Yes. I thought I said as much....
Which is why I said I am not sure how I feel about it, rather saying it was a definitely worse.
That seems to be more of an issue with the halving stacking with the DR, but 3.5 (and thereafter PF1) mostly ditched "half damage" in favour of DR. Except incorporeal creatures, of course but they do not usually have DR as well. And PF1 allowed crits on undead too.
Yeah, Pathfinder relaxing the rules for critical hits and precision damage helped, though Rogues were still held back by Elementals and other things.
I have a Player's Handbook 3.0, which is basically an SRD (if you skip the pencil-sketch-art pages). Ask nicely and I'll dig stuff up for ya.
Well, for certain values of ‘problem’, I suppose.
It's at this point someone needs to say look at 3.5 E6.
That's a good suggestion. I did look at E6. It didn't quite scratch the itch - I liked the higher level abilities, I just wanted to keep it to a manageable place. Playing an optimized character in the teen levels with just the core 3.0 (or 3.5) books was a very different power level then doing the same with several years worth of books. Even if there wasn't explicit power creep (and there was), you still got more ways to fulfill prerequisites, more options that when taken together were more than the sum of their parts, etc.
I always felt E9 would be good, I think it's basically due to the old name level being level 9 that it's stuck in my mind.
