The Great Debate: 3.0 vs. 3.5

[Gez]

Overall, the edition 3.5 is probably better.

But there's still lots of things I thought should not have been changed. (See that other threads.) So, I vote for a cobbling together.

Anyway, when you add variant rules, house-rules, and stuff borrowed from other d20 games, you end up with a whole new Frankeinstein's game.

 

[Bigwilly]

3.5 with some house rules

No 2 for 1 on power attacks - still seems to work fine for my frontliners.

Gnomes can either have bard or Illusionist as favoured class - Gnome illusionist in party when converted from 3.0 to 3.5.

Occasional use of 3.0 spells - if I can't be bothered looking up the new version. All the little changes to spells were the major hurdle in going from 3.0 to 3.5 - all the playes with spellcaster PCs had to relearn what spells they had and what there new effects were. And the real reason they changed gnomes favoured class from illusionist to bard (apart from giving the bard all the illusion spells) is that they shafted the illusionist.

Bigwilly

 

[Darklone]

3.5 took care of 80% of my 3rd edition houserules... and the remaining 20% were not about game mechanism problems, but for flavor.

Some puny 3.5 problems do exist... but they are less severe than most 3.0 stuff.

 

[Hand of Evil]

3.5 but still have houserules.

 

[Mercule]

3.5 is better, hands down.

The only throw-back to 3E that we use is to ignore weapon familiarity. We'd probably dis the poke-mount Paladin, too, but no one likes Paladin as a class, anyway, so we ditched it completely. Otherwise, most of the variants we use are from some post 3.5 book (like UA) and wholely unrelated to 3.0.

 

[The_Warlock]

After having purchased and read 3.5, I found there were unnecessary complexities they added that I didn't like, while they cleaned up the language and implementation of classes and certain spells and rules which was needed, and there organization was much better. In the end I disliked more than I liked (esp weapon rules and magic changes), and found that my style of DMing and play was somewhere in the middle. So, I'm finishing my complete houseruling - taking what I like from all the major sources and just making my own documents and database. I won't play 3.5 straight up since it felt like they were putting rules in that took away the ability to use your items, skills and spells with creativity and ingenuity - essentially removing options so that DMs didn't have to deal with players who might have a brain and a neat idea.

But that's me. Cobbled all the way.