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

Pedantic said:

It's this fundamental attitude toward what the rules are for that I miss most, and I think is basically gone from modern TTRPGs. It was just expected that you'd want the rules to model whatever idea you had in your head about the setting and situation worked, and if you wanted something to be different, your first step was to go and design for it, or find someone else who'd designed for it. It was a self-perpetuating loop as well, in that you'd see someone had done some cool rules for advanced throwing weapons, and then you'd try to figure out where atlatls could fit into a campaign. It happened on both sides of the table too, in that a lot of player side engagement with the rules was spinning out cool ways they interacted. That was actually the positive side of RAW extrapolation, where you'd have both white room theorizing, and you'd just explore what happened when various bits of the rules worked together, and more practical stuff, like, "hey, adamantine ignores hardness, so we can use this dagger to tunnel through this wall, given enough time!"

There was a certain toy-etic nature to rules in that period that you still see echoes of in 5e, but is largely gone now. You were finding blocks and putting them together in new and interesting ways all the time. Homebrew has obviously not gone anywhere, but it no longer is tied to setting rules for how the game and world work as a norm. You've got DMs making moment by moment, "what does this check do?" decisions, which are tied to immediate, specific situations at the table, and not as an activity separate from play, to create the environment play would then happen inside of.

It's all still doable, but mostly I just miss the norms. If you wanted your setting to be some way, you started with "what rules will I be using, and how will I change them to more directly represent this," or you found some interesting mechanics/interactions that you liked, and started working out what kind of setting they produced. That connection was taken as given.

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I don't know if it's a generational thing (I am 52 now, started with the Red Box), or the way the presentation of the game itself fostered this attitude, but I always found it paradoxically difficult to "sell" the toybox nature of 3.0 to 3e players themselves.
When I set the ground for the use of variants in the DMG (e.g. training to advance, use of power components to control the creation of magic items, low magic assumptions, limit race/class combinations, no prestige classes; just to name the most common) the reaction was most of the time of surprise and disconcert (if not outright rejection!), despite the fact that the variant rules are clearly part of the game by definition (they are in the DMG).

3e quickly developed a sort of odd culture where you could go to any internet forum, and people talked as if every new option in every new book that wasn't strictly optional was 100% available (and somehow a few Unearthed Arcana things snuck in there as well), and how dare any DM make changes to the sacred RAW- do you want to totally wreck the balance of the game?!

And hyperbole aside, there were things you could change that could easily tilt the game's design, like old-school cheapskate DM's wanting to keep their players poor until the inevitable TPK...or DM's like me who were a little generous with things like rolling for stats and bonus Feats and a few extra magic items here and there who suddenly had characters tearing through difficult encounters like the monsters were made of cardboard!

But even if you played the game precisely as written, you came to realize that the entire game was built on assumptions that would never survive actual play. Not ever group has a four-man party of Fighter/Rogue/Cleric/Wizard. Not everyone played a Human, cared only about damage dealing, and took only vanilla Feats that granted numeric advantages. Some of the most busted things in the game were in the PHB, and there was a lot of useless cruft in the PHB as well.

3.x thus ended up pretty much exactly where 2e had been, with tons of crazy ideas thrown at the wall to see what stuck, a plethora of wacky options to work with, and some obviously far superior to others. Except now everything was being examined with a microscope, picked apart, dissected, scrutinized, examined, and debated online so that anyone with an internet connection had access to a "completely understood" metagame...which quickly fell apart the instant it came into contact with any custom content or rulings by a DM!

Add onto this all the shared horror stories of DM power trips (of which there were sadly many from the pre-internet era, where people put up with a lot of nonsense because...what choice did you have?), and suddenly any DM who didn't let you play your Half-Giant Warblade/Warmind 5 (to totally bust Elder Mountain Hammer with Sweeping Strike) and didn't let you have the exact magic items your build needed, was a total jerk who didn't understand how the game was run, man!

As a player, I really loved 3.x. But I wouldn't want to DM for it again.

James Gasik said:

3e quickly developed a sort of odd culture where you could go to any internet forum, and people talked as if every new option in every new book that wasn't strictly optional was 100% available (and somehow a few Unearthed Arcana things snuck in there as well), and how dare any DM make changes to the sacred RAW- do you want to totally wreck the balance of the game?!

And hyperbole aside, there were things you could change that could easily tilt the game's design, like old-school cheapskate DM's wanting to keep their players poor until the inevitable TPK...or DM's like me who were a little generous with things like rolling for stats and bonus Feats and a few extra magic items here and there who suddenly had characters tearing through difficult encounters like the monsters were made of cardboard!

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3.x did lack advice in How To Run A Game where the PCs were poor - or flush with gear. Although I'm another GM who is generous with stats and allowing "take a bonus feat in lieu of a class feature," and I still had to help a player tune and power up his character. Then again, I consider "characters tearing through difficult encounters like the monsters were made of cardboard" to be merely a minor annoyance, one I totally prefer as a GM over inadvertent TPKs.

On the other hand, I'm harsh about "No I will not allow that" when it comes to prestige classes, or certain spells and feats, especially those from outside the core set. Or about non-core PC races. I haven't had problems selling my players this (except maybe for that one player with a strong Loony streak). Maybe I've been lucky. Maybe it's that the players are also gray-haired elders of gaming like myself.

On the third tentacle, 3.x does have a strong ethos of "players should mostly have the items they want" because the game is set up to make having those items a fun imperative for the players and a survival imperative for the characters. When I GM 3.5 I'm willing to go with the flow on that, and if I'm not it's a sign that I need to use a different system for the campaign. Although I do have grumbles about how the incentives are stacked to push multiple lesser items rather than a few big ones.

Finally there are issues that aren't specific to 3.x but rather are common to all the D&D editions I'm familiar with, or even to fantasy games more generally. Things like grappling rules, dependence on magical healing, and dealing with (or magically evading) the painful annoyance of encumbrance. (I've played in 1e games and even pre-1e games where bags of holding were freely handed out to 1st level character simply because encumbrance was such a pain that even the DM didn't like it.)

Edgar Ironpelt said:

3.x did lack advice in How To Run A Game where the PCs were poor - or flush with gear. Although I'm another GM who is generous with stats and allowing "take a bonus feat in lieu of a class feature," and I still had to help a player tune and power up his character. Then again, I consider "characters tearing through difficult encounters like the monsters were made of cardboard" to be merely a minor annoyance, one I totally prefer as a GM over inadvertent TPKs.

On the other hand, I'm harsh about "No I will not allow that" when it comes to prestige classes, or certain spells and feats, especially those from outside the core set. Or about non-core PC races. I haven't had problems selling my players this (except maybe for that one player with a strong Loony streak). Maybe I've been lucky. Maybe it's that the players are also gray-haired elders of gaming like myself.

On the third tentacle, 3.x does have a strong ethos of "players should mostly have the items they want" because the game is set up to make having those items a fun imperative for the players and a survival imperative for the characters. When I GM 3.5 I'm willing to go with the flow on that, and if I'm not it's a sign that I need to use a different system for the campaign. Although I do have grumbles about how the incentives are stacked to push multiple lesser items rather than a few big ones.

Finally there are issues that aren't specific to 3.x but rather are common to all the D&D editions I'm familiar with, or even to fantasy games more generally. Things like grappling rules, dependence on magical healing, and dealing with (or magically evading) the painful annoyance of encumbrance. (I've played in 1e games and even pre-1e games where bags of holding were freely handed out to 1st level character simply because encumbrance was such a pain that even the DM didn't like it.)

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Yeah, the magic item pricing guidelines were a particular hobgoblin, and when they tried to address it, it actually made some people more contentious. "Healing belts are too cheap! They make it so you're always at full hit points when combat starts!", and so on.

Which I never saw an issue with- the monsters start at full resources, don't they? But this move towards making D&D encounter-based instead of day-based attrition (which was seen with the Warlock, the Book of Nine Swords, and other places in later 3.5) was not embraced by many.

Which made 4e doubly contentious. If you liked the idea of not having to balance "adventuring days" that much, it was great! If you preferred the old "wear them down until they can't go on", not so much- even though that did still happen once you ran out of healing surges, it apparently felt way too generous for some.

Personally, I loved Reserve Feats and Eternal Wands, since it made my job easier. Not enough emphasis was placed on the principle that consumables shouldn't effect your Wealth By Level, so players avoided them like the plague. And it didn't help that some charged items were heinously expensive- nobody wanted a Staff of Healing when you could load up on Wands of Lesser Vigor, lol.

Encumbrance though. Yikes. I get why it exists, I mean, you want to limit how much loot PC's take out of the dungeon, especially in 1e, where that's experience points and the ability to pay for training, but once those no longer were factors, it remained as a nod towards the very realism that Gary lambasts in the DMG (for a guy who felt arguments about realism were problematic, he sure liked to make rules that reflected real-world problems, lol).

Even though now, if you don't want your players to have too much treasure, you can just...not give it to them, and it really doesn't effect a whole lot.

Or give them a sea of platinum pieces and see if they can come up with a good use for it, lol.

And yeah, obviously even in 1e, encumbrance was one of those things like light sources, shelter, and readily available food and water that just stops being a factor after awhile. Gary offered multiple "mega capacity" magic items, spoons that make gruel, ioun stones that let you survive without food or drink or even air (if my memory serves), portable iron towers, and that's before we even get to the spells!

The ability to "opt-out" of exploration challenges was present from the very beginning of 1e, which always struck me as odd when fans of the old school wax nostalgic about the rigors of survival. Did they just not use such things? Was nobody casting goodberry or create food and water back in the day?

I know one of my earliest 3e characters, a Cleric, started a campaign in the desert, where the DM fully expected us to struggle to survive, but armed with a spell list that let me resist the environment for 24 hours, remove fatigue, create water (and later food!), I became a survival expert without any points in the vital skills, soon supplanting the Ranger entirely, and the DM finally just threw up his hands and shifted gears as I kept finding solutions to problems in my spell list.

And then by the time we had Warforged, I think most DM's exploded when you could play a race from level 1 that basically didn't care about all these low level hassles. Poison? Fatigue? Drowining? Starvation? Ha! I'm a superior metal man, fleshbag!

Edgar Ironpelt said:

3.x did lack advice in How To Run A Game where the PCs were poor - or flush with gear. Although I'm another GM who is generous with stats and allowing "take a bonus feat in lieu of a class feature," and I still had to help a player tune and power up his character. Then again, I consider "characters tearing through difficult encounters like the monsters were made of cardboard" to be merely a minor annoyance, one I totally prefer as a GM over inadvertent TPKs.

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While I don't entirely disagree, I've always found if the PCs consistently roll over opposition, they stop taking anything seriously, both in and out of character.

James Gasik said:

Yeah, the magic item pricing guidelines were a particular hobgoblin, and when they tried to address it, it actually made some people more contentious. "Healing belts are too cheap! They make it so you're always at full hit points when combat starts!", and so on.

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Players really want to bring their characters back to full hit points after each encounter. When I'm a player, I want my PC back to full hit points after each encounter. To paraphrase Dickens, if a DM wants the party to regularly have encounters when they're down on hit points, "Then the DM is an ass, an idiot." So I'm willing to go with the flow of cheap & abundant wands of Cure Light Wounds, unless I'm willing to provide even cheaper alternatives. I'm even willing to contemplate a house-rule use of the Heal skill to routinely bring characters back toward full hit points, thus committing the blasphemy of effective non-magical healing.

More generally, my view is that non-magical things, and even certain magic things, should not be per-day resources to manage. Spells should be special in being per-day resources because that's a major balance limitation for them - and it takes away from it limiting spells when things like Barbarian Rage or even Clerical Undead Turning are made into per-day abilities too. Making them per-encounter instead of per-day is just a band aid applied over a self-inflicted injury.

As an aside, I've noticed that on-line fora like this one skew heavily GM-centric. Elements criticized for being "problems" or making the game "less fun" are very often things that only do so from the GMs point of view, rather than being problems or fun drains from the players point of view. E.g. those belts of healing

GM: Healing belts are cheap and make it so you're always at full hit points when combat starts!
Players: Yes, that's their up-side. What's the down side again?

Edgar Ironpelt said:

Elements criticized for being "problems" or making the game "less fun" are very often things that only do so from the GMs point of view, rather than being problems or fun drains from the players point of view. E.g. those belts of healing

GM: Healing belts are cheap and make it so you're always at full hit points when combat starts!
Players: Yes, that's their up-side. What's the down side again?

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You know, I once quit a campaign as a player because I thought we were leveling too fast and gaining too much treasure for it to be fun.

I think you are describing a particularly subjective experience. My general theory on RPGs is to be the GM I would want to have as a player; and to be the player I would want to have as a GM. As such, the idea here that I'm doing anything as a GM that I wouldn't enjoy as a player just doesn't sit well with me.

I mean, as a player I enjoy games like "Slay the Spire". Why would I want a distinctively different experience in my TTRPGs?

Celebrim said:

You know, I once quit a campaign as a player because I thought we were leveling too fast and gaining too much treasure for it to be fun.

I think you are describing a particularly subjective experience. My general theory on RPGs is to be the GM I would want to have as a player; and to be the player I would want to have as a GM. As such, the idea here that I'm doing anything as a GM that I wouldn't enjoy as a player just doesn't sit well with me.

I mean, as a player I enjoy games like "Slay the Spire". Why would I want a distinctively different experience in my TTRPGs?

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The problem is, you can't run a game the way you'd want to play, unless your players are the same. You're trying to run the game they want to play, not what you do. If you're not willing to do that, you need to get a different set of players where you can, because otherwise you're not running the game they want.

Smashing monsters too easily isn't always a problem of too much resources however. Sometimes it's the players own fault, they optimize, they use good tactics, and work together well.

Not saying they shouldn't do this, I mean, it makes sense to do so, but there's a lot of factors that go into how difficult a game is. Often times I've struggled with powerful parties trying to find out how far I can push them without murdering them outright.

My main issue really has been that it's rare that everyone in the party is equally strong- it's usually one or two players that is noticeably above the curve, and if I adjust the power level for them, the other players will suffer for it.

I was just talking to a younger DM today, who is into game design, and he pointed out it's a lot like how most RPG's these days aren't really that hard, and if you optimize, you'll smash even the final boss easily. But with the bonus content or New Game + modes, the game's difficulty spikes so much that you need to cheese every advantage you can get to win, and there are people who truly enjoy this kind of play.

Basically, not every player wants the same difficulty, and this is really a conversation that needs to be had before the game begins. If a group came to me wanting the "hardcore experience", I'd have to send them elsewhere. Not because I couldn't do it, but because either I'd get bored of pitting the under-geared heroes against a dozen Deadly encounters, or they'd just die, and neither of these things are what I enjoy about gaming. Taking on a great challenge and winning is great, but too much of that and it becomes grueling. I've been in many games over the years where I dreaded the next encounter, because our reward for surviving the experience would be...an equally harrowing experience.

Maybe this is why I've only had one session of Call of Cthulhu where I had fun, lol.

Thomas Shey said:

The problem is, you can't run a game the way you'd want to play, unless your players are the same. You're trying to run the game they want to play, not what you do. If you're not willing to do that, you need to get a different set of players where you can, because otherwise you're not running the game they want.

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There is a complex trade off going here. My current set of players are mostly happy with challenge as an aesthetic and do want to face a good mix of obstacles and triumphs and do what to feel their triumphs are earned based on overcoming real difficulty, so in this case I don't really have to compromise between what I want and what they want.

But I want my games to be more open-ended sandboxes with more literary pretentions than they are interested in, and they would really prefer more linear combat heavy sessions with straight forward A->B->C progressions. Fortunately, they put up with my pretentions because they do like a little bit of variety, but I probably would be better off relaxing and just giving them more linear action sequences.

However, one of the things that is true about GMing is that you shouldn't do it unless you enjoy it, and so you have to compromise between running the sort of game you enjoy running and the sort of game the players enjoy playing. And this for me isn't a huge compromise because really the biggest kick I get is out of bringing enjoyment to other people. Nonetheless though, I still have to do some things for my sake. For example, I'm never happy with a game that isn't internally consistent and doesn't play out logically.

And so for example in the current "Rise of the Empire" era Bounty Hunter game one of my rules is that the investigation has to be hard enough that it's plausible no one has solved it and that is why they call in bounty hunters. It's much more plausible to do that than have situations where the Empire hasn't solved it because it lacks the military force to solve it, except when the PCs stumble on problems in the course of doing something else and just happen to be on the scene. But this leaves an investigation phase in most cases of what I can imagine that isn't their favorite thing but is necessary for me to believe in the story.