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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7886757" data-attributes="member: 1465">The 3.0 edition worked for me. It was solidly designed, not as flexible as 5e but there was anyway room for your own stuff, even though it usually meant you had to pull some strings somewhere else in the system. Expanding 3.0 with supplementary material also worked for me up to when such material didn't fundamentally alter the CORE rules and thus remained mostly additive bits: that meant the early 5 "class-oriented splatbooks" and campaign settings books such as the FRCS and its first extras (Monsters/Magic of Faerun, Faiths & Pantheons). Despite the already sheer amount of extra feats, spells and prestige classes, it did not feel bloated yet at this point.Then came 3.5 and it did NOT work for me. The CORE 3.5 was still ok, I've DMed it for a year and then went back to 3.0, which was better to my tastes, but I also continued playing 3.5 as a player. However, 3.5 supplements destroyed the edition for me. They attempted to do way too much just to keep selling at the established pace, and soon games were filled with naughty word characters with way too many players obsessed with "builds" rather than paying attention to the game's events. The fast publishing mills encouraged people to always think about what's next to buy, subtly suggesting that what you already had was always insufficient, and that the game constantly needed to be fixed or improved. But the vast majority of the non-core material did nothing useful or just messed up the game even more.This meant for me that moving back to 3.0 also provided a safe harbor against further bloat and mess. Eventually I stopped playing 3.0 only because I stopped playing anything, for life reasons (the usual work, family & stuff). Before I did however, I admit that I definitely noticed how a few months off from DMing were enough to already lose the grip on certain rules, which is a sign that 3e was indeed probably a bit too demanding in terms of rules mastery. Finally, the arrival of 4e was a blessing in the wicked sense that I hated it so much that it made it very easy to pull the plug off D&D when I needed to, just long enough until 5e to be announced when time for hobbies was starting to reappear on the horizon.</blockquote>

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