Okay, I have an idea for a campaign or one-shot to run with my youngest brother in the near future and I may also run it as a Play-By-Post as well, and I want to run it in an old-school style but with 3.5 as the system. Before I get further into detail on that, let me provide a little background first.

I started becoming a true RPG gamer in February of 2007 and I started with D&D 3.5 in its final days. I was thirteen years old and my father was our DM. He was more familiar with AD&D (2E is his favorite system), so we house ruled a lot of stuff and ignored or de-emphasized a lot of the finer details such as Challenge Ratings, Skills, and the miniatures system. We also only had the Players Handbook as that's all I could afford with the allowance money I had saved up at the time. So the end result was a somewhat old-school game in its presentation, even if the system was the same system that heralded the beginning of the New School.

Now it's ten years later and I feel old now, even if I'm only twenty-four. I want to go back to my gaming roots. I want to do something I wanted to do as a young teenager yet was too afraid to do. And that is run a game of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, the same game I started with.

I'd only use the Players Handbook for now, as I own it on hard copy AND that was all I had back when I started gaming. I wrote all sorts of characters back then, many of which I never got to play. I wrote my own campaigns and settings when I was thirteen, but they never saw the light of day as I was too afraid I'd screw up as a newbie DM. Ten years later and I have yet to run a long-term D&D campaign. Now it's time to stop dawdling and do it.

I want to use the core character classes and races of 3.5, and I want to run the campaign as a wide open sandbox game in the old-school style.

Some tropes I consider to be "Old School" include the following...

1. Sandbox instead of Railroading

2. Character immersion and an emphasis on role-playing over "roll-playing"

3. Rulings taking precedent over hard rules

4. A custom setting instead of published settings, though you can include crossover elements from other settings and sources.

5. Interesting characters and stories, but not resorting to a domineering railroad narrative or giving characters plot immunity.


So, should I go through with this. I was intending to run Microlite74 over at RPG Pub, but I may take the same ideas and settings and retool them for house-ruled 3.5 instead.

You have some interesting ideas here, particularly the 5 bullet-points of Old School philosophy. For me a #6 might be that OS also includes simple rules and my personal opinion is that 3.5 doesn't fit that criteria, but it's possible that you can pull it off with a strong enough emphasis on the other 5.  I'd be interested to hear how this campaign works out for you.

The problem I noticed when I tried to run 3.5 as an old school sandbox is that 3.5 doesn't scale well.  What I mean by this is that in older editions certain enemies would remain a threat (look up Tucker's Kobolds in Dragon magazine for an extreme example) no matter what level the players were.  Hell, 2nd edition had a boxed module called Dragon Mountain that was almost entirely kobolds and it was a fairly high level.  In 3.5 and its clones, scaling is much more precise, meaning anything you place in your sandbox is either going to be very underpowered or very overpowered.  I think there is a thread floating around about scaling at the moment.

3x doesn't do rulings well either, because almost everything is codified in the rules.

Of course, if you have players that are on board, than the two above things won't matter.  I never had that luck and eventually just tossed the 3x era out the window.

Quote from: Bloodwolf;996705The problem I noticed when I tried to run 3.5 as an old school sandbox is that 3.5 doesn't scale well.  What I mean by this is that in older editions certain enemies would remain a threat (look up Tucker's Kobolds in Dragon magazine for an extreme example) no matter what level the players were.  Hell, 2nd edition had a boxed module called Dragon Mountain that was almost entirely kobolds and it was a fairly high level.  In 3.5 and its clones, scaling is much more precise, meaning anything you place in your sandbox is either going to be very underpowered or very overpowered.  I think there is a thread floating around about scaling at the moment.

3x doesn't do rulings well either, because almost everything is codified in the rules.

Of course, if you have players that are on board, than the two above things won't matter.  I never had that luck and eventually just tossed the 3x era out the window.

I'll make sure to emphasize the five points of Old-School play that I outlined to my players and make sure they're on board with it before I start. Thanks for the information. I appreciate it,

If I was going to run 3.5x, I'd probably use the e6 variation and then deal with the abilities of the missing levels through feat chains.

I think it should work out fine as long as your players are on board with it and understand you're not going to be bound by a rulebook. When players are having fun with their characters and your world, at least in my experience they aren't worrying about whether you're adhering to the letter of the law. Also, just don't let players keep copies of the rules at the table so they can't quite chapter and verse at you if you have any of those types in your group. Just let them have copies of whatever spell or equipment rules they actually need to play their characters  as competent.

Quote from: Krimson;996716If I was going to run 3.5x, I'd probably use the e6 variation and then deal with the abilities of the missing levels through feat chains.

Yes. E6 rocks. It's the only version of 3.5 I'd run.

Quote from: Aglondir;996733Yes. E6 rocks. It's the only version of 3.5 I'd run.

What is this E6 variant you speak of?

Quote from: Doc Sammy;996740What is this E6 variant you speak of?

PDF Link. It's very short and worth reading. I think it's a fun approach to 3.5.

Why not just use an older game?

Quote from: Krimson;996716If I was going to run 3.5x, I'd probably use the e6 variation and then deal with the abilities of the missing levels through feat chains.

I ran a fun game using the Pathfinder Beginner Box that matched Doc's description. The PBB goes to level 5. I think this can work as long as you cap max PC and NPC level, somewhere in the 5-10 range. An E6 system where you get Feats after the level cap is nice but may not be needed, I would suggest run with a hard cap at 10. This covers traditional D&D zero to superhero play. The biggest thing is to have slower* advancement - give less XP for monsters, give XP for finding treasure and other non-fighty achievements. Don't let PCs buy powerful items, but do have powerful stuff available to find. This helps balance Fighter types vs Wizard types.

I rem I ran Lost City of Barakus sandbox 3e campaign module that worked very well; it uses half XP, we ran it levels 1-8  (still only took 32 sessions) and I had a hard PC/NPC level cap at 10.

Don't even think about going over level 10, and you want the bulk of play in the 1-6 range, 1-8 at a stretch. 3e already assumes high level characters get less XP & be sure to have PCs advance more slowly once they hit about 3rd, it should preferably take around 50 sessions to hit 9th and think of retiring.

*Although playing online slows things anyway.

The 1e Rogues Gallery had a picture of two characters laughing at killing a bunch of kobolds with a fireball.  Kobolds were never a threat mechanically. What was a threat was a DM treating them as a rationale or theme for a killer dungeon.

When 3e came out, we just played it like AD&D with a different skill system. That's really what matters, how you play it and a willingness to ignore rules you don't like. (That said, high level still becomes really bloated because it keeps going at 10th level instead of largely stopping)

In your shoes I'd probably try Microlite 20 Purest Essence. It's undeniably a d20 system, it's all of 17 pages long and includes a bestiary, spell lists, equipment, optional rules...
Probably the best d20 clone ever. And has a very cool layout too.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;996748Why not just use an older game?

Nostalgia, mainly. 3.5 was my first system.

I do like the older systems though.

Here's a thought: roleplaying is what happens when there aren't any rules. This is people's argument against social skills, but there are even people who argue against having thieves in AD&D1e and earlier, arguing that "roll to detect traps" takes away from those who would otherwise be poking and prodding and twisting and checking things out.

Now, this is not to go all thespy and "why do we even have rules, let's all just hold hands and sing kumbaya" and stuff. But as editions get more comprehensive, they do bland out a bit. The rules of AD&D1e are incomplete, incoherent and self-contradictory, and that's a good thing.