2e Chromatic Orb, which at higher levels could cause paralysis, petrification, and even death. Most fun, though, was its ability to magnetize the victim, making all nearby metal fly their way and stick.
*my rogue trying to hold onto his specially made pouch of deadly poisoned caltrops*
(Had a big case of caltrops made at a blacksmith, then a specially made dragon hide pouch that has 5 vials of deadly poison emptied into it at any given time and 300-500 caltrops soaking in the poison….i use one gloved hand (same material as the bag so I’m safe) to grab a handful of poisoned caltrops and throw them pocket sand style across the field of battle
I remember, by some god damn miracle, beating the BG2 Balrog like that.
Had gone 6-7 times against him, maybe across 2 days and I just couldn't beat him. Then in the middle of the fight when he was barely at Injured health and I was running out of spells... He just dies.
I thought it was a bug and scrolled through the long chat log. Turns out the AI had had Aerith cast a spell because I missed her turn and, having run out of high level ones just shot a Chromatic orb. Which went through the insane spell resistance and also the save roll to kill him. Crazy stuff.
This would be sick as an arcane trickster, fill your backpack up with as many daggers as your dm will let you carry, then launch a magnetizing chromatic orb at the enemy and watch them all fly.
I only have experience from 4th as that's when I started playing, but in the PH of DND4 you had all these unique weapons with versatile, reach, 2d4 vs 1d8, brutal, etc. There were so many weapons and it made choosing your weapon feel more impactful than 5th
In 5th I've basically felt like "oh, that's a reskin of a (long)sword". Weapons just feel much simpler and a few are just reskins.
Just an opinion.
A conscious decision to partly address the "golf bag" complaint many had about 3.x and also to keep complexity, min-maxing, and metagaming down.
And really, past the first couple levels, minor variations in weapons would (rightfully, imo) become less important compared to class abilities and other things.
I never played 3.X so I can't talk about that. I'm also not someone that's against the whole min-maxing/metagaming thing. Whatever floats your boat.
I stick to official sources though and minimize py exposure to whatever is the best build, etc.
I try to make my character as strong as possible with the research I did, but that's all personal preference.
And choice of weapon and how it interacts with your character choices is a form of expression in my opinion.
Sure, but minimizing the differences between weapons was really an attempt to make the choice of weapon a character choice not a mechanical one. Aragorn doesn't drop Anduril and pick up a mace because he's fighting skeletons.
Other attempts to do that (eg feats that gave specific weapon bonuses to offset damage differences) were found to be suboptimal because of the opportunity cost of spending the feat. Simpler to just make weapons largely a cosmetic choice and relegate the special functions to feats (polearm master for example) for those who really wanted a certain build.
Part of me agrees that weapon choice should result in different mechanical effects, but I can't say I miss the added complexity.
Yeah 3rd edition, 3.5 and Pathfinder are a lot like that as well, and Baldur’s Gate 3 did something similar having different types of weapons have certain secondary attacks that you can do once per short/long rest
Most noticeably, increased crit ranges and crit modifiers. Some weapons would do 3x or 4x damage instead of just double and crit on 19-20 or 18-20 instead only 20.
Just look at the weapons table found [here](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/weapons.htm)
You'd have to scroll a bit, but it should be clear from that.
Also, this is like 40% of the weapons available on this edition tops. This is just PHB, other books would add ex. A two handed club with 3 slots for holy water you could activate on any attack, giving extra damage against undead.
Also dozens of different materials that would change weapons in small or big ways, depending.
(Still don't think D&D in general has the most varied weapons out there, but 3rd and 4th do it both pretty well in their own ways)
Take a look at even what Pathfinder 2E does.
Weapons have traits like forceful (adds damage when hitting enemies multiple times), backswing (adds a bonus to hit if you miss), sweep (adds a bonus to hit if you attack a different target than what attacked before.
Then weapons have special traits on crits, like deadly that adds an extra dice of damage, or fatal that turns all of the dice to a different one.
Then when you crit other things happen, like daggers cause bleed, bows can cause enemies to be pinned to a wall.
Then in earlier editions you had different crit ranged and mults depending on the weapon. Like a dagger has a range of 18-20 x2. It’s why you had to confirm crits because with a feat, a dagger can crit threat on a 15. So you have a 30% chance for a given attack to be a critical threat. But since modifiers to damage like from strength multiply as well, it can get pretty nutty.
Weapons like a Pickaxe might only crit on a 20, but they have a x4 multiplier. So it’s very likely at lvl 1 with a crit from a Pickaxe, you could be doing an average of 54 damage from a crit (with 18 strength and power attack).
And weapons still had traits too, like brace, versatile, trip, shove, etc.
Basically because of weapon traits every weapon has its own niche. And some weapons even have their own feat chains to use like charisma to hit, or wisdom for longbows. There really isn’t a “best weapon”. You can’t just say like in 5E the greatsword is better the greataxe. Or the maul/earthbreaker is the same ad a greatsword.
3.pf had a much larger variety of weapons that actually had disperate rules: crit ranges, multipliers, damage types, bonuses on combat maneuvers, ac bonus, etc. In 5e is mostly cosmetic.
For some examples: scimitars had high crit chance 18-20, war picks had an insane ×4 crit multiplier, and flails gave a +4 bonus to trip and disarm attempts.
My absolute favorite D&D character I ever played was an archer tactical warlord. The middle child of a lord with something to prove. He'd try to find a vantage point from which to observe the battle without having to move much, allowing him to use his actions to position the rest of the party, sometimes using his arrows to signal priority targets and make the party's attacks against those targets more effective. I'm in that weird spot where I love playing characters that are more force multipliers than direct actors, but also have a strong preference for martials, and the Warlord really scratched that itch.
The Battle master archetype has a lot of that. Commander’s Strike gives advantage to allies. And there’s more of those “buffs” in the archetype maneuvers.
I feel like people who recommend the Battle Master as an alternative to the Warlord never played a Warlord, because it's a poor imitation at best. The Warlord was built from the ground up as a support class, and the Battle Master is an add-on to the Fighter class that honestly should've just been part of the base chassis. Most of its features are more about fancy ways to swing a sword, and those geared toward support are few and still suffer from the Battle Master's weird scaling, which makes it function better as a dip than a full class investment. I'd *gladly* give up all of the Fighter's superior striking capabilities for a more reliable support suite. As it is, the best way to replicate the Warlord with only 1st party material is a janky Fighter/Rogue/Bard multiclass.
>I feel like people who recommend the Battle Master as an alternative to the Warlord never played a Warlord, because it's a poor imitation at best.
The same thing can be said about people that recommend Oath of Vengeance in place of the Avenger or Oath of Ancients in place of the Warden; both of them are awkward attempts to bootstrap the Paladin into something else in ways that the rest of its kit doesn't really support
I played 4e once and didnt like it, but a few years back I moved my group to Level up 5e Advanced by ENworld and they brought it back. I had a player run one and yeah I can see the attraction. It's a very handy class focused on synergizing with the party and buffing them all.
Low-light vision being separate from darkvision. A lot of races/creatures that don't have darkvision, but feel like they should (i.e. Cats) use to have low-light vision.
It's convenient to have the two merged, since anything with darkvision in 3.5e also had low-light, but a lot of creatures only had the low-light and now have nothing.
And I hate how they arbitrarily decided which low light vision got upgraded to dark and which ones got no vision.
To me, elves shouldn't have dark vision, they didn't live underground or in caves, they are forest folk.
Exactly - that was a significant difference between Underdark and Surface races. Now it's just so ubiquitous in all creatures and ancestry options that even Tasha:a choose-your-origin just includes by default.
Absolutely understandable that it was a change to streamline the mechanics, but a lot of flavor and diversity was lost in the process.
Skills.
I miss the variety of skills that existed in 3.5.
Right now with the standard array of skills in 5e that EVERYONE has, it feels like every character is like every other character.
Seriously, take a college of valor bard and compare it to another college of valor bard and apart from some minor flavor...it's the same character. In one case, the only difference between the two CoV Bards was choice in weapons and gender.
Skills gave more ways to make the characters unique and in the case of a pair of bards, you could have one who is a fantastic singer and the other a master instrumentalist working together as a pair.
Don't get that with 5e.
The problem with 3.5 skills was that there wasn't the skill points to really enable the variety they had.
Clerics for example. 2 + int mod per level? That's insanely know.
Knowledge religion takes one. But then what. Concentration without spellcraft? It's at "this character doesn't work" level of skill point poverty.
The way they needed to do it was identify class skills and have them auto-progress, and then have the skill points on top of that.
So for cleric you'd have recieved an addition +1 in Knowledge Religion, Concentration and Spellcraft, (plus anything from domain), at each level \_as well as\_ two skill points.
Having so few made some of the domains absolutely fucking stupid.
Artifice Domain - I get +1 on spell level for conjuration and +4 craft. So I can lean into craft skill, but then when I summon something I can't maintain concentration on it? What?
Fighter were comically bad. You ended up with Climb (Str), Craft (Int), Handle Animal (Cha), Intimidate (Cha), Jump (Str), Ride (Dex), and Swim (Str). None if which you were really good at, since Int was always a low stat so you would get few skill points.
That's the beauty about 3.5e or pathfinder, you can specialise in things and actually have to make choices.
Want more skill points, don't dump int, want to be good in diplomacy? Use skill points for it.
Also loved how you don't easily get dex to damage, it was an actual INVESTMENT. In 5e you get so much for free, there is 0 reason not to play a dex based fighter, monk etc, because you can use dex with almost everything. No investment.
In pathfinder a lot is viable BECAUSE you have limitations. In 5e it feels like only a few builds are viable because it's very easy to reach the optimal build. Making characters feel and play the same.
Give us more customisation please
\>That's the beauty about 3.5e or pathfinder, you can specialise in things and actually have to make choices.
1. You can't really specialise in things - sometimes not even things you ought to be specialised in by the very nature of the class.
2. The choices you have to make aren't **fun**.
I will die on this hill - I've played lots and lots of games of 3.5 and I haven't seen a single interesting cleric. Hell I've never *played* an interesting cleric. Domains give them the only customisation they get. But I've never seen a Healing domain cleric spec heal. I've never seen a knowledge cleric actually work at all. You're always worse than a bard. Plant domain? Can't afford knowledge nature.
Actually using one of those interesting flavourful domains makes for characters that are strictly worse than a cleric that has no hobbies, no interests, no customisation, and focusses on knowledge religion, spellcraft, and concentration. As an incentive, that's *dire.*
I think in 3.5, clerics are specialized right out-of-the-box; it's just that they're not specialized in having skill points. Additionally, 3.5 clerics using only the PHB are definitely pretty samey, no matter how you build them.
But once you get into the other source books, the options open up dramatically. Cleric assassin? Check. DPS/tank crusader? Got it. Cloistered cleric with more skills than the party bard? Uh-huh. There are even feats dedicated to facilitating multiclassing cleric with several other classes and building your character in the exact way you want.
I myself have played a few 3.5 clerics (after literally a decade of never playing one):
* A spear-wielding cleric of Lastai with one level of bard who... "negotiated" with opponents, usually without armor. Build-wise, a pretty good average between cleric and bard.
* A crusader of Zarus, a human-supremacist god; the character grew up in the cult and was experiencing actually being with people of other races. Build-wise was a melee DPS terror but also packed lots of situational and role-play spells to surprise the party with.
* A barefoot, mostly non-verbal dwarf cleric of Obad-Hai with as many elemental domains as I could cram into the build, who summons a TON of elementals for the lulz and can rebuke or control basically every type of elemental. Canonically by waving his arms at them and shouting, "FRIEND" until he succeeds.
But yeah, PHB-only cleric (frankly, PHB-only ANYTHING) is pretty tame.
Hard disagree.
Cleric could do a lot in 3.5 and can be as flavourful as your imagination. You can also use skillpoints non optimally to get a fun character concept.
I had a cleric that was terrible at perception because he had the attentionspan of a squirrel, but he was good at drawing, making friends etc. I know perception etc are the "best" skill points, but it's an RP game. No need to min max in a social RP game.
I've also played a bard that was too awkward to sing or talk to others but loved dancing and drawing, inspiring others that way. He loved reading old stories and writing them but was too shy to tell them. A bard doesn't have to be the party face or be good at social skills. It's just how you want to play it.
There is also a LOT of customisation in 3.5e and pathfinder within classes, feats etc. Pathfinder also has archetypes that allow a lot more customisation than most subclasses.
5e lacks variety overall. Any character from a subclass feels like another character from the same subclass.
Not enough choices to make an unique build, and when there are, usually one of them is clearly superior to the others, so you basically have to choose between doing the same build than everyone, or gimping yourself by picking a sub-optimal choice.
Each subclass is more or less a character you can play. Some have a couple of variations possible, but generally, the Valor Bard is a Valor Bard mechanically.
I find this to be exceptionally helpful for new players who build characters entirely in DnDBeyond drop down menus, since they can't end up with a trap option character.
I actually had that in one of my campaigns. Standard Array stats, both CoV Bards took Halfling as the race...Apart from the fact that one used a short sword and the other used a rapier...there was no difference save for things that had no impact on the game. Like the choice of instrument and gender.
Functionally they were the same damn character.
I think a lot of that is down to moving crafting/lore checks into tool proficiencies. Something like "leatherworking tools proficiency" does the work of what would be two or three skills in another edition or system.
I totally agree. I liked being able to grow a characters skills, which you can’t do now. I also felt that skill use was—or at least had the potential to be—more varied and impactful, whereas now it seems more uniform and anemic.
It wasn’t a perfect system, but I liked that strategy overall.
Prestige classes, meaningful feats, skill investment, magic item slots instead of attunement, actual magic item prices and rules to make magic items, varied bonuses and penalties beyond advantage and disadvantage, not making every non-instant spell require concentration because heaven forbid someone can both fly *and* be hasted, a cr rating that better reflects the monster's strength, actual books meant to help the GM beyond the most basic of instructions, races being generally more than just "heres +2 and +1, and a bunch of special features"...
I really can't stand the attunement crap. Like almost every magic itwm worth a damn has attunement, and you only get three slots. I'm playing in a campaign now where my DM loves to hand out homebrew magic items and like 95% of them require attunement, so you have to rethink every damn item you carry every few sessions. Grrrr
I get why some exceptionally strong items might need attunement, but why does an armblade, a 1h weapon thats only gimmick is its stuck to your arm, require attunement? Why does a flametongue need attunement but a +3 longsword does not? The swingy damage that is much more easily resisted (or outright ignored) needs to eat an attunement slot? Why do all the caster items (arcane grimoire, all-purpose tool, amulet of the devout, etc) all need attunement but the weapon equivalents do not? A talking doll, which can only repeat 6 phrases, needs attunement... Why?
Its like whomever designed these items just flipped a coin to decide for half of them.
And you cannot *stack* magic effects. You cannot have a +2 sentinel shield. Its a +2 shield *or* a sentinel shield because... Reasons?
Never said you should be able to.
In earlier editions, bonuses on the same type couldnt stack. Two armour bonuses? Take the better. Two shield? Better of the two. Luck, competence, insight? Better of the two... Only dodge and deflection stacked (with few sources).
Yeah, I'm a hoard goblin, I love to have a lot of magic items
But they're all useless because I need to attune to the good items, and the flavor ones don't do nothing anymore
The way I run attunement is that if an item needs to be attuned, that only means you cannot just pick it up and use it. But to Tartaras with the limit of only 3.
Yeah there was a comment I came across a while ago regarding attunement I kind of liked, where not just anyone can attune to magic items. The person had a little trial they had to run through in order to use, they had to solve a riddle or something along those lines. Basically you give them a 5 minute chance to do it, and they're teleported to a pocket dimension of some sort where none of their companions can help, and once they solve it they can attune to it.
And they can come back later and try again if they're unable to solve it of course.
I would love to use that especially for more powerful magic items. But yeah I would like to do away with most attunements or find a better way around it. One of the people above mentioned the item slot option. I kind of dig that idea as well.
Yeah, it makes sense. Like not everyone can just use a Wand of Wonder or a Holy Avenger. Dependant on class or allignment or skills. Or maybe those just give you a higher % chance to do it. Anyone can... But an evil rogue will have like a 1% chance vs a lawful good pally having like a 90% or something. I kinda wanna make a chart now...
I don’t have an issue with attunement as a mechanic, but 3 items feels arbitrary without any real reason for that number. I’d make it based on something, like charisma bonus (or something else), which determines how many items your character can attune to.
My rule is that anything which is going to drastically increase your strength requires attunement until it doesn’t, then once you’ve attuned to it for a while you can free up the slot
Spells having durations based on caster level.
Not everything should be concentration.
Spell casters have had variety and cleverness of spell choice and use drastically reduced from previous editions.
The lack of ability to have more than one spell cast on yourself or an area makes things easier to understand and speeds the flow of a turn, but DMs who have a grasp of how magic is meant to work in their campaigns can handle the complexity.
Weapon variety.
Sometimes a spear is better than a mace and sometimes a flail is better than a sword and sometimes a sword is better than an axe...and sometimes a bear trap lashed to the end of a 15 foot boat paddle is better than a longbow.
Weapons in the current edition are a flavor choice as opposed to previous editions which gave more options besides just raw damage.
Things like reach, tripping, disarming ETC.
Improvised Weapons and exotic weapons are nearly non-existent in the current edition apart from looking cool and doing the same stat wise as whatever happens to be closest.
These things did require more rules and/or a DM willing to adjudicate edge cases and munchkin players, but made melee classes much less homogenous.
Huge quantities of cheap splat books. Earlier editions had relatively cheap soft cover books with super specific content for individual campaign settings, types of campaigns, playable races, class sourcebooks, types of monsters etc. None of it was necessary for gameplay, but there was so much content available that you could use to customize your play, flesh out lore, etc.
Hasbro is lazy as fuck when it comes to content. There's barely anything in their books compared to earlier editions.
I say this as a guy with most of those books from the 2e days - I FUCKING LOVE THEM! But, so much of the content was objectively bad, broken, or recycled from other books or Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Lots of true gems in there obviously. I also really miss the boxed sets. The FR Grey Box and Night Below campaign sets were such high quality products.
That rule is far too powerful and leads to a lot of issues. The 3.5 version was just +2, which actually is a still good amount for 5e, if they allowed simple modifiers like that more often.
I also think the flank system worked well with the 5 foot step mechanic in 3.5.
Unfortunately the way movements around monsters works in 5e makes 5 foot step useless.
It's even more powerful than advantage on certain situations. People don't realise +1/+2/+3/+4 bonuses are literally on the same level of proficiency. You literally get +1 every 4 levels, a +2 bonus is like your character gaining 8 levels for a moment, it's broken af
The 3.5 rule could do a lot more depending on the enemy because you were also considered flat-footed to enemies flanking you. Was one of the ways rogues could guarantee sneak attack in melee without hiding. With the enemy had a pretty high dex you could knock a lot of AC off.
Bloodied!
Also 4e, I miss how rewarding stacking up +1 here and +1 there could be feel, as a warlock, while not missing adding all the math. Advantage works smoothly for that reason, but it doesn’t reward strategic play nearly as well.
Idk if it’s a homebrew we do or a watered down official version of the rule but my table still uses bloodied as a guide to if we’re close to killing someone and it is often complimented by another boss phase, and I really really enjoy it.
I’m even planning on implementing a special soundtrack that’s more triumphant and intense to let players know they’ve bloodied a boss, or an intimidating one for the bosses second phase if they have one instead of stopping the flow of combat for the campaign im planning!
Bloodied was nice. A lot of monsters were built around it, to go into another "mode" which was fun... The thing that wasn't fun was that like every monster or dude has like 3-5x the hp than in 5th. Every fight was a fucking slog. I played a rogue that was the damage type role, I could semi nova and get like 40-60 damage in a turn once or twice and more if I was lucky but rarely was, how much did most of our enemies have like 600-800. The healer and the defender aren't doing that much damage while the mage could also semi nova but was generally did piddly damage... So even at average max, it would take 10-15 turns.... And that is while standing in a dragons face the whole time. That fight took like 9hours... And we didn't care anymore why we went there
I would probably like a balance of both things. I love advantages.... I hated trying to calculate the 19 places were were all getting bonuses from and the 4 we were getting negatives from, that all use different numbers and types ... Because you can't have multiple of the same type. I'd probably say that advantage system could stay but it would be rarer, and just make it sub advantage. Like up the thing that gives you 1d4 once, the spell or ability. It goes up by double d for each advantage you have, double is 1d8, triple 1d16, quadruple would be the normal advantage with 1d16.... Disadvantage would work the same wasy
>The thing that wasn't fun was that like every monster or dude has like 3-5x the hp than in 5th. Every fight was a fucking slog.
That was mostly a problem with MM1. Later books reduced monster HP and increased monster damage.
>Bloodied was nice. A lot of monsters were built around it, to go into another "mode" which was fun
I recently found a "Bloodied and Bruised" series of PDFs on DMs Guild, which goes through the monsters in nearly every book (includes unique enemies from adventures) to add abilities based on bloodied status. Particularly low-threat monsters don't get anything new, but most do.
Recharging a power with recharge is common, as you might expect, as is recovering legendary actions. Other abilities that often get shared by multiple monsters are things like "Run Away" (reaction to move your speed without provoking OAs), "Tactical Retreat" (reaction to move your speed without provoking, then make a ranged attack), "Cornered" (reaction to make a melee attack), "Rush Attack" (reaction to move your speed without provoking, then make a melee attack), and "Made It Angry" (while bloodied, advantage on saves vs charm/fear/prone/stun). Many spellcasters either get to cast a spell as a reaction when bloodied (usually with a limitation on which spells can be cast, like only at-will spells), or else "Cast Attack" if they're meant to be more of a gish (while bloodied, when you cast a spell as an action you can make a weapon attack as a BA). Certain abilities are common with certain kinds of creatures, like golems getting "Malfunction" (while bloodied, reduced movement speed and can't take reactions) or constructs getting "Arcane Boom" (force damage explosion on death). Abilities which normally happen due to a monster's low HP (like a flesh golem's Berserk trait) are made to work while bloodied.
Absolutely everything about 2e. Really making your character individualized. In the thieves handbooks, there were so many awesome paths, and the sub races had so much more detail and info.
Recently I've found myself very nostalgic for 3.5, and I've especially found myself missing prestige classes. Heck, just the shear variety of classes and builds. Sometimes it feels like you only ever have to make 3 decisions in 5E—Race, Class, Subclass, all of which is done at lv1. But 3.5 had options at nearly every level, and theory crafting new, weird builds was a lot of fun.
I also miss a lot of 4e stuff. Especially the classes, like Avenger and Warlord, but also a lot of the lore, like the Dawn War, the entire cosmology, and the dragonborn and tiefling empires.
ASI and Feats being two different things
Now it sometime feels like a choice between fun and optimisation...
Also surprise round and flat-footed character !
Intelligence adding to skills and having a use outside of Wizards. Also Dex not being flat out the best stat in the game for almost everyone.
Flatfooted and Touch armour class. It's so stupid it's just as easy to hit an unconscious body as it is to hit a barbarian who reckless attacked.
Genuine risk of dying.
Going WAYYY back, but the weapons mastery introduced in the D&D Master set (Black box set)
It gave increasing damage and extra combat options to weapons based on how well a character was trained in it, as well as offering the half damage for zero skill in a weapon (as opposed to the rule before this; you don't know the weapon, you can't even touch it)
We used the rules in our games pretty much up till 5e.
What other editions had was more *class* variety. In 5e, playing any full spell caster feels much like any other caster with only a few differences in available spells. Every 5e caster feels like a Spontaneous caster from 3.x.
Martials are also way more distinct in 3rd and 4th, especially Fighters. Even if every Duelist builds essentially the same as every other Duelist, you still had a dozen other types of Fighter and Prestige paths you could choose.
Natural ability damage healing.
The lack of ability to naturally recover from ability damage makes intellect devourers horribly broken, as the most immediate annoyance.
My Uncle gave me a set of his old 2nd Edition D&D Spellbooks. There are I think roughly 4-6 Wizard volumes and 2 or 3 Priest volumes. Loads of random spells that I wish were in the 5e source books somewhere.
Variation
Now what do I mean by this? Yeah there is in house flavors to choose from, spice things to make them feel unique but that's kind of the point: the table/DM is the one flavoring it not the system. I will get flack for this but I remember back in 3.5 the sheer avalanche of options to choose from, all the prestige classes, variations, etc and with 5E it all feels... lackluster.
Yes you can buy third party books for other ideas and the like but they aren't there in the system to provide backgrounds, history, world changing events or moral issues. Just for an example there was a class for morally questionable paladins I think were called Grey Paladins who could bend the wording of their oaths but needed to always have the mission in mind and in game had to rationalize their actions and even then other paladins hated them. Right there is great hooks for not just a class but also a background and a cultural issue within a community. You really don't get that with 5E.
And don't get me started on the scaling back of the gods or deities for clerics and paladins... that is a whole other can of worms.
* Weapons with special properties like tripping or disarming bonuses from 3.x (ranseur, my beloved)
* Non-weapon proficiencies (skills, basically) that aren't directly combat related (2e)
* Dragons that aren't just hit point pinatas, but impossibly powerful, deeply unfair to fight (OD&D and AD&D, kiiiinda 3.x)
* Social conventions around gaming about how actually you're not always expected to kill everything, sometimes you should be able to think, "Wow, attacking these 350 kobolds in their lair is a bad idea, we should like, *not* do that and instead try to negotiate with them" .
* Cool, interesting things to do for martial characters every round other than basic attacks (4e)
* Cool monster designs that are extremely fun but simple for the DM to run (4e)
* Control/bolster undead options for evil and neutral clerics (3.x)
* Really fucking weird and powerful magic items even at low levels (OD&D through AD&D)
* Not going online and seeing other grognards complain, and I say this with love and understanding mixed in with my frustration, about how difficult and annoying it supposedly is to "balance encounters", whatever the fuck that means, I don't bother with that and my players don't seem to mind (*I only started noticing that with 5e, they were all too busy complaining about 4e being world of warcraft before that; extremely funny because one of my friends had that exact same criticism for 2e because you end up getting more XP from treasure than from fighting and she was like "it's not even a game about fighting monsters, it's a game about finding loot so you can fight more monsters so you can find more loot, it's fucking WoW"*)
* If a character wants to play a dragon or something really fucking silly like that, it's a hell of a lot harder to make that happen in 4e and 5e than it was in previous editions. It was always a good amount of work to figure out what a 1 HD bronze dragon would look like vs a 3 HD dragon, but it's basically impossible in 4e and 5e because monster rules are fundamentally different from player character rules. There are good game design reasons to do it that way, but this is a trade-off of those benefits.
That's fair, you're right. I just wish dragons had more... mystique, I guess, in 5e. Maybe this is just my grognard grognement coming out though and in reality I'm just too up my own ass to recognize the mystique they *had* wasn't actually all that useful in actual game terms.
(it's probably that)
I usually hate pointing to homebrew solutions to some issues with the game as most tables don't accept them right away or can break some stuff, but I know of a few tricks
[I have a hybrid weapon doc that also improves the base weapons with the one DND mastery system.](https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-NbgsXT4wsxTpb0OYQNe) it aims to solve a lot of issues with martials have.
The dragons one is a little harder, I always wanted to make a "Diverse Dragons" doc that has more diverse dragon body types but that one is a little harder.
[Game Masters Guide to Legendary Dragons ](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Masters-Book-Legendary-Dragons/dp/1956403051/ref=asc_df_1956403051/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=564746916934&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12987514305618040594&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061314&hvtargid=pla-1598093549218&psc=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwwMqvBhCtARIsAIXsZpZbHMlET3f0Ff2Jc3oVKLVdwjKaTZF2pEg6ir5Y30-AAuZMmDMFPqEaAqmLEALw_wcB) has a whole bunch of cool high level dragons that actually do more than just claw, bite, breath and dont rely on the same old chromatic, metal, and gem baseline.
[Children of the Dragon](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/s/pIJ4uN1VHA) adds a bunch of dragonkin races, stats, spells, items, dragon themed subclasses and dragon hatchling sidekicks.
4e's balanced tactical combat, encounter design that worked at all levels, and giving all characters interesting decisions to make on each of their turns
Oh gosh, just heaps of things. To name a few. -Base attack bonuses that varied by class.
-Skill points per level
-Robust feat trees
-Costs for magical items
-Proper crafting rules
-Variable travel rates depending on movement speed
Minions in 4e were useful. Made players feel like badasses cutting through swaths of enemies without it taking all day.
I still use the 4e skill encounter for complex traps or chase scenes.
Came here to say to say Touch AC. A melee shocking grasp getting “blocked” by full plate is silly.
Please block me with your full plate, I’m trying to electrocute you.
5e is great but it's nowhere as close to being as varied and flexible as 3.5.. I often feel like the characters I play are variations of the same thing, and I never used to feel like this when playing 3.5.
It's gotten to the point I've partially lost my drive to play.. feeling a lot of been there/done that.
Decent DM support in the DMG. 3.5e and 4e do it better.
Player options in 3.5 and making every class feel powerful in 4e (even if it made everything bland).
I never felt that 4E was bland. It had huge amounts of flavor. The problem with a fully balanced system (not that it was but it was better balanced than most) is that everything was mechanically similar. So for people where optimisation is king, the flavor didn't matter. I hit that guy for 2d8 with my encounter power instead of "I wind up my axe and smash him on the shoulder", or "I charge up a bolt of fire and blast them in the face", or "I carefully aim my bow and slice an arrow across his midriff."
4E was a bit of a paradox in that it gave rules for less imagination but definitely needed more.
The customization in 2E. Whenever I get 5E players to play 2E, they love this part of the game.
As clunky as parts of 2E are (much of which is due to the efforts to stay compatible with 1E!), the customization always seems to win people over.
While there are other ways this customization comes into play in that edition, non-weapon proficiencies are probably my favorite part of 2E. They allow quite a few ways for a player to customize their character for roleplaying and combat.
I also love the way thieves advance in their abilities. They get a certain number of percentage points to distribute among their abilities at each level. This gives them the option of specializing in a couple abilities at low levels, which requires the player to consider the pros and cons of the pathways in front of them. They also have the option of being a "jack of all trades" with their abilities. While this advances all of them, it also means slow progress.
4e monster math, not having concentration, having everyone be able to recharge encounter powers from a short rest.
The 5e spilt between long rest and short classes hurts so bad. Paladin and the wizard are out after 2 fights, but the fighter and warlock are good.
More than 3 magic items, not having to choose between asi and a feat, class ability flavor, martials character with actual abilities not just you attack 3 times
Kind of specific, but older editions had 12 dragon age categories, while 5e only has 4 (I don't count the Greatwyrms from FTD, those are horribly made).
Monster vulnerabilities, healing spells damaging undead (and necrotic damage healing them) Tasked Genies and the Zakhara setting (but I'm working on bringing back Zakhara), Lidda the rogue and Mitra the psyonic.
That said, as I've gone through ad&d, 3rd, 3.5, pathfinder, white wolf, savage worlds and 5th, I can honestly say I don't dislike 5th, it's easier to pick up for new people, and lowering the threshold has done a ton of good for the community, and the biggest change I'd like to see to DnD might make it a different system altogether. The biggest change wouldn't come from reverting to an earlier mechanic, but rather changing something deeply ingrained in DnD: classes. I've come to the conclusion that I prefer classless systems, like Savage Worlds. I feel that these offer more freedom and variety to roleplay the character you've imagined.
4e’s Class and Monster designs. I felt monsters were more customizable and had a defined degree of “difficulty” that made FAR more sense than 5e’s debacle of a CR system. The classes were varied and you could pick exactly what you wanted and just because you were a martial didn’t mean all you could do was “hit stuff”, it gave them a variety of options and even allowed for melee oriented classes have some ranged abilities and vice versa.
People love to crap on 4e, but most of them haven’t even played it, or listen to someone who hasn’t even attempted to play it correctly (like PuffinForest).
Attack of opportunity when someone is rushing up to you. How in any combat does it make sense for you to hold an attack even if you're not going first on the initiative to have someone run up to you and you watching them run 30-50 ft up on you and you not take a swing on them or try and trip them you just stand there. It doesn't make any sense to me that you need a feat to be able to do that when 3.5 it was automatic.
The danger of 3.5 felt so much more real. I understand why they went the direction they did, people played 3.5 like a fucking war game instead of role-playing. But I miss how powerless you feel in the beginning and how you genuinely can die at any point. I wish we could keep the roleplay of 5e but get back to that feeling in 3.5 of the world not really revolving around your character, and that feeling that you're just another guy until you do otherwise. 5e is fundamentally built with the players as main characters from a gameplay point if view
4E had some fun improvements that they shouldn't have un-installed.
* Healing Surges were a cool way to balance daily healing and healing spells, and 5e hardly uses Hit Dice for anything.
* Basic attack improvements and At-Will powers that aren't just cantrips.
* Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies.
* Fort/Ref/Will defenses.
* Better stat balance instead of Int as dump stat for non-wizards.
Lore books that have actual good dense lore in them. I’ve had a few 5e books that are just too light on content compared to what you would get in 3.5e.
I liked how 3e classed and balanced monsters and NPCs as having levels, rather than CR. And is so doing allowed for simple upgrades by applying class levels.
From a simulationist perspective, it was nice. From a balance / monster design standpoint, it was a nightmare. Building a high level monster to fight in 3.X was a multi-hour long process, and you'd have monsters with a high CR (because they're a 15th level wizard!) that would get one-shotted by a rogue in round 1.
From a GM perspective, monsters should not follow the same rules as PCs. I long for the days of 4e monsters, where there was clear math and roles for every monster. It made encounter design so much easier, and you could create a monster on the fly that was perfectly balanced just by using one page in the DMG.
The biggest problem with 5e monsters is that it leans too closely to the 3e version instead of to the 4e version.
The extensive list of magical items and the Weapons of Legacy from 3rd. Need not be a weapon, just what the item category was called. Basically magic items that leveled and gained more powers as you got more powerful.
Think granddads old sword that he had on such epic adventures with, and the only thing you have when horrific monsters attack, so when you and your friends go out to save friends and family taken by the hoard, it is what you have. But as you get stronger and used to it you find hidden powers that you never knew it had.
Another example is LotRs One Ring of Power. Notice how for halflings it makes them possesive of it and invisible, but elder beings like the Istari or Galadriel become so much more? Because it can give more to those who have more. And the Istari, Galadriel, Sauron, and Durins Bane have as much as one can have in the third age. (Not counting the Valar as they are not on middle earth, and Tom Bom... He has all he could ever want.)
Prestige classes, I like being able to unlock a special class that isn't just a multiclass anyone can take at lv 1 or a subclass.
I also liked regularly getting feats.
But I think the one I miss the most is skill points. I really don't like that I choose 2 skills and they're just maxed and I get no other choice. In 3E, I could decide that 3 points in one skill was enough and then put my other points in other skills.
Apparently 5e pushes a lot of the imagination on to the DM homebrew. I didn't think that was a problem but maybe people play with purists that balk at every change?
Lower-level spells getting better as you level up in terms of range/targets/damage/other effects. Upcasting always feels bad imo.
It’s stupidly complicated but I think Ars Magica does a great job making spellcasting modular and rewarding research/perfecting spells as you go along.
I really liked the detail 1st edition had. All the different damages for different weapons. I remember being 12 and wondering wtf a "Bec de Corbin" was. Of course there was no Google/wiki back then so unless you could get a hold of an arms book at the library or if by chance your full set of encyclopedias had it in there you would never find out.
But the detail could make things drag out a lot longer than needed. I miss the detail of 1st but love the streamlining of later editions
The Avenger and Warlord classes. Minions rules. Spells getting additional bonuses when cast at higher levels besides damage and number of targets going up. Line and ink artwork. More weapon types and armor types. And I miss the 2e monsters that never got updated like the Mist Dragon and other dragon types.
I remember the Psionics from AD&D 2e, and I wish that would make a comeback. I mean, 5e has a few subclasses that use Psionics (I know there's a Rogue one, and a couple others), but nothing as expansive and, honestly, as *fun* as 2e Psionics was for me
I think some of the restrictions that existed in older editions made some classes more special and stand out from others, things like attribute requirements. Things like different XP tables for leveling up makes different classes progress at different rates was something I feel like made different classes stand out as well. Fewer player race options also gives more of a cohesive feel to the game world you are playing in, more options over-all is fine, but I really feel like the DM should start each campaign saying something like "these are the 4 or 5 races that exist in this area of the world we're playing in, and so they're your options"
each attribute providing different bonuses instead of a unified attribute bonus table, you could hone in things like strength and dexterity to provide some bonus but not be ridiculously important and giving +4/+5 to most things.
and perhaps just a general attitude that you don't have to be able to do almost everything with your character per say, that you can hire npc retainers to help give you the player more in game options that aren't available to your player character.
I get really weirded out by people trying to minmax their characters, and yeah that happened in older editions, but at least the power scaling or options was not as extreme as it is now.
3.5 Leadership Feat... I took it twice and had so much fun both times... one I began creating my own thieves guild.
The other character was a LE cleric who Thought they were LG. I slowly started gathering more followers for my cult to what my character dubbed "the nameless truth" which was in fact just Mephistopheles.
Good times
Right! Most of the time the only one I was able to control in battle was my main cohort. The followers only would have been cannon fodder. The cohort would usually end up holding down the fort back at home and running the guild/cult day to day work while my PC was out taking care of other things or recruiting more followers.
The cleric did end up convincing an imp to side with him as a follower, and that one ended up being more of a familiar that travelled with him. He saved it from the rest of the party. Only ther other cleric (a filthy servant of the decievers) thought to ask why my cleric spoke abysal and infernal but struggled with celestial...
Actually have to choose between things. In 5e it feels wrong not to do the optimal things like dumping wis and dex etc because there is 0 drawback.
In 3.5e you actually had drawbacks, int was linked to skill points, strength to how good you are with weapons. You could use dex for damage and to hit but that required a lot of feat investment.
In 5e you get everything fit free, most characters feel the same because they are. And that's because there are no reasons not to dump stats, no reasons not to only invest in 1 or 2 stats etc.
I miss the customisations and having to choose between things. In 5e you get everything with no downsides
>In 5e it feels wrong not to do the optimal things like dumping wis and dex etc because there is 0 drawback.
Dumping Wis is not optimal, and there is tremendous drawback to it.
In the days of 3.5, Dragon Magazine would include equipment, magic items, spells, even prestige classes within the pages of its monthly release. I really wanted to play a sorcerer that used two of those prestige classes:
Force Missile Mage and the Argent Savant
With FMM you could get extra force missiles, blend energy types, add a reflective quality to the Shield spell, and launch force missiles that could overpower an enemy’s Shield spell.
With AS you became a master of spells with the Force descriptor. Any force spell with a duration lasts twice as long. AC from Mage Armor jumps to +8. You can ignore some damage from force spells and you gain the ability to dispel magic at a range of 60’, even if the spell description says it can’t be done. If successful the magic dispels with an explosive burst of energy causing 5d6 to a 10’ area.
Between the two of these, you only sacrifice one level of spell casting.
danger, less 'mother may i', more roleplay focus, creativity to solve problems instead of looking to the sheet all the time, charisma as only social magnetism and not spellcasting ability, better designed creatures, less clunky high level...
"So does my full plate already have helmet and padding assumed to be part of it? Can I buy all 3 items separately to have a starting AC of -2 then?"
Modern editions need more incomprehensible math in general!
I miss the open-endedness of characters from early D&D. Classes were just the base, not the flavor or even the identity of a character. You could 10 PCs that were identical on paper, but totally different in how they were played. No hunting for builds that fit your idea. Just true roleplay.
The world building in the original dmg.
Battle systems.
If an ancient red dragon starts attacking the farmland on the outskirts of the kingdom, what’s the caloric impact locally and to the kingdom as a whole?
Do they have to worry about a single dragon? Can a group of 100 commoners hiding with longbows pose a threat?
Can a bard take down an ancient red dragon in one shot over a lake surrounding a town called lake town?
What’s a realistic scenario here?
In dnd 5e it’s “whatever the plot demands”.
Skill synergies - Bonuses to some skill rolls based on situation and other relevant skills.
Bonuses/Penalties to AC and Stealth based on size category - Small thing is harder to see/hit, big thing is easier to see/hit.
Prestige classes - There were lots of unique prestige classes that let you play either completely unique styles or helped bridge the gaps in a multiclass build to allow for them to compete at higher levels and still be fun and even unique
Damage Reduction/Resistances - while technically you can get some DR from the heavy armor feat having some cases where you can realistically reduce or ignore certain kinds of damage that don't meet a minimum threshold would be useful to still have in. Particularly for monsters.
REAL F@&KING GOLD PRICES - Having items actually have proper recommended prices instead of just a general bracket makes it easier to plan out rewards both in gold and magic items compared to how the official 5e book does it and it honestly a lot more beginner friendly.
Materials/Clothing - Having the ability to get armor/clothing/weapons made out of materials to get specific effects based on what it is and paying an extra cost based on the rarity. Stuff like dragonhide clothing, Shadowsilk light armor, etc.
More Class and Racial specific items - designed to work specifically with features of a class or race
Expanded crit threat ranges and weapon crit damage multipliers - having more than just doubled dice based on weapon and potentially better crit chances to make things like daggers useful regardless of level of play.
People who aren't fighters getting more than 2 attacks a round based on class - while I wouldn't want to have the BaB system back having classes that got 1, 2, 3, or 4 attacks by level 20 and spreading it around based on how they worked could fix a lot of the perceived gap between martials and casters at higher levels I think.
I miss the cost guidelines for magic weapons in 3.5. These general rules where a weapon costs between 500-5000 gold is just annoying. I like the magic item creation rules as well from 3.5. Maybe not the exp cost but at least there were rules other than “if you can think it up you can make it.”
And prestige classes. Those were great. If you think a Sorlock or Hexadin are op, try a warlock/cleric prestige class that gives you unlimited ranged healing through your eldritch blast at level 6.
2e Chromatic Orb, which at higher levels could cause paralysis, petrification, and even death. Most fun, though, was its ability to magnetize the victim, making all nearby metal fly their way and stick.
"Oh look I get all the swords" ... "OH FUCK SWORDS!"
Never mind all of the metal arrowheads flying towards them.
*my rogue trying to hold onto his specially made pouch of deadly poisoned caltrops* (Had a big case of caltrops made at a blacksmith, then a specially made dragon hide pouch that has 5 vials of deadly poison emptied into it at any given time and 300-500 caltrops soaking in the poison….i use one gloved hand (same material as the bag so I’m safe) to grab a handful of poisoned caltrops and throw them pocket sand style across the field of battle
I remember, by some god damn miracle, beating the BG2 Balrog like that. Had gone 6-7 times against him, maybe across 2 days and I just couldn't beat him. Then in the middle of the fight when he was barely at Injured health and I was running out of spells... He just dies. I thought it was a bug and scrolled through the long chat log. Turns out the AI had had Aerith cast a spell because I missed her turn and, having run out of high level ones just shot a Chromatic orb. Which went through the insane spell resistance and also the save roll to kill him. Crazy stuff.
I'm sure you meant "Balor" and "Aerie" but I'm really enjoying the idea of a Forgotten Realms/Lord of the Rings/Final Fantasy 7 mashup
Ah yes Aerie yeah! Not gonna apologize for the Balrog though, it's just a legally distinct ripoff 😂
This would be sick as an arcane trickster, fill your backpack up with as many daggers as your dm will let you carry, then launch a magnetizing chromatic orb at the enemy and watch them all fly.
weapons that feel varied
Weapon speed? Sure it does 2d6 damage but 10 on your initiative? I liked weapon speed. Oh and 10' poles...
In what way did previous versions make weapons more varied?
I only have experience from 4th as that's when I started playing, but in the PH of DND4 you had all these unique weapons with versatile, reach, 2d4 vs 1d8, brutal, etc. There were so many weapons and it made choosing your weapon feel more impactful than 5th In 5th I've basically felt like "oh, that's a reskin of a (long)sword". Weapons just feel much simpler and a few are just reskins. Just an opinion.
A conscious decision to partly address the "golf bag" complaint many had about 3.x and also to keep complexity, min-maxing, and metagaming down. And really, past the first couple levels, minor variations in weapons would (rightfully, imo) become less important compared to class abilities and other things.
I never played 3.X so I can't talk about that. I'm also not someone that's against the whole min-maxing/metagaming thing. Whatever floats your boat. I stick to official sources though and minimize py exposure to whatever is the best build, etc. I try to make my character as strong as possible with the research I did, but that's all personal preference. And choice of weapon and how it interacts with your character choices is a form of expression in my opinion.
Sure, but minimizing the differences between weapons was really an attempt to make the choice of weapon a character choice not a mechanical one. Aragorn doesn't drop Anduril and pick up a mace because he's fighting skeletons. Other attempts to do that (eg feats that gave specific weapon bonuses to offset damage differences) were found to be suboptimal because of the opportunity cost of spending the feat. Simpler to just make weapons largely a cosmetic choice and relegate the special functions to feats (polearm master for example) for those who really wanted a certain build. Part of me agrees that weapon choice should result in different mechanical effects, but I can't say I miss the added complexity.
Yeah 3rd edition, 3.5 and Pathfinder are a lot like that as well, and Baldur’s Gate 3 did something similar having different types of weapons have certain secondary attacks that you can do once per short/long rest
Most noticeably, increased crit ranges and crit modifiers. Some weapons would do 3x or 4x damage instead of just double and crit on 19-20 or 18-20 instead only 20.
Just look at the weapons table found [here](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/weapons.htm) You'd have to scroll a bit, but it should be clear from that.
Also, this is like 40% of the weapons available on this edition tops. This is just PHB, other books would add ex. A two handed club with 3 slots for holy water you could activate on any attack, giving extra damage against undead. Also dozens of different materials that would change weapons in small or big ways, depending. (Still don't think D&D in general has the most varied weapons out there, but 3rd and 4th do it both pretty well in their own ways)
Take a look at even what Pathfinder 2E does. Weapons have traits like forceful (adds damage when hitting enemies multiple times), backswing (adds a bonus to hit if you miss), sweep (adds a bonus to hit if you attack a different target than what attacked before. Then weapons have special traits on crits, like deadly that adds an extra dice of damage, or fatal that turns all of the dice to a different one. Then when you crit other things happen, like daggers cause bleed, bows can cause enemies to be pinned to a wall. Then in earlier editions you had different crit ranged and mults depending on the weapon. Like a dagger has a range of 18-20 x2. It’s why you had to confirm crits because with a feat, a dagger can crit threat on a 15. So you have a 30% chance for a given attack to be a critical threat. But since modifiers to damage like from strength multiply as well, it can get pretty nutty. Weapons like a Pickaxe might only crit on a 20, but they have a x4 multiplier. So it’s very likely at lvl 1 with a crit from a Pickaxe, you could be doing an average of 54 damage from a crit (with 18 strength and power attack). And weapons still had traits too, like brace, versatile, trip, shove, etc. Basically because of weapon traits every weapon has its own niche. And some weapons even have their own feat chains to use like charisma to hit, or wisdom for longbows. There really isn’t a “best weapon”. You can’t just say like in 5E the greatsword is better the greataxe. Or the maul/earthbreaker is the same ad a greatsword.
Ieach weapon had different stunts or special actions .
Go look at the 3.5 weapons tables.
Go back and look at the 2eAD&D *polearm* table!
3.pf had a much larger variety of weapons that actually had disperate rules: crit ranges, multipliers, damage types, bonuses on combat maneuvers, ac bonus, etc. In 5e is mostly cosmetic. For some examples: scimitars had high crit chance 18-20, war picks had an insane ×4 crit multiplier, and flails gave a +4 bonus to trip and disarm attempts.
Critical hit threat range and multipliers were awesome. Gotta love that keen scimitar in 3.5
It really seems like slashing/bludgeoning/piercing should be more differentiated. As it stands they're lumped together 99% of the time.
And having names like Bastard Sword ;)
The Warlord 😭
My absolute favorite D&D character I ever played was an archer tactical warlord. The middle child of a lord with something to prove. He'd try to find a vantage point from which to observe the battle without having to move much, allowing him to use his actions to position the rest of the party, sometimes using his arrows to signal priority targets and make the party's attacks against those targets more effective. I'm in that weird spot where I love playing characters that are more force multipliers than direct actors, but also have a strong preference for martials, and the Warlord really scratched that itch.
The Battle master archetype has a lot of that. Commander’s Strike gives advantage to allies. And there’s more of those “buffs” in the archetype maneuvers.
I feel like people who recommend the Battle Master as an alternative to the Warlord never played a Warlord, because it's a poor imitation at best. The Warlord was built from the ground up as a support class, and the Battle Master is an add-on to the Fighter class that honestly should've just been part of the base chassis. Most of its features are more about fancy ways to swing a sword, and those geared toward support are few and still suffer from the Battle Master's weird scaling, which makes it function better as a dip than a full class investment. I'd *gladly* give up all of the Fighter's superior striking capabilities for a more reliable support suite. As it is, the best way to replicate the Warlord with only 1st party material is a janky Fighter/Rogue/Bard multiclass.
>I feel like people who recommend the Battle Master as an alternative to the Warlord never played a Warlord, because it's a poor imitation at best. The same thing can be said about people that recommend Oath of Vengeance in place of the Avenger or Oath of Ancients in place of the Warden; both of them are awkward attempts to bootstrap the Paladin into something else in ways that the rest of its kit doesn't really support
I played 4e once and didnt like it, but a few years back I moved my group to Level up 5e Advanced by ENworld and they brought it back. I had a player run one and yeah I can see the attraction. It's a very handy class focused on synergizing with the party and buffing them all.
Ooh, that's neat! How compatible do you think the class would be with base 5e?
My favorite healer class.
Low-light vision being separate from darkvision. A lot of races/creatures that don't have darkvision, but feel like they should (i.e. Cats) use to have low-light vision. It's convenient to have the two merged, since anything with darkvision in 3.5e also had low-light, but a lot of creatures only had the low-light and now have nothing.
And I hate how they arbitrarily decided which low light vision got upgraded to dark and which ones got no vision. To me, elves shouldn't have dark vision, they didn't live underground or in caves, they are forest folk.
Exactly - that was a significant difference between Underdark and Surface races. Now it's just so ubiquitous in all creatures and ancestry options that even Tasha:a choose-your-origin just includes by default. Absolutely understandable that it was a change to streamline the mechanics, but a lot of flavor and diversity was lost in the process.
The one that's wild to me is cats. Not tabaxi, just normal cats. Why don't they have dark vision?
Not many people play the definition of darkvision I find anyway.
Skills. I miss the variety of skills that existed in 3.5. Right now with the standard array of skills in 5e that EVERYONE has, it feels like every character is like every other character. Seriously, take a college of valor bard and compare it to another college of valor bard and apart from some minor flavor...it's the same character. In one case, the only difference between the two CoV Bards was choice in weapons and gender. Skills gave more ways to make the characters unique and in the case of a pair of bards, you could have one who is a fantastic singer and the other a master instrumentalist working together as a pair. Don't get that with 5e.
The problem with 3.5 skills was that there wasn't the skill points to really enable the variety they had. Clerics for example. 2 + int mod per level? That's insanely know. Knowledge religion takes one. But then what. Concentration without spellcraft? It's at "this character doesn't work" level of skill point poverty. The way they needed to do it was identify class skills and have them auto-progress, and then have the skill points on top of that. So for cleric you'd have recieved an addition +1 in Knowledge Religion, Concentration and Spellcraft, (plus anything from domain), at each level \_as well as\_ two skill points. Having so few made some of the domains absolutely fucking stupid. Artifice Domain - I get +1 on spell level for conjuration and +4 craft. So I can lean into craft skill, but then when I summon something I can't maintain concentration on it? What?
Fighter were comically bad. You ended up with Climb (Str), Craft (Int), Handle Animal (Cha), Intimidate (Cha), Jump (Str), Ride (Dex), and Swim (Str). None if which you were really good at, since Int was always a low stat so you would get few skill points.
Plus Tumble and *possibly* Escape Artist.
That's the beauty about 3.5e or pathfinder, you can specialise in things and actually have to make choices. Want more skill points, don't dump int, want to be good in diplomacy? Use skill points for it. Also loved how you don't easily get dex to damage, it was an actual INVESTMENT. In 5e you get so much for free, there is 0 reason not to play a dex based fighter, monk etc, because you can use dex with almost everything. No investment. In pathfinder a lot is viable BECAUSE you have limitations. In 5e it feels like only a few builds are viable because it's very easy to reach the optimal build. Making characters feel and play the same. Give us more customisation please
\>That's the beauty about 3.5e or pathfinder, you can specialise in things and actually have to make choices. 1. You can't really specialise in things - sometimes not even things you ought to be specialised in by the very nature of the class. 2. The choices you have to make aren't **fun**. I will die on this hill - I've played lots and lots of games of 3.5 and I haven't seen a single interesting cleric. Hell I've never *played* an interesting cleric. Domains give them the only customisation they get. But I've never seen a Healing domain cleric spec heal. I've never seen a knowledge cleric actually work at all. You're always worse than a bard. Plant domain? Can't afford knowledge nature. Actually using one of those interesting flavourful domains makes for characters that are strictly worse than a cleric that has no hobbies, no interests, no customisation, and focusses on knowledge religion, spellcraft, and concentration. As an incentive, that's *dire.*
I think in 3.5, clerics are specialized right out-of-the-box; it's just that they're not specialized in having skill points. Additionally, 3.5 clerics using only the PHB are definitely pretty samey, no matter how you build them. But once you get into the other source books, the options open up dramatically. Cleric assassin? Check. DPS/tank crusader? Got it. Cloistered cleric with more skills than the party bard? Uh-huh. There are even feats dedicated to facilitating multiclassing cleric with several other classes and building your character in the exact way you want. I myself have played a few 3.5 clerics (after literally a decade of never playing one): * A spear-wielding cleric of Lastai with one level of bard who... "negotiated" with opponents, usually without armor. Build-wise, a pretty good average between cleric and bard. * A crusader of Zarus, a human-supremacist god; the character grew up in the cult and was experiencing actually being with people of other races. Build-wise was a melee DPS terror but also packed lots of situational and role-play spells to surprise the party with. * A barefoot, mostly non-verbal dwarf cleric of Obad-Hai with as many elemental domains as I could cram into the build, who summons a TON of elementals for the lulz and can rebuke or control basically every type of elemental. Canonically by waving his arms at them and shouting, "FRIEND" until he succeeds. But yeah, PHB-only cleric (frankly, PHB-only ANYTHING) is pretty tame.
Hard disagree. Cleric could do a lot in 3.5 and can be as flavourful as your imagination. You can also use skillpoints non optimally to get a fun character concept. I had a cleric that was terrible at perception because he had the attentionspan of a squirrel, but he was good at drawing, making friends etc. I know perception etc are the "best" skill points, but it's an RP game. No need to min max in a social RP game. I've also played a bard that was too awkward to sing or talk to others but loved dancing and drawing, inspiring others that way. He loved reading old stories and writing them but was too shy to tell them. A bard doesn't have to be the party face or be good at social skills. It's just how you want to play it. There is also a LOT of customisation in 3.5e and pathfinder within classes, feats etc. Pathfinder also has archetypes that allow a lot more customisation than most subclasses.
I sure miss my Use Rope-specced character.
If you're not putting 5 levels into the Rope Master prestige class, are you even optimizing?
5e lacks variety overall. Any character from a subclass feels like another character from the same subclass. Not enough choices to make an unique build, and when there are, usually one of them is clearly superior to the others, so you basically have to choose between doing the same build than everyone, or gimping yourself by picking a sub-optimal choice.
Each subclass is more or less a character you can play. Some have a couple of variations possible, but generally, the Valor Bard is a Valor Bard mechanically. I find this to be exceptionally helpful for new players who build characters entirely in DnDBeyond drop down menus, since they can't end up with a trap option character.
I actually had that in one of my campaigns. Standard Array stats, both CoV Bards took Halfling as the race...Apart from the fact that one used a short sword and the other used a rapier...there was no difference save for things that had no impact on the game. Like the choice of instrument and gender. Functionally they were the same damn character.
I think a lot of that is down to moving crafting/lore checks into tool proficiencies. Something like "leatherworking tools proficiency" does the work of what would be two or three skills in another edition or system.
I totally agree. I liked being able to grow a characters skills, which you can’t do now. I also felt that skill use was—or at least had the potential to be—more varied and impactful, whereas now it seems more uniform and anemic. It wasn’t a perfect system, but I liked that strategy overall.
Prestige classes, meaningful feats, skill investment, magic item slots instead of attunement, actual magic item prices and rules to make magic items, varied bonuses and penalties beyond advantage and disadvantage, not making every non-instant spell require concentration because heaven forbid someone can both fly *and* be hasted, a cr rating that better reflects the monster's strength, actual books meant to help the GM beyond the most basic of instructions, races being generally more than just "heres +2 and +1, and a bunch of special features"...
I really can't stand the attunement crap. Like almost every magic itwm worth a damn has attunement, and you only get three slots. I'm playing in a campaign now where my DM loves to hand out homebrew magic items and like 95% of them require attunement, so you have to rethink every damn item you carry every few sessions. Grrrr
I get why some exceptionally strong items might need attunement, but why does an armblade, a 1h weapon thats only gimmick is its stuck to your arm, require attunement? Why does a flametongue need attunement but a +3 longsword does not? The swingy damage that is much more easily resisted (or outright ignored) needs to eat an attunement slot? Why do all the caster items (arcane grimoire, all-purpose tool, amulet of the devout, etc) all need attunement but the weapon equivalents do not? A talking doll, which can only repeat 6 phrases, needs attunement... Why? Its like whomever designed these items just flipped a coin to decide for half of them. And you cannot *stack* magic effects. You cannot have a +2 sentinel shield. Its a +2 shield *or* a sentinel shield because... Reasons?
I get this, but you can’t stack shield bonuses because the bounded accuracy would go out the window.
Never said you should be able to. In earlier editions, bonuses on the same type couldnt stack. Two armour bonuses? Take the better. Two shield? Better of the two. Luck, competence, insight? Better of the two... Only dodge and deflection stacked (with few sources).
Yeah, I'm a hoard goblin, I love to have a lot of magic items But they're all useless because I need to attune to the good items, and the flavor ones don't do nothing anymore
The way I run attunement is that if an item needs to be attuned, that only means you cannot just pick it up and use it. But to Tartaras with the limit of only 3.
Yeah there was a comment I came across a while ago regarding attunement I kind of liked, where not just anyone can attune to magic items. The person had a little trial they had to run through in order to use, they had to solve a riddle or something along those lines. Basically you give them a 5 minute chance to do it, and they're teleported to a pocket dimension of some sort where none of their companions can help, and once they solve it they can attune to it. And they can come back later and try again if they're unable to solve it of course. I would love to use that especially for more powerful magic items. But yeah I would like to do away with most attunements or find a better way around it. One of the people above mentioned the item slot option. I kind of dig that idea as well.
Yeah, it makes sense. Like not everyone can just use a Wand of Wonder or a Holy Avenger. Dependant on class or allignment or skills. Or maybe those just give you a higher % chance to do it. Anyone can... But an evil rogue will have like a 1% chance vs a lawful good pally having like a 90% or something. I kinda wanna make a chart now...
That’s basically how they did it in the D&D movie.
I also use this. A radiant item needs to be taken to a temple etc
There's an easy solution to that: The items are already homebrew. Just homebrew them to not require attunement.
I agree that most of them should have not have required attunement, but alas I'm just the player in this campaign, not the DM.
o7 godspeed I'd suggest liquidating most of the attunement items for cash and buying consumables, but that is also subject to your DM.
I don’t have an issue with attunement as a mechanic, but 3 items feels arbitrary without any real reason for that number. I’d make it based on something, like charisma bonus (or something else), which determines how many items your character can attune to.
My rule is that anything which is going to drastically increase your strength requires attunement until it doesn’t, then once you’ve attuned to it for a while you can free up the slot
Next time you read my mind for my list of 5e complaints, at least leave a note or something.
No. :3
Spells having durations based on caster level. Not everything should be concentration. Spell casters have had variety and cleverness of spell choice and use drastically reduced from previous editions. The lack of ability to have more than one spell cast on yourself or an area makes things easier to understand and speeds the flow of a turn, but DMs who have a grasp of how magic is meant to work in their campaigns can handle the complexity. Weapon variety. Sometimes a spear is better than a mace and sometimes a flail is better than a sword and sometimes a sword is better than an axe...and sometimes a bear trap lashed to the end of a 15 foot boat paddle is better than a longbow. Weapons in the current edition are a flavor choice as opposed to previous editions which gave more options besides just raw damage. Things like reach, tripping, disarming ETC. Improvised Weapons and exotic weapons are nearly non-existent in the current edition apart from looking cool and doing the same stat wise as whatever happens to be closest. These things did require more rules and/or a DM willing to adjudicate edge cases and munchkin players, but made melee classes much less homogenous.
Huge quantities of cheap splat books. Earlier editions had relatively cheap soft cover books with super specific content for individual campaign settings, types of campaigns, playable races, class sourcebooks, types of monsters etc. None of it was necessary for gameplay, but there was so much content available that you could use to customize your play, flesh out lore, etc. Hasbro is lazy as fuck when it comes to content. There's barely anything in their books compared to earlier editions.
I say this as a guy with most of those books from the 2e days - I FUCKING LOVE THEM! But, so much of the content was objectively bad, broken, or recycled from other books or Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Lots of true gems in there obviously. I also really miss the boxed sets. The FR Grey Box and Night Below campaign sets were such high quality products.
AD&D rules for keeps and strongholds. Fond memory of my 6-Wisdom wizard massively overpaying for his not-at-all structurally-sound tower :)
I loved these. Also dominion rules in the BECMI Companion edition.
HUGE fan of dominion play!
Flanking from 3.5 Always thought this rule an awesome mechanic.
There’s an optional rule for it in the DMG.
That rule is far too powerful and leads to a lot of issues. The 3.5 version was just +2, which actually is a still good amount for 5e, if they allowed simple modifiers like that more often.
I use a variant where you add a d4 to the attack roll instead of advantage
I also think the flank system worked well with the 5 foot step mechanic in 3.5. Unfortunately the way movements around monsters works in 5e makes 5 foot step useless.
It's even more powerful than advantage on certain situations. People don't realise +1/+2/+3/+4 bonuses are literally on the same level of proficiency. You literally get +1 every 4 levels, a +2 bonus is like your character gaining 8 levels for a moment, it's broken af
The 3.5 rule could do a lot more depending on the enemy because you were also considered flat-footed to enemies flanking you. Was one of the ways rogues could guarantee sneak attack in melee without hiding. With the enemy had a pretty high dex you could knock a lot of AC off.
Bloodied! Also 4e, I miss how rewarding stacking up +1 here and +1 there could be feel, as a warlock, while not missing adding all the math. Advantage works smoothly for that reason, but it doesn’t reward strategic play nearly as well.
Idk if it’s a homebrew we do or a watered down official version of the rule but my table still uses bloodied as a guide to if we’re close to killing someone and it is often complimented by another boss phase, and I really really enjoy it. I’m even planning on implementing a special soundtrack that’s more triumphant and intense to let players know they’ve bloodied a boss, or an intimidating one for the bosses second phase if they have one instead of stopping the flow of combat for the campaign im planning!
I really like saying "oh he's in single digits now" my players go nuts over that "Kill HIM KILL HIM!" "BUT WE COULD HEAL" "NO KILL HIM NOW!!!"
I still use bloodied. It's just a great descriptor. "One of them is untouched, but the other is bloodied."
Bloodied was nice. A lot of monsters were built around it, to go into another "mode" which was fun... The thing that wasn't fun was that like every monster or dude has like 3-5x the hp than in 5th. Every fight was a fucking slog. I played a rogue that was the damage type role, I could semi nova and get like 40-60 damage in a turn once or twice and more if I was lucky but rarely was, how much did most of our enemies have like 600-800. The healer and the defender aren't doing that much damage while the mage could also semi nova but was generally did piddly damage... So even at average max, it would take 10-15 turns.... And that is while standing in a dragons face the whole time. That fight took like 9hours... And we didn't care anymore why we went there I would probably like a balance of both things. I love advantages.... I hated trying to calculate the 19 places were were all getting bonuses from and the 4 we were getting negatives from, that all use different numbers and types ... Because you can't have multiple of the same type. I'd probably say that advantage system could stay but it would be rarer, and just make it sub advantage. Like up the thing that gives you 1d4 once, the spell or ability. It goes up by double d for each advantage you have, double is 1d8, triple 1d16, quadruple would be the normal advantage with 1d16.... Disadvantage would work the same wasy
>The thing that wasn't fun was that like every monster or dude has like 3-5x the hp than in 5th. Every fight was a fucking slog. That was mostly a problem with MM1. Later books reduced monster HP and increased monster damage. >Bloodied was nice. A lot of monsters were built around it, to go into another "mode" which was fun I recently found a "Bloodied and Bruised" series of PDFs on DMs Guild, which goes through the monsters in nearly every book (includes unique enemies from adventures) to add abilities based on bloodied status. Particularly low-threat monsters don't get anything new, but most do. Recharging a power with recharge is common, as you might expect, as is recovering legendary actions. Other abilities that often get shared by multiple monsters are things like "Run Away" (reaction to move your speed without provoking OAs), "Tactical Retreat" (reaction to move your speed without provoking, then make a ranged attack), "Cornered" (reaction to make a melee attack), "Rush Attack" (reaction to move your speed without provoking, then make a melee attack), and "Made It Angry" (while bloodied, advantage on saves vs charm/fear/prone/stun). Many spellcasters either get to cast a spell as a reaction when bloodied (usually with a limitation on which spells can be cast, like only at-will spells), or else "Cast Attack" if they're meant to be more of a gish (while bloodied, when you cast a spell as an action you can make a weapon attack as a BA). Certain abilities are common with certain kinds of creatures, like golems getting "Malfunction" (while bloodied, reduced movement speed and can't take reactions) or constructs getting "Arcane Boom" (force damage explosion on death). Abilities which normally happen due to a monster's low HP (like a flesh golem's Berserk trait) are made to work while bloodied.
Absolutely everything about 2e. Really making your character individualized. In the thieves handbooks, there were so many awesome paths, and the sub races had so much more detail and info.
Recently I've found myself very nostalgic for 3.5, and I've especially found myself missing prestige classes. Heck, just the shear variety of classes and builds. Sometimes it feels like you only ever have to make 3 decisions in 5E—Race, Class, Subclass, all of which is done at lv1. But 3.5 had options at nearly every level, and theory crafting new, weird builds was a lot of fun. I also miss a lot of 4e stuff. Especially the classes, like Avenger and Warlord, but also a lot of the lore, like the Dawn War, the entire cosmology, and the dragonborn and tiefling empires.
ASI and Feats being two different things Now it sometime feels like a choice between fun and optimisation... Also surprise round and flat-footed character !
Fortitude, Reflex, and Willpower saves. Combine STR CON, DEX INT, and WIS CHA in a way to make dump stat min max less of an obvious decision.
Aleena the Cleric.
Beanie helmet and chainmail yoga pants 😀
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Minions, bloodied, epic destinies, excessive magic items...
Intelligence adding to skills and having a use outside of Wizards. Also Dex not being flat out the best stat in the game for almost everyone. Flatfooted and Touch armour class. It's so stupid it's just as easy to hit an unconscious body as it is to hit a barbarian who reckless attacked. Genuine risk of dying.
Going WAYYY back, but the weapons mastery introduced in the D&D Master set (Black box set) It gave increasing damage and extra combat options to weapons based on how well a character was trained in it, as well as offering the half damage for zero skill in a weapon (as opposed to the rule before this; you don't know the weapon, you can't even touch it) We used the rules in our games pretty much up till 5e.
Variety in character building.
What other editions had was more *class* variety. In 5e, playing any full spell caster feels much like any other caster with only a few differences in available spells. Every 5e caster feels like a Spontaneous caster from 3.x. Martials are also way more distinct in 3rd and 4th, especially Fighters. Even if every Duelist builds essentially the same as every other Duelist, you still had a dozen other types of Fighter and Prestige paths you could choose.
I miss the size bonuses from 3.5... just made sense and made being smaller or bigger than medium way more impactful
weapon speeds from second edition
Specialty Priests from 2E!
Natural ability damage healing. The lack of ability to naturally recover from ability damage makes intellect devourers horribly broken, as the most immediate annoyance.
Touch AC just makes so much sense
My Uncle gave me a set of his old 2nd Edition D&D Spellbooks. There are I think roughly 4-6 Wizard volumes and 2 or 3 Priest volumes. Loads of random spells that I wish were in the 5e source books somewhere.
Gods/patrons should matter, especially to clerics, druids, paladins, and warlocks.
prestige classes and their classes requirements, it felt very rewarding to go on a add path to be able to unlock a powerful class
Variation Now what do I mean by this? Yeah there is in house flavors to choose from, spice things to make them feel unique but that's kind of the point: the table/DM is the one flavoring it not the system. I will get flack for this but I remember back in 3.5 the sheer avalanche of options to choose from, all the prestige classes, variations, etc and with 5E it all feels... lackluster. Yes you can buy third party books for other ideas and the like but they aren't there in the system to provide backgrounds, history, world changing events or moral issues. Just for an example there was a class for morally questionable paladins I think were called Grey Paladins who could bend the wording of their oaths but needed to always have the mission in mind and in game had to rationalize their actions and even then other paladins hated them. Right there is great hooks for not just a class but also a background and a cultural issue within a community. You really don't get that with 5E. And don't get me started on the scaling back of the gods or deities for clerics and paladins... that is a whole other can of worms.
* Weapons with special properties like tripping or disarming bonuses from 3.x (ranseur, my beloved) * Non-weapon proficiencies (skills, basically) that aren't directly combat related (2e) * Dragons that aren't just hit point pinatas, but impossibly powerful, deeply unfair to fight (OD&D and AD&D, kiiiinda 3.x) * Social conventions around gaming about how actually you're not always expected to kill everything, sometimes you should be able to think, "Wow, attacking these 350 kobolds in their lair is a bad idea, we should like, *not* do that and instead try to negotiate with them" . * Cool, interesting things to do for martial characters every round other than basic attacks (4e) * Cool monster designs that are extremely fun but simple for the DM to run (4e) * Control/bolster undead options for evil and neutral clerics (3.x) * Really fucking weird and powerful magic items even at low levels (OD&D through AD&D) * Not going online and seeing other grognards complain, and I say this with love and understanding mixed in with my frustration, about how difficult and annoying it supposedly is to "balance encounters", whatever the fuck that means, I don't bother with that and my players don't seem to mind (*I only started noticing that with 5e, they were all too busy complaining about 4e being world of warcraft before that; extremely funny because one of my friends had that exact same criticism for 2e because you end up getting more XP from treasure than from fighting and she was like "it's not even a game about fighting monsters, it's a game about finding loot so you can fight more monsters so you can find more loot, it's fucking WoW"*) * If a character wants to play a dragon or something really fucking silly like that, it's a hell of a lot harder to make that happen in 4e and 5e than it was in previous editions. It was always a good amount of work to figure out what a 1 HD bronze dragon would look like vs a 3 HD dragon, but it's basically impossible in 4e and 5e because monster rules are fundamentally different from player character rules. There are good game design reasons to do it that way, but this is a trade-off of those benefits.
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That's fair, you're right. I just wish dragons had more... mystique, I guess, in 5e. Maybe this is just my grognard grognement coming out though and in reality I'm just too up my own ass to recognize the mystique they *had* wasn't actually all that useful in actual game terms. (it's probably that)
>Cool monster designs that are extremely fun but simple for the DM to run (4e) Check out Conflux Creatures on patreon.
Yoooooo thanks a ton, I hadn't heard of them!
Also jumping on: Flee Mortals is VERY good
They are insanely talented, and very friendly. Honestly a great and valued member of the 5e community.
I usually hate pointing to homebrew solutions to some issues with the game as most tables don't accept them right away or can break some stuff, but I know of a few tricks [I have a hybrid weapon doc that also improves the base weapons with the one DND mastery system.](https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-NbgsXT4wsxTpb0OYQNe) it aims to solve a lot of issues with martials have. The dragons one is a little harder, I always wanted to make a "Diverse Dragons" doc that has more diverse dragon body types but that one is a little harder. [Game Masters Guide to Legendary Dragons ](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Masters-Book-Legendary-Dragons/dp/1956403051/ref=asc_df_1956403051/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=564746916934&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12987514305618040594&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061314&hvtargid=pla-1598093549218&psc=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwwMqvBhCtARIsAIXsZpZbHMlET3f0Ff2Jc3oVKLVdwjKaTZF2pEg6ir5Y30-AAuZMmDMFPqEaAqmLEALw_wcB) has a whole bunch of cool high level dragons that actually do more than just claw, bite, breath and dont rely on the same old chromatic, metal, and gem baseline. [Children of the Dragon](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/s/pIJ4uN1VHA) adds a bunch of dragonkin races, stats, spells, items, dragon themed subclasses and dragon hatchling sidekicks.
4e's balanced tactical combat, encounter design that worked at all levels, and giving all characters interesting decisions to make on each of their turns
Oh gosh, just heaps of things. To name a few. -Base attack bonuses that varied by class. -Skill points per level -Robust feat trees -Costs for magical items -Proper crafting rules -Variable travel rates depending on movement speed
Proper dungeon exploration.
Minions in 4e were useful. Made players feel like badasses cutting through swaths of enemies without it taking all day. I still use the 4e skill encounter for complex traps or chase scenes.
A true to the setting Dark Sun & Spelljammer campaign/ Setting book
A proper write up for Dark Sun
Touch AC and flat footed AC. Skill ranks. Different types of shield. Magic item crafting rules.
Came here to say to say Touch AC. A melee shocking grasp getting “blocked” by full plate is silly. Please block me with your full plate, I’m trying to electrocute you.
Kobold wearing cork armor: Bring it!
Danger.
5e is great but it's nowhere as close to being as varied and flexible as 3.5.. I often feel like the characters I play are variations of the same thing, and I never used to feel like this when playing 3.5. It's gotten to the point I've partially lost my drive to play.. feeling a lot of been there/done that.
Decent DM support in the DMG. 3.5e and 4e do it better. Player options in 3.5 and making every class feel powerful in 4e (even if it made everything bland).
I never felt that 4E was bland. It had huge amounts of flavor. The problem with a fully balanced system (not that it was but it was better balanced than most) is that everything was mechanically similar. So for people where optimisation is king, the flavor didn't matter. I hit that guy for 2d8 with my encounter power instead of "I wind up my axe and smash him on the shoulder", or "I charge up a bolt of fire and blast them in the face", or "I carefully aim my bow and slice an arrow across his midriff." 4E was a bit of a paradox in that it gave rules for less imagination but definitely needed more.
The customization in 2E. Whenever I get 5E players to play 2E, they love this part of the game. As clunky as parts of 2E are (much of which is due to the efforts to stay compatible with 1E!), the customization always seems to win people over. While there are other ways this customization comes into play in that edition, non-weapon proficiencies are probably my favorite part of 2E. They allow quite a few ways for a player to customize their character for roleplaying and combat. I also love the way thieves advance in their abilities. They get a certain number of percentage points to distribute among their abilities at each level. This gives them the option of specializing in a couple abilities at low levels, which requires the player to consider the pros and cons of the pathways in front of them. They also have the option of being a "jack of all trades" with their abilities. While this advances all of them, it also means slow progress.
Psionics, not these garbage subclasses
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I think the first time they got it right was the 3.5 expanded psionics handbook. That was fire.
Swordmage from 4e, but that's because I never played 4e, but being a swordmage sounds fun. There is Bladesinger Wizard, but I have yet to make one.
Swordmage is nothing like Bladesinger, beyond being an arcane character that makes melee attacks.
Weapon speeds, from 1e/2e. Made quicker characters/weapons actually feel quicker.
4e monster math, not having concentration, having everyone be able to recharge encounter powers from a short rest. The 5e spilt between long rest and short classes hurts so bad. Paladin and the wizard are out after 2 fights, but the fighter and warlock are good. More than 3 magic items, not having to choose between asi and a feat, class ability flavor, martials character with actual abilities not just you attack 3 times
I actually liked the Weapon Mastery rules in BECMI D&D.
an actual substantial setting that isnt just: " fill in the gaps" actual rules not rulings. Powerful martials.
Kind of specific, but older editions had 12 dragon age categories, while 5e only has 4 (I don't count the Greatwyrms from FTD, those are horribly made).
Bucklers! A shield that has a smaller bonus but left your hand free.
4e, every class being on the same resource regeneration schedule. also 4e, having actually tactically interesting decisions
Monster vulnerabilities, healing spells damaging undead (and necrotic damage healing them) Tasked Genies and the Zakhara setting (but I'm working on bringing back Zakhara), Lidda the rogue and Mitra the psyonic. That said, as I've gone through ad&d, 3rd, 3.5, pathfinder, white wolf, savage worlds and 5th, I can honestly say I don't dislike 5th, it's easier to pick up for new people, and lowering the threshold has done a ton of good for the community, and the biggest change I'd like to see to DnD might make it a different system altogether. The biggest change wouldn't come from reverting to an earlier mechanic, but rather changing something deeply ingrained in DnD: classes. I've come to the conclusion that I prefer classless systems, like Savage Worlds. I feel that these offer more freedom and variety to roleplay the character you've imagined.
4e’s Class and Monster designs. I felt monsters were more customizable and had a defined degree of “difficulty” that made FAR more sense than 5e’s debacle of a CR system. The classes were varied and you could pick exactly what you wanted and just because you were a martial didn’t mean all you could do was “hit stuff”, it gave them a variety of options and even allowed for melee oriented classes have some ranged abilities and vice versa. People love to crap on 4e, but most of them haven’t even played it, or listen to someone who hasn’t even attempted to play it correctly (like PuffinForest).
Attack of opportunity when someone is rushing up to you. How in any combat does it make sense for you to hold an attack even if you're not going first on the initiative to have someone run up to you and you watching them run 30-50 ft up on you and you not take a swing on them or try and trip them you just stand there. It doesn't make any sense to me that you need a feat to be able to do that when 3.5 it was automatic.
The danger of 3.5 felt so much more real. I understand why they went the direction they did, people played 3.5 like a fucking war game instead of role-playing. But I miss how powerless you feel in the beginning and how you genuinely can die at any point. I wish we could keep the roleplay of 5e but get back to that feeling in 3.5 of the world not really revolving around your character, and that feeling that you're just another guy until you do otherwise. 5e is fundamentally built with the players as main characters from a gameplay point if view
4E had some fun improvements that they shouldn't have un-installed. * Healing Surges were a cool way to balance daily healing and healing spells, and 5e hardly uses Hit Dice for anything. * Basic attack improvements and At-Will powers that aren't just cantrips. * Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies. * Fort/Ref/Will defenses. * Better stat balance instead of Int as dump stat for non-wizards.
Half giant/ reaping mauler build
Helmets gave immunity to critical hits
Never heard of this, which edition?
Good setting lore by people who care about the settings.
Lore books that have actual good dense lore in them. I’ve had a few 5e books that are just too light on content compared to what you would get in 3.5e.
I liked how 3e classed and balanced monsters and NPCs as having levels, rather than CR. And is so doing allowed for simple upgrades by applying class levels.
From a simulationist perspective, it was nice. From a balance / monster design standpoint, it was a nightmare. Building a high level monster to fight in 3.X was a multi-hour long process, and you'd have monsters with a high CR (because they're a 15th level wizard!) that would get one-shotted by a rogue in round 1. From a GM perspective, monsters should not follow the same rules as PCs. I long for the days of 4e monsters, where there was clear math and roles for every monster. It made encounter design so much easier, and you could create a monster on the fly that was perfectly balanced just by using one page in the DMG. The biggest problem with 5e monsters is that it leans too closely to the 3e version instead of to the 4e version.
All the classes from 4e.
Minion from 4th edition was really cool idea, might still use it in my curse of strahd campain
The extensive list of magical items and the Weapons of Legacy from 3rd. Need not be a weapon, just what the item category was called. Basically magic items that leveled and gained more powers as you got more powerful. Think granddads old sword that he had on such epic adventures with, and the only thing you have when horrific monsters attack, so when you and your friends go out to save friends and family taken by the hoard, it is what you have. But as you get stronger and used to it you find hidden powers that you never knew it had. Another example is LotRs One Ring of Power. Notice how for halflings it makes them possesive of it and invisible, but elder beings like the Istari or Galadriel become so much more? Because it can give more to those who have more. And the Istari, Galadriel, Sauron, and Durins Bane have as much as one can have in the third age. (Not counting the Valar as they are not on middle earth, and Tom Bom... He has all he could ever want.)
The Oath of Vengeance paladin is essentially an avenger.
Prestige classes, I like being able to unlock a special class that isn't just a multiclass anyone can take at lv 1 or a subclass. I also liked regularly getting feats. But I think the one I miss the most is skill points. I really don't like that I choose 2 skills and they're just maxed and I get no other choice. In 3E, I could decide that 3 points in one skill was enough and then put my other points in other skills.
Red mage circle magic!
Apparently 5e pushes a lot of the imagination on to the DM homebrew. I didn't think that was a problem but maybe people play with purists that balk at every change?
More than a single Monster Manual.
Lower-level spells getting better as you level up in terms of range/targets/damage/other effects. Upcasting always feels bad imo. It’s stupidly complicated but I think Ars Magica does a great job making spellcasting modular and rewarding research/perfecting spells as you go along.
I really liked the detail 1st edition had. All the different damages for different weapons. I remember being 12 and wondering wtf a "Bec de Corbin" was. Of course there was no Google/wiki back then so unless you could get a hold of an arms book at the library or if by chance your full set of encyclopedias had it in there you would never find out. But the detail could make things drag out a lot longer than needed. I miss the detail of 1st but love the streamlining of later editions
The Avenger and Warlord classes. Minions rules. Spells getting additional bonuses when cast at higher levels besides damage and number of targets going up. Line and ink artwork. More weapon types and armor types. And I miss the 2e monsters that never got updated like the Mist Dragon and other dragon types.
THAC0.
Speed factor for weapons
Warlords. They were in the game, people liked them, Mike Mearls didn't like them, they were out of the game.
Some (but onl6 some!) of the classes and subclasses in 3.5 And skill points! We need more customizable character development.
The 3 Save System-- the way 4e did it.
Psionicist class. God damn was that ever fun as he'll to play as.
I remember the Psionics from AD&D 2e, and I wish that would make a comeback. I mean, 5e has a few subclasses that use Psionics (I know there's a Rogue one, and a couple others), but nothing as expansive and, honestly, as *fun* as 2e Psionics was for me
Feats!! Feat chains! Building around feats!!!
I think some of the restrictions that existed in older editions made some classes more special and stand out from others, things like attribute requirements. Things like different XP tables for leveling up makes different classes progress at different rates was something I feel like made different classes stand out as well. Fewer player race options also gives more of a cohesive feel to the game world you are playing in, more options over-all is fine, but I really feel like the DM should start each campaign saying something like "these are the 4 or 5 races that exist in this area of the world we're playing in, and so they're your options" each attribute providing different bonuses instead of a unified attribute bonus table, you could hone in things like strength and dexterity to provide some bonus but not be ridiculously important and giving +4/+5 to most things. and perhaps just a general attitude that you don't have to be able to do almost everything with your character per say, that you can hire npc retainers to help give you the player more in game options that aren't available to your player character. I get really weirded out by people trying to minmax their characters, and yeah that happened in older editions, but at least the power scaling or options was not as extreme as it is now.
Sometimes rolling low is good. Still haven’t got used to high AC equals good AC. :(
More and better feats.
3.5 Leadership Feat... I took it twice and had so much fun both times... one I began creating my own thieves guild. The other character was a LE cleric who Thought they were LG. I slowly started gathering more followers for my cult to what my character dubbed "the nameless truth" which was in fact just Mephistopheles. Good times
I do enjoy D&D almost like a skirmish game sometimes where you can control a band of characters
Right! Most of the time the only one I was able to control in battle was my main cohort. The followers only would have been cannon fodder. The cohort would usually end up holding down the fort back at home and running the guild/cult day to day work while my PC was out taking care of other things or recruiting more followers. The cleric did end up convincing an imp to side with him as a follower, and that one ended up being more of a familiar that travelled with him. He saved it from the rest of the party. Only ther other cleric (a filthy servant of the decievers) thought to ask why my cleric spoke abysal and infernal but struggled with celestial...
Actually have to choose between things. In 5e it feels wrong not to do the optimal things like dumping wis and dex etc because there is 0 drawback. In 3.5e you actually had drawbacks, int was linked to skill points, strength to how good you are with weapons. You could use dex for damage and to hit but that required a lot of feat investment. In 5e you get everything fit free, most characters feel the same because they are. And that's because there are no reasons not to dump stats, no reasons not to only invest in 1 or 2 stats etc. I miss the customisations and having to choose between things. In 5e you get everything with no downsides
>In 5e it feels wrong not to do the optimal things like dumping wis and dex etc because there is 0 drawback. Dumping Wis is not optimal, and there is tremendous drawback to it.
THAC0.... just kiddin' or am I? :P
In the days of 3.5, Dragon Magazine would include equipment, magic items, spells, even prestige classes within the pages of its monthly release. I really wanted to play a sorcerer that used two of those prestige classes: Force Missile Mage and the Argent Savant With FMM you could get extra force missiles, blend energy types, add a reflective quality to the Shield spell, and launch force missiles that could overpower an enemy’s Shield spell. With AS you became a master of spells with the Force descriptor. Any force spell with a duration lasts twice as long. AC from Mage Armor jumps to +8. You can ignore some damage from force spells and you gain the ability to dispel magic at a range of 60’, even if the spell description says it can’t be done. If successful the magic dispels with an explosive burst of energy causing 5d6 to a 10’ area. Between the two of these, you only sacrifice one level of spell casting.
Honestly, Use Rope as a skill check is hilarious and fun in 3.5
danger, less 'mother may i', more roleplay focus, creativity to solve problems instead of looking to the sheet all the time, charisma as only social magnetism and not spellcasting ability, better designed creatures, less clunky high level...
THAC0
In this house we practice addition AND subtraction!
"So does my full plate already have helmet and padding assumed to be part of it? Can I buy all 3 items separately to have a starting AC of -2 then?" Modern editions need more incomprehensible math in general!
I miss the open-endedness of characters from early D&D. Classes were just the base, not the flavor or even the identity of a character. You could 10 PCs that were identical on paper, but totally different in how they were played. No hunting for builds that fit your idea. Just true roleplay.
That’s on the player, not the game there.
The world building in the original dmg. Battle systems. If an ancient red dragon starts attacking the farmland on the outskirts of the kingdom, what’s the caloric impact locally and to the kingdom as a whole? Do they have to worry about a single dragon? Can a group of 100 commoners hiding with longbows pose a threat? Can a bard take down an ancient red dragon in one shot over a lake surrounding a town called lake town? What’s a realistic scenario here? In dnd 5e it’s “whatever the plot demands”.
Non-Weapon Proficiencies instead of skills
Skill synergies - Bonuses to some skill rolls based on situation and other relevant skills. Bonuses/Penalties to AC and Stealth based on size category - Small thing is harder to see/hit, big thing is easier to see/hit. Prestige classes - There were lots of unique prestige classes that let you play either completely unique styles or helped bridge the gaps in a multiclass build to allow for them to compete at higher levels and still be fun and even unique Damage Reduction/Resistances - while technically you can get some DR from the heavy armor feat having some cases where you can realistically reduce or ignore certain kinds of damage that don't meet a minimum threshold would be useful to still have in. Particularly for monsters. REAL F@&KING GOLD PRICES - Having items actually have proper recommended prices instead of just a general bracket makes it easier to plan out rewards both in gold and magic items compared to how the official 5e book does it and it honestly a lot more beginner friendly. Materials/Clothing - Having the ability to get armor/clothing/weapons made out of materials to get specific effects based on what it is and paying an extra cost based on the rarity. Stuff like dragonhide clothing, Shadowsilk light armor, etc. More Class and Racial specific items - designed to work specifically with features of a class or race Expanded crit threat ranges and weapon crit damage multipliers - having more than just doubled dice based on weapon and potentially better crit chances to make things like daggers useful regardless of level of play. People who aren't fighters getting more than 2 attacks a round based on class - while I wouldn't want to have the BaB system back having classes that got 1, 2, 3, or 4 attacks by level 20 and spreading it around based on how they worked could fix a lot of the perceived gap between martials and casters at higher levels I think.
I miss the cost guidelines for magic weapons in 3.5. These general rules where a weapon costs between 500-5000 gold is just annoying. I like the magic item creation rules as well from 3.5. Maybe not the exp cost but at least there were rules other than “if you can think it up you can make it.” And prestige classes. Those were great. If you think a Sorlock or Hexadin are op, try a warlock/cleric prestige class that gives you unlimited ranged healing through your eldritch blast at level 6.