D&D 3E/3.5 Why 3.5 Worked

[Helldritch]

Combat could take that long. Depending on the style of your DM. I always discouraged the 5MWD so the most different buff you would see was about 10 to 12 spells/effects. Some were common to all characters, others were more of a personal nature. I reiterate that 3 different sheets were more than enough. Ho and is epic level 23 enough to warrant high level play? Because that is the highest my group ever rose in 3.x.

Yes I do remember combat taking 4 hours, some were even longer than that. But we never needed a spreadsheet for the bonuses...

 

[Maxperson]

I submit that since classes were supposed to be roughly balanced, that differenting class power levels was also objectively broken. Even if, as you've mentioned, your table did not have a problem with it.

Do you have anything that says that they were supposed to be roughly balanced in 3e? I never heard anything like that and I have a hard time believing that anyone could think that casters were roughly balanced with non-casters.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm very confused by this. Many prebuffs lasted hours to all day. So they were spending resources to finish multiple battles in just a few rounds, and at a discount of both action economy and actual spell slots.

CoDzilla was a real thing.

3.5 didn't have many buffs that lasted hours to all day. Did you stick with 3e?

 

[Blue]

Do you have anything that says that they were supposed to be roughly balanced in 3e? I never heard anything like that and I have a hard time believing that anyone could think that casters were roughly balanced with non-casters.

blink

Every designer of every edition of D&D talking about balance?

Sorry, this is like asking "is water wet".

 

[Maxperson]

blink

Every designer of every edition of D&D talking about balance?

Sorry, this is like asking "is water wet".

Can you quote one claiming 3.5 was supposed to be evenly balanced? They've mentioned balance, but never claimed it was evenly balanced or even supposed to be evenly balanced. They knew it wasn't balanced and designed it to be off balance to a degree. Hell, I remember one of them saying that weak feats were a design feature to reward system mastery.

 

[Blue]

Can you quote one claiming 3.5 was supposed to be evenly balanced? They've mentioned balance, but never claimed it was evenly balanced or even supposed to be evenly balanced. They knew it wasn't balanced and designed it to be off balance to a degree. Hell, I remember one of them saying that weak feats were a design feature to reward system mastery.

Sorry, I don't accept your arbitrary requirement that 17 years after release to have a quote handy for what is common knowledge that D&D designers attempt to balance character creation options like races and classes.

There's plenty of evidence that they were trying, with things like ECL instead of just letting you be a Minotaur like in AD&D 2nd. (As much as that turned out to not work well.)

 

[Maxperson]

Sorry, I don't accept your arbitrary requirement that 17 years after release to have a quote handy for what is common knowledge that D&D designers attempt to balance character creation options like races and classes.

There's plenty of evidence that they were trying, with things like ECL instead of just letting you be a Minotaur like in AD&D 2nd. (As much as that turned out to not work well.)

D&D: Mearls Talks Game Evolution from 3.5 to 5e

Dungeons and Dragons has changed drastically from edition to edition--but one of the big changes driving 5th Edition is the playstyle that they were hoping to evoke in their players, and the community they were hoping to build. Take a look.

www.belloflostsouls.net

The Issue of Game Balance

Game balance is the hobgoblin of the D&D designer's mind. It's a shiv to the ego's gut, a reminder that even the best design will spring a h...

kotgl.blogspot.com

It's clear that they knew the game was unbalanced and designed it that way so that people that wanted to could create great power disparities. Out of a designer's mouth.

And here they ID back in 2005 the strongest class and weakest race.

Design & Development: Dev Test Answers

Design & Development: Dev Test Answers

archive.wizards.com

 

[Helldritch]

3.5 didn't have many buffs that lasted hours to all day. Did you stick with 3e?

The buffs he talks about are the reasons the 5MWD happened. Without the 5MWD, no CoDzilla. The problem was not the buffs per see, but the fact that with the 5MWD a fight supposed to challenge the players had to be on par with them. Then the players, having a rough time, had to buff themselves even more. In return, the DM had to push it a bit further in planning to challenge the players again and so on and on and on. No wonders some had to have a spreadsheet with all the buffs...

With a DM in control of the 5MWD, that is: "he eliminates it from his table"; the need for endless buffs dissipates. I know of some tables where every players had Bull's strength or Cat's grace or whatever other stat needed to be buffed. Then they would chant, bless, pray, haste, stone skin and many other possible buffs for one fight. And the higher the party, the more of these spells they would have.

One trick to end the 5MWD I gave to quite a few DMs is to have the vilain set up a room where the players will fight him. The villain will flee, leaving the players with his minions to fight. Then a few hours later, the villain knows the players do not have their buffs anymore and they are probably weakened. He then hunts them down. At high level, this can be deadly for the players. A lich launching meteor swarms at the same it did its own CoDzilla (a mage could do that too) will destroy the group. It could even clone/raise them and put them in stasis to prevent unwanted resurrection (after all, you can't raise what is already living, even if it is in stasis... or even sicker, transform them into ghouls. Now the group is toast...). The 5MWD had its place, once in a while. Who doesn't like a big bad brawl? But it had to be a sparse thing, not the norm. The 5 MWD being out of the equation, no need for spread sheets... (I hate Excel anyways...).

 

[hawkeyefan]

D&D: Mearls Talks Game Evolution from 3.5 to 5e

Dungeons and Dragons has changed drastically from edition to edition--but one of the big changes driving 5th Edition is the playstyle that they were hoping to evoke in their players, and the community they were hoping to build. Take a look.

www.belloflostsouls.net

The Issue of Game Balance

Game balance is the hobgoblin of the D&D designer's mind. It's a shiv to the ego's gut, a reminder that even the best design will spring a h...

kotgl.blogspot.com

It's clear that they knew the game was unbalanced and designed it that way so that people that wanted to could create great power disparities. Out of a designer's mouth.

And here they ID back in 2005 the strongest class and weakest race.

Design & Development: Dev Test Answers

Design & Development: Dev Test Answers

archive.wizards.com

I hesitate to jump back into this discussion, but I don’t think that Mearls’s comments quoted in that article are any kind of defense of the 3.x game design. He’s criticizing it for having conflicting elements. I don’t think he’s really talking about balance among classes, casters and non-casters.

He’s basically concluding that the game was broken.

As for something that states that the classes were meant to be balanced (even though they clearly were not), what about the fact that this was the first edition that used the same XP chart for advancing levels?

That seems a pretty strong indication of how they looked at the classes as being equally viable, I’d say.

Too bad, as Mearls explains, that as they continued to add elements to the game, they undermined that idea.

 

[Helldritch]

I hesitate to jump back into this discussion, but I don’t think that Mearls’s comments quoted in that article are any kind of defense of the 3.x game design. He’s criticizing it for having conflicting elements. I don’t think he’s really talking about balance among classes, casters and non-casters.

He’s basically concluding that the game was broken.

As for something that states that the classes were meant to be balanced (even though they clearly were not), what about the fact that this was the first edition that used the same XP chart for advancing levels?

That seems a pretty strong indication of how they looked at the classes as being equally viable, I’d say.

Too bad, as Mearls explains, that as they continued to add elements to the game, they undermined that idea.

You're always welcome with your comments. It's always appreciated.
The part I made in bold characters explains exactly what happened. 3.5ed was fine at the start. It is all the added spells, options, prestige classes and what not that had been added over the years that broke the game. In fact, if you kept to the DMG, PhB, MM1,2 (and may be the others MM). The game was not broken at all. Some of the prestige class were so broken... and the added spells/feats/prestige classes in various supplement were coming out too fast to be fully play tested. This led to the imbalance the game knew.