I’ve recently been again captured by the charm of the 2003 Forgotten Realms book Unapproachable East. It came out right after the released of the revised 3.5e edition, but still feels in many way like the tone and style of of the earlier books. Back in the day when the revised rules came out, I was very much in love with the changes, and so was pretty much everyone else I knew about. Even though the changes to the rules were not that severe, the people at WotC used the opportunity to make new versions of many of the splatbooks to begin a stylistic remodeling of D&D, which in hindsight was one of the biggest shifts in feel and tone that D&D ever did. Instead of simply dividing D&D’s different phases of identity into TSR old school (1974-1999) and WotC new school (2000-present), I think we could just as well split it into Oldschool D&D (1974-1983), Middle Period (1984-2002), and Dungonpunk (2003-present).
I find myself having a lot of nostalgia for 3rd edition books from the first three years, but feel absolutely nothing for Eberron-Pathfinder period. I actually really like Wayne Reynolds’ art style, but it doesn’t mesh with the kind of fantasy campaign I want to actually play.
So these last days I’ve been pondering the admittedly very silly idea of perhaps maybe running another game with the original version of the 3rd Edition rules 20 years later. No rational reasons for that choice, just plain, straightforward nostalgia. Over the years, people have been looking back at the changes made by the rules revision, and a good number of people have shared the opinion that many of the apparent improvements actually made the game worse. There’s even some really fringe weirdos who think the original version is actually better suited to running and playing a modern D&D game with a more oldschool approach.
But this morning, I had for a moment a thought that maybe, I could even run the campaign idea I am pondering simply with 5th edition and call it a day. But I soon remembered several reasons why 3rd Edition is still beating out both 3.5e and 5th edition as the rules that feel the most right:
- Damage reduction in 3rd Ed. only cares about the modifier of the main enchantment of a weapon to overcome. A +3 weapon will go through the DR of any enemy who has DR against +3, +2, +1, and silver weapons. No need for a golf bag of different blades for different types of enemies. Also, having a plain +2 sword can be a visible game changer instead of just a +1 increase to attack and damage from your previous weapon.
- Damage reduction and energy resistance in 3rd Ed. tends to block very large amounts of damage to the point of easily outright cancelling an attack instead of just making it less efficient. This means more situations where an enemy is close to invulnerable to what the players can throw at it, and that require them to come up with unusual out of the box solution instead of just brute force attacking.
- In 5th edition, demons, aboleths, and other big critters lost almost all of their spells that make fighting them different from oversized ogres.
- The low-levels in 5th edition are stupid. That’s the fun part of the game, not something that should be rushed through as fast as possible.
- Even with just the PHB, 3.5e and 5th edition try to put cool new special abilities into every level of every class, creating a much stronger incentive to get deeply invested in character builds. Class level tables looking boring and empty in 3rd Ed. is something I regard as an advantage.
- Concentration in 5th edition really changes the fiction of how Forgotten Realms used to work in its original presentation.
- When you invite players to join a 5th edition game, they want to play tiefling bards, dragonborn paladins, and githyanki warlocks. Even when you specifically tell them in advance that this version of the Forgotten Realms is not that kind of setting.
How does concentration change the fiction? I have no knowledge of the old FR, but it seems odd that a rule like that could have implications for the setting.
Simply that certain combinations of active spells are no longer possible in 5th edition. As you go higher up in levels, it increasingly changes how the world ticks.
I have a lot of affection for the first few 3.0 adventures and splatbooks. The Sunless Citadel and The Forge of Fury were written with a very different adventure paradigm than the kind of tactical wargame approach 3.5, and the early splats were short paperbacks with black and white interior art from usually one or two artists. It’s this more restrained, semi-hobbyist approach that, rather than pad things out to get a hefty tome, was using sidebars to cram interesting ideas into a smaller space
Actually, the class tables in 3e and 3.5e are almost identical. Some classes (rogue and bard come to mind, but I think more) have abilities written into their class text that were not included in their tables, which was confusing. These were simply added to their tables in 3.5e rather than being lost in their text.
I have a PDF that outlines every single change between 3e and 3.5e and the truth is the vast majority are reorganizations such as the one I just mentioned and clarifying text. I have gone over the changes many times as my group still plays 3e as a 3e/3.5e hybrid.
The only real changes to speak of are the damage reduction changes, how Paladin’s mount works, long/skinny monsters becoming round, the 1.5x move rate for diagonals being clarified, “shadowy illumination” was added to light sources, monsters gaining feats at same rate as PCs (further, the 3.0 MM failed to list key stats in the monster entries that would need to be calculated on the fly like grapple bonus, 3.5 fixed this), weapon sizing, the few rogue only skills now open for all to learn, and many, many spell changes.
The thing about the spell changes though is that many of them were actually changed to work more like their original 2e versions, which I prefer. Otherwise most of the changes were to fix glaring mistakes or some changes to ranges to make them fit better if you are using a grid, which as you know was the predoimment style of play from the late 90s-mid 2000s. Further, a lot of the spells that were brought back to their 2e counterparts or changed in general were done so to bring the power level of the game back down a little, as 3.0 is more high powered than 3.5e. The same was done with feats (except for natural spell getting added to 3.5e core from the 3.0 book Masters of the Wild, this was a mistake for sure).
Speaking of feats, the complete series of books that followed the 3.5e release are almost entirely reprintings of the 3.0 splatbooks, and I mean over 80% word for word the same material, especially Complete Warrior (which also added the feats and other material from 3.0 Oriental Adventures and a few other places). A few of the feats got reworked a little where they either didn’t make sense or were too powerful.
It is hard to stress how much of the changes in 3.5e are hardly changes. The 3.5e books are very similar to the 3e core books, nearly identical. I am one who prefers the 2000=2003 era of 3e, but if you know both well enough it becomes very clear that 3.5e plus the first four Complete books is an almost identical play experience to 3.0 core books with the subsequent 3.0 splats, except the books reach much more easily and the power level is brought down slightly.
The 3.0 splats have better cover art than the first handful of Complete books, that’s about all. Knowing both sets of rules and either running the game with 3.0 core and adding the handful of really, really good 3.5e changes OR just 3.5e core rules and keeping the 3.0 rulings that you prefer (this is what my group did and stuck with).
It is a wonderful system and Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet and Skip Williams did a masterful job at maintaining much of 2nd edition in the rules, bringing back some flavor from 1st edition, and looking to other popular rulesets at the time that people were leaving D&D for such as Runequest, Warhammer FRP, GURPS, Rolemaster, Ars Magica and so forth and bringing in rules that made people able to play D&D the way they expected to be able to play it. 2nd edition in 1999 looked much like D&D did in 1979 and people were fed up with trying to use a miniatures war game tweaked into a role playing game whent he rest of the industry had moved on. 3e brought all of this together and to great success. The wealth of D&D stuff printed between 2000 and 2009 (if you bring in Pathfinder stuff, tweaked down to work with 3e), is enough for several lifetimes of gaming.
Although, yes, after that initial reprinting of the core books and the 3.0 splat book reprints in the Complete series, the game changed indeed. But the first wave of 3.5e releases should not be counted there.
Also worth noting, if you know the books well, there is a lot in the late 3.5e released, both official and third party, that is similar in nature to the 2000-2003 period of the game and worth using. It shouldn’t all be thrown out based on release date. Who wrote or published the material is more key here.