D&D 3.x Mike Selinker about the release of 3.0 D&D

[dbm]

When 3e came out, I was probably a decade away from the last time I had played D&D (2e as it happens, through I had probably played more BECMI or 1e at that stage in my D&D ‘career’). We moved away from 2e to Rolemaster and GURPS as our main game systems. I would have probably heard about 3e on Usenet, and learned about Eric Noah’s site there, which brought me here when 3e was starting to be teased at events and so on.

3e sounded sufficiently different, and closer to what we liked about other systems, to give it a try. And we enjoyed it. This time also coincided with a dip in the size of my regular gaming group (due to people moving away and real life commitments) but we then met some new players as one of my cousins married a gamer and so a happy union of gaming groups happened.

That new influx of players were big fans of D&D (it is the most commonly played system, after all) so 3.x became our primary system for the full run of that edition, and we also moved into 4e when that came out. Mainline D&D has been in a frequent rotation since then, with other systems like Call of Cthulhu, 13th Age and Savage Worlds in the mix.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I still have it--and it still has the eTools CD-ROM in the back.

The music of the character generator lives rent-free in my head. Also "click here to turn off my annoying voice."

 

[delericho]

It was an exciting time. I'd been away from D&D for a long time, mostly playing VtM at the time, but the excitement around the WotC buyout and the new edition drew me back in. I'd been eagerly following the various developments in Dragon magazine (having started buying it again), on usenet, and on Eric Noah's site.

So on the first day it was available I went to my FLGS (now closed, alas) and picked up the two copies of the PHB, plus whatever else they had available - "Death in Freeport", "Three Days to Kill", the "Creature Collection" (and maybe "Sunless Citadel" - I forget whether that came out at the same time). I then proceeded to devour them all, those being the days I had the time and patience to do that.

And I was blown away - 3e was a revelation. It was followed by a DMG that was likewise a massive step up from the near-useless 2nd Ed version, and a MM that in fairness didn't match the Monstrous Compendium, and it was great. And then they almost immediately saw a huge drop in quality with "Sword and Fist" and the rest of the splatbooks.

 

[haakon1]

"Death in Freeport", "Three Days to Kill", the "Creature Collection" (and maybe "Sunless Citadel"
…
And I was blown away - 3e was a revelation. It was followed by a DMG that was likewise a massive step up from the near-useless 2nd Ed version

Good times. I fondly remember running “Three Days to Kill” and “Sunless Citadel”. Meepo!

 

[Voadam]

I had the PH preordered on Amazon. I was a couple years out of law school and very excited by the OGL and the then draft SRD.

My gaming then was occasional cross country get togethers for gaming weekends or batchelor party gaming with my long time friends/gaming group. When my brother got the banewarrens module he started a regular online email 3.0 game for me and one other friend that later shifted to a yahoo group thing with more from our original group and it went on for years.

 

[Echohawk]

do you remember where you were? I was out of the hobby until near the end of 3.5.

I was actively running a 2e campaign at the time, and one of my players had emigrated to the UK to work for WotC roughly a year before 3e was released. Consequently, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a photocopy of an early version of the PHB a few months before it was released. (I might still have that in storage somewhere.) We converted that campaign to 3e after the core books had all been released, but by then that campaign was on life-support because half of the players had emigrated, so we only ran a few 3e games over the next few years as special events when there were enough players in the same country. The following year (early 2001) I launched a new 3e campaign for a bunch of completely new players. That one ran for almost nine years before concluding, adapting to 3.5e midway. I can't say 3.0 brought me back to D&D because I'd never left, but it did present an opportunity for me to bring new players into the game. I was a lot more comfortable introducing them to the 3e ruleset than I'd have been introducing them to by-then very bloated 2e.