D&D 3E/3.5 Why 3.5 Worked

[Blue]

The prestige class and feat bloat is what I loved most about the game. Not the power of it, but the versatility that enabled me to create virtually any concept I could imagine. Having only the base classes with very few subclasses means that I sometimes have to sacrifice my vision of my character and cludge into subclass. Since I hate to do that, I have to toss out characters that I want to play and limit myself to what's available.

This was exactly why it was a hot mess - because to challenge that required DMs to put player-level attention to detail when building NPCs and other foes. If a player puts a dozen hours into their build, and a DM needs to do that times 4-5 per encounter, that's a ridiculous amount of prep. Sure, they could throw straight casters with 9th level spells at PCs with 5th level spells to have an easier time to buidl, but then we're breakign all that versimlitude that the simulation-heavy rules were giving us.

TL;DR: The same thing the players loved made it hell to DM.

 

[Gladius Legis]

Iterative attacks were the worst sort of system. 3.x combats with anything other than a full caster or ToB class had no flow or movement. Just stand in place (other than one 5-foot step) and hack away, and hope the DM played along and kept the monsters in the melee instead of moving them around the battle map.

 

[Blue]

Maybe some DMs don't think of themselves as God?

Some DMs might even gasp view themselves as one among a group of friends that are all coming together to have mutual fun.

Yeah, I've played with DMs who saw themselves as god and acted like tin pot dictators. Never stayed. I like your view of DMs much better.

 

[Blue]

It was very hard to keep supplement bloat out of the game when your players are insisting they need this ability, item, race or etc. for their character concept, which some author had “thoughtfully” stated up for you an supposedly play tested. It’ll be fine to add to your campaign - until three levels down the road and some ability comes into play that just wrecks the game state.

To add to what you are saying, it was directly discussed that there were different groups on each book, with outside resources and such. So that two books both in the pipeline at the same time would not see each other. So playtesting literally could not include them both (or all ten, or however many were in the pipeline at the same time - one a month, and probably 6-12+ months on each from proposal until print?)

So even with what playtesting they did do, you could get a PrC feature from book A that was never playtested alongside feat from book B and item from book C and suddenly there are all these power combinations.

 

[Blue]

I got really tired of players trying to spam disarm or trip. Just have a fumble table for god sake. It for boring. And then the crit fishers. I am sure the mechanics are important in their own mind for them to role play their character concept.

3.5 really rewarded specialization. So you had the trippers. The grapplers. The diplomancers. The intimidators. The crit-fishers. The disarmers. All sorts of things to reach ridiculous bonuses in one specific subsystem to abuse it.

 

[Don Durito]

The amount of player options in 3.5 is often praised but there's a conflict between two different kinds of players options.
a) There's the whole build thing where you plan out a specific character from the beginning to level 20 (or wherever you think the build is complete). You can also manipulate this to make the character you envision mechanically distinct (so it doesn't have to be about pure powergaming.)
b) There's character options that help develop the character organically in play. For example, as the character grows you may decide you want to choose something organically to represent the characters growth and change. Your ranger has been doing several missions for the church of Balthus - so you may want to pick up a cleric level. Your fighter has been failing a lot of stealth roles - perhaps find a way to get training in Stealth. You made a pact in the last adventure with the volcano god - is there something that can represent this mechanically?

3.5 could do A well. It could sort of do B as well (up to the point at least that most people actually reached) provided that everyone in the game was very relaxed about optimising. Where it really struggled was when a player cared about both A and B as they tend to contradict each other (the player who likes to build their character reactively can't easily optimise when optimisation requires advance planning). It also really struggled if you had mixed A and B priorities in the same group.

 

[Blue]

As a side note, I loved 3.x. That's why I ran it for 12 years, and played so much of it. But I burnt out on it from the DM side, and then playing in games with optimizers and splat books I relaized that all of what used to be the cool customization of characters became a chore. That I was required to work out builds ahead of time because I needed to juggle when I'd get enough max skill ranks (at various level of being able to advance them) to pick up a requisite feat at level X instead of X+3 which was my next opportunity in order to fulfill the requirements for PrC Y, whcih really was just a stepping stone to PrC Z.

It really was great. When it had few options and low levels. But it bloated, and the groups near me played with everything at player request. And when I DM'd the same thing - players wanted their crunch.

For all that it became broken, it was still my favorite system at the time and for a long time afterward. It wasn't until 13th Age (and later 5e) came out did I find a D&D-like system that I enjoyed more than 3.x when it was good. And part of that is my changing tastes in games, from crunchy towards less-so.

 

[Ogre Mage]

3.X was a dream for both character optimizers and special snowflake syndrome sufferers. Armed with a few splatbooks, you could super-customize your special snowflake PC into a grandmaster of whatever you wanted to specialize in. I had a Rogue with the Ninja Spy Prestige Class who had a hide skill in the +36 to +40 range and could hide in plain sight.

But it is true that at higher levels (generally starting around Tier 3), the system broke down quickly. Some of my DMs of that era were cringing and yelling over "CoDzilla" and the "Cheater of Mystra."

 

[Tony Vargas]

My biggest DM/player argument happened because of a player who had built his character so that he could trip everyone he fought, and then attack his prone enemy with his subsequent attacks. It became very old, very quickly.

As sad as that sounds, the infamous chain-tripper was arguably the high-water-mark of the D&D fighter...
...as sad as that sounds.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

3.X was a dream for both character optimizers and special snowflake syndrome sufferers. Armed with a few splatbooks, you could super-customize your special snowflake PC into a grandmaster of whatever you wanted to specialize in. I had a Rogue with the Ninja Spy Prestige Class who had a hide skill in the +36 to +40 range and could hide in plain sight.

But it is true that at higher levels (generally starting around Tier 3), the system broke down quickly. Some of my DMs of that era were cringing and yelling over "CoDzilla" and the "Cheater of Mystra."

I dm 3/3.5 primarily. Chosen of mystra is one of the only things other than psionics that i ban.

I once banned an actual player (fairly new to our group) for actually trying (and utterly failing) to pull the wool over my eyes and convince me that a pc having 10 levels of red wizard, a circle made up of lower level red wizard followers, levels in chosen of mystra, undeath, and reserves of strength all in combination on the same character wasnt broken. This was after he first suggested and was refused the option to build something along the lines of a more tame (but still titanically broken) pun pun type character.

We just stopped telling this person we were meeting.