What went so terribly, horrifically wrong?

It's kinda telling that the people criticising D&D do so with points, arguments and examples, and the people defending it do so with insults.

This. Rewarding system mastery excludes all the literal retards in a SOCIAL game ffs.

It would be kinda telling if it were true*
Shit, fucked my post all kinds of up.

>Toughness, a deliberate trap action.
But that's wrong. It's a situational feat, very useful for things like convention play and was designed as such.

That's the retrospective he wrote, full of justifications and explanations came up with after the fact.

He coined the term Ivory Tower Game Design, that post sparked almost 100% of the controversy after very, very small online murmurings beforehand.

Saying it's a retrospective doesn't make it any less true.

>But that's wrong
What

It's still:

1) Born from a misunderstanding of what a "Timmy" card is, and
2) A terrible way to design a game.

Besides which, the difference between "this feat is deliberately designed to only be useful in an extremely limited number of circumstances" and "this feat is never good" is pretty much semantics, particularly when dealing with a feat like Toughness, which is in fact *never* good, even in its intended arena.

It's particularly problematic in the fact that you can't *change* the choice once you've made it, at least not for that character. In Magic, if your deck has a card that isn't useful, then between games you can swap it out for another one - even tournament games allow a sideboard for exactly that reason.

The 1st-level elf wizard, meanwhile, is stuck with Toughness for the rest of the campaign.

Except for everyone who actually followed the game during the development process.

>never good
>can almost double a level 1 characters hp
>stuck with for rest of campaign
>doesn't even know what convention play is

Development process? How do you think the game was developed, by committee? You must be really good at rationalizing away why 3.5 is still the most played RPG.

What?

I'm just saying for people who followed the articles and discussions around it during development and playtesting, these problems were present and actively discussed.

Nah, it's easy to rationalise it. Brand, presence and being in the right place at the right time to capitalize on the online boom. Given those factors, the system could have been even worse and it likely wouldn't have hurt it much.

Please provide evidence, because I was around at the same time, and while I remember a very, very, VERY small amount of people discussing these "problems" there was always 20x the number stopping all those threads for naysaying, and it was basically unknown to everyone.

>Posted the actually pretty reasonable "controversy" so early in thread
>Trying to steal away our fun and memeing
Fuck you, nigger

Look, it doesn't matter *why* 3e was designed with an Ivory Tower mentality, because an Ivory Tower mentality is still a terrible way to design an RPG. Frankly it's not even that good in other types of games - which is why, for example, Magic: the Gathering doesn't actually make a habit of designing deliberately bad cards.

(They have, in the past - Chimney Imp was deliberately designed to be the worst card in Magic at the time, as a joke/thought experiment ("how bad can a card be before no one will run it under any circumstance?") - but that's still only a single card in an entire set, and anyone who accidentally runs Chimney Imp can fix the problem much more easily than someone who picks Toughness)

>You must be really good at rationalizing away why 3.5 is still the most played RPG.

Nice bait, but 5e is by far the most popular RPG nowadays.

Just like Chimney imp can be useful if you imprint it with a mimic vat and use it to place all your opponents draws on top of their deck, toughness can be useful for one-time convention play when there were very few 1st level feats actually beneficial to a wizard.

Do you count pathfinder as a different rpg? Because it matters a lot for the numbers.

And it's still bad design, because you could print something that was useful in that context and actually worth taking outside of it, too.

>very useful for things like convention play

It's still an option presented in the game as something equivocal to something actually WORTH HAVING OVER A LONG TERM.

D&D should not be exclusively allowed to have its metaphorical cake and eat it. It can't be mechanically built around single session convention plays and also built and designed for long as campaigns and treat these as two seperate categories but with no actual distinction in game.

That's just piss poor planning right there.

allowing a blanket OK to write whatever 3rd party crap you wanted thanks to the OGL.

>can almost double a level 1 characters hp

In practical terms, there isn't much difference between 6 hit points and 3 hit points in 3e magic. A standard orc with his standard falchion deals 2d4+4 damage, which is going to drop the elf wizard outright anyway even with minimum damage. The wizard is honestly better off focusing on magic sure his spells can hit their target DCs with Spell Focus; or even ensuring that he can go first with Improved Initiative.

The game doesn't outright tell you that it is equivalent. Nowhere does it say that all the options are equal, that was an assumption you made yourself.

No, it really does not matter. Throw every other RPG on the market together and they all might maybe kinda even begin to approach 5e's numbers.

The fact it that most people play *current edition* of *most popular thing*. And in the RPG world that means 5e D&D.

If he stays at range and that same orc throws it's javelin (1d6+3) he actually has a chance at staying standing.

Which is a reasonable assumption to make, particularly since most people probably haven't even *heard* of convention play, let alone actually play in conventions.

> Nowhere does it say that all the options are equal

It just puts all these variantly useful things in the exact same category.

And fuck YOU player for not immediately understanding how this option is bad compared to this other one. I the game designer am FAR TOO BUSY writing another 3 Wizard/Sorcerer spells to meet you half way on any of this shit.

This is not factual, I'm glad you have your feelings about popularity though.

Just to be clear, I have nothing to say to refute this, the game made the mistake of having options for different styles of play without telling people that there were different styles of play.

Exactly.
See

>I have a life and don't wanna autistically pour over this book comparing every character option to make the most optamized build

>LOL WHAT A RETARD

But I don't see any evidence to suggest that different styles of play needed different options at all, or justifying why a shitty feat like toughness couldn't have been better while still being something good to select for convention play.

A relatively small one, however. The average of 1d6+3 is 6, so he's still dropping to 0, leaving him with just one action per turn. And of course you then run into the problem that an Orc is CR 1/2, meaning there's a good probability of there being another orc in the room.

And of course there is the problem of goblins. At CR 1/4, there's probably four of them in the room. While each does only 1d6 (3) damage with their morningstar, the fact that there's more to deal with means that action economy starts to turn in their favor. Particularly since they're goblins, and therefore have INT 10, and therefore can be reasonably expected to target the wizard first.

Not all options can be made for every play-style and still be equally powerful. You can say that they could be made that way easily enough, but actually doing it would be impossible.

Certainly there is room for disappointment in failing to achieve perfection.

What different play styles do you consider needing support? Because I still don't see any justification for Toughness existing.

Being able to survive the initial action economy turn while some are killed keeps it more balanced in their favor.

And the level 1 wizard is less of a threat than any barbarian, who they'd have to get by to get to the wizard anyways, wouldn't they know that at int 10?

I love when we have the same thread every day for 10 years....
Some people like X, some people don't, most of us just don't give a fuck.

One-off's will appreciate options that are more powerful at specific levels, as there are many things in the game that are stronger at particular levels than at others. (things that target specific saves, feats like toughness which peak at level 1, etc)

Campaign play will have VASTLY different power levels to abilities based on it's level of social vs pure combat.

Any given game is going to be incredibly varied. Certain options are vastly different in power to a creative player instead of to an unimaginative one.

They let casterfags design an edition.

Leave us to our fun. I've probably DMed more 3.5 than everyone else in this thread put together, and it hasn't been my game of choice since 2013.

I still enjoy hearing dissenting opinions, and it's an interesting social experiment to see how people can feel their problems are so vast and obvious when to most people they're not even noticeable.

With an INT 10, they can be expected to be as intelligent as the average human. The average human would know that one guy who can mumble some words and put them all asleep in 6 seconds, is more dangerous than one guy who can swing an axe and kill one of them in 6 seconds.

The wizard is always the most dangerous person in the room.

I'm not OP, but honestly, 3.pf is total shit. I say this as someone who's always run D&D and who stuck with 3E during most of its lifespan.

This isn't true at level 1, sleep has a fairly small cast area, and a very limited number of uses, assuming that it's all he prepared. Meanwhile they're getting beheaded by the guy with the big blade. A very real death.

At other levels, much harder to argue against the wizard.

This is assuming that the goblins are also int 3 and don't run, setup ambushes, or sneak around.

It's idiot trolls exaggerating and lying in order for their hyperbolic statements to get any attention.

Saying "3.5 was flawed but good, though largely superceded by 5e" won't get much attention despite being the general consensus among roleplayers, so they have to get attention by screaming "LOOK HOW AWFUL THIS POPULAR SYSTEM IS, I HATE EVERYONE WHO EVER PLAYED IT."

So?

You know what gives Toughness a modicum of usefulness? Make it grant 2 hit points plus 1 hit point per level. That means that at level 1 it grants +3, at level two it's +4, and so on. At least then it gets observably better as your level increases.

This thread is about 3.5 not Pathfinder

A good idea, but there are almost no scaling feats so not something they thought of. Honestly, for a feat slot, it should just give +2 Con and +2 hit points.

>Started that vile fantasy trend of everyone wearing weird leather bondage gear, fur, and blacks/earthtones that we see today in GoT
>Introduced Book of Vile Darkness in an edgy attempt to draw controversy/sales
>Spellcaster edition. Failed to start weaning the playerbase off of Vancian magic
>Prestige classes: Either useless or a no-brainer compared to the core classes.

You mean 5e?

>This is assuming that the goblins are also int 3 and don't run, setup ambushes, or sneak around.

But they're not, they're INT 10.

>This isn't true at level 1, sleep has a fairly small cast area

100 ft. + 10 ft./level range, 10-ft. radius (therefore, 20 ft. diameter, or if you like, most of the squares in a 4x4 square grid). While not fireball-huge, that's still pretty decently-sized, especially considering the typical size of a dungeon room.

I refuse to believe someone who knows what 3.5 is is incapable of using google

Alternatively, it's people who sincerely think it's shit and hope that highlighting its terrible design decisions will help people be aware of them and notice their like in other games, letting them be better at selecting systems to play.

Seriously, the 3.5 core books are garbage. Incredibly class imbalance, lacklustre core combat mechanics and a CR system that gives no actual indication of the difficulty a combat encounter will present. It's trash.

If you assume the goblins are intelligent, then they likely don't get in a lot of scenarios where the wizard could freely cast sleep without hitting allies, although the goblins would be effected first since they have

This.

That's literally repeating what he said, but in a more calm manner and adding in a weak excuse about helping others.

You're an idiot exaggerating and lying in order for your hyperbolic statements to get any attention.

So, here's your (you).

>guys can we talk about something other than blue? I know this is a board for colors but all we do is talk about one color.
>FUCK YOU. I love blue, I've discussed blue for 10 years and I'm not about to stop. Believe it or not I actually enjoy everyone screaming at me to shut the fuck up about blue.

Alternatively, I'm entirely sincere and expressing an opinion.

The idea everyone who opposes you must be insincerely trolling or expressing something they don't believe is true is an intellectual black hole that just lets you dismiss your opponents without thinking, and you're wilfully indulging in it.

I believe everything I said, and I believe all my points are justified. If you actually disagree, then disprove them. Or just dismiss me as a troll because it's the only way to defend your broken sack of shit system.

I feel we've wandered. My ultimate point is that there's little difference between 3 hit points and 6 since even at 1st level you're likely to run into things that can deal 6 or more damage outright, and a wizard is better off focusing on not getting hit than on surviving hits.

Meaning even in a 1st-level convention adventure, Toughness' actual usefulness is dubious at best.

It's not that they're insincere, it's that they're making bold and obviously incorrect hyperbole like saying
>core books are garbage
>garbage
>broken sack of shit system

Despite the general consensus being
>3.5 was flawed but good, though largely superceded by 5e

Yeah, there are other much softer hitting enemies like cats though. Really, at level 1 there are almost no feats that are useful to the wizard, I would say that Toughness is comfortably in 4th place in order of useful level 1 wizard feats.

>Alternatively, I'm entirely sincere and expressing an opinion.

Doesn't stop you from being both an idiot, and exaggerating for attention.

Just because you believe it doesn't make you less of a troll, it makes you a particularly dedicated one.

If you're calling someone a troll, you're calling them insincere. Trolling is by definition the act of saying things just to upset people, either expressing opinions you don't hold or exaggerating them to unreasonable degrees purely to piss people off. I am not a troll.

I am also not a liar. Despite your claim that consensus defines reality, I believe that the 3.x core books are hot garbage in RPG form, barely functioning and only tolerated because people have become so invested in them and their shitty design decisions.

Justify the class imbalance. Justify the trap options. Justify the CR system that does more to hurt than help a prospective GM. Justify the boring as hell combat where none of the default actions save 'full attack' are worth using without ludicrous amounts of investment, which still ends up being outright worse than a few low level spells.

Make actual points and actual defences. Argue ideas, not your opponents, or you just make it seem like you have no actual ground to stand on.

>Trolling is by definition the act of saying things just to upset people

Trolling is just saying dumb things for attention.
That's exactly what you're doing.

I laughed, scrolled down, then scrolled back up and chuckled again.

And, once more, we come back to attacking your opponents.

If you actually had a point, you wouldn't need to do this. You wouldn't need to assume insincerity on my part in order to dismiss my points, because arguing the points themselves should be easy for you.

And yet this is what the D&D defence force does, time and time again. When faced with points, arguments or even opinions they dislike, they brand everyone involved a troll, because it's utterly impossible that someone could sincerely, honestly hold these opinions.

It's intellectually dishonest, and it's fucking pathetic.

>If you're calling someone a troll
I didn't say you were a troll, I guess what this user said.
Listen user, how can something "barely function" when literally hundreds of thousands of people have played and enjoy it, and continue to do so? What is your definition for non-standard, personal definition for "barely"? Is it "exceedingly well?"

You exaggerate all those issues way too much, and completely ignore all the good points of the system because those would undermine your postition.
You're not here to present a fair evaluation of the system, and you clearly don't even understand half of what you're talking about.
You are literally just here to shitpost and tell people how much the game upsets you, and you spend more time justifying why to yourself than actually convincing anyone else.

>my argument is please stop picking on me
ok

The point is arguing with you is a waste of time because you are a troll hoping to bait people into a pointless argument that leads nowhere, but provides you an opportunity to further exaggerate and demand that your personal opinions be treated as facts.

Calling you an idiot is really all you deserve, because anything else just encourages you to talk more about a game you don't understand. It's much better to have you flail around and try to pretend you're not a troll despite spamming these threads and bumping them with your inane criticisms.

Trolling requires 3 components:
Insincere, controversial, and fallacious.

If you are controversial and fallacious, but sincere, then you are just bad at arguing what you actually care about.
If you are insincere and fallacious, but not controversial, no one will care or bother to reply.
If you are insincere and controversial, but not fallacious, then you are simply presenting real arguments.

Because RPG's are a medium where the GM is capable of making things work, even if they're crap RAW, and with enough time and investment 3.x can work pretty well.

None of that contradicts my core point. These issues were well known back in the day, they were talked about and discussed often enough, but the people still playing it are the people who learned to cope with them.

But working around them doesn't mean they don't exist, even if you're at the point of doing so without even thinking about it. They're still significant design failures that deserve to be remembered.

I don't even hate 3.x. I've had some fun games with it. But the core systems are hot garbage, and that shouldn't be excused or whitewashed.

Having severe flaws to its fundamental mechanics is in no way undermined by the strengths of 3.x, because those strengths are built on top of those flaws. The awesome spellcasting system is rooted in the issue of caster supremacy, the breadth of content is undermined by the extensive trap options, core imbalances and lack of interesting decisionmaking in combat outside of spellcasting. Heck, lack of interesting mechanical decisionmaking at all outside of spellcasting, given how fiddly and rough the skill system is.

I am someone who cares about system design, which means that instead of just taking something and figuring out how to make it work, I like to get into why it doesn't work. Most of the people criticising 3.x are probably coming from the same place. Many groups won't bother. The GM will get a functional understanding of how to make it work and stop there. But that doesn't mean those fundamental flaws aren't present or should be overlooked.

And once again, you're incapable of actually arguing any points. All you can do is dismiss your opponents. Pathetic.

Shouldn't you actually try and point out a flaw or better yet a series of flaws in the system instead of just trying to distract from the topic and accusing everyone else around you of attacking your sincerity or whatever?

Try and introspect about how little "arguments" you've posted.

>with enough time and investment 3.x can work pretty well
>"barely functional"

It's kind of a shame you lack the ability to notice how few arguments you are putting forth while claiming your position is unassailable.

Trolling just requires you to say something stupid for attention.

You can't prove sincerity.
Your statements are controversial and largely innaccurate and rely on extreme hyperbole.

That's what makes you a troll, and whether or not you are sincere is of little consequence.

see

I've already posted several. I'm waiting for anyone to actually respond without dismissing them out of hand.

That the GM is required to put in a shitton of work to make a game function makes it barely functional.

A well designed system creates less work for the GM. A badly designed system makes more work for the GM. 3.x is a badly designed system.

>you won't fall for my bait!

The only thing that's pathetic is your arguments and that you think anyone's dumb enough to engage in your stupidity.

See the trolling attempt is a mindgame, but the troll themselves will know if they are sincere. That's the secret, that's what makes it so critical.

No, you've just made vague statements like "core imbalances". You don't have any examples or basis behind the claims.

This is why people aren't taking you seriously.

So your non-standard definition for "barely" is anything that takes some amount of work?

What is this "less" and "more" even relative too?

How much work it should take. GMing always takes work, GMing a crunchy system always takes more work than a light system.

If a systems mechanics are well designed and functional, they will reduce the work required of the GM as they will support them, removing the need to do things like micromanage players character sheets, if the system balance is good enough it's not necessary, or providing effective tools for encounter building rather than forcing the GM to math out his PC's expected damage output and how much they can take and figure out the values.

A bad system, on the other hand, makes these things harder. Micromanaging sheets is an utter necessity in 3.x, while the CR system tells the GM it will help them, while actually making it harder to tell if an encounter is balanced or not due to the system itself lying to you.

Bad design.

you know, I play everquest on and off, was my first mmo I dove into and was a massive fucking part of my life. now, let me explain to you how level 105 worked in that game lat time I played it (its been a few expansions and the devs despise the playstyle skill allowed)
You play up your character, you fuck up the alternate advancement the first time, meaning that you now have to piss more time away getting more aa because you fucked up.
at this point you are expected to read what aa's do and possibly look up a wiki to find out what people who ran the numbers say about the aa
so now that you got a better grasp of the aa system you continue leveling, most of this is bitch work grinding as nothing is really worth stopping and sticking around unless you really like an expansion. Its somewhere around level 95 that the game full stops holding your goddamn hand,or there is no content that holds your hand, and almost regardless of class you play a group mission game as it's the most effective and fastest way to do it anymore.
now it may not happen day 1 of this cycle, at some point you find someone who is well the fuck above your skill level. This personally happened to me with every class I played, and I ended up getting better then each of the players I watched to the point it's obvious they were still doing things wrong, and all that I did was read up on how my abilities stacked with each other
somewhere in here is where people either get good or stay bad
The sad thing is,at 105 I was able in group gear to do something like 200k dps with a wizard till the devs bastardised everything, most wizards only manage to pull off 30k and run out of mana all the fucking time when literally all they have to do is read how stacking works
Unless d&d completely obscures everything, it's been a long time since I was new to it so I can't really tell from a noobs perspective, you not reading the fucking player's guide and then playing the game is a fuck you to everyone involved

Casters and Martials

Core combat maneuvers against full attack

The CR system. Just... The CR system.

These are simple, obvious and should be clear if you've ever read any 3.x related content.

>how much it should take
What do you personally think such a vague statement means?

How does a game's design prevent you from having to check your players character sheets? That sounds like trust so it's group based and not system based.

>uses reduce and harder without giving reference as to what in comparison too.
>"One will be harder, and the other easier!"
Than what?

A PC's expected damage output being consistent across all builds and levels sounds like a BAD thing. People hated their characters being too similar.

The CR system works very well as a rough guideline, but the variety in player builds is too great to allow for ANY possible consistency in it's creation, no matter how much of a genius game designer you were.

See the social vs high combat posts above.

Please, don't argue with them. They honestly don't know anything and are just repeating memes at this point.

I'm not sure what else to say.

GMing takes a base amount of work. Any GM knows that.

The system can make your job easier, giving you less things to do, or make it harder, giving you more things to do.

That's all there is to it.

The CR system utterly fails. Some encounters will get stomped despite being arguably higher level, others will always be ridiculously lethal because of SLA or monster caster save or dies, which the system barely accounts for, as part of the larger issue of 3.x having no idea how powerful spellcasting actually is in its own rules.

As for social vs high combat, I can't buy that because other systems have fixed it by dividing those resource pools up, letting you have access to both without necessitating a tradeoff.

Which is just one of the many good design lessons you can learn from understanding why 3.x is crap.

It's the same in WoW, a player who knew what they were doing could do more than 3x (10's of thousands of more) DPS than the casual players.

Basically if you didn't read anything and expected to just do a tenth of the work for the same payout you would get nowhere. Same for reading the players handbook in 3.x. You traded your time for your efficacy. RPG's are a social game that unfortunately require some contribution from each person involved.

>class imbalance
doesn't come up in casual play
>trap options
aren't traps but rather situational for things like conventions
>Justify the CR system that does more to hurt than help a prospective GM
massively overstated. For most things CR works.
>Justify the boring as hell combat where none of the default actions save 'full attack' are worth using without ludicrous amounts of investment, which still ends up being outright worse than a few low level spells.
child of its time. elaborate combat systems didn't really become a thing until recently.

Look, I read the book before I ever tried to play, maybe I'm special, but how in the fuck do you read the literal rulebook where everything is spelled out for you and not see half the shit that is coming your way?

I say this because I don't know what the norm is, do people typically not read the rules before they play?