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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 9147446" data-attributes="member: 6670763">Back in the day when 3.5e was released, I absolutely loved it, like seemingly the vast majority of people. I dumped my old original rulebooks on ebay and was really happy with the new books that I kept using until eventually switching to Pathfinder. But in hindsight, the old 3rd Edition and 3.5e feel like a much bigger shift in the tone and style of D&D than was apparent at the time. Even though I played vastly more 3.5e than I had played 3rd Edition before, I am having a lot of nostalgia for the former but can't emotionally connect to the later. 3.5e feels like part of the Pathfinder, 4th ed. and 5th ed. family of RPGs, while the early 3rd edition books feel a lot more reminiscent to AD&D to me. When I look at books like Monsters of Faerûn, Fiend Folio, Manual of the Planes, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, Lords of Darkness, Silver Marches, and Unapproachable East (a very early 3.5e book but with the old feel) I really want to run a campaign with those again.Unfortunately, the original 3rd Edition core rulebooks from 2000 do not exist as pdfs. You can't get them anywhere. But the original rtf files that WotC released as the first SRD are still around. Those are a horrible unsorted mess with bad formatting that quickly made me give up on trying to recreate the old books as single files a few years ago, but fortunately some kind and obviously mad soul actually did go through with this earlier this year. <a href="https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/423878/Before-the-Empire-the-30-SRD" target="_blank">Before the Empire (the 3.0 SRD)</a>It's available both in pdf which you can easily copy and paste, but also as odt which you can edit directly.This is probably the closest you can get to getting the original 3rd Edition rules again.<a href="https://www.dragon.ee/30srd/" target="_blank">There is also one online version of the original SRD</a> for anyone interested in this discussion but not wanting to get the pdfs.But to be fair, there were plenty of things about the original rules that kind of sucked. A revised edition was not a bad idea in itself. It's just that some of the changes made by 3.5e are not universally seen as improvements by many people and are causing new problems with the game of their own.What I want to do with this thread is not to collaboratively design a specific retroclone of 3rd edition. Ultimately, what changes to gameplay are good or bad is a subjective thing that depends a lot on what each person wants to get out of the game. So I think there is no need to try to convince anyone that any option shared here is the right choice and better pick over the others. But to make the right pick for yourself, it of course helps a lot to understand what issue each proposal is meant to address and what it is supposed to accomplish, so please go into exhaustive detail about the reasoning behind your proposals and ask questions about those that you don't find convincing.</blockquote>

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