When did you enjoy 3.x?

[Nightchilde-2]

I enjoyed 3.x immensely. Until it began to become a grind. Higher levels, treasure rolling, encounter building..the more I did it, the more it began to grate on my nerves and the more I burned out on it.

I haven't played 3.x since around the time the PHBII came out. However, everything I've seen about 4e has invigorated my zest for D&D again. It has a lot of ideas that I said "If I were going to heavily houserule 3e, I'd do this..and this..and this..and this..." But, I believe it's better to find a game that fits my style rather than try to hammer my style onto a game system so I moved on to other systems.

Come June though, I'm starting a 6-month long 4e campaign....

 

[Wormwood]

I will say this in 3e's defence: the underlying d20 system was remarkably easy to tinker with. That helped a lot.

 

[Steely Dan]

So, what I'm getting is that many of us DMs found 3rd Ed a bit of a headache to DM, which makes me wonder, I wonder who is most looking forward to 4th Ed, DMs or players.

 

[Ginnel]

3rd Edition, hmm liked it because it introduced me to tabletop, and the DM's who ran it were pretty rules loose and the friends I played with didn't power game. I'm currently DM'ing in 3.5 converting over some of my own ideas combined with 2ed's planescape setting, the last time I had fun playing was last week

Where there wasn't a single traditional combat, players explored and investigated, met a harmonium modron and his sniveling buddy and managed to out bluff them, debated working for the sensates, then finally they explored Mortuary using a wand of summon dretch to create a distraction as they dived through a portal into the elemental plane of fire, good times.

Now I look to tomorrows game and the combats ahead not in apprehension, but I can only think how much easier and fun it would be to run it in 4th ed instead.

 

[theNater]

My first introduction to 3rd edition came after I'd been running another game for quite a while, and one of my players wanted to run a game of his own. So I enjoyed it for the opportunity to be a player rather than a GM. And D&D is very solidly playable for the style of combat it traditionally represents(european heavy armor and weapons). Most other RPGs I've seen that focus on the same sorts of weapons can be a little too...realistic with things like what happens when a 5-pound chunk of metal hits a person at high speed. The hit point abstraction is quite palatable. I find the 1d20 mechanic annoyingly swingy, but I was only too happy to put up with it for some of the fantastic effects D&D permits.

That particular campaign was a good time. It included a few of my favorite moments(notably my aquisition of a +1 worg's head of kobold slaying), though it was starting to get kind of off-balance by the time it fell apart due to the participants going their separate ways. We were just starting to get out of the sweet spot, and it showed.

Things started to sour for me somewhat in a later campaign. The DM for that game had picked up a module about which he was extremely excited, so he asked us to put together some 4th level characters for it. We ended up with a beguiler, a druid, a cleric with a race that had an ECL of 3, and my barbarian who had picked up a single sorcerer level(enlarge person + true strike + enrage = hilarity). Things were a little bumpy, but acceptable, and we were progressing through the module steadily.

Until we ran into the will-o-the-wisp.

We'd managed to work our way up to level 6 or 7 by this time, so it had a CR in a reasonable range of our party level. But we couldn't kill it. All of our casters' spells would just bounce right off, and it went invisible every other round, in addition to flying around, so I was only occasionally able to reach it with my great flail. I was whiffing at it every time it came close enough(I'd like to say smacking it, but it had this crazy high AC), and the rest of the party was buffing me and trying to give me flanking bonuses. Eventually I managed to land a couple of solid blows on it and take it down. In the interim, it had done more damage to the party than any other single monster in the entire campaign. After it was over we made the GM show us the monster manual and found the line that gave us all the trouble:

Immune to all spells except magic missile and maze.

It didn't have too many hit points, a single volley of missiles from an appropriately levelled mage would probably have killed it. A second volley certainly would have. But we didn't have an appropriately levelled mage. So we couldn't hit its AC, which was apparently supposed to be irrelevant, and we couldn't bring magical might to bear because we didn't have the correct spell. We were just out of luck, and that's all there was to it.

That hurt. I don't play heroic fantasy games to feel ineffectual, I have plenty of other sources for that. But that wasn't enough to completely turn me off to the game, and a little while later an idea for a one-shot started rattling around in my head. Something high-powered, a team of level 16s kicking butt and taking names. So I threw some encounters together, quickly invented a couple of traps(I remember being surprised that there weren't any traps with a CR on the order of my party in the DMG), and fired up the game. First encounter: a horde of skeletons! Enough to make for a CR of 14, to give the characters a chance to show off without burning through too many of their resources. They opened the door, saw the writhing mass of bones, and rolled initiative. Druid is up first, he fires off a good-sized area damage spell.

A really good-sized area damage spell.

An area damage spell big enough to fill the room.

And that's it for the skeletons. Minimum damage with a successful save is still sufficient to kill them off. No showboating, no people behaving awesomely because there's only a tiny risk, just the druid naming a spell and the enemies keeling over.

This wasn't the only encounter that didn't go as I'd expected. The CR 16 encounter(a couple of golems) took forever, because the golems I'd chosen had some strange immunities I hadn't accounted for. Those selfsame immunities severely restricted the party's options, so only the first three rounds were interesting. The party circumnavigated my traps with very little expenditure of resources, because they had mobility options that rendered the traps irrelevant. And the CR 17 dragon at the end of the dungeon destroyed the party almost as quickly as the druid had taken out the skeletons.

And that's when I realized that I had no idea how any monster group would interact with any party. The primary tool for that (CR) tells me nothing at all. The way the combats work depends more on whether the party has the specific gear (adamintine weapons for the golems), ability (magic missile for the will-o-the-wisp), or resistances (the dragon was alternating between a sleep effect and a breath weapon; none of the characters could withstand both) for the monsters. If they do, the party wins. If they don't, the monster wins.

So I gave up on 3rd edition. But I'm very excited by 4th edition, because it promises to address all of these issues.

The large scale removal of immunities precisely addresses the problem we had with the will-o-the-wisp and the golems.

Minions are exactly what I wanted in the skeletons fight. The "takes no damage on a miss" effect would have left some from the initial blast for the melee fighters to show off on.

The uniform advancement of attack bonuses and defenses takes out the "rock-paper-scissors" problem of the various saves which is what got me with the dragon.(If reflexes isn't favored, you will die to the breath weapon. If will isn't favored, the sleep effect will put you under.)

In conclusion, yes, I did have fun with 3rd edition for quite a while. I love the sword-and-sorcery style it evokes. I love holding off swarms of the undead with my strong sword arm, and blasting rooms of monsters with my fireballs. I love walking with the elves and the dwarves. I love staring down a dragon and sharing that knowledge that only one of us will survive the battle, and neither of us can be sure of who it'll be. But I hate being eaten by a fist-sized ball of light. I hate having to scrutinize every monster for 20 minutes before I can be sure it's okay to have my players encounter it. I hate realizing that I'm not allowed to make my saving throw because if I have a chance to succeed, someone else can't fail. And I hate losing my newly crafted character because some random orc got a lucky roll.

I'm looking forward to 4th edition because I hope it will provide me with all the things I love without including all the things I hate. Every piece of preview information I see makes me more sure those hopes will be realized.

*Edited for error correction.*

 

[Lacyon]

When did you enjoy 3.x?

Yesterday.

 

[ebenmckay]

I started playing DnD when my older cousin introduced me to 1e in the early 90s. After playing a couple sessions I was hooked to this strange thing called an "arrpeegee" and I went out and bought the 2e books (black covers). It was a lot of fun (especially the "Combat and Tactics" book), but some of the rules seemed overcomplicated or arbitrary (THAC0? Demihuman level limits?).

Then 3rd ed came along and said "you're right! Some of those rules WERE overcomplicated and arbitrary! Here's an elegant new edition which addresses all of those issues! And look! A unified artwork style!"

I was in heaven. 3.0 was a godsend. It felt like 1e and 2e in the places that mattered, but sleeker and sexier in the mechanics. I bought splatbook after splatbook (except for the campaign settings; I preferred making my own) and my library grew.

Then suddenly 3.5 came out! Wha?! You mean to say that my library of 3.0 books is obsolete? "Too soon," I cried, and ran into the arms of another. For Exalted (mostly 1e) and WEG Star Wars and 2e-4e Shadowrun and GURPS and Scion and Mage and others were there, promising more, promising an end to the advancement plateauing of levels and HP, promising character points.

I strayed. I missed 99% of the 3.5 experience. I impulsively swore I wouldn't come back, wouldn't be contrained by (ugh) levels again.

Then an old board game crept back into my attention. A good old simple out-of-print game called Warhammer Quest. I played, hesitantly at first. It grew on me. Levels. HP. Classes. Non-unified character ability mechanics! Hack...AND Slash! Suddenly all that nostalgia of my first brush with 1e hit me. I felt like a kid again. Suddenly I wanted to kill waves of monsters in a dimly lit corridor in a forgotten underground maze.

My friend Matt announced he had purchased the World's Largest Dungeon module. I said why not? I rolled up a cleric. There was hacking... AND slashing. It was a blast.

Then I heard the rumour that there would be a 4th edition in the next few months. I looked it up. I loved what I saw. I had to know MORE. Fantasy swords-and-sorcery was alive again, it was something I craved again.

If I had been hardcore invested into 3.5, I'm sure I would've reacted to the announcement of 4e just as I had to the announcement of 3.5. I'd've raged against the change, against the obsolesence of all those books. Sure, my books would've still been usable, but all I'd have to look forward to in terms of future content for my yesterday's-news edition of the game would be unstable and unbalanced homebrews whipped up by 12-year old online posters with an unhealthy Dragonball Z fixation or who had just seen a Predator movie for the first time. Or the tired sighs of the players who wanted the hot, new edition and felt restricted by my wish to play with the books I'd invested in.

So to me, the preview of 4e feels just like the first time I cracked open a 3.0 book and saw all the elegant solutions to the last edition's mishandlings. I am excited.

Whoo, that went longer than I expected.

 

[Storminator]

Before I DMed moderate to high level games.

PS

 

[duke_Qa]

I like playing 3.5, as long as i don't have to spend a week prepping a optimized build.
I can't stand GMing 3.5 when my players biggest joy in life is optimizing their characters so much that i have to spend 5x more time prepping encounters.

I can manage GM'ing a 3.5 houseruled edition in the low-lvls with more hp(2x(max hd+con), at first lvl) and second winds(25%), and with a majority newbie players. Been doing that the last months here at school, and that works fine because they haven't started creating more optimized characters than a fighter with power-attack and a greatsword... and being around lvl 5

4e seems to improve upon the fields that i like(easier GMing, less rule rigidity around monsters/stuff) and handicap the fields that i don't like(restricted multiclassing, more hit points, more tactical game where you can feel the flow of combat going one way or the other, better math).

It might not be of the same opinion in a year, but I believe I'll still prefer 4e over 3e at that time. From what I've read, I haven't seen any showstoppers, so the only true way to find out is to check it out.

 

[lvl20dm]

I loved 3.x, but I'm going to echo what others have said: high-level play was discouraging and very low-level play stopped being fun after the first time we did it. I ran or played in lots of campaigns in 3rd edition, and most of them hit a wall at level 13. The game, at that level, had become so unenjoyable that we usually started a new campaign (or the entire party got killed). It could be that 4e doesn't fix this problem, but it seems that that they have from what information we've gotten about high levels.