D&D 3E/3.5 Why 3.5 Worked

[hawkeyefan]

Of the many complaints about 3.X that are made, often for very understandable reasons, this is one I understand the least.

You do not have to make certain that PC's have the correct "wealth by level". In 10+ years of DMing 3.X, I've never once calculated PC wealth or tried to calculate treasure based on expected wealth by level. Likewise, while I have on occasion gone through the step by step process of modifying a monster to achieve a custom result, no one is forced by the system to either modify monsters in the first place (as opposed to just playing them straight out of a Monster Manual or other resource) or use some system when creating a monster. Whatever you do as a DM is perfectly right and valid - assign hit points, skills, or whatever as you see fit. Or don't. Just write down the minimum you need to know to run an encounter, and fill in the details on the fly when and if you find you need them.



Sure, I can see that. But that is a burden you put on yourself, and not something imposed by the system. It's something of an open question if a system can actually impose anything on a GM, but what you are talking about is simply guidelines that exposed the underlying math, and not hard and fast rules that a GM has to abide by. (Seriously, is there such a thing as a hard and fast rule that GMs have to abide by?)

While I agree with you that a lot of the elements could be easily ignored (and were, by my group) there were many where that decision was a harder one to make. Sure, Wealth by Level and Monster Creation rules are best as guidelines, and can easily be ignored....but I think it's harder to do that with options for player characters. The Complete series of books...Complete Warrior, Complete Divine, Complete Scoundrel, etc.....is where things really started to get tough for my group.

Players would see these books and get excited and pick them up....and then they'd want to use the options presented within, and I couldn't blame them. But then it's a new book of material that the DM either needs to be familiar with, or willing to accept that there's going to be new mechanics and elements that he's going to have to learn on the fly in play.

This was a real sticking point in our game. Especially in the form of third party books that weren't even known commodities. It led to all kinds of issues.

Yes, we could have instilled a "core only" rule or something similar. I really didn't want to do this because it was a case of me being the most aware of the problem because I was the primary DM. It was much more obvious to me because I was constantly changing the game on the fly to account for a steady stream of new mechanics and players' options. For the players, it seemed like there were minor issues here and there, and they only started realizing there was an underlying cause as time went on, and some took longer to realize it than others.

So I didn't want to be the kind of DM who decides everything for the group, and I kept trying to adapt and deal with the problem. In retrospect, I should have addressed it head on much sooner.

So that's not to say that I didn't like the edition, or that it wasn't worthwhile....far from it. I'd probably say that It was the edition I played the most and had the most fun with (although 5E is great, too). But as a system, I think the criticism that it became more cumbersome and unwieldy over time is valid. Your decision to keep to "Core Only", although a good decision, doesn't excuse the edition for the bloat problem.

 

[Anoth]

As a DM 3.5 made me think of finding a new hobby. The core was fine but all the crap tacked on via splats and expansions made the game crazy unwieldy and honestly more like work than fun to run for me. When I bought a book written just to clarify all the rules in other books I realized this wasn't for me. Too many feats and round by round shifting mods and multi-page stat blocks at higher levels. Then again I'd rather have a loose framework to use than a tightly coupled interlocking system. Actually I hit this point in both my 3.0 and 3.5 games. I just figured I'd give it one more shot in 3.5 but it flopped about the time they went to the abyss in Savage Tide. I think having a group that is die hard rather than kind of beer and pretzels casual would help with this kind of system. My group is 50/50 and honestly half of them were having trouble keeping up with their own options. And I'd find myself running fights with 10+ opponents with all their own feats and stuff to take care of. Not my bag.

I don’t understand why people feel they have to use all the Books. Just use the PHB or what you want. Everything is optional.

 

[TheSword]

The biggest issue for me in 3.0 and it’s emulators, is that the feat system so often codified things that people should be able to try anyway, and by codifying it locked it down.

For instance if I am playing a wizard that wants to have my fireballs appear as flaming skulls, my DM thinks yeah that sounds cool. No problem.

Unfortunately if my DM has read or owns The Complete Mage splatbook, he realizes that this is what the Feat Spell Thematics does. Now he’s forced to either remove (or deny) what would be an otherwise reasonable request or invalidate an official feat. Both are possible of course but not without house ruling. Casting spells secretly is another example, but there are lots out there.

It’s these restrictions and the clumsy mathematics where auto success or auto fail is common that makes 3e less fun for me to DM.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I don’t understand why people feel they have to use all the Books. Just use the PHB or what you want. Everything is optional.

Thats gotta be one of the top 10 rules for dms to remember. Everything is at your whim. Everything is optional. God does not ask for permission.

 

[Anoth]

Thats gotta be one of the top 10 rules for dms to remember. Everything is at your whim. Everything is optional. God does not ask for permission.

I like having options. I don’t understand the need to use them all. Different books will be useful in different games, settings, and groups. I want them to put out lots of books. But dear god I don’t want people feel they are obligatesLed to use them all the time for everything.

I really think players handbook plus one other book per character may be the best rule for some people.

 

[Celebrim]

Your decision to keep to "Core Only", although a good decision, doesn't excuse the edition for the bloat problem.

No, it doesn't. And, the "bloat problem" came down to a couple of fundamental decisions about how they'd monetize the edition.

Decision #1: Players are where the money is at. Third edition was the first edition primarily marketed to players and not to DMs. Where as most of the content in prior editions was aimed exclusively at DMs - monster manuals, setting supplements, adventures, etc. - they made a conscious decision to aim 3e primarily at players. (I should say here I'm not privy to the actual internal details of WotC's brand management, so this is all speculation on my part, but I do think I'm a pretty good detective.) As a result, there was a rule that no book was going to be produced by WotC without at least part of the book aimed at players. Since players are only interested in one thing from a rules perspective, that meant every book came loaded with character options. And it's that, and not rules aimed at making settings or minigames come to life, that caused the mechanical bloat.

Decision #2: Highly aggressive publishing schedule. When it became obvious that 3e was a success, someone made the decision to milk that cash cow as fast as they could. That meant publishing like 6 large hardcover rules supplements a year. It was an avalanche of books. Not only did that mean that new options were being introduced all the time, it also meant that no one in brand management had a comprehensive picture of what they were doing with the brand. The pace of publishing exceeded the ability of anyone to adequately review much less play test what was being published, and it meant that there was basically no real coordination between products. No one was even attempting to address how all this material would be used or how it would fit together. Brand management was de facto being left up to the individual Dungeon Masters to decide if and how they would integrate all this content with their game. In effect, they were directly sacrificing the long term health of the brand for short term profits.

I'd like to think that among the lessons the 5e brand management team has absorbed, is the consequences of the above two mistakes.

 

[Celebrim]

The biggest issue for me in 3.0 and it’s emulators, is that the feat system so often codified things that people should be able to try anyway, and by codifying it locked it down.

For instance if I am playing a wizard that wants to have my fireballs appear as flaming skulls, my DM thinks yeah that sounds cool. No problem.

Unfortunately if my DM has read or owns The Complete Mage splatbook, he realizes that this is what the Feat Spell Thematics does.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

This is one of the several reasons that any Feat which wasn't core I wanted to individually review and if needed rewrite before I added it to my game.

I love feats. I've written a lot of them. But the Feat mechanic is very deceptive from a design standpoint. Feats are short little bits of rules. So, you might suppose that Feats are easy to design. Ideally, you really only need to write a sentence or two. Certainly, tons of publishers acted like Feats are easy to design. But designing a good Feat is actually really difficult, because what a Feat really does or ought to do is interact with some subsystem of your rules. And what too many feat designers tried to do is make Feats that were little rules subsystems in and of themselves. And the result of that is, among other things, exactly what you are talking about here.

A feat should not by its existence imply a restriction in what is possible unless that restriction preexists the feat. A feat can say, "Normal: There is a restriction. Benefit: This restriction is partially removed." But a feat should never create a new restriction on characters who don't have the feat. Ones that particularly annoyed me were feats that implied, for example, only someone who has the feat can throw an opponent in a grapple. They'd codified the rules for throwing an opponent in the feat, rather than codifying the rules for throwing something as a standard combat maneuver, and then having a feat "Hey, you know Judo!" that made you good at it.

This is a specific example of a general rule that a feat should never have a remote side effect in the rules. You should never need to know a feat exists in order to know what the rules are. Only the feats that the characters involved in an action have should be relevant. You shouldn't need to know all 600 or 6000 feats in order to know what the rules are.

Again, no brand management. Rather than extending the basic rules, so much of the rules of 3e ended up silo'd off to specific Feats or PrCs as the "answer" for how limitations in the basic rules would be solved. But that really only made the problem worse.

 

[ccooke]

Homogeneity... in what sense?

I'm four sessions in to a new 5e campaign. We have an air-genasi barbarian, an eladrin warlock, and a gnomish artificer. We all took standard array stats... there is no recognizable homogeneity in this group.

So, I think what @Son of the Serpent is talking about is the mechanical simplicity and homogeneity. This is actually one of my favourite parts of 5e, but I can see why some people can dislike it. As an example, absolutely every d20 roll in 5e is either an Ability Check, Attack Roll or Saving Throw. Everything. Rolling initiative? That's a Dexterity Ability Check. Death save? That's an untyped (with no ability bonus) saving throw. Anything that affects "Saving throws" affects death saves (So, for instance, anyone making a death save within 10' of a 6th level paladin gets to add the paladin's Charisma bonus to their save).

To my mind, the majority of what makes 5e, 5e at a system level is the way that the core has been pared down, simplified and interlinked. Where previous editions had special cases and specific rules covering different situations, 5e has a small number of unified mechanics that are reused and reskinned in different ways. Compare the d20 combat options - the 3.5e PHB has 27 pages of combat rules. Fifth edition has eight. The impact of the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic is deeper because it is the standard way to make something situationally better or worse.

There are a number of other examples, too - there's only one spell slot progression (for classes that get a standard per-day spell slot pattern), and different classes just advance through it at set rates (either full, ½ or ⅓ progression). Almost everything that's triggerable and supernatural as an ability is mechanically a spell, so long as a spell exists for the effect, and so on.

To me, this is one of the reasons why 5e is easier to tweak and change, too. There are fewer interactions to keep in mind when you're changing things, because there are fewer (but more deeply linked) mechanics. I've said before that the actual genius of 5e is that it retains a level of depth and complexity with a vastly simpler core. To my tastes - and of course, this will be violently false to some people reading this! - 5e has managed to cut out a lot of meaningless complexity and choices that didn't matter, in favour of keeping depth where it is needed and choices that make a difference.

To bring things back to 3e... One of the reasons I love 3e is that it has a system framework and it builds depth and complexity by hanging things onto that framework. I loved to play 3e and the depth of character creation was a big part of that. Where it loses to 5e (again, to me!) is that the decisions in 3e were often of very little import, and often needlessly restricted. I'm far happier with 5e's ability for me to say "Oh, $character is a drop-out from a Wizard college, so is trained in Arcana" than, say, choosing where to put four individual skill points (probably into a cross-classed skill, for many of my characters).

 

[hawkeyefan]

Thats gotta be one of the top 10 rules for dms to remember. Everything is at your whim. Everything is optional. God does not ask for permission.

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

 

[Umbran]

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

Or, if you are a god, you are very much tied to your worshipers...