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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 9148862" data-attributes="member: 1465">I am glad I kept all my 3.0 books. Well in honesty, that was because I didn't switch to 3.5 so didn't buy anything from the 3.5 era (except Unearthed Arcana because it was a semi-editition-agnostic collection of variants). I played 3.5 for about a year using only the SRD, mainly because I was waiting for the errata-heavy period to be over before buying books with at least the most important corrections, but then we realized 3.5 didn't offer us any real improvement, and on average had as many benefits as drawbacks compared to 3.0, in addition to being designed a series of unrelated 'patches' instead of one cohesive whole, so we went back to 3.0. Either way, as I said I am glad I still have all my 3.0 books <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Nowadays, I am more of a fan of taking a RPG or edition as a whole, and not make modifications as much as possible. But at the same time, I tend to see each ruleset as a toolset, thanks to "rule 0", so if something in the gameplay rules doesn't yield satisfaction around the table, I generally just ignore it and make my own adjudications or "dial" something to make it work more satisfactorily, but I don't really establish a house rule, it's more like good referee work. For example, in 5e I don't need to pedantically follow DMG examples on exploring by passive checks if I feel it ends up forcing me to script in advance which hidden things will be found and which not; to me those are just possible rulings that the "rule 0" anyway always has precedent to. Similarly, I tend not to house rule character abilities but instead I adjust adventures in such a way as to make certain abilities more frequently useful (if we feel they are weaker than average) or more frequently hampered (if we feel they are stronger than average). House ruling means to establish a new basis, which then can prove equally unsatisfactory if next adventure is different.That said, I had a many-years phase in 3.0 (while everybody else was playing 3.5) when me and others in the group (rotating DMs) had lots of fun heavily modifying the ruleset. Some of my own works included  for example greatly expanding the skill system with new skills and lots of new uses for the less common skills (note: no merging or removing skills from the PHB) or making domains a lot more at the center of cleric spellcasting. So I certainly have experience in tinkering with the system, but the motivation was just to have fun pretending to be game designers, NOT to allegedly fix something broken.I agree, the one and only problem I had with 3e was the unwieldy amount of character material which allowed powergamers to get too much advantage over casual players, and made DM's balancing spotlights too difficult. Ironically, "system mastery" was one of the design goal of 3.0 according to Monte Cook, so finding winning combos was meant to be part of the 3e game experience; but at the same time Monte Cook explained that the original 3e designers NEVER meant for character material such as feats and prestige classes to be mass-published, in fact he said the original idea was for the DMG to show a few example of prestige classes that each DM would use as a basis to create their own small bunch tied to their setting's narrative. Instead it became a money grab and made the edition collapse. That's another reason why I was glad to move back to 3.0 because at least the amount of character material "froze" to a limited amount (it still wasn't small, but more or less I had no major issue playing with PHB + 5 base splatbooks and/or one single setting 's material).</blockquote>

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