D&D 3E/3.5 3rd Edition Revisited - Better play with the power of hindsight?

I've recently been going again through the old 3rd edition books Manual of the Planes, Expanded Psionics Handbook, and Lords of Madness looking for ideas for a campaign concept I am entertaining. There's a bunch of really interesting content in those books, and it occurred to me that I don't know any other game or even edition of D&D that would let you replicate many of those without very extensive rewriting. Pathfinder 1st edition maybe, but that's still mostly the same game. And that in turn had me opening up to at least entertaining the idea that perhaps 3rd edition might be a game that actually plays decently well if you run it the right way.

I first started to be interested in RPG just a few weeks before 3rd edition came out, and so I actually waited that long to get the new books right on release as the very first game system I would try to learn. I stuck to it exclusively through its entire run and then to Pathfinder for another two or three years. I think I had close to every single 3rd edition book that was released for at least a while before I resold about half of them. (Except for the Prestige Class, spells, and items books.) I've also been a lot on the Giant In the Playground forum and RPG.net (before it went mad). So unlike with all the original OSR discussions where I only had other people's words to go with, with 3rd edition I lived through it all myself.
While I was all in on all of that at the time, I've seen first hand all the stupid nonsense about the reception of, and culture around that game, which at the end of it convinced me that 3rd edition was a complete mess and the d20 system a really terrible engine for "Roleplaying™" Games. (Yes, I partook generously in that OSR stuff that became popular at the time.)

But considering now how the game would play in practice now that I have some 15 more years as GM under my belt with a far broader horizon of what games and campaigns can be, I've actually been a bit appalled at how I remember myself running this game (and Pathfinder) in the 2000s. Man, I was really bad. But so seems to have been everyone else I've encountered in the common discourse around the game back in those days.

I don't really have much of a thesis here on what exactly 3rd edition did wrong and what about it was actually really bad design. But I have developed a hypothesis over this month that perhaps the way I have seen 3rd edition played, and heard it self-reported being played by other people, and the general sense of disappointment I've seen about it in recent years, might not actually be primarily the fault of the game rules as they are designed, but by the way we tried to use them.

Maybe the negative and disappointing experiences many people seem to have made with the game are not because it is a bad tool, but because we tried to make it do things it was not meant for?

One thing that I find to be very noticeable with 3rd edition in hindsight is that there seems to be a very considerable disconnect between the people who designed the main rules set of the game, and the people who actually wrote the majority of supplements over the game's seven year run. Manifested very strikingly here at the introduction to Prestige Classes in the Dungeon Master's Guide:


Yeah, everyone who has read more than three 3rd edition books knows that this is not at all how the D&D product catalog evolved after the release of the Core Rulebooks. I'm going entirely by memory here, but the old 3rd edition website had index lists of all feats, PrCs, and spells that appeared in the official WotC 3rd edition rulebooks and supplements, and I am pretty sure the total list of PrCs was over 700. (Also over 1,000 feats.)
WotC was always in the money business, and money is made by selling books. And character options sell books. So as long as players were paying for it, they spewed out an endless stream of races, classes, prestige classes, items, and spells. As I remember it, PrCs were the main selling points of the dozen or so book specifically addressed to players. And of course 90% of them were complete shovelware junk that nobody remembers. But the remaining ones really fed the leviathan that was Character Optimization. In my perception, CharOps became the dominant aspect of the 3rd edition online culture and discourse. I agree that it was a very fun hobby where you can sink hundreds of hours into discovering new unintended combinations of abilities and items that were probably written by two people who had no awareness of each others' works. And it's something that you can argue about and defend in discussions much more so than the vague generalizations of how you prepare adventures. But that was playing with the rules of the game. It was not playing the game.

Okay, rhetoric ramblings aside, my current interest is in re-reading, re-examining, and researching the actually written mechanics of the three Core Rulebooks and separating it from what players in the 2000s thought the game to be or wished the game to be, and what the publisher found to be the most efficient way to sell books. Was 3rd edition a hot mess? Yes. But was it a badly designed game system from the start or did the problem lie with how the game was received?
For a very long time, D&D 3rd edition was widely regarded as the game that can do any kind of fantasy campaign that you could think of. (And even non-fantasy games with the many d20 spin-off game systems.) But I think this can very unequivocally dismissed as wrong. I think pretty much everyone now agrees that no game system is a good for any imaginable campaign. Any good system is still only good at the one thing it is made for.

What I am wondering now is, what kind of adventures, campaigns, and play style is D&D 3rd edition actually best at? What part of the rules seem to have been widely misunderstood or misapplied? And what small tweaks might make a major positive difference?

I have a fondness for the 3.0/3.5 era. One thing I liked about it was that any concept I dreamed up I could use mechanics to define to get the feel right. However, one of the things that also crushes me under its weight is that there is, indeed, a rule for pretty much everything. The math, although strictly addition & subtraction, could become cumbersome at higher levels, if only because an adjustment over here affected half the other subsystems attached to it.

I don't think it's a bad system, but this edition really brought the concepts of "builds" and "balance" to the forefront. I am one of those GMs who doesn't care about things like "avaerage damage output" and things like that. I grew up with BECMI and 2nd Edition, and I consider game balance an illusion, utterly and completely.

If I'm doing MY job right, you won't need to worry about challenge or fun, and if if you're playing with skill, then you won't worry about being "effective." There is always something to do as a player, be creative and don't assume you cannot have fun because you don't have a superhero character. You do NOT need to have similar results of to-hit success or damage results to participate in an effective way. Use your brains and think outside the box. That's where the fun is at.

When next I run 3rd, I plan to let players pick whatever classes they want to mess with that I've chosen to fit the campaign, and I'll be drawing from materials that have a wide range of so-called power levels. Go. Nuts. Make the CONCEPT you actually want, not just a mechanical nuke. I'm even going to include the NPC classes as player options (Commoner, etc.), in case there is a player's concept they fit, and if they fit the world. I can futz with creatures to adjust them, challenge-wise, including stripping entire abilities, and tailor each adventure to the exact characters involved, so even if someone has a character who is merely skilled at languages, I can accommodate that and you will still have fun, even if you have to use the fighter to hide behind during combat and use your creativity to effect results rather than mechanics. Remembering old style game play can really help with 3rd, in this way.

This is why I think you're more correct than not in your post's thesis. It's the intent of the play, really, that drives this system's personality, and its interconnectedness was a virtue and a bane. A lot of players got so good with these rules they could really force a GM to do what they wanted, in some cases, if that was their goal, and show them a rule which allowed it. My advice for GMs using 3rd is that YOU run your table, not the players, and for darn sure the system itself doesn't. Make rulings on rules and clearly define early on that simply because a rule exists in an official book does not mean you will accept that rule at the table. You are a Judge in every sense of the term, lean into it. The system is a toolkit to bend to your milieu, not to define it, and this has been lost with the obsession over mechanics in a lot of modern, crunchier games. A lot of GMs I was around during the 3rd era forgot that and soon had a load of very min/maxed powerhouse PCs around the table, simply because they sniffed out rule synergies and leaned on them.

Wow, it appears that I've strayed a bit from the original topic, but I feel it is all related.

Yora said:

What I am wondering now is, what kind of adventures, campaigns, and play style is D&D 3rd edition actually best at?

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This was a bit of a toughie.

Based on my more unpleasant experiences with 3e and inferring from what I saw as a GM, 3e seems to be good for:

1. "Kill largely non-threatening monsters for XP and loot." You can entertain players in any and all configurations by creating a verifiable stage of dominos for them to knock down (if you adhere to the CR/EL rules while they optimize up the wahoo, this will be easy) and then salvage riches from. If you adjust the monsters to be more challenging to whatever the players scaled themselves at, they'll whine.
2. "OC building." Most players don't seem to care for setting/premise as much as being allowed to play whatever they want. You can put "reasonable" limits for this provided "reasonable" means "doesn't invalidate what I am trying to do mechanically or disallow evil or dumb characters". Keep in mind that "the number of options" that is toted about has nothing to do with anything and most "OCs" will use the same cookie cutter overpowered options because they're overpowered.
3. "Let's debate the rules." There is a contingent of players that just seem to be there to quote and argue over the rules. If they "beat" the GM in this capacity, they are very VERY happy.

More seriously, IMO, 3e is good at the following:

1. Low-level adventures (period when its easiest to adhere to the intended system goals, there is a reason why E6 is popular).
2. Adventures with a time limit (Red Hand of Doom).
3. Adventures that adhere to the original design goals (e.g., dungeon crawls ala Forge of Fury, Necromancer Games modules).
5. Adventure paths (I call them XP trails and setpiece trains from time to time but they largely help corral expectations that it can solve a fair number of problems from the get-go).
6. Narrative-focused campaigns (the reduced lethality can be helpful if character continuity is needed).

With 3e, you can run a traditional attrition-centric D&D sandbox with Gygaxian naturalism but there are elements added that get in the way:

1. Wealth fungible for magic items meant that any item not helping the necessary number cycle effectively disappeared.
2. Feat-based item creation ensured parties would always have what they wanted even if they couldn't buy it provided they had the prerequisites.
3. Wands, scrolls, staves, and similar items effectively removing spells per day limitations and therefore attrition in ways.
4. Lack of strict scaling necessitate a video game designer approach to creating detailed tactical situations as opposed to top level strategic ones.
5. Unless policed, the rules discussions and number crunching can considerably distract from actually playing the game for potentially hours.
6. The encounter-based experience system was far too easily reduced to "kill monsters for XP".

The very first thing I would do to greatly improve the game and (mostly) everyone's experience with it immediately conflicts with the whole initial premise of taking the game as it actually is and working with that. Which is to lower the level cap from 20th level to 12th level.

For the (anecdotally) normal campaign that goes from 1st level to 8th or 10th, that doesn't actually impact what happens in the game very much. But I think it immediately turns the entire game into a considerably smaller mountain to tackle. Throw out all the 5th and 6th level bard spells, the 7th to 9th level cleric, druid, and wizard spells, and the 4th level paladin and ranger spells and forget about them. A few people will miss them, but I think for the vast majority of people that is all material that never will come up anyway. And it's been that way (anecdotally) all the way since AD&D first came out and to this day. Make your super famous archmages and high priests 11th and 12th level. Those are mightily impressive enough and if the campaign runs for so long that the PCs actually reach such levels it will be really cool for everyone involved. And by that time, you can use pretty much any monster in the Monster Manual as a big scary boss monster. Even most of the popular big scary boss monsters will already be left in the dust by a party of four 10th level PCs anyway.

One thing that this does is that it communicates to the players that their characters probably will only have three or maybe four feats on their character by the end of the campaign. Creative feat stacking is one of the main things that gets you lost in the Chat Ops weeds.
If the campaign does use Prestige Classes, and I think it's really important for every GM to reclaim authority over that aspect of the campaign, then there will really only be room for 1 Prestige Class per character. That means PrCs regain the aspect of being membership in a small and very exclusively group rather than something that you dip into to qualify for another PrC of feat.

Speaking of which, I realized literally only yesterday what the purpose of the Multiclass XP penalty and Favored Classes was. What it does is to discourage players from dipping one or two levels in a class to collect their front loaded main abilities. Like 2 feats for 2 fighter levels, or 8+Int skill points for 1 rogue level, which you can all put into a single skill if you do it at a later point.
Elves are free to dip wizard, dwarves are free to dip fighter, and halflings are free to dip rogue. Which all seems appropriate to give each race as a whole more character and evoke their niche.
But I have to say, in the good 7 or 8 years that I had been casually hanging around Char Op subforums, I am pretty sure I have never seen anyone even mention that Multiclass XP penalties could be a factor. This was something that was in the rule, everyone saw once and thought it was stupid (because they didn't understood what it was supposed to do?), and immediately became common consensus to completely ignore for the entirety of the game's run.
But maybe do enforce it (and remind the players of it in advance, because everyone think it's ignored by default) to put a bit of breaks on the whole Char Ops train that easily runs away from you. In theory, spending time between games on theoretical optimization of your character shouldn't have any negative impact of what actually happens when you play. But in my experience it often does. It's a big part of what I usually call "Searching for the solution to obstacles on your character sheet". And that's what RPGs really should not be about. In combat situations maybe, but overall playing an RPG should not be approached as a math puzzle. You have both a player for every party member and a GM for all the NPCs present who can play all the characters as people. Through complex interactions. It's not a 1980s computer game or choose your own adventure book with dice. I think that for a really enjoyable roleplaying game, players should think of their character sheet as little as possible and imagine the game world as a real place instead. Letting the Char Ops train run away with you is something that I encountered and experienced as one of the big obstacles towards that goal.

Indeed, putting up a barrier to "optimization" is one good way to go. 100% agreed. A lot of times I made certain "greater" versions of feats off limits, to stymie the laser focus of some of the synergy rules bloodhounds I played with. They'd sniff out advantages 5 levels ahead. Characters became more diverse or focused around their general concept as the ability to stack ridiculous bonuses was lost.

Yora said:

Yeah, everyone who has read more than three 3rd edition books knows that this is not at all how the D&D product catalog evolved after the release of the Core Rulebooks. I'm going entirely by memory here, but the old 3rd edition website had index lists of all feats, PrCs, and spells that appeared in the official WotC 3rd edition rulebooks and supplements, and I am pretty sure the total list of PrCs was over 700. (Also over 1,000 feats.)

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I never really viewed prestige classes as optional any more than I did multiclassing. Sure, I know technically rules as written they were optional, but I feel as though most DMs who would say no to such things would be pilloried. (With except to some prestige classes that were just ridiculous.) I liked the idea of prestige classes, but quickly grew to disfavor them as players often had to map out their plans for advancement many levels in advanced.

I am still from the school of DMing that holds I am the final arbiter of all rules. It doesn't matter to me at all if a player REALLY wants that prestige class - if it doesn't fit in my world or if I don't like it, it will not appear in my game. The de-emphasis of this within modern rule sets could be part of the issue. In the end, I am running the game, so my call is the last word if I do not wsnt it in the game.

3e largely had a "too many cooks" problem. A lot of very creative ideas were out there, but along with them were some very bizarre things as well. Eberron shows that a game that tries to use all of 3e's assumptions simultaneously is a kind of gonzo kitchen sink full of splashy good things.

The key element a lot of people don't really notice with Eberron is how most NPC's are limited to level 10 and below. Because high level NPC's, with the kind of options players have, would totally warp campaign worlds inside out. A poster on the Giant in the Playground Forums, Emperor Tippy, postulated a "Tippyverse" where NPC's with the thought processes of players would create isolated city-states connected by teleportation circles, guarded by cost-efficient Shadesteel Golems, with all resources generated by things like Create Food And Water "traps" (the trap rules being ripe for abuse), and the main concern of the powers that be is preventing "scry and die" tactics from their rivals.

The rest of the world would be a wasteland full of horrible monsters and likely an active "wight-pocalypse" as the world would be overrun with undead that have the Create Spawn ability and don't need any sustenance.

As for Char Op, almost nothing can be done without the DM being complicit in whatever stunt a player is trying to do. I don't have any problem with a player wanting to optimize their concept, but the arcane gyrations sometimes required does bother me, as does the ever growing fear of overspecialization.

I absolutely despise all the strange prerequisites characters have to do to get a core ability. I mean, even the PHB has goofy things like Combat Expertise being the gateway to just about every good Combat Feat!

So what I think I would do, if I had a chance to DM for 3.5 again, is I'd replace all prerequisites with "level X", that is, the minimum level I'd want to see it in play. And also, I'd give my players a limit on how many books they can use outside of the PHB, forcing them to really consider if some options are worth locking them out from others.

"Oh you want your Druid to have a Fleshraker Dinosaur animal companion and access to Venomfire? That's cool, but no Aberration Wild Shape for you."

James Gasik said:

3e largely had a "too many cooks" problem. A lot of very creative ideas were out there, but along with them were some very bizarre things as well. Eberron shows that a game that tries to use all of 3e's assumptions simultaneously is a kind of gonzo kitchen sink full of splashy good things.

The key element a lot of people don't really notice with Eberron is how most NPC's are limited to level 10 and below. Because high level NPC's, with the kind of options players have, would totally warp campaign worlds inside out. A poster on the Giant in the Playground Forums, Emperor Tippy, postulated a "Tippyverse" where NPC's with the thought processes of players would create isolated city-states connected by teleportation circles, guarded by cost-efficient Shadesteel Golems, with all resources generated by things like Create Food And Water "traps" (the trap rules being ripe for abuse), and the main concern of the powers that be is preventing "scry and die" tactics from their rivals.

The rest of the world would be a wasteland full of horrible monsters and likely an active "wight-pocalypse" as the world would be overrun with undead that have the Create Spawn ability and don't need any sustenance.

As for Char Op, almost nothing can be done without the DM being complicit in whatever stunt a player is trying to do. I don't have any problem with a player wanting to optimize their concept, but the arcane gyrations sometimes required does bother me, as does the ever growing fear of overspecialization.

I absolutely despise all the strange prerequisites characters have to do to get a core ability. I mean, even the PHB has goofy things like Combat Expertise being the gateway to just about every good Combat Feat!

So what I think I would do, if I had a chance to DM for 3.5 again, is I'd replace all prerequisites with "level X", that is, the minimum level I'd want to see it in play. And also, I'd give my players a limit on how many books they can use outside of the PHB, forcing them to really consider if some options are worth locking them out from others.

"Oh you want your Druid to have a Fleshraker Dinosaur animal companion and access to Venomfire? That's cool, but no Aberration Wild Shape for you."

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Minimum levels sound like a great idea, actually.

And yes, DM complicity is very much key to runaway optimization. Never be complicit in wrecking your own game.

AMP said:

I've recently been going again through the old 3rd edition books Manual of the Planes, Expanded Psionics Handbook, and Lords of Madness looking for ideas for a campaign concept I am entertaining. There's a bunch of really interesting content in those books, and it occurred to me that I don't know any other game or even edition of D&D that would let you replicate many of those without very extensive rewriting. Pathfinder 1st edition maybe, but that's still mostly the same game. And that in turn had me opening up to at least entertaining the idea that perhaps 3rd edition might be a game that actually plays decently well if you run it the right way.

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I'm not quite sure how best to respond to this. Has the collective wisdom really reached the stage of thinking 3rd edition was a badly designed game but we on EnWorld might still be able to rescue it into something playable?

Lots of people played it for a very long time, including me. I am still playing it, in as much as I'm still running Pathfinder 1st edition - including at high levels.

The best way not to break the game is to agree that you are not going to break the game. If everyone agrees to that in advance then it's not necessary to have a long list of banned rules. I think the only thing I banned outright was the Black Tentacles spell, and that was because of the sheer tedium of the 3.5 grapple rules when used against large groups (I'm happy to allow it in Pathfinder games since grapple works differently).

Its great strength is that characters are incredibly customisable, so you'll never run out of things to play.

From the DM's side, I think it is important not to be too caught up in the details. All the time spent making sure enemies have the correct number of feats, skill points etc. is time that you could have been spending coming up with awesome situations. And if the PCs are having too easy a time of it, give the monsters the Advanced template from Pathfinder i.e. +4 to all ability scores.