Flexor the Mighty! said:
I'm 31, possibly professional, and I detest DM'ing 3.x edition. The 1e campaign, which started out at 3.0e has come to an end. I await Castles & Crusades to deliver d20 fantasy role playing without the amount of baggage I find causes me too much prep time and makes the game run to slowly. This is only my opinion and is not representative of the gaming population as a whole. I know I'd rather not game than DM 3e again.
My experience seems to be the flipside of that coin.
I'm 39, a professional. I've been playing D&D since 1982. D&D Basic, AD&D, 2nd Edition AD&D, 3E, 3.5.
The campaign I originally started out playing in, in 1982, is still going, though 2nd Edition about killed it (we've converted the campaign, and the PCs, from AD&D to 2E to 3E, and now to 3.5). 2E drove me nuts, and when I discovered game systems that were a little more coherent (such as West End's d6 Star Wars), I moved over to those. The groups I play in (and, admittedly, act as the "lead dog" for) played almost no actual D&D from about 1993 on, and I bought almost nothing that TSR / WotC put out for 2E from that point forward.
When 3E came out, it reinvigorated my interest in D&D, and did the same for the players in my groups. Most of my players love coming up with concepts for their characters -- and, you know what? Most of them are role-playing concepts, not "what's the fastest way I can get to this cool PrC" concepts. We do have a few munchkiny players, and yeah, the rules do seem to let them go a bit nutty sometimes, but the "storyteller" and "problem-solver" players don't seem to be so horribly encumbered by the rules that they can't enjoy doing their thing, too.
The mechanics are so much simpler now than before, and IME, once a player gets the basics, learning the rest doesn't seem to be a big issue.
Yes, there are a *ton* of optional rules (esp. if you include the third-party stuff), but there's no rule that you have to use 'em. In our groups, we use the core books, the Complete books, and the FR books (in one group, I'm running a campaign in the Silver Marches, and that book has proven a wealth of inspiration for the adventures I've written). I don't buy every single book WotC releases, but clearly 3E / 3.5 has strongly increased how much of my disposable income is going to gaming in general, and Renton in particular.
I DM regularly for two groups. In one (the Silver Marches one), I write everything we play. Once I come up with the plot, it takes me about 2 hours to stat everything up (and my recent discovery of Jamis Buck's NPC Generator is cutting that time even more) -- I don't find that to be too odious a load. In the other group I DM, I use published adventures; the biggest time sink there is reading the reviews here on EN World to see which modules are worth my time.
I have no idea if my experience is typical or not. All I can say is, for me, 3E brought me back to D&D, and it's keeping me here.
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