"Apply the highest of all modifiers of the same type."

Reduces a bit of stacking, no?

You could go a step further (would be fiddly) where fire and water/ice damage cancel out 1:1, but then fire and lighting wouldn't.
Could be a mess of a chart trying to figure that out.

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on February 06, 2023, 11:55:54 PM
I love D&D 3.5. I don't have a gaming group, but if I had one....then I'd play D&D 3.5.

I would sacrifice you and your books.

I'm an old saw on this. If, today, you're ever going to go to 3.x for you gaming fix. Go Fantasy Craft.

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 07, 2023, 10:33:22 AM
I have a question about weapon damage... I'm partial to going back to a d6 for all weapons, but is there a possibility that you could have critical damage just explode at 6, but be capped in explosions by a multiplier? The battleaxe gets three explosions, the rapier explodes at 5-6 but only gets two explosions, maybe some other weapons explode at 1d3 beyond the first dice.

Well... WFRP does something sort of like this, but it doesn't vary it by weapon as much. Most one handed weapons (sword, axe, mace, etc) are just a "hand weapon", which does 1D10 + strength bonus(SB) damage. All weapons in WFRP, in fact, do 1D10 +/- something. This keeps all weapons in a narrow range of deadly. Yes, a dagger is "less" deadly, at 1D10+(SB-3), but it's not wildly different. And all weapons explode on a roll of 10.

WFRP's major differentiation between weapons is in qualities. A "fast" weapon gives a minor penalty to someone trying to parry or dodge, a "slow" weapon gives the same minor percentage of a bonus to the same, and so on.

Quote from: tenbones on February 07, 2023, 10:43:21 AM

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb on February 06, 2023, 11:55:54 PM
I love D&D 3.5. I don't have a gaming group, but if I had one....then I'd play D&D 3.5.

I would sacrifice you and your books.

I'm an old saw on this. If, today, you're ever going to go to 3.x for you gaming fix. Go Fantasy Craft.

OT
I considered Fantasy Craft myself for a while back when it was fairly new. Mainly because I found a fan made supplement named Planescraft. A truly indepth beautiful conversion of Planescape. I found the pdf on an old hard-drive and was overjoyed it was not forever lost.

I still maintain to this day, Fantasy Craft is the finest 3.x design ever put to print. It's the apotheosis of 3.x design... and it should have been the 4e of D&D.

But alas... that happened in another timeline.

Quote from: Zelen on February 07, 2023, 01:07:35 AMHere's the things I don't like about it:

* The game assumes you're going to run with characters that have a glut of magical items.

This isn't true. The Wealth Per Level chart is meant to be a maximum value, not a minimum. So 3e was the first edition to actually put a limit on how much magic the party was carrying. When I ran AD&D adventures for my third edition group, I would have to radically reduce the amount of magical treasure available to be found.

Plus, 3e finally adjusted the value of high level magic items compared to more common low level ones. For example, in AD&D, a +5 sword was only worth 7.5 the price of a +1 sword whereas in 3e it was worth 25 times as much as a +1 sword. This alone dramatically reduced the power level of low to mid level adventurers compared to their AD&D counterparts.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on February 07, 2023, 11:04:31 AM
This isn't true. The Wealth Per Level chart is meant to be a maximum value, not a minimum. So 3e was the first edition to actually put a limit on how much magic the party was carrying. When I ran AD&D adventures for my third edition group, I would have to radically reduce the amount of magical treasure available to be found.

It was both. If you didn't keep to the expected levels of magic items, the CR ratings became even more meaningless than they already were. Plus, different classes were more or less reliant on magic items - the power imbalance became even worse between the classes if you tried to run a low-magic-items game.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on February 07, 2023, 11:04:31 AM
Plus, 3e finally adjusted the value of high level magic items compared to more common low level ones. For example, in AD&D, a +5 sword was only worth 7.5 the price of a +1 sword whereas in 3e it was worth 25 times as much as a +1 sword. This alone dramatically reduced the power level of low to mid level adventurers compared to their AD&D counterparts.

Which was only ever relevant if you ran a setting where there was Ye Olde Magick-Mart for players to go on shopping sprees.

Quote from: tenbones on February 07, 2023, 11:02:13 AM
I still maintain to this day, Fantasy Craft is the finest 3.x design ever put to print. It's the apotheosis of 3.x design... and it should have been the 4e of D&D.

But alas... that happened in another timeline.

   Imagine Fantasycraft's design and principles with the user-friendly presentation of things like 4E or OSE...

I think 3.5 is a decent edition with lots of cool ideas.

I find BAB superior to THAC0, prefer ascending AC, enjoy the idea of feats (if not 3.5 implementation), and the numbers are in the right ballpark for me (the 15th level fighter SHOULD have a +20 BAB!). Melee weapons are better balanced than 5e. Fort/Reflex/Will is better to me than 5 abstract saves.

It is just too fiddly and crunchy for my tastes, and probably too unbalanced (especially spells).

And yeah, 5e is better for me because of that( although I've abandoned that too in favor of my B/X / 3.5e and 5e hybrid).

I almost think I could re-write 3.5 to make it easier and more balanced, but:

a) I no longer thrust the OGL.
b) It would be a lot of work and not enough interest, I think.
c) FantasyCraft exists.

Never played FantasyCraft but it looks awesome upon reading it.

My big observation on 3.5e is that it plays a ton better if you remove most of the core classes and use the splats. If you've ever seen the 3.5e class tiers list, the most extreme outliers (god-tier and trash-tier) largely come from the PHB; fighter, monk and paladin on the trash side (owing mostly to the combo of low skill ranks and the multi-attack with movement issues) and cleric, druid, sorcerer and wizard in god-tier (for those not keeping track that makes Barbarian, Bard, Ranger and Rogue (and the NPC Adept class which is ranked as more effective than fighter, monk or paladin) in the effective but neither able to break the campaign over their knee with various spellcasting options nor so weak that some other class actually does their schtick better.

Basically, as they got more feedback they learned how to better make classes in the sweetspot. The Book of Nine Swords was basically all about creating non-suck versions of the Fighter (Warblade), Monk (Swordsage) and Paladin (Champion).

But the bitter irony of 3.5e is that, as is often the case with RPGs, most GMs (c. 90% in my experience) would only play "Core Only" under the misguided notion that anything additional would actually be poorly tested and less balanced when the truth is the opposite was true; the core classes were assembled with the LEAST feedback and largely based on the assumption that people would play under the same assumptions as AD&D without consideration for how their rule changes actually changed the dynamics of risk and reward.

A prime example is "save or die" spells. If you build under AD&D assumptions, then save-or-dies are high risk options (because the high level critters they're worth using on can make their saves rather easily) and spells like fireball with their saves for half damage (and much lower bloat when an ancient huge red dragon has 88 hp) were the reliable go tos (10d6 averages 35, half that is 17.5 or 20% of that ancient huge dragon's hp). They also stacked with the damage output coming from the fighter and the thief's backstab to bring the thing down as a team effort.

But in 3.5e that red dragon now has 700+ hp and even a 20d6 meteor swarm is doing at best 10% of that dragon's hp if the dragon fails (or 5% if the dragon succeeds). And if you played that way with wizards prepping cones of cold to take on the red dragon and engaged in relatively static battles where the fighter didn't have to move more than 5' per round then the core 3.5e mechanics work fine.

Except, since in 3.5e a caster can increase the difficulty of the saves vs. their spells by buffing their casting stat and various feats and because the curve for saves actually falls behind this rate of improvement (particularly for the less strong saves), it becomes much more effective to prep save-or-dies and wipe that dragon out with a single failed saving throw... and also making the damage track the fighter and rogue were working on irrelevant as soon as the failed save hits. Plus the dragon just needs to keep the melee types moving 10'+ and half to three quarters of their effectiveness disappears due to how multi-attacking worked.

Classes designed further in had realized these things and started giving melee types more ways to deliver damage spikes with single attacks and reducing access to all those save or die spells.

GMs by contrast didn't want to deal with a bunch of splatbooks and so limited things to core only and then wondered why their campaigns kept falling apart around level 10-12.

As a result I have far more love of 3.5e splats than I do of the playstyle mentality that hovered around the system.

Quote from: Bruwulf on February 07, 2023, 10:59:22 AM

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 07, 2023, 10:33:22 AM
I have a question about weapon damage... I'm partial to going back to a d6 for all weapons, but is there a possibility that you could have critical damage just explode at 6, but be capped in explosions by a multiplier? The battleaxe gets three explosions, the rapier explodes at 5-6 but only gets two explosions, maybe some other weapons explode at 1d3 beyond the first dice.

Well... WFRP does something sort of like this, but it doesn't vary it by weapon as much. Most one handed weapons (sword, axe, mace, etc) are just a "hand weapon", which does 1D10 + strength bonus(SB) damage. All weapons in WFRP, in fact, do 1D10 +/- something. This keeps all weapons in a narrow range of deadly. Yes, a dagger is "less" deadly, at 1D10+(SB-3), but it's not wildly different. And all weapons explode on a roll of 10.

WFRP's major differentiation between weapons is in qualities. A "fast" weapon gives a minor penalty to someone trying to parry or dodge, a "slow" weapon gives the same minor percentage of a bonus to the same, and so on.

I think it was Hackmaster that included rules like weapon heft, which may involve much of the same thing. They're probably not the only system that does this, but those weapon properties are definitely something I've always wanted to use with initiative order.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 07, 2023, 01:14:07 PM
It is just too fiddly and crunchy for my tastes, and probably too unbalanced (especially spells).

Only 4th edition has really balanced spells.  And at least in 3.X, you have several ways to interrupt a cast, including readying an arrow

Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 07, 2023, 01:14:07 PM
a) I no longer thrust the OGL.

Unlike Pathfinder 1e, only the core rules are part of the OGL.  All the splatbooks and extra everythings are simply not under the OGL with 3.X, meaning you either have a pile of books or a pile of pirate pdfs- I'm pretty sure they never sold any PDFs either, as by the time it was obvious they should, they were trying to kill it to shove everyone into fourth.

But yea, the fact that they haven't given us any statement LEGALLY AFFIRMING that they have no right to "unauthorize" the OGL means that anything not explicitly entered into public domain or creative commons is highly sketchy for building anything real on top of.  You could, of course, still build a CAMPAIGN on such a platform.  We've never required an open source license to run games.

It used to be my favorite version of D&D, but I don't play it anymore cuz my group wants to play 5e, and TBH I'd rather play 5e too. It isn't necessarily that 5e is so great (although it has its merits), but rather that 3e's flaws are so great, it's easier for me to put up with any misgivings I may have about 5e than to go back to 3e and try to fix it, then somehow convince my group to play my own fixed up version of 3e. If I'm gonna put that amount of effort into a game it's going to be my own system, not an old edition of D&D that's hardly played anymore.

That being said, I firmly believe that every single gripe that people have about 3e is either Grognard syndrome or a problem of implementation (or likely both) rather being some fundamental issue with the game's core concepts or mechanics themselves. The idea of Feats is great, for example, but the way that 3e handled them is utter crap—most of them a too weak, gate functions that should be available to everyone behind a feat, or rely on feat-chains that require you to get a bunch of seemingly unrelated garbage tier feats just to get to the "good" ones somewhere down the line (assuming you even play that character long enough to get enough feats to get there).

Skills are also too many, too complicated (if you multiclass) and can get too high. Listen and Spot, for example, should be a single Perception skill IMO (the way it's handled in 5e), and Move Silently and Hide should also be a single Stealth skill. The idea of keeping these skills separate is a carryover from earlier editions that was stupid then too. Skills should not get beyond +10 or so (not counting ability score modifiers or class bonuses), and I don't like the idea of having to pay double for so-called cross-class skills, since it's too clunky, punitive and overcomplicates skill selection, like having to spend a bunch of points across dozens of skills isn't already nerve wracking enough, particularly for casual players who don't know WTF to do with those points or how to spend them without gimping their characters.

I could go on, but I have other stuff to do and others have pointed out many of its other flaws already. All in all, 5e is more simple and straightforward, less flawed (and it has many, just not remotely as many as 3e does out of the box), and far less punitive of bad build decisions, which is why it's gobbled up so much attention away from earlier editions.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 07, 2023, 01:54:33 PM
My big observation on 3.5e is that it plays a ton better if you remove most of the core classes and use the splats.

I just buffed the martial classes some, it was never as dire as the tier charts made it sound.  Oh no it can fly, let me remember to use any of the million ways to fly a fighter has!

QuoteIf you've ever seen the 3.5e class tiers list

...then you know why we got 4th edition.  These rabble-rousers bled so many tears that the developers honestly thought that straight game balance via direct comparison of chart-granted abilities was the most important thing.

Quote(and the NPC Adept class which is ranked as more effective than fighter, monk or paladin)

Oh man, I remember arguing with this bad take years ago.  Did you ever see this happen at a table?  I sure af did not.

QuoteThe Book of Nine Swords was basically all about creating non-suck versions of the Fighter (Warblade), Monk (Swordsage) and Paladin (Champion).

I've never allowed any of that munchkin crap.  Core-only was imbalanced, but that stuff  was simply beyond the pale.  They had friggin spell charts!  The fact that 3.5 became infested with this, the truenamer guy, and incarnum, was a reason why Pathfinder was welcomed with open arms, a promised reset away from powercreep junk like that.

QuoteA prime example is "save or die" spells. If you build under AD&D assumptions, then save-or-dies are high risk options (because the high level critters they're worth using on can make their saves rather easily) and spells like fireball with their saves for half damage (and much lower bloat when an ancient huge red dragon has 88 hp) were the reliable go tos

1ed Dragons had incredible saving throws (your dragon would save as if it had 22 hit dice, not the 11 that it actually had), but 2ed dragons had magic resistance, and so did 3rd edition dragons.  The "ancient" category goes away as you move from 1st to 2ed, and dragons gain more total categories, so I'm not sure whether we should look at the great wyrm in 3.X as equivalent, but you did, so lets go.

QuoteBut in 3.5e that red dragon now has 700+ hp

The great wyrm red averages less than 540 hit points.  That's a big increase, but it's not totally immense.
But he also has a spell resistance of 32, and has feats available to up that value if he likes (building a 3.X dragon is pretty time consuming!)  The spell resistance of 32 means that a 12th level caster has a 5% chance to affect the dragon with a spell, long before a saving throw occurs.  A 20th level wizard has a 45% chance of affecting the dragon, unless he has a feat to up that amount, or some special item or whatever.

Blasting spells definitely are weaker, but all spells are annoying to land against a dragon.  Since most dragons learn spells that protect themselves, casters normally spend the early rounds of draconic combat trying to unweave the dragon magic, a rather orthogonal plan that definitely goes along with the primary strategy of the rest of the party.  It takes quite a bit of effort to land save-or-die spells versus the dragon as well, especially in core, where you are mostly limited to Will and Fort saves, which dragons normally do amazing at.

Quoteit becomes much more effective to prep save-or-dies and wipe that dragon out with a single failed saving throw

This is really not my experience with dragon combat.

Also regarding a different post entirely:

Quote from: hedgehobbit on February 07, 2023, 11:04:31 AM
This isn't true. The Wealth Per Level chart is meant to be a maximum value, not a minimum.

Neither.  It's meant to be an average.  Read the section in the DMG, page 135, and you'll see.  It explicitly calls it out, then points out that at a level where the average wealth by level is 19,000 gold pieces, no adventure will be written assuming the party has an item that costs 20,000 gold.  Nothing in there implies it's a maximum, and in fact, as an average, it can NEVER be a maximum.

Quote from: VisionStorm on February 07, 2023, 03:41:38 PM...
Skills are also too many, too complicated (if you multiclass) and can get too high. Listen and Spot, for example, should be a single Perception skill IMO (the way it's handled in 5e), and Move Silently and Hide should also be a single Stealth skill. The idea of keeping these skills separate is a carryover from earlier editions that was stupid then too. Skills should not get beyond +10 or so (not counting ability score modifiers or class bonuses), and I don't like the idea of having to pay double for so-called cross-class skills, since it's too clunky, punitive and overcomplicates skill selection, like having to spend a bunch of points across dozens of skills isn't already nerve wracking enough, particularly for casual players who don't know WTF to do with those points or how to spend them without gimping their characters.

I could go on, but I have other stuff to do and others have pointed out many of its other flaws already. All in all, 5e is more simple and straightforward, less flawed (and it has many, just not remotely as many as 3e does out of the box), and far less punitive of bad build decisions, which is why it's gobbled up so much attention away from earlier editions.

Agree with all that, except I don't think 3E/3.5 skills are fixable without almost a complete rewrite of the system from the foundations.  That is, part of the reasons that skills are so messed up is because of the flaws in the classes, feats, etc.   Even the spells get into the game a little, though that's more fuzzy and depends somewhat on how you view magic working.

The biggest difference between 3E and 5E is that 3E's flaws are central to its design, and thus hard to fix, while 5E's flaws are largely peripheral to its design and/or vestiges that can be dropped on a whim.  Plus, being a somewhat simple game, it's easier for the GM to compensate, and house rules are less likely to have unexpected side effects.  And by that I mean from a design intent. 5E does a better job of doing what it was designed to do, however much some people don't like that intent.

Eh, every game has its fault lines, where it gets deceptively tricky to change it.  I free admit that about half of my dislike for 3E is that its fault lines fall right where I can least tolerate them.  All that really means is that it wasn't designed for me.

Edit:  Should also mention that the 5E designers cheated.  They recognized they and all of WotC didn't the slightest idea how to attach a quality skill system to a class-based game.  So they compensated by making so minimal as to almost not matter.  If they'd had the courage of their convictions, 5E wouldn't even have a skill system (which many people have suggested with backgrounds taking up the slack).