D&D 3E/3.5 Happy Birthday D&D 3.5 - you're old enough to drink!
- Thread starter Blue
- Start date
Hear, hear! 3e gave us so many great things, from the OGL to unified mechanics. It really brought the TTRPG industry back to life after a dark era. And it is directly responsible for ENWorld's existence. We can definitely say that without 3e none of us would be here.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if 3.5 would have come out 10 years after 3e, rather than just a few. Would we still be playing a more complex D&D? Would 4E ever have happened? What would have happened to the d20/OGL industry without the huge shakeup that 3.5 was?
el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
I was just discussing with a friend if it might be easier to go back and simplify 3e than it would be to make 5e into what we want. So while I never fully adopted 3.5 (I just took what I wanted and/or houseruled a 3.25 compromise) I still think it was a good enough rule set to work with even if I don’t want all the bells and whistles.
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
3ed was the start of the Hardcover-a-Month era. I don't think it would have been possible to go for 10 years, and then only have an update.
::laughs in Pathfinder 1E::
Joking aside, I quibble with the idea that 3.5 is "just an update." As opposed to the current revision, it made substantive changes to some of the deeply ingrained elements of the game and it was pretty messy to try and use older 3E stuff with 3.5 stuff pretty shortly after publication.
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
This is honest curiosity, not a trap - which part of it would you be looking to simplify?
For example, I'd play but not run 3ed or 3.5 just using the core books. The profusion of character creation options, often in the pipeline at the same time to maintain their publishing schedule and never playtested against each other, was a part of what burnt me out on the game. That's 75% character creation/advancement profusion, 15% feats that suddenly impied that you couldn't do certain things without feats, and 10% new rules that we now had to look through a literal dozen books to find (since they didn't sell PDFs).
On the other hand, to run the system I'd also require simplify creating foes, which many consider to be a strength of the system but after running multiple campaigns in 3.x I found wasn't something I'm willing to do anymore in terms of prep time it consumed. Give me a simple system like 13th Age for making foe of the appropriate challenge and I'm happy.
There's a lot of simplifying that's already happened from 3.5 to 5e that I'd probably want to replicate if an update to 3.5 was to be my main system. Which simplifications are you looking for?
Well then it was old enough to drink years ago!
Man in the Funny Hat
Hero
E6: The Game Inside D&D
Note to mods: E6 was born in House Rules, but I ran the idea of posting in General past Piratecat a while ago, and it’s finally ready for the bigtime. Thanks! This is E6’s sixth major incarnation here at EN World; in this thread I hope to talk about preparing E6 games, how to talk to...
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