did what I think D&D is all about, mixed all up until I was left with a ruleset I was more into.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And aren't possible now. When I think of my favorite characters from 3e, none of them are buildable in 5e.

I bounced off of 5Ed during the prerelease revelations. Never spent a cent on it.

So I have no idea how many of the late-era 3.5Ed PCs I made were capable of having reasonable, playable 5Ed facsimiles made of them. I know not many could be easily built in 4Ed, and goodness knows I tried.

That said, some of what I came up with in 4Ed wasn’t easily modeled in 3.5Ed, or was flat out better with the 4Ed rules. (I especially appreciated the 4Ed’s Warlock over its predecessor.) And in fairness, I’m certain that 5Ed’s rules would have found me trying out certain things that would have been unwieldy in 3.5Ed or 4Ed.

 

[Maxperson]

I bounced off of 5Ed during the prerelease revelations. Never spent a cent on it.

So I have no idea how many of the late-era 3.5Ed PCs I made were capable of having reasonable, playable 5Ed facsimiles made of them. I know not many could be easily built in 4Ed, and goodness knows I tried.

That said, some of what I came up with in 4Ed wasn’t easily modeled in 3.5Ed, or was flat out better with the 4Ed rules. (I especially appreciated the 4Ed’s Warlock over its predecessor.) And in fairness, I’m certain that 5Ed’s rules would have found me trying out certain things that would have been unwieldy in 3.5Ed or 4Ed.

You can do a bit more with 5e now than you could when it started. They've added a class and some subclasses, but nowhere near what 3e provides.

With 3e the sheer number of classes, prestige classes, skills, feats, and races means that you can make almost any concept you can envision.

There are something like 115 subclasses in 5e. 3.5e has something like 750 prestige classes, and those prestige classes can be fit nicely on multiple different classes, unlike subclasses which only work for the base class they were built for. 5e has about 100 feats. 3.5e has about 1500.

Even with most of the books put out by 5e, I can't build a single 3.5e character that I played past 5th level, and even then I can't build most of under 5th level. The different feats and class abilities that just plain don't exist in 5e makes it pretty much impossible.

As an example, take Hide in Plain Sight. In 3.5e it was an ability that let you roll a hide check to hide without any cover at all. The ability doesn't exist in 5.5e that I can tell, and in 5e only a ranger has it and even then it takes 1 minute to do and you can't move. Basically it's Arnold in Predator covering himself in mud and being still at the mud bank. And you have to be 10th level to do it. A closer ability is the 5e wood elf ability to hide in light cover, such as rain or dim lighting. 5.5e got rid of that ability as well, though. One of my characters is a drow Rogue/Shadowdancer that I think is 6th level. That one ability to hide in plain sight as a 1st level Shadowdancer means that 5e can't make the character. He's not a ranger or 10th level, and he's not a wood elf, so I can't even get close to that ability.