Does anybody still play D&D 3.5?

It's the only Players Handbook I own.  Is it any good, or has 5E just eclipsed it completely?

I ask as I see plenty of OSR games based on B/X, and even a few for AD&D.  But 3.5 seems like it's just the one everyone forgot about. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 06, 2023, 10:26:36 PMIt's the only Players Handbook I own.  Is it any good, or has 5E just eclipsed it completely?

D&D 3e is a great game. I'd put it as the second best version of D&D ever made but I haven't played 5e so my ranking isn't quite fair. I know it gets a lot of flack for being "new school" but I'd argue that most of what is in 3e is just rephrasing or simplifying stuff that was already in D&D 2e (Feats are just 2e's NWP renamed.)

That being said, I don't play it as I've personally moved away from miniatures and battlemats and those two things are too baked into the 3e rules to easily remove. I found it easier to start with OD&D at add 3e-isms to that game. The way OD&D handles hit dice (where different classes get a different number of hit dice rather than better hit dice as they level up) is just so mechanically superior that I'll never use any other system.

I ran a 3e game for a good five years back in the day so I can answer any questions you might have.

I really like Pathfinder 1e, and the last game I ran was a mix of Pathfinder and 3.5.  That being said, that entire table wants nothing but 5e now, just like apparently the rest of the world.

Because 5e has swept everything, it has completely devoured 4e and mostly wiped out 3e.  I suspect there are more people playing the small d20 3.X-ish variants than playing 3.5 proper these days.

There is an entire subreddit for D&D 3.X though, and the fact that 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder 1 are basically all the same game provides access to an incredible trove of content.  Unlike 5e, you have plenty of room to design items and spells too.

I think the only stuff 5e didn't eat was the stuff that was too far away- even though 5e has several obvious inspirations from OSR, it's far enough from OSR that it can't eat that, and it can't eat other IPs that have other things going on either.

I will say, given that 3.X was effectively all of tabletop gaming for a few years straight, it's shocking how thoroughly it has been devoured by 5e.

I don't hate it as much as some. I got a lot of years of fun play out of it. And whatever else, I'll always give it credit for being an injection of lifeblood into the community at a time when it needed it.

But am I fan of it? No. It's too beholden to miniatures, it's poorly balanced and scales poorly, the absolute bloat of content - particularly prestige classes - is oppressive and tedious, and, while I admit this isn't fundamentally 3.x's fault, per se, I find there's something about it that just absolutely brings out the worst of otherwise even pretty good players, vis a vis things like minmaxing and munchkiny behavior.

I include myself in this; I find myself not thinking of "what would be interesting to play" and more "how can I best make a combat monster that's useful in play and can hold their own", thinking about fun and interesting characters concepts only as a depressed afterthought when I realize what I actually want to play is mechanically garbage.

So no, not a fan.

I'll say this about 3.x: It, more than anything else, pushed me away from a love of crunchy, fiddly systems. I used to be a huge fan of things like Shadowrun, 3.x, etc. But now, I'm more in a "sometimes less is more" camp. If all one handed weapons are "Hand Weapon, 1D6 damage", I don't have to deal with internal angst because I want my dwarf to use an axe, but longswords are just inherently better. You can go too far in the other direction, too, but... yeah.

I've pretty much only played some of 3rd and less of 5th in my own life, as much as I want to play any of the older editions.

I'm currently playing in a Ravenloft 3.5e game with some old friends that I've reconnected with, another one in the same group next month.

Quote from: Bruwulf on February 06, 2023, 10:41:21 PMparticularly prestige classes

I still remember when I read the sage advice saying that yes, of course you can have as many prestige classes as you can qualify for.  I actually felt like a physical twang, like I couldn't believe they would be so dumb.  To me the entire concept of the prestige class was about really digging deep into a specific kit, doubling down on certain strengths, or expanding to a very new and precise mechanical and lore based set of elements.

Instead they apparently intended it as a grab bag to sell product.  Easy enough to houserule it to one prestige class per, of course (a reasonably popular houserule), but it meant that the game as discussed on forums became very divergent from tables that I saw actually played- and the couple I ran into that actually had some level of optimization were completely absurd to me.

It's said that people buy the next version just to escape all the splatbook enhancements, and 3.5 really made the case for that.  If nothing else, the book of nine swords made the giant in the playground forum into unreadable shit, as everyone told anyone asking for "how to make a paladin" exactly which combination of swordsage and that Great Value Paladin nine-swordsy thing they needed to do INSTEAD and how to trick your DM into letting you do it....

Whatever, it was a great system if you set some common sense limits.

While I have no hate for 3 or 3.5, I do generally view them as obsolete. Smartphones have drained average player attention spans to not quite zilch and the Forge lived out it's entire short and miserable existence since 3.5 was published.

Fundamentally, I view 5E as 3.5 under a coat of varnish. In fact, upon reading the book upon launch I immediately dubbed it "3.5 Magnum," because the spell lists had been changed, a good number of the die sizes had been stepped up, and the modifiers had been replaced with an all in one (dis)advantage mechanic, but otherwise the 3.5 DNA was quite obvious.

I don't play D20 games that often--I don't think they actually do that much with their mechanics--but if I were to run an oldschool D&D game, I would probably run 5E and replace the (dis)advantage mechanic with the Shadow of the Demon Lord Boons and Banes, so you can have stacking modifiers with diminishing returns. It's not perfect, but that's a pretty drag and drop replacement which gives you access to both 3.5 and 5E's OGL content if you interpret 3.5's standard +2 modifiers or 5E's Advantage as adding a Boon, gives you most of the crunch of 3.5 proper while still not allowing min-maxing to go too far into bananas because of diminishing returns, and on general, Boons and Banes is a good compromise mechanic between 3.5's modifiers to the sky and 5E's "OP Advantage FTW" mechanics.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 06, 2023, 10:26:36 PM
Does anybody still play D&D 3.5?

It's the only Players Handbook I own.  Is it any good, or has 5E just eclipsed it completely?

I ask as I see plenty of OSR games based on B/X, and even a few for AD&D.  But 3.5 seems like it's just the one everyone forgot about.

Sadly I sold my 3.5 collection years ago to purchase Rogue Trader books. It was't that i didn't like it, just people moved on to 4e and pathfinder. And the internet optimization forums made the game feel unplayable, even though it was't. But the Tiers, combined with player investment could really make for wonky results at the table.

I love D&D 3.5. I don't have a gaming group, but if I had one....then I'd play D&D 3.5.

3E is a really good edition. I would play it.

Here's the things I don't like about it:

* The game assumes you're going to run with characters that have a glut of magical items.
* No really good CR / encounter building system for GMs
* The game encourages fiddly number-stacking -- This can be solved to some extent via GM fiat saying, "You can get up to 2-3 bonuses, and no more." or just by playing with players that have outgrown the "I'm going to make the most OP character" phase

You can fix a lot of the problems running E6.

"The game assumes you're going to run with characters that have a glut of magical items."
For me this was a selling point.  I always wanted to give out more magical items in 2ed, but I always went over in really long campaigns, and it was always a struggle to stay under what was quite obviously a moderate-magic-item power budget.  Like yes, your paladin was supposed to get a holy avenger, but like, at level 17 or whatever, and there were rules about his OTHER items.  The fighter could become a real beatstick with good items, and it wasn't obvious except with a lot of experience when you were going over.  Meanwhile, 3.X had a wealth by level chart that was reasonably tested (and worked well barring the real outlier items), AND it had compensations for high magic, which I could easily use.  Now I knew I was doing something with at least minimal testing, and was actually intended.

5ed is worse than both in my opinion- a tight power budget that the devs refuse to officially disclose, that you can easily gimp your players by going under or ruin your encounters by going over, with no mention of what is a high magic game or a low magic game.  You can find people claiming that 5ed was designed to work with no magical items, and at medium and high levels that is just absolutely 100% false.


"No really good CR / encounter building system for GMs"

Yea this was and is a big problem.  Eventually you get good at it, but that's not really a defense, merely a "at least it's not entirely a mess" argument.

"The game encourages fiddly number-stacking"

Even without munchkins you still have this.  It's quite reasonable to assume that you will take feats an items that add to your hit, add to your attacks per round, add to your critical confirmation, expand your crit range, and add to your critical damage.  All of these stack multiplicatively, and all are available together from the higher end of the mid levels.  A typical PC will land on a few of these just leveling and looking at feats.  Put a magic item shop in there, and they'll request at least one weapon affix that they think is good, and there you are.

I do think that having a few of these things is good design, but there's just too many of them right away, and they are all priced a bit in a vacuum, be it as spells, items, or feats.

QuoteYou can fix a lot of the problems running E6.

You can, and I really like E6.  But there are longevity issues there- there simply aren't enough cool feats to have that alone as a reward mechanism.  I think for really long E6 games, you would want some more typical epic boons, most of which are balanced for games where the epic players are level 10-20.

Ultimately, I want a way to advance characters in a way that is meaningful but not just painfully exponential or world altering.  3.X isn't any worse at this than other D&D versions though, and OSR kind of gives you a better angle here anyway.

The reason you don't see a lot of OSR games based on 3rd edition is that most people define the OSR as games based on 2nd edition or earlier. A surprising amount of influence from it does creep in though. Dungeon Crawl Classics uses the 3.x save system, and Helveczia uses quite a lot from 3.x.

And of course there are plenty of games based on 3.x  (essentially anything with "D20" in the title), but they're not considered OSR, and most of them are out of print now.

3.0 was my first RPG, so it's always going to have soft spot in my heart. Some of the criticisms are valid. Some of them really aren't:

Like Hedgehobbit pointed out, the idea that it "isn't D&D" doesn't hold water, as a lot of what it was doing is just rephrasing and clarifying mechanics that were already in AD&D. Personally, I'm completely baffled by people who say it requires miniatures and grids.  We played the game for years and never once used either. In fact, the first time I used miniatures was for 5e, and the first time I used a grid was for Hyperborea. It falls apart at high level, but IME that's true of every single edition of D&D.

3.5 is still the edition of D&D with the greatest degree of character customization, and the closest D&D ever got to the level of customization you get in classless games. Unfortunately, the munchkinism that its famous for is a direct consequence of that. At root level, it's the same problem 5e has started experiencing in it's latter years. When you publish so many character options, you place the onus on the DM to restrict which ones will be available in each campaign, and players inevitably pressure DMs to include all of them.

And a lot of the optimizations that got passed around on message boards were based on exploits, if not outright cheats of the system. Prestige classes are a good example. I actually think they're a great idea, in principle. The whole point was that they were classes you couldn't just choose because they represented organizations in the game world you had to earn membership in. They should be roleplaying rewards that might or might not even come up in a campaign. Problem is that people just ignored the roleplaying requirements and treated them as "advanced classes" you could plan into your build optimization. The 5-class stack builds you saw are a similar thing. Those should (a) require a roleplaying justification for how your character is trained in five different professions, and b) come with a crippling XP penalty, but a culture developed that ignored those restrictions.

As far as the pros of the system, there's a few things from 3.x that I would really like to see carried over into more OSR games:

--The 3-save system: Far and away the most intuitive save system D&D has ever had. If something attacks your body from the inside, it's a Fortitude save. If it attacks from the outside, it's Reflex, and if it attacks your mind or spirit it's Will. That's one of several places where 5e is a strict downgrade (WTF is a Charisma save?).
--The weapon balancing: Out of the D&D editions, 3.x does the best job of giving different weapons pros and cons, chiefly by varying their critical ranges. For example, A longsword and a battle-axe might do the same damage, but the sword crits more often, while the axe does more damage per critical hit. A rapier does less base damage than a battle-axe, but crits three times as often. Having more frequent or more powerful critical hits also helps mitigate the HP bloat problem, which is still plaguing 5e, even after they generally nerfed weapon and spell damage.
--Skill ranks: The original 3.0 skill system was admittedly a mess. 3.5 cleaned it up a bit, and Pathfinder cleaned it up further, but at the base level I think it's a good idea to give every class some ability to customize their skills. It does a lot to help alleviate the D&D problem of every character of a certain class being extremely similar. Feats do that as well, but feats I could honestly take or leave. The skill system was far from perfect, but it could have been perfected with a bit more iteration.
--Prestige classes: Like I said, it's a great idea in principle; it just needs a better execution.

I don't think 5th edition makes 3rd obsolete at all. In fact, I think it's generally an inferior game. 5th edition sits in an awkward compromise position where it lacks the customization and granularity of 3rd, but also lacks the simplicity of OSR games. It tries to do both and does neither well.

What made 3.x obsolete was Pathfinder. 1st edition Pathfinder took the design ethos of 3.x to it's next step, further streamlined some of the clunkier mechanics and fixed a lot of the balancing issues. These days, most people who like 3.5 are playing Pathfinder instead. As much nostalgia as I have for 3.x, if today I wanted to play a high fantasy game with a high degree of variety and depth in the character building, I'd go with either Pathfinder 1 or more likely Shadow of the Demon Lord. Both games achieve the same design goals more elegantly than 3.x does.

The only reason I kept my 3E rules is that I rather like the flavor in Arcana Evolved, and just conceivably might run it again when I've forgotten how much the 3E skill system annoys me no end.

Seriously, far as I'm concerned, except for an improved bard and ranger, the 3.5 changes were just rearranging deck chairs, sometimes into worse spots.  If I were to run AE/3.5 again, though, there is one easy fix that I'd do that would let me skip E6 (which doesn't appeal to me):  No prestige classes.  All spell casters can take exactly one of the major caster classes, and they must multi-class into a non-caster (or at least a very weak, unrelated caster class) every other level.  Yep, you max out your wizard or druid or cleric part at 10 levels at level 19 or 20.  Do relatively low magic items and use monsters to match.  This is where the CR system not really working doesn't matter, because just like before, you are figuring it out using your own good sense.  Without the nagging thought  that the CR information is useful as more than a coarse estimate.

There, most of your insane stacking that causes combat to be buff, buff, buff, kill is handled.  The AE classes mixed in gives you some variety despite the above limits.  Instead of the game starting to frazzle around level 7 and being unplayable dreck by level 13, you've shoved those limits back.  It will still get bad at the very end, but the campaign is unlikely to last that long anyway. 

The 3.X/d20 system has always eluded me. I found it an mechanical improvement regarding streamlining AD&D. But too confined. While AD&D 2ed seemed more as at tool box where you could easily pick and choose what you wanted to use and not to use. 3.X was a much more complete package-deal. And it just felt too clunky in practice and overwhelming. And that (for me) it seemed really hard to play without minis and grid.

That and having to deal too often with toxic problem-players that was obsessed with the char-build minigame. I never caved to the demands of adding splatbooks and tried to run standard D&D 3,5 with core books only. Most people interested in the game refused to play anything at all if they hadn't free access to any splatbooks they wanted. And so my very short attempt of playing 3 X came to an abrupt end. I went back to TSR D&D and then hoisted the battleflag of the OSR. I  also dabbled a bit with with 4e via the Essentials line found it much more approachable than 3.X. Though that didn't not run for a long time either.

That said for me the allure of 3.X was all the cool third-party supplements, settings and alternative games. Like Conan D20, Midnight, D20 Modern, Star Wars D20/Saga, Warcraft, Game of Thrones, CoC D20, Dragon Star etc etc.

I'm a very rules lite GM at default and almost nobody I play with seems to have any interest in such a complex game as 3.X. If I had really dedicated players I wish to someday give both Conan D20 and CoC D20(for some reason) a fair chance at the table.

Regular D&D 3.X? I don't really see me picking it over either 5e, TSR D&D/OSR etc. If I did I would try out using it for a 3e Forgotten Realms campaign for some early 00's nostalgia.

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 07, 2023, 09:48:59 AM
... Personally, I'm completely baffled by people who say it requires miniatures and grids.  ...

3.5 is still the edition of D&D with the greatest degree of character customization, and the closest D&D ever got to the level of customization you get in classless games. ... When you publish so many character options, ... players inevitably pressure DMs to include all of them. And a lot of the optimizations that got passed around on message boards were based on exploits, if not outright cheats of the system.

Prestige classes are a good example. I actually think they're a great idea, in principle. ... They should be roleplaying rewards that might or might not even come up in a campaign. Problem is that people just ignored the roleplaying requirements and treated them as "advanced classes" you could plan into your build optimization.

As far as the pros of the system, there's a few things from 3.x that I would really like to see carried over into more OSR games:

--The 3-save system: Far and away the most intuitive save system D&D has ever had. ... (WTF is a Charisma save?).
--The weapon balancing: Out of the D&D editions, 3.x does the best job of giving different weapons pros and cons, chiefly by varying their critical ranges. ...
--Skill ranks: The original 3.0 skill system was admittedly a mess. 3.5 cleaned it up a bit, and Pathfinder cleaned it up further, but at the base level I think it's a good idea to give every class some ability to customize their skills. It does a lot to help alleviate the D&D problem of every character of a certain class being extremely similar. Feats do that as well, but feats I could honestly take or leave. ...
--Prestige classes: Like I said, it's a great idea in principle; it just needs a better execution.
...

I'm keen on limiting the character options by limiting the components you can combine to create a character, something like standard array baskets (pick one), B/X classes, 2e Kits, and 5e backgrounds as an example. Given how little time most players have to carve out for gaming, they will generally go for this build method 9/10 times.

If someone wants a very specific kind of character, then they'd have to build it by hand from the bottom up, with a feats and a point buy system balanced to the above designed like Skills & Powers; but if you do that at the last minute the rest of the table may start the game without you. Plan ahead, or hop in the middle.

I think a big solution to the "prestige class" problem is to design it more like a "heroic destiny." This is how your charscter will be remembered in epics, myths, and legends, the thing distinguishes you from any other warrior, even one from the Amazon. It should not have any level up conditions to its powers whatsoever: you gain each and every power by accomplishing certain roleplaying goals from a set of certain ways, and you don't have to hide those indications from your players outright if you want to keep them fun. Beyond whatever you get to start off with, of course.

I might venture that a save involving Charisma has something to do with your characters vitality or faith. Some people can be shaken from their religious or metaphysical convictions in ways that has nothing to do with willpower, and might provide some opportunities to explain changes in alignment, if so desired. You can even in a condition of being damned, or spiritually hollow otherwise, such that you cannot be raised/resurrected if you die without resolving this problem first; or at least be ailed by minor hexes that plague many of your ambitions. If I were to include a Perception attribute, it would also involve your receptiveness to the supernatural and not just your ability to look and listen your organs, so for a faith/vitality save like this you'd pick the higher between Cha or Per.


I have a question about weapon damage... I'm partial to going back to a d6 for all weapons, but is there a possibility that you could have critical damage just explode at 6, but be capped in explosions by a multiplier? The battleaxe gets three explosions, the rapier explodes at 5-6 but only gets two explosions, maybe some other weapons explode at 1d3 beyond the first dice.