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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 4117929" data-attributes="member: 1465">I missed the 2e-3e transition discussions, because at that time I wasn't interested in RPGing (although I had played D&D before that). So my comments here apply to what I thought when I picked up the 3e core books in 2001, while the gaming community had been playing 3e since a year already, and compared the 3e rules with OD&D and AD&D 2e (although I wasn't an expert with them, I had played both).I didn't know the intricacies of OD&D and AD&D because I had only played with their core rules. 3e gave me immediately the impression of being MORE intricate and tactically interesting.It also gave me the impression of being more simple to remember (d20 rolls, saving throws) and more streamlined (skills and feats system, multiclassing rules). Since I didn't consider the difficulty of the correspondent previous edition rules as a value, these immediately seemed an improvement to me.All the big sacred cows were there, even those I wasn't very fond of, so yes it felt like the same game.What started to feel different after a year or so was the abundance of discussions about "builds" and the attitude towards powerplaying and trying to break the system. Internet however had a major effect on this, because it made every little "bug" universally known.I felt like 3e was flexible enough to support all previous styles at least.Absolutely utterly not! With the 3e skill system, a MAJOR attention was dedicated to "everything else beside combat". Also a large amount of spells were designed to be useful in non-combat situations.3.5 made it certainly worse: skills started to become cheaper for example (indirect psychological effect of making something cheaper, is that it often lowers the interest in it), and spells were oriented more to combat particularly to damage.Considering that with TSR the game was at best stabilized with negative hit points, at least the gimmickery was bringing it back...It still got the traditional races, classes and monsters in core, vancian magic with most of the old spells, it's got all the sacred cows, and the general idea about how an adventure looks like (difficult, with high degree of mortality and quickly draining your resources). That's pretty much like precious D&D versions.</blockquote>

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