D&D 3E/3.5 What was the original intended function of the 3rd edition phb classes?

[Orius]

The Problem was (IMNSHO) was bad game design and testing.

To some degree, but....

I disagree entirely.

The alleged "problem" with 3e was all the "forum meta" and online culture that had people using 3e in ways it absolutely, positively was not designed for.

All this "CodZilla" nonsense, and tiers, and other forum jargon. . .that cleanly divided 3e players into two camps:

1. People who used online message boards and whose play style changed to incorporate powergame strategies from online.
2. People whose gaming styles didn't change due to online powergame tricks, either because they didn't care, or weren't online.

I knew a few people who tried to use all this forum talk stuff in actual games, they were insufferable and nobody wanted to game with them, because they were so upset that everyone else was playing to have fun. . .and not using optimal "builds" and other cheesy strategies. People who had played 1e and 2e and now were playing 3e the same way found 3e to work many times better, faster, and cleaner than AD&D ever was.

3e had only a closed playtest at WotC, among players who had been playing AD&D 1e and 2e for years. It was pretty clearly designed and tested with that play style in mind.

The vast majority of the people I played 3e with, especially in the early years of the 2000's, loved it as a clean, straightforward, intuitive improvement over AD&D.

So many of the 3.5e changes seemed completely superfluous, and only to further complicate the game, and I'd only learn later they were carefully worded rule patches for something someone had done at some point to break something by intentionally misreading the rules.

It was a wonderfully written and well tested game. . .that after its release was met with a completely different and very hostile player culture than the one it was tested with.

My understanding is that much of the original playtests of 3e didn't look much at the levels past 6 or so, which was a mistake because more emphasis was placed on developing those levels which for a long time had been mostly an afterthought. In previous editions the idea was generally that you hit name level, build a castle, and gather an army, and high level play was leading your army. Unfortunately, 2e kind of ignored a good deal of that and strongly encouraged retirement at name level while setting the XP tables from levels 1-20. 3e did make an attempt to develop what had been mostly empty levels, but had definitely mixed results.

Then there was the old D&D/AD&D divide which existed for no good reason. B/X was a fairly solid rules set, throw in some of Companion or use the RC and you've got a pretty solid set of rules that actually works with the old endgame. The problem there is that D&D got an unfortunate reputation as a "kiddie" game even though it had fewer gaps than AD&D and it eventually withered away.

WotC messed up by listening far too much to min-maxers and adding far too much powercreep to the game to appease them, and it didn't help that a lot of the powercreep benefitted casters who absolutely did NOT need it. I'm not too bothered by some of the lightened restrictions on casters since they could be badly hosed in so many ways before 3e. But 3e ignored problems with noncasters and caster dominance with all the powercreep. By the time you get to the end of 3e, there's what 9 or 10 different magic systems at least? What did martials get? Oh yeah, one of those unnecessary magic systems that only could be used by three new powercreeping classes and no benefits or boosts at all to existing classes.

Add on top of that excess new races, classes, feats, spells, magic items and so on which added more powercreep and the beginnings of the player entitlement culture and you get a recipe for disaster. Then further mess things up by viewing things that were meant to be rough guidelines like CR or WBL as absolute gospel. It's not surprising a lot of people don't want to DM it.

I don't hate 3e, on the contrary it cleaned up a lot of AD&D's problems and created a system that really worked well with some of the mechanical developments 2e had been experimenting with. In the long run, it's easier to work with 3e's core than to try to retrofit 2e to work in a similar fashion. But it definitely needs some stronger controls on it.