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Author Topic: D&D 3.5 fans?  (Read 10087 times)

Venka

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #30 on: February 07, 2023, 04:34:15 PM »
While I think it's totally possible to use the 3.5 skill system (and I also prefer Hide and Move Silently merged, as Pathfinder did, and 5ed copied), you're in very good company complaining about the skills in 3.5.  If Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships because of its beauty, the alternating extremely prescriptive and very vague skill system of 3.5 was the Ruleset that launched a thousand OSR products.  The entire OSR is due in some serious part to the 3.5 skill system being very much not to the taste of every table.

Eric Diaz

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #31 on: February 07, 2023, 05:41:08 PM »
While I think it's totally possible to use the 3.5 skill system (and I also prefer Hide and Move Silently merged, as Pathfinder did, and 5ed copied), you're in very good company complaining about the skills in 3.5.  If Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships because of its beauty, the alternating extremely prescriptive and very vague skill system of 3.5 was the Ruleset that launched a thousand OSR products.  The entire OSR is due in some serious part to the 3.5 skill system being very much not to the taste of every table.

Fair enough, and I DO think 5e skills to be better than 3.5... but the RC and AD&D 2e skills weren't that great either, so 3.5 is in many ways an improvement.
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Jam The MF

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #32 on: February 07, 2023, 07:17:00 PM »
D&D 3.5 received the greatest most extravagant retro clone treatment, of all time.

Pathfinder 1st Edition.  It isn't note for note D&D 3.5, but it was a very close emulation and expansion.  It was so robust, it had 6 hardcover Bestiaries and a hardcover Monster Codex.  7 Monster Books released by Paizo, alone.  Plus dozens of other optional hardcovers.  You could play different things in Pathfinder for the rest of your life, and still be playing close to D&D 3.5

Or, you could play straight up D&D 3.0 or 3.5

Just imagine a crunchier version of D&D 5E, with many more options.
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Bruwulf

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #33 on: February 07, 2023, 07:40:46 PM »
While I think it's totally possible to use the 3.5 skill system (and I also prefer Hide and Move Silently merged, as Pathfinder did, and 5ed copied), you're in very good company complaining about the skills in 3.5.  If Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships because of its beauty, the alternating extremely prescriptive and very vague skill system of 3.5 was the Ruleset that launched a thousand OSR products.  The entire OSR is due in some serious part to the 3.5 skill system being very much not to the taste of every table.

Ehh. On the list of actual, crippling problems with 3.x, the skills system is pretty far down. The skill system was annoying, fiddly bullshit - but it was also pretty easy to just ignore the worst of it's problems, most of the time. Not so the massive fundamental imbalances, bloat, and so on.

If you grafted the 3.x skill system on an otherwise-sound and good system, you could probably manage to live with it. Grafting a good skill system on to 3.x doesn't save 3.x. 

Effete

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #34 on: February 07, 2023, 09:17:44 PM »
Played 3.x for years when it first came out. Spent way too much money on all the supplement /expansion books. Houseruled the fukk out of it to fix all the stupidness. Eventually stopped playing and never went back.

The skill system was trash, but as Bruwulf pointed out, it wasn't the worst part of the game. The class imbalance, good Feats gated behind shitty Feats, and just general bloat (leading to groan-inducing powercreep) are worse offenders.

Twenty years ago I would have called myself a fan. Not now. With the amount of work needed to fix the clases, feats, and spells, you're better off just playing something else. Unless that "something else" is your fantasy heartbreaker of 3.x, in which case, have at it hoss.

Aglondir

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #35 on: February 07, 2023, 11:06:54 PM »
What's wrong with 3.x skills? Yeah, there were a few hiccups at first:

Use Rope
Hide + Move Silent
Balance + Tumble
Listen + Spot

But those were fixed in later games, like Pathfinder or True 20.

VisionStorm

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #36 on: February 08, 2023, 07:06:48 AM »
Agree with all that, except I don't think 3E/3.5 skills are fixable without almost a complete rewrite of the system from the foundations. That is, part of the reasons that skills are so messed up is because of the flaws in the classes, feats, etc. Even the spells get into the game a little, though that's more fuzzy and depends somewhat on how you view magic working.

That's the thing about 3e; every fix requires you to gut it out from the heart, and just keep the core components, like Ability Scores/Modifiers, BAB, and Saves (and even that needs work), then reimagine it from the ground up, with a version of Skills, Feats and even Classes that actually work. Which means a new skill system, reworked classes and a new list of feats that don't suck. Which means you might as well do your own game, cuz you're gonna end up doing the same amount of work anyways, and it's gonna end up being something not quite 3e regardless.

Steven Mitchell

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #37 on: February 08, 2023, 08:45:15 AM »
What's wrong with 3.x skills? Yeah, there were a few hiccups at first:

Use Rope
Hide + Move Silent
Balance + Tumble
Listen + Spot

But those were fixed in later games, like Pathfinder or True 20.

I'll use one example that's easier to explain, but with a note that if you start to dig, you'll find this same kind of problem in almost every 3E/3.5 skill.

Listen + Spot is supposed to fix a real problem.  The problem is that a single Perception skill is way too valuable compared to other skills.  You can get around that somewhat by rarely calling for skill checks (i.e. player skill matters when they say they look somewhere), though that is swimming upstream against what the rest of the system is pushing.  You can try to buff out the rough edges with class skills, fiddly ranks, etc. to force people to take something else.  Sound familiar? 

Just because the initial 3E fix was worse than the problem in some ways, that doesn't remove the problem that was there.  The 3.5 solution is half correct.  It removes a "cure" that is worse than the disease.  Then it kind of scrapes by ignoring the real issue, hoping no one notices with the zillion fiddly changes throughout.

To actually fix the problem, you have to do what Vision Storm said in the post below yours.  Which is hard, thoughtful design work, with payoffs that aren't obvious until you've done most of it.  Oh, and doing it will almost assuredly send a herd of sacred cows trampling over a garden, through a house, and ripping up a vineyard before they finally plummet over a ravine where the survivors drown in a raging torrent. :D

Thus the conclusion that some of us have come to that there are really only two reasonable courses of action, given that in the "hard, thoughtful design work" area, WotC seems to be rather limited, and to running off the people that tried:  Ignore the warts and enjoy it for what it is.  Or if that isn't possible any longer, give it up as a lost cause.

I'm not trying to convince so much as explain.  When some of us say that 3E/3.5 isn't fixable, we don't mean there's no conceivable route to fix it.  We mean practically, it won't happen, and if it did, many of its current fans wouldn't recognize it.  Note that 4E and 5E both tangled with some of the hard core issues in 3E/3.5, with some success.  They both also handled some hard core issues by writing them effectively out of the game entirely, to more or less success depending on who you ask, and their preferences. 

I don't have the slightest doubt in my mind that both Chris's suggestion for using non-core classes or Tenbones's suggest to get Fantasy Craft are great options, if they happen to appeal.  That is, I'm fairly certain, despite having never even read either, that they are both more coherent than 3E/3.5 as a system at the table.  They are also going to be a bit more narrow in appeal, as any well-designed fix will be.

Aglondir

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #38 on: February 08, 2023, 11:30:56 AM »
What's wrong with 3.x skills? Yeah, there were a few hiccups at first:

Use Rope
Hide + Move Silent
Balance + Tumble
Listen + Spot

But those were fixed in later games, like Pathfinder or True 20.

I'll use one example that's easier to explain, but with a note that if you start to dig, you'll find this same kind of problem in almost every 3E/3.5 skill.

Listen + Spot is supposed to fix a real problem.  The problem is that a single Perception skill is way too valuable compared to other skills.  You can get around that somewhat by rarely calling for skill checks (i.e. player skill matters when they say they look somewhere), though that is swimming upstream against what the rest of the system is pushing.  You can try to buff out the rough edges with class skills, fiddly ranks, etc. to force people to take something else.  Sound familiar? 

Just because the initial 3E fix was worse than the problem in some ways, that doesn't remove the problem that was there.  The 3.5 solution is half correct.  It removes a "cure" that is worse than the disease.  Then it kind of scrapes by ignoring the real issue, hoping no one notices with the zillion fiddly changes throughout.

To actually fix the problem, you have to do what Vision Storm said in the post below yours.  Which is hard, thoughtful design work, with payoffs that aren't obvious until you've done most of it.  Oh, and doing it will almost assuredly send a herd of sacred cows trampling over a garden, through a house, and ripping up a vineyard before they finally plummet over a ravine where the survivors drown in a raging torrent. :D

Thus the conclusion that some of us have come to that there are really only two reasonable courses of action, given that in the "hard, thoughtful design work" area, WotC seems to be rather limited, and to running off the people that tried:  Ignore the warts and enjoy it for what it is.  Or if that isn't possible any longer, give it up as a lost cause.

I'm not trying to convince so much as explain.  When some of us say that 3E/3.5 isn't fixable, we don't mean there's no conceivable route to fix it.  We mean practically, it won't happen, and if it did, many of its current fans wouldn't recognize it.  Note that 4E and 5E both tangled with some of the hard core issues in 3E/3.5, with some success.  They both also handled some hard core issues by writing them effectively out of the game entirely, to more or less success depending on who you ask, and their preferences. 

I don't have the slightest doubt in my mind that both Chris's suggestion for using non-core classes or Tenbones's suggest to get Fantasy Craft are great options, if they happen to appeal.  That is, I'm fairly certain, despite having never even read either, that they are both more coherent than 3E/3.5 as a system at the table.  They are also going to be a bit more narrow in appeal, as any well-designed fix will be.

I guess it depends on the specific instance of 3.x.

D&D 3.5: Search, Listen, Spot
D20 Modern: Search, Listen, Spot
Spycraft: Search, Listen, Spot
FantasyCraft:Search, Listen, Spot

True 20: Search and Notice (This is the ideal arrangement for me.)
Mutants and Masterminds 2E: Search and Notice

Pathfinder: Perception
SW Saga: Perception
Mutants and Masterminds 3E: Perception

I've arranged the games (roughly) chronologically. The idea of a unified Perception started around 2007, and persists to this day, but I don't think it's fair to say that is a universal 3.x problem. There's too much variation in the sample set. I do think it's on target to say it's a problem for 5E, however.

Here's the True 20 skill array. I don't see any glaring problems here. I'd delete Concentration, and Escape Artist never seemed to be useful in our games, but other than that it's pretty solid.

Acrobatics
Bluff
Climb
Computers
Concentration
Craft*
Diplomacy
Disable Device
Disguise
Drive
Escape Artist
Gather Information
Handle Animal
Intimidate
Jump
Knowledge*
Language
Medicine
Notice
Perform*
Pilot
Ride
Search
Sense Motive
Sleight of Hand
Stealth
Survival
Swim




mAcular Chaotic

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #39 on: February 08, 2023, 12:14:51 PM »
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.
I've talked to some 3.5 grognards and they claim PF is actually worse -- that Paizo basically took some 3.5 house rules and made them official, but it didn't necessarily improve the game, just took it in a direction that Paizo liked.

SotDL is like 3.5? Really? I am surprised. I thought it was supposed to be more like 5e.
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Wtrmute

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #40 on: February 08, 2023, 12:17:45 PM »
As a 3.5 clone, I was always partial to Justin Alexander's unreleased Legends & Labyrinths. It has a copy of 3.5's skill system, as opposed to a more streamlined one, but it smoothed out a lot of the cruft that was accreted to 3.x over its run. Of course, you can still add in 20,000 splatbooks to it and make it bloated, but with some judicious use of a GM's fiat, you can curate what gets included and what gets left out. The game by itself is rather solid.

Teodrik

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #41 on: February 08, 2023, 02:41:09 PM »
I remember that I really looked forward to Legends&Labyrinth
by Justin Alexander. I thought it was really  sad that it was never finished.
« Last Edit: February 08, 2023, 02:44:26 PM by Teodrik »

ZeroZero

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #42 on: February 08, 2023, 02:45:02 PM »
3.5 had it's hiccups, but it's still my favorite system. Now that I think on it, might be because its the one I played the most on tabletop and computer games, but even if I'm biased, I'd say it's still an amazing game.
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ForgottenF

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #43 on: February 08, 2023, 06:16:34 PM »
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.
I've talked to some 3.5 grognards and they claim PF is actually worse -- that Paizo basically took some 3.5 house rules and made them official, but it didn't necessarily improve the game, just took it in a direction that Paizo liked.

I'm sure there's arguments either way. Honestly most of my experience with 3.5 was as a teenager, and most of my experience with Pathfinder is from the video-games, so I'm really not the guy to judge between. I also don't bother too much with the minutiae of game systems, because I usually just homebrew them away anyway. My general sense is that Pathfinder simplifies the 3.5 skills, but makes the feats more complete, and generally buffs up the class abilities and adds a lot more classes (often 3.5 prestige classes that have been turned into base classes). As to my comment about 3.5 players having moved to Pathfinder, that's just the impression I get looking around the hobby.

SotDL is like 3.5? Really? I am surprised. I thought it was supposed to be more like 5e.

As far as systems go, it's not all that similar to either. It uses six attributes, AC, and a d20 to attack, but that describes dozens of games. There's no skill ranks, feats, proficiency modifiers, base attack bonus, or advantage/disadvantage (though there is a similar system in boons and banes). The reason I brought it up is a bit esoteric, but I'll try and explain:

I'm not generally someone who is looking for the "best" RPG. Rather,  I figure there are certain games that do certain things well, and I try to pick based on what I want for a particular campaign. The reason I would choose 3.5 or Pathfinder for a campaign would be if I wanted a game with complex character building, and a large number of classes. SOTDL achieves that goal through its mix-and-match system of multiclassing, and it's a system that these days I would probably choose over either 3.5 or Pathfinder.

VisionStorm

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Re: D&D 3.5 fans?
« Reply #44 on: February 10, 2023, 06:06:48 AM »
What's wrong with 3.x skills? Yeah, there were a few hiccups at first:

Use Rope
Hide + Move Silent
Balance + Tumble
Listen + Spot

But those were fixed in later games, like Pathfinder or True 20.

I'll use one example that's easier to explain, but with a note that if you start to dig, you'll find this same kind of problem in almost every 3E/3.5 skill.

Listen + Spot is supposed to fix a real problem.  The problem is that a single Perception skill is way too valuable compared to other skills.  You can get around that somewhat by rarely calling for skill checks (i.e. player skill matters when they say they look somewhere), though that is swimming upstream against what the rest of the system is pushing.  You can try to buff out the rough edges with class skills, fiddly ranks, etc. to force people to take something else.  Sound familiar? 

Just because the initial 3E fix was worse than the problem in some ways, that doesn't remove the problem that was there.  The 3.5 solution is half correct.  It removes a "cure" that is worse than the disease.  Then it kind of scrapes by ignoring the real issue, hoping no one notices with the zillion fiddly changes throughout.

To actually fix the problem, you have to do what Vision Storm said in the post below yours.  Which is hard, thoughtful design work, with payoffs that aren't obvious until you've done most of it.  Oh, and doing it will almost assuredly send a herd of sacred cows trampling over a garden, through a house, and ripping up a vineyard before they finally plummet over a ravine where the survivors drown in a raging torrent. :D

Thus the conclusion that some of us have come to that there are really only two reasonable courses of action, given that in the "hard, thoughtful design work" area, WotC seems to be rather limited, and to running off the people that tried:  Ignore the warts and enjoy it for what it is.  Or if that isn't possible any longer, give it up as a lost cause.

I'm not trying to convince so much as explain.  When some of us say that 3E/3.5 isn't fixable, we don't mean there's no conceivable route to fix it.  We mean practically, it won't happen, and if it did, many of its current fans wouldn't recognize it.  Note that 4E and 5E both tangled with some of the hard core issues in 3E/3.5, with some success.  They both also handled some hard core issues by writing them effectively out of the game entirely, to more or less success depending on who you ask, and their preferences. 

I don't have the slightest doubt in my mind that both Chris's suggestion for using non-core classes or Tenbones's suggest to get Fantasy Craft are great options, if they happen to appeal.  That is, I'm fairly certain, despite having never even read either, that they are both more coherent than 3E/3.5 as a system at the table.  They are also going to be a bit more narrow in appeal, as any well-designed fix will be.

I guess it depends on the specific instance of 3.x.

D&D 3.5: Search, Listen, Spot
D20 Modern: Search, Listen, Spot
Spycraft: Search, Listen, Spot
FantasyCraft:Search, Listen, Spot

True 20: Search and Notice (This is the ideal arrangement for me.)
Mutants and Masterminds 2E: Search and Notice

Pathfinder: Perception
SW Saga: Perception
Mutants and Masterminds 3E: Perception

I've arranged the games (roughly) chronologically. The idea of a unified Perception started around 2007, and persists to this day, but I don't think it's fair to say that is a universal 3.x problem. There's too much variation in the sample set. I do think it's on target to say it's a problem for 5E, however.

Here's the True 20 skill array. I don't see any glaring problems here. I'd delete Concentration, and Escape Artist never seemed to be useful in our games, but other than that it's pretty solid.

Acrobatics
Bluff
Climb
Computers
Concentration
Craft*
Diplomacy
Disable Device
Disguise
Drive
Escape Artist
Gather Information
Handle Animal
Intimidate
Jump
Knowledge*
Language
Medicine
Notice
Perform*
Pilot
Ride
Search
Sense Motive
Sleight of Hand
Stealth
Survival
Swim

No one said that it was a universal problem with all 3e derived games in general, but with D&D 3e, which is the core rule set being discussed. That other games eventually addressed this later on doesn't really disprove that it was an issue, but rather highlights the fact that it was, or other games using the 3e engine wouldn't have had to do it differently. And all of those games involved a significant rework of the core 3e rule set, which highlights what we said about how much you'd have to change to make 3e work.

This is also a D&D specific issue AFAIK, because no other game that I recall uses three different skills to handle spotting things through sensory perception, which is a carryover from earlier editions, where Find Traps and Listen were separate Thief abilities, like noticing a tripwire was some type of specialized tasks that required special training. The 5e distinction between Perception and Investigation is silly and confusing too. Sifting through junk to find something not immediately apparent to the naked eye is not some sort of specialized skill that requires separate training. The deductive reasoning aspect of the skill might be easier to justify as a separate skill, but that's something I'd usually prefer to leave to the players to figure out on their own rather than have a skill check do the thinking for them, and would handle as an actual Deduction/Reason skill if I wanted to include it.

But if a task involves finding stuff, I'd rather handle that under a single skill—not just for simplicity's sake, but also because in my experience it is. You don't need extra training to notice that the seams that you found on an otherwise bare wall are actually a secret door. That's just a needless complication that adds extra steps. The one exception to this would be what I would term "knowledge-based perception", such as Tracking attempts, or Survival checks to find food and water, since those types of tasks require specific knowledge to attempt.

Sensory perception might work (at a penalty) to find a specific type of plant if you know what you're looking for, for example, but generally speaking, identifying a specific plant (or whatever) would require a relevant knowledge skill, such as Herbalism. So I do think that knowledge-based perception is a separate skill using the appropriate knowledge skill. Intuitive or instinctual perception (Sense Motive in 3e, Insight in 5e) is also its own skill as well. But sensory perception without specific knowledge is just "Perception" (or Notice, Observation, whatever).

Regarding True 20's skill list, it's not bad compared to D&D 3e or even many skill-based systems (which tend to have ridiculously inflated lists). But I'd probably fold Climb, Jump, etc, into a single Athletics skill (at least for a 3e based game), and Drive and Pilot into a universal Piloting skill. 3-4 skills to handle athletic type stuff is too much for a game with limited skill points that expects you to invest a ton of points into every skill individually, and vehicle operation rarely even comes up in actual play to treat every vehicle type as a separate skill.

I also don't think that vehicle operation is such a specialized task that every vehicle type needs to be handled separately, even to the degree that certain vehicles need specific training to familiarize yourself with them, cuz ultimately the core talent that determines your level or how good you are at steering vehicles is basically the same. It's more like you need to become qualified to handle a vehicle without penalty, but once you do, it's all the same thing. Granted, 3e and most systems don't handle skill level and specific qualifications as separate, but that's closer to how I view piloting vs specific vehicle types, than every single vehicle being this thing you have to level independently. Same with weapon skills. All melee weapons share the same body mechanics in my experience, you just need to familiarize yourself with specific weapons or specialize in them.

TL;DR: Sensory perception shouldn't require separate skills, unless it involves specific knowledge, in which case the appropriate knowledge skill trump Perception skill. The only other type of "perception" skill is Intuition (Sense Motive/Insight). And general skills, plus specialties and qualifications make more sense than every tiny skill variant being this separate thing you need to level independently.