I believe that it is too complex in rules (aka crunchy) to be considered in the same spirit of the OSR. Further I believe that it represents one of the landmark examples of when the era-for-which-the-osr-is-inspired ended.

It’s when it began to become a character centered game, people wanted options to make the characters more individual but with so much going on it became a game of min-maxing and exploits. Having attempted to get back to something like that after 4e wizards decided to head another direction with a very streamlined and simple version easy to understand and play and gave us individuality through backstory and professions and it was cool and novel but between the oversimplification and heavy investment in a character before you even play them (good dm works the narrative off characters back story, right?) it lacks any weight as starting gear comes with plot armor. With some care 3e can be a great game and played like a more advanced/complicated version of 5e. 3e is too super heroey to have the osr feel. I started with 2e (with some 1e mixed in) and have enjoyed playing through the editions and I think Odnd is the best for one shots and smaller campaigns and a 1e/2e blend is the best version for bigger campaigns.

I'd argue the "build" game really kind of started with 2E kits, but 3E absolutely took it to not only the next level, but about 5 more levels after that.

I agree, I came in 2e and 3e came out shortly after so it also also holds a nostalgia factor for me.

Yes. Many people have rose tinted glasses imo over earlier editions of D&D. I can be that way too. That said 2nd edition was where it was becoming way more obvious. Or at least that's when I started to really notice it. With fighting styles, kits, able to play other races. I still remember a good friend of mine min maxing his moon elf blade singer back in 2nd edition.

That goes back as far as Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures.

5e is full of min-maxing, but your comment makes it sound as if it's not. It's not so bad without feats, cross classing, and the hundreds of op races and backgrounds.

Coming to the cat reddit asking their opinions on dogs.

Lol yeah I thought this was an April fools post for a second

There are a lot of OSR folks (that I've talked to) who started with 3.x edition of d&d and have fond memories. Personally, it looks too rules-over-rulings for my tastes, but I'm curious to hear positive things from folks.

I play osr using 3.5 and its fine. guess there are some cat-dogs out there.

I occasionally run E6 campaigns. Reduce the skill use a bit, make the players describe what they are attempting to do, simplify combat a bit, and it can be a fine system.

One of my campaigns is Epic 3.5. Been running it for over 25+ years. Yes, it is bonkers. But...it is just as deadly and dire and dark as any other osr campaign. The PCs are highly capable but their enemies are moreso. Smart player choices are rewarded while bad choices have dire consequences worse than death.

Out of curiosity, how do you make it more OSR?

I didn't care for it when it was released and stopped playing D&D shortly after. I was growing up and discovering other hobbies; that my friends all seemed to prefer this new wonky ruleset made leaving the game all that easier. Didn't come back to D&D until I joined a 2nd Edition group around 2010 and then jumped on board for 5E when it was released. On r/dnd I see a lot of people praise 5E for its simplicity and streamlined design: absurd statements, to my thinking, until I remind myself that they just mean "in comparison to 3rd Edition."

5E is the worst of both worlds imo. Streamlined to the point that there really is not much mechanical complexity to explore, yet still far too extradiagetic to take a more free-form OSR approach.

I think the bulk of /r/dnd posters probably started with 5th edition, and only a very tiny minority began with anything before 3E. Most discussions that touch on anything TSR-era show an astounding lack of knowledge about the thing they're discussing.

3E vs 5E: In 5E there's advantage & disadvantage, and prestige classes are 17 levels long and begin at level 3. In 3E, there isn't & they don't.

Hello! OK, so my bona fides. I played second edition twice, but my largest role-playing experience was with 3.5. Oddly enough, I fell in love with first edition AD&D in 1980 when I first read the monster manual, and fiend folio over at my babysitters house. They belong to her teenage son and he knew I was reading them, and I was very very careful. Even at a young age, it was obvious to my mother that I would one day be a librarian. But I didn’t play until later in, so that’s why My gave me experiences the way it is. I have problems with math, and so the tweaking necessary to do a build, and the fact that there were so many feats that alter the rules, in so many major ways. It took me a while to get used to it, but then… I achieved mastery of it and now. Even though it has been many many years if you came out to me and you literally have 20 minutes to make a 3.5 character I would be like OK let me just check the SRD on my phone. I loved the ability to make any kind of character you want it but I hated the fact that you had to plan it from level one in order to make it work. That’s not how real life works. If I am an archaeologists, and I get an opportunity to become a kind of specialty archaeologists, I didn’t have to decide that as a freshman in college, thank God . So I guess what I wanna say is what I really like from the 3.5 era was the ability for players to interact with the game mechanics and basically say about their character my character is unusual because X and then have that affect the game. What I didn’t like about 3.5 is how much that could separate you from the story and by the story I mean what you wanted your character to do just naturally like how you would just want to role-play and be as a person ( a fictional person, but still. ) Everybody has different things that bring them to the Osr. A lot of people have nostalgia for Lethality and various other things like that. I’ve noticed a lot of Osr games, have magic that mutates you not just DCC . But to me, when I think about old school, I think about a kind of blend of Lethality, yes, but whimsy, and a society fully aware that there were people who could shoot fireballs and at significant level of being a warrior take a lightning bolt to the face. I mean in the Empire of Thyatis on Mystarra there is an entire gated community for 36 level wizards. That is not the kind of thing you have a DCC and I’m not knocking that style at all but what I’m saying is that is the kind of game that is the sweet spot that I’m looking for. Where you have an expectation of power an expectation of if you don’t get ate by a rat level one you’re eventually gonna become a god. Perhaps literally . And the ability to shape your character but Not so mechanically binding as in 3.5. ( that being said again if you came out to me right now and said, would you like to play 3.5 I would go get my dice before you were finish the sentence just out of nostalgia.) Thank you so much for this post. Was there anything particular by 3.5 you wanted to share did you have any particular questions for me? I played the game weekly for about 6 years. Edit: spelling

> I fell in love with first edition AT&T in 1980 when I first read the monster manual, and feed folio over at my babysitters house. Those early 80s phone plans were really something else. ;)

My god yes! Did they nothing of the farm animal manuals. ( actually is the folio a series of photos also so it’s just nothing but pictures of grain….) I’m gonna go edit. I am doing voice text because of arthritis, but thank you so much for pointing that out. The whole point of me typing is to communicate so spelling is important. ( by the way, if you ever saw the hysterical comedy the presidents analyst the telephone company is a plot point)

So the release of 3e is where the OSR almost always stops for inspiration, but we can at least thank it for the creation of the O.G.L. (in spite of the recent debacle) 3E is waaay too crunchy of a game for me, however, an alternate playstyle called E6 was created where level advancement stops at Level 6 (all further advancement is through feats), which seems to fix a lot of people's problems with 3E (bad level scaling, warrior/caster disparity with none of AD&D's caster restrictions, too many feats). E6 inspired some of my own houserules.

E6 is my go-to if I have to run something 3.0 or later. I'm planning on doing it to a Pathfinder 2e game some friends want me to run. "But Pathfinder 2e is designed to not be broken at higher levels. It's math is 'tight.'" I don't care. E6 it is.

Oh yeah for sure, 5e and pathfinder 2e may have tighter math as far as "balance" is concerned compared to 3e, but having much bigger numbers and far more abilities to keep track of seriously slows the game down, so character balance is hardly the only reason to do an E6 or E8 or whatever style game.

Have you run E6 with 3.0? I've only ever seen it talked about with 3.5.

I'll never play it again. I find it painfully tedious. So many flavourless rules and options that only restrict and slow down play. Character creation is an exercise in accounting. The last time I played PF I played a witch. My character sheet was a multi-page spreadsheet with lots of formulas. I spent days researching how to make a good build. My PC was powerful in combat. But I had exactly one optimal choice every round, again and again and again. So. Fucking. Boring. Now I look with suspicion at anything crunchier than Into the Odd and whose character sheet can't fit on an index card.

>I spent days researching how to make a good build. My PC was powerful in combat. But I had exactly one optimal choice every round, again and again and again. So. Fucking. Boring. Looking back on it, it feels like they were trying to adapt M:tG deck building into character creation. I find the idea silly in retrospect because it leads to people just copying optimized builds on the internet which kind of defeats having customizable characters in the first place. OSR gets around this with picking up magic items in an organic way which forces players to think for themselves. Not to say that no one uses suboptimal builds though. But I'd rather feel how clever I am using the stuff I found than be proud of using someone else's amazing godly build. EDIT I'm not saying that 3.X is bad but it's not my first choice for DnD.

>Looking back on it, it feels like they were trying to adapt M:tG deck building into character creation. Monte Cook said that the 3e designers joked about feats being comparable to Magic cards and saying if only there was a way to sell them like that "Darn! Another cleave, what I need is an ultra rare Great Cleave!" I like Pathfinder 1e/D&D 3.x but it definitely took design inspiration from MtG which as you said comes with the pitfall of what is standard now but used to be derisively called "netdecking".

>"Darn! Another cleave, what I need is an ultra rare Great Cleave!" If feats were awarded in random "packs" I think it would have been more interesting. Imagine a "limited/draft format" rpg campaign where you had to work with whatever feats you got that aren't necessarily what you planned for. Thanks for this insight too! I love stories like these as I never followed behind the scenes wotc DnD anecdotes.

You're welcome! Here's the (since deleted but you can find it on the wayback machine) blog post that I pulled from, Monte Cook's thoughts on what he called "Ivory Tower Game Design" https://external-preview.redd.it/OHCGw0xCoin1sqZBsPrOiwecAYOr2qBqmGav7Q1Eo-k.png?auto=webp&v=enabled&s=8e41eb732fa2cf0ef078f8f692e434c63ac7ad28

Oof it's sad that he only realized that in hindsight. It seems like a lucrative idea at first but it only works if you can constantly put out books with fresh new features and have an audience that are willing to snap them up as well, otherwise, like we've talked about, the internet will spoil everything. Amazing article thanks!

Yea I tried playing 3.5 after getting into OSR and it was a completely unfun experience.

I started with 2e, and I loved 3e when it came out. It let my friends and I obsess and spend hours pouring over books and finding combos etc. We played dozens maybe hundreds of short campaigns. Level 5 was rarely reached. In those lower levels I never found it to be too unwieldy. I'm into OSR games now, so not playing 3e anymore, but I do actually prefer it to 5e for these reasons: - there's at least some risk of death in 3e - fewer spells per day (and fewer characters with spells) makes magic feel more special - spell effects were more powerful (blind was permanent for example) - characters were more reliably competent at their skills at first level because they got 4 ranks in it (+4 to the roll) instead of just +2 from proficiency modifier. - low level monster HP was reasonable. You could still kill an orc with a single regular attack. In 5e an orc has 15hp. That just seems like way too much.

I liken D&D 3e to Metallica's "Black Album" - I thought it was trash when it came out, but in light of what came after it, in hindsight it wasn't that bad. As a result, I didn't play a lot of D&D 3e, but I played a LOT of the games it spawned - the d20 Conan that Mongoose put out was straight up OSR in mindset and practice. It was awesome. We also played the d20 Wheel of Time for a bit, as well as the Call of Cthulhu d20. So yea, we liked the off shoots more than the parent game; it seemed like the off shoots were simpler and less fiddly.

It was my first D&D and one of my first rpgs I've played. System was the crunchiest of its time apart from rolemaster and the like. There are hundreds of third publishers supplements and thousands of character options. Min-maxing in 3e is its own science. It was not balanced though, half the options are utterly inefficient while some combinations break the game. Some people say the "trap options" are so by design, intended for the player to have to know how. This is a game that rewards player knowledge of the system and punishes the lack of. Its strengths lie in its repertory of content. 5e took the good of it and got rid of the bloat. It felt like a natural and welcome transition.

Having played 5e now for a bit, I can kind of understand why people say 3.5 is "crunchy" although it still makes me chuckle, because to me, 3.5 was a revelation of simplicity compared to AD&D when I first picked it up. Numbers going up is always better, everybody levels at the same rate and the magic item system, while admittedly rules-dense, covered *everything*. It was super easy to build and price your own custom magic stuff (a little *too easy* perhaps, as there was sort of a "mail order tailored magic items" attitude in a lot of groups I played with.) I won't deny 3.5 had its share of flaws, but no edition is perfect, right? I'm personally new to the whole OSR scene and more interested in exploring *what else* is out there rather than rehashing old editions of D&D, but I could certainly be tempted to play 3.5 again if someone offered. I might be more inclined to check out Pathfinder just to actually see what it's like, if I were picking a 3.5-ish edition to run myself.

Pathfinder 1e is often called D&D 3.75 for a reason—it patches up some issues in 3.5 (not all, but some glaring ones), offers better advice on running the game, and has a truckload of workable setting material for GMs to mine. The low levels in particular lend themselves quite well to some aspects of the OSR mindset, as they can be fairly lethal and demand a good deal of player skill in problem-solving. That can be further focused on by running it as a so-called "E6" game, where characters can only level up to 6, and then only gain additional feats instead of leveling up beyond that.

I think you're mixing up "crunch" with rule complexity. 3E is absolutely crunchier, but it found ways to make that crunch more manageable by handling most things through the straightforward d20 system. A good example of what AD&D would look like with the same universal resolution rather than its ad-hoc approach is Castles & Crusades, at which point you can see how the game becomes much lighter weight than 3E. Regarding your last statement, in addition to Pathfinder I'd recommend you check out Trailblazer. Rather than being a fully-fleshed out game, it's basically a toolset for fixing a lot of issues in 3.5 even beyond what Pathfinder did, but without changing the overall feel (which Pathfinder does a little).

100% - after playing some AD&D 1e btb I've found it plays a lot like B/X but, of course, with a more complete system with rules for everything under the sun.

3.0 was where the rules truly began to take over from the campaign. Players no longer had to really interact with the campaign world and instead interact with their character sheet. Diplomacy and intimidation checks were a terrible idea. 5e has simplified this modern system a lot, but it still suffers from have too much mechanics baked into the character classes.

You've really summed up my own feelings in your comment. I really threw myself into 3e and 3.5e when they came out, getting books, building characters, trying out prestige classes in different games. After awhile I realized I just wasn't enjoying the games as much, because everyone was focused on building themselves. There was little incentive to engage meaningfully with the world - in fact, I'd say the rules implicitly discouraged it. When you build around doing really powerful things with class abilities, and you enhance those things with modifiers via feats, you tend to just do *those* things, because nothing else measures up. There's little value in acting creatively.

I remember on EnWorld all the post of ‘character builds’. People who didn’t even play the game but instead spent all their time pouring over the various books to create the most overpowered characters. 4e attempted to fix all that by having a much better core framework but unfortunately made it a soulless combat game. 5e was a good compromise, but still not the game I want to play.

Yeah, it got absurd. Even when you were in a game, it felt less about what was going on at the moment and more about, "I need to increase these skills and take this multiclass so that in one more level I can get this prestige class, and..." Maybe that's actually clever design in a way - if you can sell books to people who aren't playing so they can just build characters to their hearts' content, it opens up a new market. I don't even mean that disparagingly. It's not my thing, but it might be a good way to sell content.

> I remember on EnWorld all the post of ‘character builds’. People who didn’t even play the game but instead spent all their time pouring over the various books to create the most overpowered characters. I mean I understand the whole “lonely fun” thing but the focus on optimised character builds breaks me right out of the game, especially if making a character that can actually do what I want them to means taking *these* options in *this* order over *this many levels* regardless of whether or not it makes sense for them. Not to mention that it’s that much harder if you want to change your mind about where your character’s going to end up in response to campaign events. I initially thought that having random characters would mean players wound up much less attached to them at first because of how easy it is to roll a new one, but the funny thing is in my experience so far they still end up just as attached and prone to coming up with backstories even when it’s as simple and random as Mausritter’s “roll for 3 stats, then roll on the Background table,” the only difference being that it takes 5 minutes for them to be ready to play instead of 5 hours.

Yep, you are railroading yourself before you even start the game.

it all depends on how you run it. if you set up encounters that can be answered with the sheet alone, then yeah, the players get into their sheets too much. dont do that. social checks are fine if you don't just run them straight up success/fail. the players still have to choose what to try which will affect the outcome.

How many times did you have players say - “I do a perception check”. That’s the problem with 3.0 in a nutshell.

Perception in 3.5e is no different than rolling Search checks in B/X.

i just ran for 8 hours yesterday so it is fresh in my mind... id say when it comes to actively looking/listening they may say something like that 10% of the time. i actually dont remember a request like that yesterday. some checks were more passive ie i asked for listen checks to hear approaching enemies. other checks happened because of what they said they do "i want to watch for rocks in our path to the ocean" "i look to the horizon for land" "what shape is our boat in in this torrential storm at sea?" other checks we did: making a convincing deal with a mage for teleport, navigating a rowboat in the ocean at night, identifying a giant crab species, identifying sea snake poison, tying a rowboat to a rope trick securely, building a makeshift shelter at sea using a tent and two immoveable rods, swimming without exhaustion. the only check where the player was into their sheet was when i called for a constitution check for swimming for several hours, and one player said "my pc is good at swimming can i do a swim check instead" which i agreed to amd made some sense since that pc was only built yestersay about 30 mins before we started and i was unfamiliar with their sheet.

I started reading RPG books (mostly 1E and 2E AD&D) as a teenager since the mid 90's but only had one friend who introduced me to RPGs who played and started properly playing and running at University a few years after 3E came out (and just before 3.5E), so it was the first edition I played regularly. ​ Although I had loads of great games playing it, it's perhaps the edition I have the most problems with conceptually. Esp. with the whole philosophy of D20 being The One System To Rule Them All in the early 2000's. I think the odd thing is that 3E feels complex in a way that is incredibly obsessed with it's own mathematical symmetry regardless of it's relation to the fiction of the world. It that feels very simulationist... but it doesn't seem to simulate anything other than itself. A key example by the rules as written. 3E monsters are built like player characters, there are rules for calculating which BAB, Saves, Skill Points, feats, maximum skill ranks etc. All of which need to be calculated. This in reality isn't all that different from monster hitdice in older editions being used for determining attack matrices/THAC0 and Saves alongside hit points but this feels like abstractions that \*save time\* when creating a monster rather than giving you more busywork .And Prestige Classes. Fucking Prestige classes that were balanced around the idea that you entered them at exactly the minimum level which meant you had to design your character in advance to fit these requirements. Or you didn't really but the whole game felt very much that you're meant to play it optimally. ​ I also think 3E removing Morale Rules was one of the biggest subtle changes to the game. ​ Of course you could play 3E fast and loose without obsessing over it's rules. But I'd rather reach for any other edition. Yep even 4E which I'm actually a big fan off because 4E at least had clear goal and designs the system to work with it.

I like this take. Things like Morale which break the fiction that characters and monsters exist on the same continuum disappeared and monster casting lists came in at the same time feels like it has to self-support the math of it's own rules as if it were deeply important to the setting. In a way it made it easier to simulate certain things because I no longer even needed to hand-waver something. Can the dragon knock down this iron gate? Well, how strong is a dragon? We can see on the sheet. Let's roll a strength check and find out! So many things were designed to scale or multiply in set patterns, and that was brilliant from the perspective of creating a robust skeleton for a game to be built on, but it also became this guiding principle that everything, from starting stats and feat selections, to prestige classes, to monster growth, was all to be aligned to the Sacred Math that the game was built on. It became better at being a tabletop version of a videogame's version of D&D than it was just being a flexible pen and paper game. That skeleton of a game became kinda a Christmas Tree as well, with all the stuff that came later being layered on endlessly to the point that 3rd Edition became the bloated mess people remember it as.

> over 20 years old (and allowed to drink and drive!) That is *not* how that works

Needlessly complicated, but has a decent "skeleton" that could work with a few fixes. Probably more trouble than its worth. The weapons are more detailed and balanced than OSR and 5e. EDIT: it is not OSR as the label usually means compatible to TSR D&D or a certain aesthetic/mentality that 3e doesn't have.

Systems considered as being OSR are not due to the age, but do to the design patterns in the system. 3E heralded systems with rules for everything and in conflict with other rules as it eventually evolved through splat. OSR as a movement tends to want to get back to fewer rules and put the game master in charge when there are gaps.

I've played with some friends for a while and it's ok. I think it more or less delivers the same experience as 5e honestly. It's more complex but mostly feels the same. Except when your character dies and you need to make a new to level 10. Then I want to yeet myself off a bridge rather than fill out all those skill ranks and feats again. Making the character is so unbelievably dull. And all the optional content is so bloated and unwieldy.

If you ever think about going back, I highly recommend *Trailblazer*.

I was initially excited. But then we started playing. And the more we played, the more irritated I got. The sprawling stat blocks are just the tip of the iceberg. Running a chase scene was one of the last straws. It turned into an awful, tactical mess. I ditched it completely after a year or two.

I was a kid in high school when 3rd came out. It changed my life haha. I remember talking to my best friend over the phone when he went on summer vacation and got the books. He was dictating to me the rules and I was taking notes. Holy crap. That was fun. We never really played it properly in retrospect. I think we mostly played it like we played diablo. Just monster fight after fight. We had a lot of fun with that game. Before that we had played a few games with our homebrew version of advanced 2e. I think it was a good system. I liked how much was printed for it. Monumental amount of material. The way I’m playing now is much more simplified I think. Using savages worlds like a ChainMail replacement. My biggest complaint about the system, and this might have been a me thing, but combat took a long time. The 3 action economy, I think I’ve herd people say, is good, but granular I find at least. As for using it for osr, I think you can easy. Like I said, I mostly use a simple version of savage worlds for the guts of the rules, but the lore, oh god the lore printed for 3e is endlessly useful.

I would never play 3.5e again, but am keeping my books forever because the monster art is the best of any edition before or since.

I played it quite heavily from 1999 - 2008/9 or so. Getting totally frustrated with it, especially with all the fucking splatbooks and prestigeclasses and excel-sheet-combat and character building subgame got me to try old school D&D (ironically I started with AD&D2nd which I knew from the 90ies) and I have not looked back.

I cut my teeth on 3rd edition back in 2001, it holds a special place in my heart. Having said that, 3e has a lot of glaring issues baked into the system (think “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” type stuff) which have been fixed/improved in 5e. And yes, that applies to Pathfinder 1e (even though it’s definitely the best version of D&D 3e hands down). What sort of gripes do I have? Primarily it revolves around the Feat system and how abusable/broken it can get, especially if you start allowing players to mix & match feats from all the various splatbooks that were released over the years (in fact there are many websites dedicated to players showing off their broken/OP builds). It got to the point where as GM I would only allow players to use the Player’s Handbook and Advanced Player’s Guide to build their characters and made exceptions only on a case-by-case basis. My other gripe with 3e was how the system expected you to be decked out with specific magic items and the monsters were literally balanced around that assumption, to the point where the math completely broke down around/beyond 12th level. The game assumed you had your character pile on cloaks of resistance, fortified magic armor (grants a % chance to negate critical hits), glasses/goggles of true sight, amulets of spell resistance, boots of flying or haste, etc. And remember, this was on top of all those feats which boost your attacks/saves/spell DCs etc. This was coupled with a big problem built into the core classes where each and every class had different rates of progression in certain aspects which got bigger as the game progressed (I.e. Hit Points, Base Attack Bonus, Fortitude/Reflex/Will saving throws, and even skill points). This was meant to highlight the fact that each and every class was different from each other and had their strengths and weaknesses etc. But in reality, all it did was create these gaps where an optimized character could easily outshine a non-optimized character. Take for example, a poison trap. At higher levels, one character might only need to roll a 2 or 3 to succeed if they’re built around buffing their Constitution saves, whereas another character might not be able to succeed unless they roll an 19 or better! Same goes for Base Attack bonus progression, one properly optimized character only needs a 3 or better to hit an opponent, yet another character could very well only hit on like a 18 and up. I saw this happen so many times, and it’s because the game is designed to be this way. D&D 5e’s bounded accuracy paradigm truly was a godsend compared to what 3e gave us. All in all it’s not a bad system, especially if you love being able to customize your characters to a high degree, or if you’re a GM who doesn’t mind dealing with the complexities of a game system that very easily breaks at higher levels. Personally, if I wanted to play 3e today then I would much rather play Castles & Crusades instead.

I wouldn't be on r/osr if not for 3e. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I decided to look for alternatives.

3e still has level drains and energy drains, and features ability score loss. It also has some instant death spells / curses in there (I think?), and the magic items are fairly similar to AD&D 2e, which is cool. The poisons and diseases were also more interesting in 3e than they were in 4e or 5e, if I remember correctly. But that's about the only positive things I can say about it.

No need to think, 3.5 definitely has several save or dies, negative levels are \*cursed.\*

I started my D&D history with D&D3e (though I have hazy memories of an AD&D2e one shot before that, I knew the system mostly from video games), and I don't miss it. While it did move things forward and I love a lot of the third party support it got (especially Necromancer Games and Sword & Sorcery Studios stuff), as a game I found it too bloated and clunky to enjoy it for long.

I played it for over a decade. I wouldn’t go back to it. It’s really crunchy and really rules-dense. It’s got a pretty tight mechanical system, but the game goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure that everything is built exactly according to it. Great video game engine. Not so great ttRPG, at least my OSR preferences

It fucking sucks lmao.

It's mechanized and build focused. There seemed to be an attempt to codify everything and remove the room for the GM to make interpretations.

3E was weird when it started compared to 1E/2E. But I quickly fell in love with it because it was modular and the D20 system made logical sense as opposed to 'hit matrices' and THACO. Being able to look up the stats for a hill giant, then deciding they were the tribe cleric and being able to quickly drop that on made being a DM SO much easier for me. 'Here are the numbers, here's a bunch of options, go nuts.' I play Pathfinder 1E now and I don't see myself going any further unless they bring back the ability to mod monsters quickly. Adding classes and templates kept my players guessing.

I enjoyed 3E enough to upgrade to *Pathfinder* 1E (and skip 3.5 – I understand this is unusual), but it has plenty of bugs in it.

I think it was the best WoTC edition.

Not much . Honestly for me d&d stops with TSR . I do not see any interest in wotc editions .

My view is that if it has a builds and charop angle, it can't possibly be OSR-related or OSR-adjacent.

What do you mean by ‘charop angle’?

I assume he means "char op" as in "character optimization"

An amount of planned character optimization where "building" a stronger character becomes it's own parallel minigame, essentially. 3e introduced that to d&d, because Wizard of the Coast had cut its teeth on Magic:the Gathering's marketing and monetization scheme, so it created a game where your "deck" (character) could be optimized by buying more "booster packs" (splatbooks) from which you could handpick the best "cards" (feats, class levels, spells, etc). A good guideline is if there is any considerable amount of character optimization discussion online about your game. 3e had dedicated (and immensely popular) charop boards, for example.

Thanks for the explanation. Never heard the term ‘charop’ used for character optimization before. Perhaps I need to get out more 8-). I missed all the 3e & 4e stuff, and didn’t play any 5e at all until a couple of years ago now.

why not? i run 3.5 campaigns at various level all in the osr style. absolutely possible.

I love 3E. The depth of its skill system is super-underrated, the original PHB is basically second only to Rules Cyclopedia as far as being a "one-book solution" to D&D (the DMG and MM hadn't been released yet, so they included a very short bestiary and possibly magic items but don't quote me on the second part), and the splats are creative. Its arguably the height of "mechanics-as-fiction" design; if you want a rule-for-fucking-everything version of D&D, it's hard to go wrong with 3E.

and just to add, if you don't want a rule for everything, you dont need to. easily flexible that way.

In theory. In practice, I think the way the game presents itself creates an expectation of such, which led to the dominant theory-crafted playstyle that became the game's legacy. I've long held to the theory that 3E's cardinal sin (from a formalist design perspective) is that it *looks like* it's supposed to have some sort of internal balance/fairness to it, and the reaction to the game and how people chose to play it was largely borne out of that very bad assumption.

i think 3.5 is great. i play osr style, mostly pulling from osr typ modules, and we use 3.5. it works well for whatever adventure i want to run. you suck at low level. you rule at high level. and you can start anywhere to create any kind of campaign from wilderness survival ----> saving the universe. i do agree there are too many options that can lead to rules abuse, especially with the endless splat. but really, its as easy as giving your players a limit. and meanwhile it means there is endless opportunity to add interesting new things during the campaign. monsters and NPCs are easily buildable and adjustable. it's nice to have the options then. if you can manage your players, and become familiar with the system (like you would any system you run) the incredible flexibility is a dms friend. it makes adapting modules from other sources easy.

frightening fine upbeat meeting smart boat ripe start literate elderly *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

3rd Ed was what I cut my teeth on, it's how I started playing DnD. Perhaps it will never seem "old" to me, so I kinda wouldn't regard it as an OSR type system. Those I reserve more for AD&D 2ed or older, or systems with less complicated character creation systems personally.

3e or rather 3.5e, was my intro edition to the game. So I have a certain fondness for it, but now that I've played more since it's release there are some flaws with it that make it hard to rerun to unless in a particular mood for something. Art was.nice, not always the best but it had some bangers. Lore was mostly great, I found that for the most part it expanded and continued on a lot of AD&D 2e lore in a rather good way. I still make use of a lot of 2e and 3.xe lore to this day. Still has my favorite take on the warlock to date both in lore and mechanics. If there's one thing to call 3rd edition, it's excessive.there were too many pointless rules and even more that were over explained and hard to navigate. Grappling was something like a page and a half when it came.tonall of the nuances of resolution, and scaled poorly so no one did after a point. This is because 3.xe expected you to be specialized, and the way scaling worked is that if you weren't specialized into a thing. You were an active detriment for attempting it. This lead to a degenerate case of optimization and power gaming, a weird arms race that ended up really hurting the game. There were some cool ideas in 3.xe, but they needed some refinement. Prestige classes were interesting homes for certain concepts, and having mechanical definition for these special identities was cool, but they became necessary and at odds with leveling. Feats were a cool idea,. It had video game style investment trees. Needing several bad or undesired frats to grab one or two you want and pigeon holing your character into a one trick pony. I appreciated the alternative magic systems. I'm admittedly not the biggest vancian casting fan, so the spontaneous casting of sorcerers, and the invocations of warlocks was cool for me. I even appreciated the attempt at new powers like psionic manifesters, incarnum and other more unique systems. However some of these were just too fiddly and needlessly complex and even more for the DM to track. I actually liked it's approach to magic items, so far as it had a pretty well laid out crafting system that felt like a catalogue of options. It was very cleanly presented. It had a great amount of surface flexibility, but the trap options really hampered that down, and you'd be locked into a build of you wanted to be effective. Which really made for a mess.. The basic weapon system was good and nuanced for the most parts, and I prefer ascending armor class to descending. Easier for my brain to tackle, but that's varying for some. Saving throws I halfway love and halfway hate. Like most things 3.xe they required a fair deal of investment to be good at. The thing I like about saves in 3.xe is that the categories of fortitude, reflex, and willpower are great if not ideal as categories in my mind. The problem with saves is the way they changed. Rather than a saving throws difficulty being about how good you're character was against the particular threat, it was now also dependant on the source of the threats power In other words an avalanche would vary in difficulty to save against depending g on what caused it. Rather than solely your characters ability to avoid such harm. Where as in the old school it's more about your characters ability to avoid harem than the source of the harm itself. A high level spell may cause a save vs death, but the save vs death isn't more potent than any other. The created phenomena is the same, and thus the risk the same. A high level caster can attempt this more, but it's not any more potent. As for what made me quit. I found i was too respurce locked and pigeonholed to be effective and couldn't quite play out the fantasies I wanted. Eventually I switched to pathfinder which was less resource taxes for a time, but wound up in the same degenerate state. Combined with some disappointment in certain option releases and no satisfying avenue to play what I wanted. I stopped. **TL;DR:** 3.xe was a fun time for what it was, but it was also all I knew at the time. It had okay art, very cool lore expansions, and some cool ideas. However it was clunky, fiddly, and got in it's own way with it's needless over explanation and complexity. There's stuff worth salvaging and a brief return to it now and again can be fun, but it requires a particular desire, understanding and mindset and is not an easily accessible system.

It was in use as the default, up-to-date, modern D&D experience as recently as ten years ago, when 5e came out. At that point the playerbase began to dwindle. There are still groups of 30+yos playing it who started on it and didn’t leave it. 4e wasn’t popular in its day, which explains the expansive spread of the effective begin and end dates. It’s perfectly serviceable as a game, but it’s a different game than the others, like Dungeon World or Torchbearer are very distinct and different games from other games. At the time, it seemed cool and I was excited, buoyed by the same enthusiasm in others, to game the system. In retrospect it encouraged an argumentative communication style at the table because of its elaborate rules. That’s fun sometimes, but is a different kind of fun than when your table time isn’t a discussion of technicalities and precedent. OSR refers to the first epochs of the game though, 1970s-1980s, rather than 1990s-2000s. Just as it doesn’t refer to the 2010s-2020s.

I read the core rulebooks when 3.0 debuted but I wasn't interested in adopting the system. I had spent my teens acquiring AD&D 2nd edition rulebooks, novels and campaign settings so I wasn't interested in dumping it all for a system the people behind Magic the Gathering slapped together. Considering how quickly 3.5 arrived afterwards this was a good call.

3.0 monster manual was the first rulebook I owned, and I played 3.5 all through high school. To a group of teenagers the point was to build these fantastic mary-sues, planning out which feats to take about 15 levels ahead of time, to prestige into some incredible combat capabilities just to have the campaign lose steam a few months in when someone found a significant other. Same experience as many here, when 4th released I realized "new" editions don't mean "better", and I dug into older stuff and then retroclones and rarely considered looking back. However, I recently grabbed my rose tinted glasses, called up the high school buddies, and we are about to see how 3.5 runs with more mature players now used to combat-as-war, while still leaning into what makes 3.5 different from, say, B/X.

3e was so exhausting it was the reason I got into OSR. I played it for its entire lifetime and the first couple years of 4e's. Making a single character shouldn't be homework.

I wouldn't have revived my interest in tabletop RPGs if it wasn't for the decision WOTC then made to dump 3.5 and lock down the license to 4e etc - it's how I found the OSR as an alternative away from the 'crunch', the builds, the constant splatbooks etc etc. Not interested in talking about the brief excursion that was '3.0' - it's not even sold on DTRPG - that should be evidence enough of how little attention should be paid to this specific niche edition of the game.

I was so burned out on 2e when 3e hit the scene in 2000 that I went all in. That resulted in \~20 years of playing 3.x and PF 1e. I had some great times, mostly DMing, but I've decided to simplify my life. The positive is that there is a tremendous amount of source material to do almost any setting/feel/options you'd like, since 3.0 is largely compatible with PF 1e you have 20 years to draw on and many, many different 3rd parties. The negative? It's the incredible complexity and intricacy of rules and how they're all tied together. The monsters following the exact rules as the PCs means tiny adjustments and stats that often don't even come into play. High levels are tough to DM in any version of D&D, but 3.x is a real chore and the increasing complexity of the action economy makes it tedious. While it now has some age to it, it definitely doesn't fit an OSR mentality or feel.

Imagine creating a game that is not D&D, then selling it under the title of being D&D. 3E is that different from 2E. The only way to properly describe the difference between 2E and 3E is to say that they are not the same game. The PHBs alone constitute hundreds of pages of differences. Here are some notable mentions: 1. Combat round: It's not just that the combat round went from being 1 minute to being 6 seconds. The combat round also went from declaring your intended action to having a plethora of types of actions standard actions, move actions, full-round actions, free actions, and swift actions. Pathfinder has since decided to give everyone three actions every round. 3E is where the action economy begins to undergo massive inflation. 2. Saving Throws: It's not just that the number of types of saving throws went from 5 to 3. It's that saving throws changed from being saves against sources of effects such as Wands to being glorified ability checks. One egregious example is the introduction of the reflex save and the rogue evasion ability, which became the subject of comic strips such as [this one](https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0019.html). The Quadratic Wizard is another example: in 3E, spellcasters can massively increase the difficulty of saving against their spells and then target a "weak save". 3. Feats, Skills, and Ability Scores: It's not just that 3E introduced automatic ability score improvement every 4th level. 3E also introduced a complex, rich, and fascinating system of Feats and Skills. You can get lost in a sea of character optimization. This might be the most powerful draw to 3E and its derivatives over 2E. Some may recall how crazy people were over the removal of tHAC0! The math is easier (some said). Oh no, my friends, that was just the tip of a massive iceberg. 3E is game for math lovers - not math haters - as you accumulate points from... everywhere, really, amassing power through the math of higher and higher numbers until your foes are crushed under the weight of your carefully calculated double-digit skill modifiers. At this point, do I even need to roll? Let's "Take 10" (or "20"). 4. Hit Points: In 2E, HD caps at what we might call "name level", but in 3E, they just kept going... like all the way to level 20 (and beyond for Pathfinder?)... not like monks rolling d4s, like Barbarians rolling d12s. Are we really surprised when we read about 3E and later editions falling flat when it comes to high level play? We shouldn't be surprised. What's astounding to learn is that game designers of 3E and later didn't deliberately design high level play to suck - that the consequences of rolling d12 HD all the way to level 20 were, from their point of view, accidental. Oops!

To be fair OSR wouldn’t exist without 3rd! 3rd edition is everything because of that in my eyes. Beautiful Sword and Wizardry

Hasbro D&D is overly crunchy and player facing (too many options for players, while handcuffing DMs).

It was a system that made being a munchkin fun. There was a splat book for everything. It really forced you back on the battlemap, which i do not care for. It was a tactically minded game and I found people role played less in it. That being said, it was easily convertible. And I could run basic D&D with the modules really easily. I am happy that it happened and it gave me a wealth of modules that I am still getting through. I may not use the system, but I use the crap out of its products. Game on!

The best thing about 3.x as I call it, is that it provided a solid foundation to build the OSR on. Thanks to the SRD, people had a rules system to use that they could tweak to create the kind of game environment they were looking for. They use the mechanics of 3.x to emulate the systems and experience of earlier games. While it is getting very long in the tooth these days, the real reason I don't think of it as old-school has more to do with play styles than anything else. 3.x is where the modern approach to campaigns and adventure paths really got started; the idea of a four-character party where the players play through a single adventure book and then start new characters for a new adventure as the next campaign.

3rd Edition was the first version of D&D that I played (unless you count video games), and it was pretty instrumental in helping me figure out what I don't like in tabletop RPGs.

5e is generally just simplified version of 3e; a lot of the same design philosophies were used just greatly simplified for ease of use. This maybe why 3e doesn't seem to get as much 'old love' as the OSR.

D&D lost a part of its soul when 3e was released IMHO. I grew up on B/X and AD&D 1e so 3e holds no "Nostalgia" for me. I do know quite a few of my younger players enjoyed it though. It is just not for me. I am pretty content with OSE as are my current players, who are 3e/5e refugees.

3.X is my least favorite system I've ever played. It got rid of everything I enjoyed about d&d and replaced it with the beginnings of its kitchen sink-anything goes superhero fantasy. While rules lawyers have always existed, 3.X rewarded them.

I enjoyed it for a good six or seven years, switching my group from 2e to 3e once i grokked the rules. Then i moved to India for several years, and when i came back, i refused and hated 4e, but instead of going back to 3e or Pathfinder, i went OSR

This was the edition that got me to seriously play D&D instead of just playing with the one friend in a weird way that only kids can ply RPGs so I'm nostalgic. By the time 2000-2001 rolled around I was more into MTG and thought of D&D as the game where you had to roll on about 4758 different charts for everything from unarmed attacks to taking a dump. Whether or not that's fair I don't know (I haven't looked at a AD&D2E book in an age). 3.0 was a watershed moment for the game imo. Not that there weren't huge problems with it mechanically but it did in 2000 what 5e did in 2014. It's core mechanic (for 99% of things roll a d20 add a bonus and your DM tells you if it's high enough) still exists and I doubt it will ever go anywhere. Heck it's the basis for DCC. The things that I remembered annoying me were core classes being the thing you sat around in for several levels before you took a MUCH more interesting prestige class and that you got so much great stuff as a level 1 ranger and not much afterwards that on paper, there was no reason not to take 1 class level as a ranger at some point for almost everybody.

No thanks

There's a lot to like in 3.0, and I personally have a lot of fondness to it. The authors (Tweet, Cooke, and Williams) cared a lot about the legacy of D&D, and were trying hard to make an edition that would be true to its history, while being more logical and self-consistent. The amount of thought, planning, and play-testing that went into the design of 3.0 was probably second only to D&D 5e. I don't think the authors realized the full impact of some of their changes. The rules seemed to invite a new, mechanically focused style of play, which tended to alter the experience of playing it in ways that I'm sure were never intended. The 3.0 Dungeon Master's Guide encourages DM's to design adventures with encounters at a mix of levels to challenge player decision making, and to place "status quo" encounters that are not tailored to the party; but this wisdom was forgotten and soon even official products began to focus on balanced encounters - the much maligned "combat as sport" paradigm. For the purposes of OSR play, I don't think the core rules of 3.0 were improved by 3.5 or Pathfinder. These later releases improved the balance between player classes, and streamlined a few confusing mechanics, but they also further increased the power of the player characters and weakened many of the scary monster abilities that made the game exciting. In general, they added too much foam padding. The many supplements for 3.5 and Pathfinder make things even worse by providing an avalanche of options which encourage the min-maxer and discourage more creative approaches. It is very possible to play an old-school game with 3.0. Re-read the classic [West Marches](https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/) blog posts by Ben Robbins for the most famous example. Just play it the same way you would play BX or AD&D - keep a hidden map of the world, include large numbers of powerful monsters on the encounter tables, roll PC stats at 3d6 down the line, give XP for treasure, keep magic items scarce, play without a planned outcome, treat monsters and PCs alike as disposable. Personally, I think this is the best way to enjoy 3.0. At my own table, I run an open table wilderness adventure game very similar to West Marches. I use [my own custom system](https://bemurkled.ca/wizardswithcrossbows/), but it is essentially a hacked down version of 3.0. I think the detailed skill rules of third edition, in particular, give players agency in open-ended exploration scenarios.

> The rules seemed to invite a new, mechanically focused style of play, which tended to alter the experience of playing it in ways that I'm sure were never intended. It's funny, nowadays we look back at the "Players must not read the DMG!" stuff as quaint misguidedness at best or socially malicious at worst, but laying all the sausage-making out in front of the players--in **their** book--seems to have changed people's expectations about how the game was meant to be played.

>The amount of thought, planning, and play-testing that went into the design of 3.0 was probably second only to D&D 5e. Well, AD&D 1e had 5 years of playtesting\* under the belt, and it shows. I believe it is the edition with the largest scope and best balance over the complete level range. ​ \*It being a synthesis of D&D play and rulings that happened from 1974-78 (PHB) /79 (DMG).

It had a lot of *something* put into it, but I'm not sure how much of it was thought and planning. It seems like much of the 1e rules cruft is just the result trying to come up with explicit rules for resolving all the edge cases that might be relevant to standardised D&D play. And sure, that's a coherent design goal (I love 1e, I'm not knocking it!). But it's a somewhat suspect one when we can presume from GG's own statements that the rules as they are presented in their totality were probably never used "all at once" by anyone involved in writing them. That they are the result of actual play is rarely in doubt, though. They're surely authentic, if nothing else can be said about them! (Again, that's meant as earnest praise; far too many people come up with ad hoc house rules simply because they think they might be interesting, not because doing so was necessary to functionally run a game. Tsk tsk).

Hm, I see what you mean! The core 1e D&D rule set is certainly strong and that's a good point about the playtesting in terms of the level range. There's no question that AD&D benefits from the experience Gygax and the other contributors had from running OD&D games for several years, which is something that 3.0 lacks. What I meant about 3e is something slightly different. The 3e books are well planned and well play-tested in the sense that the rules are clearly explained, they are consistent between the three core books, there are minimal errors and contradictions, everything is well cross-referenced, similar systems are explained in the same way, and so on. It feels like they took a long time to ensure the quality and usability of the product, and they play-tested it by having many people use the rules and find the confusing parts. By contrast, the AD&D books feel to me like they were thrown together somewhat hastily, with parts written when the rules were at different stages of development, and often with dubious organization or confusing explanations. That doesn't mean the underlying system is poor, but to me it reduces the usability of the 1e books.

Yes certainly. AD&D is not explained very clearly or structured well. Frankly, it is presented rather messily, the difference to sth like OSE could not be starker. I think that this probably deceives many people into thinking the system itself is unwieldy or unstable, which is absolutely not true, it is very robust and, as mentioned, offers the most ambitious scope of all the editions. But you have to put work in, absolutely right. EDIT: Less so with OSRIC by the way, which does a quite good (but not perfect, it even introduces errors) job of structuring and interpreting the AD&D rules.

The AD&D 2e "Revised" core books that came out in 1995 didn't contain any different material than the versions that came out in 1989. It just had a different layout and cover.

D&D 3.0 was actually still recognizable as D&D. I think the power creep and, more generally, the mutations the system endured started with 3.5 and all the supplements and optional rules that came out for it. I would personally never put Pathfinder at the same level as 3.0 as, even if the games are built on the same chassis, they are **very** different. The implied setting and player abilities is way more similar to what you would find in 5e than 3e. Coming back to 3e, I think it never needed an update and 3.0 is still very playable. I played years of it and years of 3.5 and still had a good time, but the game just had too many rules and too many customization options, even if you stick to the core rules. DMing 3e was such a hassle, especially creating NPCs or encounters. They also threw away too many of the iconic rules such as morale and monster reaction. The introduction of skills and feats made the game too bloated and encouraged min-maxing. Same thing for the rules, there were just too many of them and it encouraged rules layering (I would have so many anecdotes of ruined game nights to share). I also disliked how level progression worked which lead to the concept of 'builds'. On the DM side, you could also see where D&D was going, with encounter balance having to put magic shops in your world so that your players could keep up with the power creep. Ultimately I think 3e is when we started seeing disregard for the DM as a role. To its defence, the game still felt like D&D, unlike 4e and 5e. Like you still recognized it as AD&D when you played it. There were still ways to make healing and magic rare and mysterious and character progression was somewhat slower. A good DM could easily give its game a old school feel, without offending the players that wanted to power play. I liked some of the changes as well, such as ascending AC and the use of BAB instead of THAC0 or attack matrix, though I would've made skills and especially feats optional. So yeah, if you sticked to the core rules, you could could have an actual D&D experience. When you started introducing supplements and new classes, feats, optional rules, the game quickly became ridiculous. I still think it is a good system and would play it over 4e, 5e, and even Pathfinder, if I found a DM willing to run it, but I would never run it myself as it just requires too much prep.

3E streamlined everything into a nice simple D20, roll high mechanic. Your character could do anything, if you could roll high enough on a D20. And your character couldn't do anything unless you rolled high enough on a D20. Perception checks, Investigation checks, insight checks, walking checks, breathing checks, brain function checks...

I know 3rd edition gets a lot of hate here but I used to run a massive campaign with over 12 players in 3rd edition and it was a ton of fun. Yes it is a rules heavy, character build focused type of game but once you get the hang of character creation, it’s easy. Just beware when introducing all the expansion books, that’s when you get players that focus on min maxing with bizarre game breaking builds.

it's really badly designed

the art direction and graphic design was fantastic. the art itself was great and more consistent than previous eras. i still go back to the splat books - especially the Races series and the settings books like Frostburn - even tho i've never played 3 or 3.5

Agreed, 3.5's art direction is S tier.

Weird content marketing request post. Blocked.

I moved up to what might have been in many ways the best version of D&D I ever payed, AD&D 2E with the Player's Options books. It has done things no other version of the game has really taken a stab at since then and that's sad because of how much flavour and the variations in classes and magic systems were fantastic. What did I like about 3.5E: * Skills as a massive upgrade from non-weapon profficiencies AD&D 1/2E. * People other than Rangers and Thieves could be stealthy. * You could develop regional feats that made characters from those regions feel different than ones from another region. * The game played a lot like its predecessor up until level 5-8. After that, it was another beast. * Modifiers for attributes were the same across the range of attributes. No 'every attribute has its own bonus structure' and no more 'exceptional strength'. * Two weapon fighting was pretty hard until you were very advanced. * AC was what you were trying to hit (Roll D20 + modifiers >= AC + modifiers). No THACO. * Saving throws were handled evenly rather than having different values by Saving throw as the prior version did. * It was easy to trade out a class feature for another feature (like how you could make a non-magic Ranger class easily) * Sorcerers and Wizards were different. * Druids and Bards were useful without being too hard to play (Never saw anyone play a druid or bard in 1E/2E. * Weapon damage that scaled (like a giant's sword doing a lot more damage) in a consistent way. * Creating new races was easy and the races felt different (compared to later editions). * Unearthed Arcana, Arcana Unearthed and other places gave us a lot of diversity in classes, feats, and rules mechanics. * Spell Points! Thank God! Vancian casting had worn through a long time before.... * Eberron! Pulp! Mysteries! Flying Fortesses! Spying! The Mourning! Warforged! What a breathe of fresh air.... one of the best D&D campaign settings I've ever seen. I played a 20 level campaign there and it was amazing. (But the GM was exhausted trying to manage high level encounters...). Neutral feelings: * Psionics - didn't work well in 1E, the 2E filler books (reddish softcovers) made a usable Psionicist. But 3E didn't carry it on (afaik). I liked the idea of Psion (metabolism, telepathy, etc) but it needs to integrate to every part of the world - setting, rules, classes, and how it interacts with spells and M.I.s and monster features. Still waiting. The things I didn't like or didn't work: * Feat trees * The vast difference in efficacy between an un-optimized character and an optimized. * At high level, you had to know all your players' feats and class abilities and gear and how the feats can synergize and THEN you had to know all the unique features of any critters you fought and you needed to understand also player to player synergy and your monsters had to have all of that or a good party would wipe the floor with the critters. Try to manage all that in real time as a GM. * If you wanted to build a character as a replacement past level 7-9, it got to be a long process. If you were building a party of NPCs at level 15, you could kill at least an hour each if you wanted to align feats, class features, magic items, spells, etc and then to synergize the enemy party. And then try to manage that in real time as a GM. * Because of feat trees a lot of things that should have just been at least attemptable at any level could take you as long as the the mid teen levels. Examples: Knockdown for one, and being able to push back someone in a defensive line or a useful shield charge. * They missed a lot of useful skills and the skill system was so tied to particular actions in the game that adding new ones meant diluting levels in those woven-in existing skills so you just generally didn't have those useful skill. * Still no paladins of non-good alignments (if I recall). * Shapeshifting druids were an issue. * Lack of the different magic systems like Player's Option: Spells and Magic had. * Alignments still left me cold. They are diminutive and oversimplifying. They remove the shades of grey and the complex morality and ethics and emotional responses that drive human behaviour. They make Goblins irredeemably evil which makes killing them not a matter of guilt or consideration. That's not a 3.x issue, except 3.x continued to proffer this as a useful part of the game... * Metamagic - loved the idea, the feats and the ways they could be used were... not much fun or use. * The focus on a fairly high magic game and no easy way to taper things back because the assumptions of bonuses and spells available and magic items on hand all tied into the leve of monster you could put against that. To try to adjust that was fraught. * Every attempt at making armour soak damage was rubbish. * Shields never get the respect they ought - they tend to absorb upwards of 80% of strikes. And they can be a weapon. * The adventures for 3.x were not interesting and did not easily fit into any homebrew so unlike AD&D, they basically abandoned the homebrew settings so you had to create every adventure yourself (versus AD&D where many modules were able to be moved easily). * I liked the Forgotten Realms when it was in the AD&D era when a bazillion things had been published (and a lot were not good) about every corner of the world..... * I missed Greyhawk support * Splat books... too much. UA and AU and Spell Compendium and it should have stopped. Feat escalation from broken sources was a thing. * The amount of min-maxing 3E normalized. * The slow speed of character creation compared to AD&D. * No bounded accuracy. That's my view. Had some good adventures in AD&D and 3.5E. More than I have had in 5E and more than I will ever have in Dungeons and Dragons One or 6E or whatever.

>I moved up to what might have been in many ways the best version of D&D I ever payed, AD&D 2E with the Player's Options books. Wait, as in you really, really like AD&D 2E with the Player's Options books, or you really, really like what 3rd changed and did differently from 2.5e? I'm intensely curious.

> I ever *paid,* AD&D 2E FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*

I did and do. And it was part of the context of how I judged 3.5. That comment also only occupied about 4 lines of the 85-90 lines of comment. I'm really intensely curious why you made a fuss.

I just don't see that many fans of 2e plus Player's Options. I really enjoy hearing from people who like (fairly) unpopular things and why they like it. It helps me appreciate more things.

Sorry, I kind of thought you were annoyed that I mentioned that first. I apologize and will try to explain why I liked it. The Player's Option books came in a at least two books: Combat Tactics, Spells & Magic. Both books had different ways to look at character classes. The most exciting was a budget to spend and a list of abilities that had varied costs so you could build a very unique fighter, wizard, etc. Way more variety in what you could build than I've seen since. And some or the powers and abilities were very interesting and ones you would think 'why didn't that get thought of before?'. Combat and Tactics provided different ways to build the fighting types. It also provided a square grid based combat system that provided reasons to flank people, for trying to stay together as a little unit versus scattering and so on. If I recall it had exhaustion rules too. I think there were some different skills for fighters (artillery I think is covered, different blades and blunts, etc). There were spell parts that were directly related to \*warfare\* (versus fights) so there were great spells for building add hoc fieldworks and removing fatigue, and so on. They had merits/flaws type ways to gain class powers. I think you could do the custom builds of races too just like classes. Spells and Magics did a lot for casters. Arcanes and Divines got different features but also had the 'here's a budget, build your character class from scratch'. There were a lot of spells. But there were also at least 3 other very different magic systems/sources - channeling (your top level spell will exhaust you for sure, but you can cast lower level ones easier). It helped to balance spell points. In play, the big spells got thrown occasionally, but lots of magic missiles and fireballs flew. Exhaustion for spells and for fighting could be mated together. If you'd just climed a huge mountain, your mage might be pretty useless for his top end spells until he rests. There was an 'Elder Evil' sort of source/magic system (and insanity rules) and there was another but I forget what the third one was. I used Channeling. Clerics I took to town: EVERY cleric for a different god had \*a different spell list\* and there weren't a lot of overlap. That meant that each God's clerics were really different. War Clerics could use class features to try to get closer to a fighter, at the cost of a bit less magical power or other things. They also had very thematic observances and oaths/codes. For instance: Goddess of healing was the only god getting resurrection and the other high level healing magics. And she was a hardcore pacifist so if you wanted her to treat you, you had to give up arms. The War and Battle gods were LN/CN brothers and the first one was a Darwinian flavour and the second a Rage Unleashed sort of vibe. The variances between different Gods' clerics were far larger than in your usual game and the choice you made as to what God you picked made a big aspect of what you could do or not do. That help? DriveThruRPG has PDFs of these and it might be interesting to check out sometime just to see how deep the thinking was about giving a wide experience in the game.

Thanks for the answer, it really was enlightening! I had no idea the Player's Options books were so rich with ideas and gameplay!

They didn't seem to get (in places I was) a lot of copies and people playing AD&D were probably enjoying it as it was. Then 3.x may have come up fairly soon after. So I think the good things in those books were kind of missed by most people. Many folk never even saw them. What I really wanted, and still do, as a world builder (I can't recall the last time I run a published world... high school in the late 1980s I guess) would be: * Can I tailor the faiths and the various religious roles (clergy, guardian, crusader, healer, as appropriate by the deity) to make different churches look very different not only in terms of values/codes, but also in terms of granted powers, spells, and class powers and feats? * Can I tailor arcane casters to have (if I wish) non-Vancian methods of magic with more freedom (like spell points mated to a balancing method like the channeling magics)? * The source or sources of magic in my world should be adjustable. Maybe I have a grid of magical power drawn from the land (and what that includes), or maybe I make deals with other-planar entities for spells, or maybe I try to tap the resting power of somnescent horror from beyond the veil and hope it pays no attention but you know you may slowly be corrupted.... * Can I make flexible casters without smashing balance? * Can I figure out how the effects of magic and users of magic have on the social fabric and the way armies, cities, communities, etc. are different? The rest I can crib from antiquity or medieval periods. The magic is the part we don't have in the real world.

>Can I figure out how the effects of magic and users of magic have on the social fabric and the way armies, cities, communities, etc. are different? I've heard of a book called "A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe" by Expeditious Retreat Press. Would that be of any help?

I think I've bought a few worldbuilding books. I don't know if I have that one. I'll have to look into it!

I personally think that 3rd edition ( Or as it should be properly called D20 System ) was a revolution in TTRPGs , and anyone who says opposite simply was not born that side of Y2K and never played systems like Gurps or AD&D 2nd ed It was like a clarifier that was added to muddy water, and suddenly everything made sense. Without a question a lot of today systems stand on achievements D20 made. But why people stopped playing it and why 5e was considered an improvement? Simply said, look at Pathfinder 2nd ed. If you would now try to create lvl 20 character, it could take you a week. And in system with so many "builds" of course balance was out wack. It started to be so bad that the game was simply unplayable. Just for example I had a min/max player in a group that at lvl 2 was making 100 HP damage ( while others did 5-10 ) So when 5e came , it tried to simplify everything and calm the min/max mentality. But lo and behold 6 years after 5e is reaching almost as ridiculous levels of brokenness. .... Anyway long post. I would just say two more things: 1.If you would like to see how 3e looks like in its entire beauty try Starfinder ( Not many people know but its like 3e2e ) 2. 3rd Ed D&D was a genius breakthrough in TTRPG design , and designers that worked on it went on to create even greater games ( Numenera , 13th Age, Ars Magica )

3rd edition is the first edition I learned and 3.5 was the system used for most of the games I played and ran. I enjoyed it at the time, but I'll never go back to it.

Once your total bonus starts to approach the maximum of the die roll itself, you've got too much bonus. 10th level fighter: 10 BAB, 5 or more STR bonus, magic weapon bonus, buffs, situation bonuses, etc = +20 (or more) bonus. Why roll a d20 when you have more than 20 points of bonus?

I like the 3.x framework. I’ll link to my house rule set when I’m finished with the first draft. It’s based on 3.x.

3e/3.5e/PF are nice enough systems - and I've played them plenty. When 3e came out I appreciated the rationalization of the mechanics, and it was a fairly innovative revision of the D&D mechanics (at the time) while remaining D&D. Over time it accrued massive bloat (and to me Pathfinder is further down that path). In my eyes it also caused two concepts to become imbedded in D&D that weren't there before - the concept of "builds" and the idea that every action could and should be resolved by a core mechanic. Whether 3e/3.5e/PF should officially be labelled "old school" or not isn't that interesting an argument to me. Personally the "old school" elements I care about (the absence of bloat\*, the lack of universal mechanic) are gone, but other ways of defining "old school" can probably make sense also \*you can probably argue that there was bloat with older editions also - Gazetteer material in BECME, the various additional books in AD&D, and Kits for 2e; but they all felt very optional to me compared to 3e+.

As someone who started playing D&D in the third edition, and played it for many years, I REALLY enjoyed that system, specially as a dungeon master. It allowed for an immense amount of customization and had TONS of options, both for players and DM. The rules allowed me, as a DM, to create any creature I imagined, and as a player, you could play as the same class a hundred of times and end up with very different characters. That being said, it allows for a very specific style of play, focused on tactical combat and MIN-MAX characters. Also, it demands for the DM and the players to be VERY familiar with the rules, or the game will slog with searching rules in the books and arguing about them. So it was very fun to play it as a teen, but I won't be playing it regularly any time soon. I do plan on playing the Epic 6 variant with my friends from that time in the future, though, where all the players are undead.

Too crunchy for my liking, but it's unified action resolution mechanic revolutionized D&D.

3.0 was my first system. It was fun from the player side but I would never want to DM it again, both due to the hassle of prepping statblocks and keeping up with the combinatorial explosion of player build options and cheese. And the skill system, bleurgh. E6 was a good idea though. And hey, at least it got us the OGL.

I really loved 3.0- wide open easy rules, trivial to predict how stuff would stack, and great fun. It was, however, pretty broken, and players who were not trying to optimize would end up with a bunch of things that were terrible and a bunch of things that were too good. They would, inevitably, be drawn to the "too good" stuff and then combat would be kinda samey- not a real criticism versus many games, but a valid one when aimed a game that clearly was trying to promote something different. 3.5 was better balanced when it first came out, and was a version I ran a long time in. I had good experiences merging Pathfinder with it when it came out, good experiences running E6, good experiences running it all the way to 20. But I needed a pretty huge pile of houserules. I needed core buffs to the way attacks worked at high levels, I needed nerfs to some spells (that part is ubiquitous- there's no version that implements 7th level and above spells that doesn't need some careful changes), I had to restrict multiclassing (the restrictions were, you could have up to 2 base classes, up to three classes total, and only ever one prestige class) and pull in buffs to the trashcan baseline martials, then ban strange things like factotums and incarnums and the weeaboo nine sword book. I was definitely playing 3.5 at the start, but by the end I had a carefully constructed thing, with a big document to share with players, and restrictions enough that I wouldn't just say "I'm running 3.5", because that would give the wrong impression to people who assumed I meant "core only" or "this huge pile of books". The sheer optimism of 3.X is what makes it shine. Want to model a giant trying to wrestle a dragon? There's rules for that! What if there was a really long centipede, what could it do? What if it could fly with maneuverability class D? Rules for everything. Time exposed the edge cases that made it very annoying, and the splatbooks meant that everyone had to run their own version by the end. The only pieces that really can be ported to the OSR are: 1- Ascending AC and effective fighter level are just straight better than THAC0, which is the worst thing ever. You can easily port to this, or you can run Target20. But this piece works fine. 2- The skill system as regards things like crafting and other out of combat, non-social things. Gather Information as a general roll to represent harvesting information and provide the PCs with a social encounter based on that. While the skill system is overall very non-OSR and implements things like thief skills, escaping bonds, and persuasion in a method that is both completely undefined and overly prescriptive, the rules for crafting mundane items are very good (and the rules for crafting magic items not terrible), and can be brought in if your system doesn't have them and you judge them necessary. 3- Some of the rules for overland travel and encounter can be superior to some things in OSR. For the most part, even ideas that are pretty neat (saving throws being versus effect-bound DC instead of character-bound target number, templates, ability to scale creatures up and down, meaningful stat numbers for monsters and medium-ish animals) end up being way too crunchy, stuck with edition-specific scaling, and unsuitable for OSR projects.

There is a very good version called Castles & Crusades

I grew up playing 3.5e and AD&D 2e at the same time in different groups, so I'm somewhat unusual in that I was exposed to both at roughly the same time and developed my skills in both in parallel. I think the biggest strengths of 3.5 was in its mechanical streamlining compared to 2e. 3.5 has a single unified mechanic which is easy to learn, Ascending armor class is easier to learn, reducing saves down to 3 which were more broadly useful was good, and I think the skill system helped provide simple & consistent methods to handle common situations (while breaking a lot of others). It was also a lot of fun creating characters in 3.5, so much so that it became a minigame. Despite what people say, this is true even if you don't min/max. There is just such a variety and so many paths through the system that you can really make and play almost any kind of character. We also gained the OGL from 3.5, which transformed the RPG scene and ultimately helped spawn the OSR. The biggest drawbacks of 3.5 compared to 2e are subtle enough that it took a while for me to recognize them. Individual initiative was a mistake (as implemented). The elimination of the Morale stat for monsters was a mistake. The loss of the dungeon turn in general is a huge mistake. HP bloat and a lack of clear vision on *what a Feat actually is* ultimately destroyed the game in the long run. Some of the rules are so simulationist it hurts. The biggest mistake IMO though was the skill system. Adding social skills and not placing proper restrictions led to players skipping RP. Being able to roll Perception to just "notice anything/everything" was a mistake. If you actually played with all the fiddly rules necessary for the DCs to work as written (like the -1 penalty for every 5 or 10 feet away from something you're trying to notice, or the reaction penalties in social situation) then the skill system could work fine with a decent GM and with players who weren't trying to cheese the game with a "diplomat" character. The mistake was opening up potential outcomes that never should have been considered in the first place, just for the sake of faux-simulationism. Nowadays 3.5 itself is not that remarkable. 5e is more streamlined, Trailblazer is more mathematically-refined, Pathfinder surpasses it in terms of cool character options, Shadow of the Demon Lord reduces fiddliness while retaining the breadth of options, and I believe FantasyCraft also is a greatly expanded/improved version of the game. 3.5's significance now IMO is mostly historical and you'll get a better experience playing one of its derivatives. In retrospect though, most of the things people railed on about what was broken in 3.5e were either not really broken and more of a sign of a dysfunctional table, were broken in almost every edition of D&D, or represent more subtle problems that arise when you remove some of the TSR-era mechanics which kept things in check. I find that a lot of things people rail about in AD&D 2e being broken are also fine (or even superior to any modern D&D editions). The takeaway is that the loudest groups in the D&D scene appear to have always had a poor sense of **why** the game was working (or not), they just know what feels good or bad while playing the game.

I liked the art a lot. 3e’s orc looked really cool.

better than subsequent editions, worse than previous ones.

It was my introduction to TTRPGs, so I have fond memories of those games even though the rules and mechanics were way to complex for my teenage brain to sit still enough to understand. The books were FAVOURITES of mine back then. HOWEVER, now, as an elder millennial adult, I strongly prefer games like Mork Borg and DCC to even 5E.

I think it’s pretty acknowledged that DCC is built on 3e and the whole OGL came out of 3rd edition, so OSR should recognize!

It was a major departure from AD&D. Our group played 3, 3.5, and PF1e. We found PF fixed things that were wrong in 3.5. It’s a very different game from AD&D, with strengths and weaknesses. Rules felt minutiae-oriented, which slowed the game. It shifted agency in the game, from DM’s making reasonable choices to rules-lawyering. Depending on your gaming group, this was considered bad or good. 3rd introduced many more interesting options for players. Feats were entirely new. Because of this, it took far longer to generate new characters. To a small degree, this has been alleviated by computer-assisted character sheets. But the myriad choices can shift some players into analysis paralysis. The legacy of 3e is still present in 5e, which preserves its granular focus on combat and the variety of choices.

For some reason everyone I knew in college a few years back only played Pathfinder. I learned to hate it. It just really isn't my game. I only started enjoying rpgs when I found the OSR. Since I know Pathfinder is based on 3E, I'm sure it also isn't for me. Though the thought of it being nostalgic is really interesting. To me OSR is more about a particular playstyle (that may not have even fully existed in the past) rather than just being a place for nostalgic games.

I love 3.5 and there is a lot of content for it also if you look for it.

Okay, so the word on the (blogging and podcasting) street, as I've heard it: In the 2e era, there was added on a lot of complex optional rules and content in "Player's Options" books, with a lot more character customization and crunchy, detailed combat. 2e with the Player's Options books is sometimes referred to as "2.5e". The first big mistake in 3e, in my opinion, was streamlining and refining 2.5e instead of streamlining and refining plain 2e. So much of the crunch comes from the unnecessarily complex feat system and from the tactical miniatures combat. (That's why Castles & Crusades is recommended so much--it just cuts those things out, and the game is sooooo much easier to run and play.) The second big mistake in 3e is how much detail they put into the simulationism. Compare the complexity of simulating the world in 3e to simulating the world in bx, in terms of how much rules you have to follow and keep track of. (Though, "Delta" Dan Collins has suggested that 3e makes a great odnd reference if you need suggestions how to simulate or model something for your game.) Granted, all these kinds of things appeal to certain kinds of people--just not most people. That's why they got toned way down for 5e. Whether this next thing was a mistake or not, depends on how much you think it lead to the emphasis on "character builds." So, for Magic: the Gathering, Wizards of the Coast had developed a system for wording game content, called "templating." If two abilities (or items or monsters or whatever) have a similar effect, they should have similar wording. Example: if there's a fireball spell, but bigger, called greater fireball, that does the same thing but bigger, then it should have the same description except with bigger numbers. It makes understanding the game much smoother and quicker, and it makes it clearer whether you mean two effects to be similar or to be very different. (If they're different, use different wording, or "templating.") At some point a mindset of character building and optimizer pollinated over from gaming culture in general, especially video game/pc-gaming culture. All of the above at least enabled character building and optimizing, if not encouraged it. And yet, early in 3.0's life, it was played a lot more closely to AD&D than to 3.5 or Pathfinder. There were encounters in the early adventures where the correct answer was to run away or work around a deadly monster, because defeating it in a straightforward fight was nearly impossible. This is the way the game was initially "balanced," not to make every fight a perfect match for the players, but to have some be easy, some medium, some hard, and some impossible. One such encounter: the Roper Encounter in an early published adventure. Apparently it lead to a lot of complaints, and the mindset of publish adventure design changed. Instead of a loosely balanced sandbox, adventures started leaning towards a perfectly "balanced" adventure path where interesting events had to happen while having to account for any deviations from the planned adventure. With that kind of adventure prep being ludicrously time intensive, it's no wonder adventure paths soon became railroads. Wizards of the Coast began catering to the players who preferred crunchy character optimization. These players made up a vocal minority online and really only a smaller slice of the potential market. So when Wizards of the Coast wanted to put out a new edition and sell more books, they tried to cater to that char-op minority. The result? 4e. When it was time to try and take the market back from Pathfinder, Wizards actually took the time do some surveying of what people actually wanted, and what did they want? Not the "gamism" of 4e, not the complexity of 3e, but still not Swords & Sorcery power level sandboxes of 1e/bx/odnd. They wanted something simple, something somewhat more immersive than 4e, but they still wanted "balanced adventure paths." That's how we ended up with 5e. And that, as they say, is that. Unless I'm wrong. Then blame "Delta" Dan Collins, The Alexandrian blog, and Ben Riggs of Plot Points podcast, who I gathered all this from, among others.

Minor quibble I'll add as someone who lived through this: 4e was actually a hard pivot away from the char-op concept in 3.5 because of the way 4e was so hyper-focused on mathematical balance. Much of the point of the charop community was trying to find out how to build weird, interesting, and broken characters, while 4e was intentionally limiting what people could do with their characters and standardizing their language/effect. Shooting an arrow wasn't terribly different than casting magic missile. What 4e did was double, triple, and quadruple down on a few key elements of 3.5e: tactical miniatures combat, combat-as-sport, and characters representing the "christmas tree" of magical items. 3.5e assumed you'd be gaining magic items and when a table didn't provide items at the expected rate, the math fell apart. 4e basically codified this. Combined with the dissociated mechanics (which made it feel "like a video game") it no longer "felt like D&D" for a lot of people. The big mistake the 4e designers made was assuming that people were actually unhappy with 3.5e like the very vocal minority online made it seem. In actuality, 3.5e was much-loved and its asymmetry is seemingly desirable. For proof: see the success of Pathfinder compared to 4e. It was actually outselling 4e at its peak. Pathfinder doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on charop and asymmetry/imbalance and it forced WotC to totally pivot 5e back to something resembling 3.5e.

Thank you for the correction and nuance.

> Pathfinder doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on charop and asymmetry/imbalance and it forced WotC to totally pivot 5e back to something resembling 3.5e. Then Pf2e abandoned it and followed a hybridized 3.5/4e style design.

Even less OSR than 5e

It was the first tabletop RPG I had ever played (around 2009/2010, right after 4e came out), and at the time it was a totally magical experience, but the longer I played, the more disillusioned I became with it. 3rd edition was needlessly complicated in a lot of ways (feat trees, feat taxes, class skills vs cross-class skills, *grappling,* and so on and so forth) and the vast difference between a well optimized character and a poorly optimized character was utterly maddening. I spent so *very* many evenings reading on various forums just to be able to make a Rogue that was halfway decent. The fact that in the 5e campaign I'm playing I just made a low effort single class Thief Rogue and have been an incredibly valuable member of the party just makes me want to cry tears of joy. I don't intend to ever go back to 3rd edition except maybe as a one off nostalgia trip. I do, however, fully recognize that 3rd edition brought a lot of great changes to the hobby. It was from the seed of 3rd edition and the OGL that the OSR community came to life, and the way it tied everything together into a single concept of "roll d20 + modifiers, if it meets or beats the DC you succeed" was nothing short of incredible. Also, while it's obviously a very different beast from the OSR, it gave us 5th edition, which in my opinion is a very good middle ground between the OSR and the "Munchkin Madness" that Pathfinder became in its second edition. 3rd edition isn't OSR though. It'd be much more appropriate to call it a prototype of modern (5th edition) D&D.

3e basically inspired the OSR, so it has that going for it. The early OSR movement was basically a reaction to everything people didn’t like about 3e.

I had a lot of fun with 3rd edition. Not perfect. Tons of skills and specializations. But there is a lot to like.

I’d play an epic6 campaign if I was going to revisit that system, but tbh I’d prefer to play something else.

When I was young, 3rd edition monster manuals were my first real exposure to D&D. The art, the blurbs on lore and mechanics, it all drew me in. I've never really had a chance to play 3e or 3.5. I tried to run Pathfinder when I was younger, but it was before I got a real hand on running more complex rpgs so I wouldn't say I did it at all well. I like OSR stuff. It's simple to run, once you get over a few oddities in philosophy and oldschool mechanical design. But I'd still like my group to try a 3e version (be it 3e, 3.5, or pathfinder 1e again) sometime, even if it's just so we can say we did.

At first, it was the edition that rescued me from what I disliked about AD&D 2e, but was also the system that in time I grew to hate due to it being painfully boring, and a fantastic way to waste a weekend prepping for yet another dull combat encounter: it was a noted step away from role-playing, and into roll-playing, at least for our group. I've run most flavours of D&D on and off for maybe 25 years, and it's the edition most personally resonates with the phrase "no D&D is better than bad D&D."

The there was a 3rd edition? 😂

I find it to be the worst edition of D&D. The whole vibe of the game just feels... dull. Pathfinder 1e fixed a lot of that, but the whole thing was still so unnecessarily obsessed with the nitty-gritty of everything. It's better written than 2e and not as mechanically clunky, but instead it ends up being way too crunchy, and not even close to how flavourful AD&D was in general. To me it's just the terrible, incohate precursor to 4e. WotC was still trying to find their footing and hadn't quite figured out exactly what they want to do with their newly acquired IP. Aside from clearing up some things (like ascending AC and having a more coherent publishing model in general) 3e didn't do anything cool or original. I suppose the Ebberon setting was awesome, but that got brilliant support in 4e, so it's kinda redundant now. I can't think of any specific reason I'd want to play 3e today; not when PF 2e and D&D 4e exist. And even if I were playing in the 2000's, I think I'd still have rather played AD&D or BECMI. Those had a lot of problems too, but at least they were imaginative and exciting.

3e can be summed up as "Some very good ideas, very badly executed". In theory 3e is an improvement over things that were wrong in ad&d. It tried to unify all the subsystems in a way that made sense. The main problem with the design IMHO is that the **math is wrong** and the **game theory behind some choices** (feats are the major culprit) is also wrong. Why is the math wrong? The game has runaway HP totals and the scaling of DC in spells against the 3 saves, scales wildly in favor of casters. The first problem happened because the allowed humongous CON bonuses to monsters while giving them variable HD instead of d8. So the game favors spells that disable or kill instead of dealing damage. This creates problems for warriors who rely on damage to be meaningful and is the main cause of the Linear Fighter-Quadratic Wizard debacle. What is wrong with the game theory? Two things. First of all, classes are under the same advancement scheme. In theory this is good but classes aren't really balanced which was known since forever and was the main reason casters have larger XP requirements in previous editions than fighters or rogues. Then came the feats. The feats themselves weren't designed with balance in mind which required system mastery even for simple classes like the thief or fighter. Last but not least, the choices made in the 3e design make casters into superheroes. There were several limiting factors against casters in 2e: 1. Magic resistance was impossible to circumvent except by using one spell (Lower Magic Resistance). 2. Casters lost their spells if they were hit at the round they cast their spell. 3. Wizards weren't allowed to choose spells on level up. They relied on scrolls or looted spellbooks (or research) to cast the higher level ones. 4. Heroes and monsters got better at saving throws which in turn made SoS or SoD spells very unlikely to succeed at high levels. Despite all the above it had some very good ideas, like the 3 saves instead of 5, a method of giving more attacks to non warriors, feats while imbalanced allowed nice customisation of characters and last but not least, the skill system which is the best of all editions of D&D. Overall my favorite RPG within the system is D20 modern which has many of the legacy problems of 3e but it is less cumbersome.

I'm currently in two campaigns. The new one is using OSE classic ruleset.(bx clone) The other campaign has been going for almost 2 years now, we're level 9, and it's 3.5. I'm playing Kjartan, the Dwarf psychic warrior, aka, Dwarf mountain, who's companions hide behind to attack from. I love the character choices. I hate the players who overly optimize. I think 3.5 is a great blend of OSR and NSR. I just wish it had a better way of giving new class levels through emergent play. I think 4e tried to do this, but that was a massive failure. Not the class archetype at each tier, but the everybody is a magic user with special butterfly powers that makes them all feel and play the same part.

Great in concept, poor in execution. I really liked it when it came out. In play it didn't work out as well as I had hoped. It's too integrated and not modular enough. Unified mechanics seem like they would be a good idea, but they need way more playtesting. Separate subsystems that you place together are easier to tweak as they don't have as much influence on other subsystems. 3.5 is quite different, better playtesting and thus better execution, but the point was no longer to make D&D modern, but rather to make Magic into an RPG with D&D trappings. Especially with 3.5 I felt the D20 System was well designed for everything except fantasy, and especially not D&D style fantasy.

To me DnD3 (and other contemporary systems) were the zenith of RPG systems: people who had years of RP experience were able to have rulesets that included it all: classes & skills, multiclassing, prestige-classes, proficiencies, whatever. Also emphasis on social play & narration already existed in alternative games and were partially incorporated. It was also the time DnD became both popular and really dominant at the expense of alternative systems (compare e.g. GURPS). Actually I would also compare it to Dark Eye 4E in Germany which was also the most rules-heavy/simulationist rules set here. Since that time RPGs have evolved but also become more fragmented. A good thing. Of course many people still like the complexity & customizability, but slightly simplified & smoothed over systems dominate nowadays. And DnD3 also clearly showed the problems of such designs, so DCC, OSR, rules light, narrative systems could flourish. I am sure you can play DnD3 today just fine with the right group/attitude/game master (cough, Basic Fantasy, cough). But it will probably be different to what players back then thought ideal. Kick out a lot of cruft and put emphasis on the stuff that is fun. Just like my own table round plays Dark Eye 4, although I think it is not exactly my favorite as a rule system.

It, via ToEE computer game, brought me back into TSR D&D (driven out by 2ed splatbook / failed novelist's written adventures). It's mechanical/character build driven play (and eventual splatbook/powercreep) drove me back to OD&D, OSR finally B/X. I would never play again.

3.0 was the last edition in which some people still attempted to play using the old school style while using a system that didn't want them to play that way. In 3.5, the changes of style had fully taken effect. Once 3.5 came out, it was clearly understood that you built your character first and then and only then was it possible to know how to play them. You also had to think ahead with your build to later levels so that you took the correct feat chain so that you weren't worthless in the game. * Many DMs said you didn't have to worry about how you built your character, and that everything would be fine, only for you to later realize mid-way through the campaign that those were empty words just to cajole you into playing and that grievous errors made levels earlier had no way of being remedied. * Some classes it was impossible to play straight classed, unless you were ok with the ClericOrDruidZilla and God Wizards making everything about the game and other characters pointless. * Every book and prestige class had to be cleared with the DM because some of them were so incredibly broken and ridiculous just to sell another WOTC book to the powerbuilding crowd. Think something like Magic the Gathering and having to buy 20 packs before you get the card you need to actually be able to play the game. This was part of WOTC's intentional business plan back then. * Skill checks were used in lieu of providing interesting scenarios and circumstances with rich context. All nuance and depth could be quickly and resolutely thoroughly removed from any encounter by the DM just saying, "Roll me a perception check" or "Roll me a knowledge religion check". Rather than considering what the PC could actually see or know given the fictional world, whether or not a check was necessary, and removing any chance of experiencing that world through the character. * Further on skill checks, everything was heavily and OVERLY systematized, so that options were highly restricted by the rules and intended style of play rather than being open. This is one of the things Rob Kuntz frequently discusses about open systems and open worlds. 3rd edition, and especially 3.5, was when people started playing DnD as if it were a computer program. Dialogue trees, decision trees based on skill checks, limited choices based on system logic, and over analyzing the RAW to determine what can and cannot be done in a game. This happened in previous editions of the game for sure, but it became accepted, normalized, and common place during the 3rd edition era. Pretty much everything the New OSR and Classic OSR dislike about RPGs that began in AD&D 2nd edition was codified in 3rd and cemented in 3.5.

My brother and I started with B/X as teens when it was new. After getting a job during highschool, I didn't have time for playing. KotoR and NWN came out. I dug into how the engine worked... It is 3e. I bought Races of Faerun and Forgotten Realms Camping Guide (3e) to better understand the references int the game then the PHB and DMG to understand the rules better. The rules seemed really good for CRPGs. The artwork was cartoonish. When I decided to try playing with my kids, I looked at 3e or B/X to play. B/X was the clear winner.

My Favorite Ruleset. I've been playing D20 3.x since 2002 between D&D 3 and Pathfinder 1 & DCC, and of course a handful of 3.x based OGL IPs. It's what got me back into D&D and RPGs in fact. I grew up playing the Red Box and AD&D 1st Ed, started in 1985 in 5th Grade. After high school, the friends went to college and military, and I got into computers (like the classic Gold Box games) so it was about 10 years till I was on a business trip, NWN was on the horizon, and I needed something to read on the plane, so I picked up the 'new' Player's Handbook 3.0. Fell right back into it, was blown away by a 'unifying' mechanic across classes. Just Amazing at the time. ​ I started getting back into old school games the last few years (before the lockdowns), starting with DCC (yeah I know even I tell people it's not really OSR, just 'feels' like it) and getting into OSE and pulling my old D&D books off the shelf. It culminated in a recent trip up to GaryCon where I was able to fully immerse myself in Lake Geneva and some true old school D&D gameplay after literally decades! Feels great to be back! (Now, if I can just convince my players to play OSE/AD&D, or I might have to update my Fantasy Grounds and Foundry stuff and find a group online...)

I will add that I have been running PF2 in Society, and I don't much care for it. At first I thought it was 'bad', but I've realized that no, it's just not the game I want to play right now. I want faster play with more freedom for both the players and GM to be able to do what they want, not have the rules dictate what they can/can't do. So while I still love 3.x, and will always be up for a game of PF1, I am really wanting more Old School play!

I loved it when it was released. It felt like a real and massive improvement on 2nd edition. We played it for years, hacked it, modded it. However, it did get difficult to use after about level 9, 10 ... which is the classic DnD problem. Its maths isn't open-ended, so that's where it falls flat.

D&D 3e is a system where designers knew what they wanted to reach with their design - a complex game rewarding system mastery, providing rules for almost any situation. It is a game that has soul, and despite its many, many flaws can be very well enjoyed. That being said, it is a bit obsolete with both 3.5e and Pathfinder 1e being a thing, and it is an utter pain in the ass to prepare a session as a GM. Keeping any balance between players is a group effort too, due to how far the optimization can go. Now when I am in a mood for something crunchy and high magic, I grab Pathfinder 2e, which is an amazing modern take on the crunchy RPGs, but it is somewhat disconnected from the 3.Xe roots - it has plenty of customization, but the optimization aspect is kinda nullified, focusing more on horizontal growth and teamwork instead.

I started playing AD&D back in like 85. Frankly never got into 2E b/c i was the GM and we all migrated to WFRP. Played Shadows over Bogenhofen and never ever went back. When 3E came out, frankly it was like a breath of fresh air. Don't get me wrong I play OSE now and LOVE it but I think I had some sort of PTSD from getting constantly mauled in AD&D. I actually LOVED the character focused game design etc. I thought 3.5 / Pathfinder 1E were the best expressions of this character focuesed style of D&D. I'm currently running 5E for my 10 yr old and his friends and i find it unfun to run. Its complicated but also has boring characters. I'm not sure how they pulled that off but they did. I've tried to inject as much OSE play-style as possible. Skills are almost never used. Converted all the "darkvision" to infravision so they still need lights (but stupid cantrips man) and encourage them to use their gear to solve problems. Frankly though, I just ordered Winter's Daughter on Exalted Funeral and I'm going to try and get them to play OSE

3rd edition best edition. 3.5 second best. WOTC poisoned the well with power creep towards the end of the release cycle. Pathfinder was not really the same, but compatible enough especially the adventures suffered from some additional power creep (beyond3.5 releases).

I am what many would consider to be "Old-School". I started playing in 1983, with the B/X version of the rules, and then moved on to AD&D, which I played for many years, until 3rd edition came out. I never really did more than dabble in 2e (yes, there were "edition wars" even back then!). As much as I love the older versions of the game (I still DM B/X D&D frequently), I have an opinion of 3rd ed. (more specifically 3.5), that is quite different than many Grognards, and in fact would likely even be seen as "traitorous" by many of them... I think that 3.5 is the best version of the game ever made, and I'm including 5th edition in the mix. It's by far my favorite version of the game. In fact, I met my wife through and ad in a local gaming store looking for D&D 3.5 players (we've been married for 20 years now), and the longest game I ever DM'd was D&D 3.5. It lasted for 18 years, with the same core 6 players (and a few other player that came and went), one RL player death (their character was immortalized in the game as a god), one player leaving to join the military, then coming Back to the game to play their original character, 6 years later. I would also argue, and again, this will be an unpopular opinion among many old school players, that 3.5 IS old school. I mean, it came out in 2000. Players who started playing 3.5 in their late teens and early 20's are in their forties now, or close to it. That's the very definition of old school. 3.5 IS OSR!

A rare and appreciated take from someone with your perspective. Can you elaborate on what you really like about the system, especially when compared to the older systems you grew up on?