Still playing 3e? Share your 3.0 and/or 3.5 house rules

[haakon1]

The grappling mechanics in 3.x are ridiculously over detailed. It's probably the worst part of the combat system. Initiating a grapple can grind combat to halt, requiring lots of rules-checking and dozens of modifiers and decisions.

That’s true. We use those rules, but minimize grappling situations.

 

[haakon1]

Is there a 3.5 update available online still?

I don’t know offhand. My 3.5e campaigns started as 3e, and extra rules from NBoF we haven’t revisited. I suspect there wouldn’t be a difference.

Oh, unrelated, but one thing to watch out for is errata in 3.5e. I run my game in email and typically cut-and-paste from d20 SRD when I want to reference a rule. Once, I had a player cast Divine Might or maybe Enlarge? and we discovered very different rules in our (First Printing) PHB’s versus the corrected online rules. Another player (pro Game Producer) thought to look up errata and found it. We decided to use updated rules where we know about them.

 

[haakon1]

Side note, I forgot how long it can take to make NPCs in the system,

My niece (13, new DM, plays 5e at school and learned 3.5e from me, decided to DM 3.5e) uses AI to help with that. Probably ChatGPT?

I’ve used Copilot to help a bit with that. Tell it what you want and it can make reasonable details. I tell it the race, class, gist of the character, often the Ability Scores and it’ll detail things like gear, feats, and major skills. Gives me a starting point, at least.

 

[el-remmen]

I ran what I liked to call 3.xE. It was 3.0 with stuff from 3,5 I liked and a houseruled compromise between 3.0 and 3.5 when we liked that better.

Ultimately, we houseruled the rules to emulate the homebrew setting we’d already been playing in using 2E rules since 1989, so caveat about our framework for changing stuff.

Once upon a time I had a whole wiki set up with our version of rules but while I have a back up of all the files the original site is no longer accessible.

 

[cbwjm]

I ran what I liked to call 3.xE. It was 3.0 with stuff from 3,5 I liked and a houseruled compromise between 3.0 and 3.5 when we liked that better.

Ultimately, we houseruled the rules to emulate the homebrew setting we’d already been playing in using 2E rules since 1989, so caveat about our framework for changing stuff.

Once upon a time I had a whole wiki set up with our version of rules but while I have a back up of all the files the original site is no longer accessible.

I'd be keen to have a read of those rules, would you have a pdf that you would be fine linking?

 

[earthsea_wizard]

I'd be keen to have a read of those rules, would you have a pdf that you would be fine linking?

Same here.

 

[el-remmen]

I don't have a PDF, all I have are wiki files that are messy to read. We moved to the wiki format because the 3.xE rules were so expansive we were constantly having to update things we ran into for the first time or not notice an issue with until after we'd been playing 3 years, or whatever. Plus the rules and the setting were closely tied, all prestige classes were homebrew, for example, so as the world was built up through play, the rules grew as well.
Anyway, I don't have an easy way to share them - but I do have a friend who says he knows a way to batch convert the files to another wiki format, so one day I may actually get it all back online as an archive of the setting I played and ran game in from 1989 to 2016 over the course of two and a half editions.

 

[_Michael_]

Wait, there's other editions than 3.5? lmao 3.x is the only edition worth playing, mainly because there were so many kickass third party supplements out there that house rules were unnecessary. Tournaments, Faires, and Taverns is one great example, with rules for things like jousting and playing dwarf-toss, and other tweaks to the core rules.

The fact that it had rules for pretty much everything you could think of, and if it didn't, it had a way to make those rules, was it's charm. You could pick and choose how "deep" you waded into the rules--keep it simple and light, or go information and rule dense, and make it excruciatingly detailed. IMHO, that verticality in rule-density was unique, and nothing has come close to it since with the exception of PF.

 

[haakon1]

Wait, there's other editions than 3.5?

Around here, the assumption seems to be the latest edition is the only edition. But 3.5e is my favorite too.

 

[Alzrius]

I'm a PF1 holdout, but a lot of my house rules for that are the same as they would be for 3.X due to how similar the games are (these are just a modest selection):

• It's a free action to activate/deactivate certain magic weapon qualities, such as flaming, frost, etc. A standard action is simply far too much of an investment for those.
• Spell resistance scales when you adjust natural Hit Dice for creatures. It's still the final CR +11, so it's not tied to Hit Dice directly, but if the creature gets stronger in a way that isn't tied to class levels or templates, then SR should improve also.
• I try to keep the 3.0 versions of weapon size scaling (e.g. that Medium-sized shortsword is effectively a Small-sized longsword; none of that "-2 inappropriate size penalty" malarky) and creature spacing whenever possible (no, the giant snake has not coiled up!).
• I dump the Heighten Spell feat. I'm sorry, but if you're already casting a spell in a higher-level spell slot, that's punishment enough. You shouldn't need to take a feat to get the save DC scaled up (and spontaneous casters shouldn't have to spend a full-round action to do it).