Friday, August 7, 2015

Where of Third Edition?

So I've mentioned before, somewhere in this blog, that I started playing with Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and that I had never even seen the 3.0 books. Well a few months ago I finally found a complete set of the core 3.0 books on Amazon for around $9 (including shipping). So I picked them up and have been kind of flipping through them when I'm bored just trying to see what the differences between them and the 3.5 books I know so well are - and good God are there a lot of differences!

I kind of love this 3.0 edition of the game. It's brutal and less refined. Less bulky and a bit more freeing. I'll be talking more about it I think.

14 comments:

  1. I loved the 3.0 DMG--all those premade NPCs in the back to use as is, equipment and everything. In the era of big stat-blocks those were a great time saver.

    But then 3.5e DMG took the equipment away from the NPCs. :(

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    Replies
    1. Spoilers! God!

      *flips table*

      EVERY TIME!

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    2. Ah, I see.

      Well then I bet you haven't found the hidden message at the end of the PHB index where Monte Cook wrote: "ROLEMASTER 4VR!"

      ;)

      Delete
  2. I had the most fun with 3.0 from 2000-2003; 3.5 was regarded as a necessary update so we all converted but it wasn't the same after that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What was different Nicholas it for you guys Nicholas?

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    2. 3.5 put a heavy emphasis on the miniatures, which I had never used prior to that point. When you look at how 3.0 combat was written, while it wasn't overly different from 3.5, the emphasis made few real assumptions about whether you were using minis or abstract combat; 3.5 tightened that up, released along with the Harbinger minis and really tried hard to push the idea....we got swept up into the notion and my games incorporated minis; things slowed down, and the emphasis on tactical combat started to dominate time at the table.

      3.5 also changed the way the game felt in tone....it was more about system mastery than 3.0, and many fo the fixed were designed to tighten up that emphasis.

      Not all was bad: two fixes we all liked included the upgraded ranger and the clean-up on how spells worked with prestige classes. I also remember being very annoyed at a descriptor in the Spider Climb spell that in 3.0 said "you climb at the same skill as a spider" and one of the DMs who ran on my off days interpreted that as meaning you had the same effective skill as a spider....so when using the spell you had to roll. I was hanging from a ceiling when I failed a roll and plunged to my death. 3.5 corrected this by adding to the spider climb description in the PHB and the monster description in the MM that they didn't in fact have to make checks when climbing in a manner natural to the creature, so I was vindicated =)

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    3. I'm just amazed that the DM made you roll. Had they not considered that spiders never fall unless molested?

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  3. I love 3.x of any flavor. Some people think I'm crazy....

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  4. most of the 3.x changes were just not improvements, many of the "problems" solved never were problems.

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    Replies
    1. That sounds similar to how they sold 4e by talking about how it was solving problems that never existed before. Don't get me wrong - I'm not hating on 4e; I had a lot of fun with it - but it was odd hearing about problems that had never existed until Wizards started talking about them.

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    2. True facts, Holmes. True facts.

      Delete

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