D&D 3.x Why 3.5 Worked

[Anoth]

Hmmm. Never had the problem of needing software with multiple tabs to play 3.5. I Just used a pencil and a character sheet made on a notebook.

 

[Mr. Patient]

I stuck with 3.0e and have never regretted it. After years of playing I'm still finding things that 3.5 changed that just make my jaw drop.

Interesting! Over the years I've seen several people claim that 3.5 was inferior to 3.0, but I couldn't understand what they were talking about. I saw the fixes to the ranger and bard, haste and harm, trimming down skills, etc., and I figured it was all (or mostly) to the good. But I never noticed what you're talking about regarding blasphemy, ray of enfeeblement, summoning, etc., so now I am very curious to go find my 3.0 books and see exactly what happened.

 

[Quartz]

The idea that an archmage was required in every encounter

An archmage was not needed. Just a Ring of Spell Storing, a scroll, or whatever. Aside from the issue of stacking of buffs, it prevented the Christmas Tree effect. Items came and items went.

Hell, there are nastier things to do. Like fireballing the PC when they're standing on a flammable carpet. The Fireball may do little damage but the floor under the carpet is inscribed with Symbols... Trapper plus Disintegrate with Symbols on the floor is similar. Meteor Swarms and Iron Golems is another one.

 

[Fanaelialae]

An archmage was not needed. Just a Ring of Spell Storing, a scroll, or whatever. Aside from the issue of stacking of buffs, it prevented the Christmas Tree effect. Items came and items went.

That still requires an archmage. An archmage to store the Disjunction in the ring, an archmage to pen the scroll, etc.

I mean, you probably need to spam Disjunction if you're giving out rings of 9th level spell storing like they're candy, but that would still get very silly very quickly (IMO).

 

[Tony Vargas]

As brokenness in this case is completely subjective, it can't be less broken objectively.

Oh, 5e is certainly less broken than 3.x, in the same sense that a sauna is a better refrigerator than an open-hearth steel mill. And, no, there's nothing subjective about Class Tiers or LFQW - the latter's not only objective, but quantitative.

I mean, you can argue that the class imbalances in both editions are a solid reflection of design intent, rather than accidental, and thus not 'broken' in the sense of a dropped vase being a collection of sharp fragments of glass when it was intended to be a smooth vessel capable of containing a liquid, but, functional in the sense of, well, a collection of sharp pieces of glass designed to be strewn on the floor to inflict injury on anyone walking barefoot over them (in case you ever wanted to smuggle caltrops through a metal detector, for instance).

For something to be objectively broken, it has to be like the broken math in 4e that required the expertise feats to fix.

heh. That sounds like you're saying something that's irreparable can't be counted as broken, but something that has been fixed, can still can be labeled broken. Cute.

CR in 3e was borked to high heaven. It was virtually meaningless. A PC group could defeat a creature 5 or 6 CR above them, then die to one 4 below them.

OK, that might be valid to compare to the level range on the cover of a TSR module, afterall.

I stuck with 3.0e and have never regretted it. After years of playing I'm still finding things that 3.5 changed that just make my jaw drop.

I don't often hear that, but I do kinda agree. 3.5 made a lot of little changes to 3.0, some of which seemed like obvious 'improvements,' others seemed like bad ideas, and still others merely strange. The Skill list made a little more sense, for instance. The addition of casters-stat boosting 2nd level spells and reduction in duration of what had been go-to party buffs, was inexplicable gasoline on the fire. While the whole weapon shrinkage issue seemed like an odd thing to focus on.

Despite superficial similarity, 3.5e was a vastly inferior game to 3.0e, that was clearly changed without a lot of playtesting based solely on theory and whim and a misguided notion of "elegance" that removed so many balancing elements from 3.0e, especially in terms of the spells. 3.5e famously fixed Haste and Harm, which was probably needed, but then it broke dozens of other key spells in ways that were not only terrible for balance, but terrible for gameplay. In particular, 3.5e broke wide open shape changing spells of all levels from Alter Self to Polymorph and it broke wide open summoning spells. Both not only killed balance, but they set up a situation where the most optimized play of the game centered around the games most complex and difficult to resolve elements. And it didn't help that in the process of breaking these spells, they'd also made the process of resolving them at the table more time consuming.

Polymorph had seemed pretty broken in 3.0, and late 3.5 saw an errata to it of some sort, IIRC? Also Hold Person got the save-per-round thing if not at 3.5 release, then later?

….darn, my memory's gotten even fuzzier than I'd realized.

 

[Quartz]

I mean, you probably need to spam Disjunction if you're giving out rings of 9th level spell storing like they're candy,

Of course I'm spamming 9th level spells. The PCs spam them so why shouldn't their enemies?

 

[Celebrim]

But I never noticed what you're talking about regarding blasphemy, ray of enfeeblement, summoning, etc., so now I am very curious to go find my 3.0 books and see exactly what happened.

I'll give a brief example with Blasphemy. Blasphemy was a rare spell that offered no saving throw. In it's 3.0e edition version, it was a spell meant for quickly dispatching minions that would otherwise not be a difficult to a caster of the prowess to cast Blasphemy. When 3.5e updated the spell, someone decided that instead of effecting a fixed HD foe, it ought to scale to the caster level. They made this change without updating the spell to take a saving throw, which meant they now had a die no save spell in the game that depended solely on caster level. And if that wasn't bad enough, the had elsewhere in the rules published numerous ways for a caster to easily or cheaply increase their effective caster level by an arbitrary amount based on the assumption that increased caster level was of only a minor benefit (an assumption that largely holds in core 3.0e, because for example, spells that dealt damage like fireball that did scale with level had caps on damage written into them).

The result of this was first there were builds where once the caster could cast Blasphemy or another alignment's equivalent, they could cast it at an almost arbitarily high level by stacking means to raise caster level, which meant that by the time the caster was in the mid teens they could insta-kill gods.

And the second result of this is that on the DM side, there were monsters that could cast Blasphemy at will, and PC's of a level where they were supposed to be able to face this monster would be stun locked indefinitely and the only way to thwart this was some sort of magic Paper to the monster's Rock.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Of course I'm spamming 9th level spells. The PCs spam them so why shouldn't their enemies?

Because characters of that level ought to be rare and exceptional, IMO. It's not that there can never be someone equal or above them. Those are the circles they walk in at those levels. But not EVERY fight should be with equivalent mages, otherwise the game is just a treadmill, not to mention having odd worldbuilding implications.

 

[CapnZapp]

Oh, 5e is certainly less broken than 3.x, in the same sense that a sauna is a better refrigerator than an open-hearth steel mill.

Nope that's just you not wanting to realize your reference point makes you unable to appreciate the real and fundamental improvements of 5E over 3E as regards spells and magic. Nobody is interested in the balance of a game that threw out the baby with the bathwater.

So if we must keep the analogy, I offer:
3E: a blizzard. Does the job, but easy to get lost
4E: the surface of Pluto. Perfect refrigeration perhaps, but at what cost?
5E: a modern refrigerator that lasts until just after the warranty ends. Runs well until the built-in obsolescence makes you look elsewhere.

 

[Anoth]

Nope that's just you not wanting to realize your reference point makes you unable to appreciate the real and fundamental improvements of 5E over 3E as regards spells and magic. Nobody is interested in the balance of a game that threw out the baby with the bathwater.

So if we must keep the analogy, I offer:
3E: a blizzard. Does the job, but easy to get lost
4E: the surface of Pluto. Perfect refrigeration perhaps, but at what cost?
5E: a modern refrigerator that lasts until just after the warranty ends. Runs well until the built-in obsolescence makes you look elsewhere.

As much as I love 3.x and earlier editions. This has to be the least broken edition. It also has the least amount of crunch. Which helps it be less broken. Less parts to break. I don’t know how you could even compare 5E to previous editions with respect to brokenness because it is so streamlined. Yes there is the sorlock to name only one. They are also so blatantly obvious that they are easy to avoid after a little bit of playing. And a bad no character build is not near as detrimental as in some earlier editions.

Forgive me BECMI i still love and can’t wait to play my currently 24th level thief this Friday.