Does ANYBODY still play D&D 3.5? nt

2e > 3.5e > 5e > shit > 4e

what's truly ironic is that 3.PF is gettign support andmassive expansions, while 4e players actually do sufffer from sunk cost be3cause they recieve no support or expansions...ever again. Hell, even Fantasy Craft is more sunk cost because you get no support there either anymore.

Finally, you don't even have to pay for 3.Pf, so there isn't necessarily a cost at all.

Maybe it's the other games giving people brain damage.

> 5e >shit>4e

dont you have a equal sign on the keyboard?

Oh man I'm jealous of that Draconomicon.

I just make up all my settings. I'll use whatever gods I feel fit best (from all the splatbooks), and whatever races sound like fun at the time (once again, drawing from any splat). I'd like to try an Eberron game at some point, but I've never gotten my hands on the setting book. I have the Races book and Magic book though, so I do like what I've seen so far.

I've always enjoyed sitting down with a blank slate and just filling things in at my own pace. Some is ready before the game starts, and the rest my players and I fill in as we go.

Yeah I play 3.5. Lots of options, large community dedicated to exploring those options. I like complicated mechanics, but I enjoy other RPGs too, and I'm not under the delusion that 3.5 can be adapted to play every type of game, there are plenty of RPGs that work better for certain things.

Preferably, I play in Eberron, which whether you like 3.5 or not, is a great setting with solid in-game material.

Could be worse, they could be playing pathfinder.

Literally had a guy on FB tell me that hes not interested in playing 5e cause "it's a shit edition, it doesn't have flexibility". When I asked why it's shit he replied, "I prefer pathfinder". I asked him what you can do in pathfinder that you can't in 5e. No reply.

>look at anime tiddy

He probably got distracted, it's cool

>I asked him what you can do in pathfinder that you can't in 5e.
Have numbers scale so that shitty untrained chucklefucks aren't beating the best of the best more often than they have any right to. Also can't use ToB or PoW for 5E without nerfing them to the point where I wouldn't want to bother.

me :D

i prefer dungeon world, tough.

3.5 is pretty fun with the Tier 1 and Tier 2s banned

>I asked him what you can do in pathfinder that you can't in 5e.
Play any equivalent to the T3 classes from 3.5 and not feel like you're playing a shit knockoff class. Bard is the only exception and that's because it's blatantly overpowered in 5E.

Pleb taste

I still at times play 1 e.

So.. Shit is 3.pf?

People who haven't played gurps

ROM/Merc MUD

I hate you for your choice of systems, but I am so glad to see that there are still people who remember those.

Nah, I play 3.5 and I've played GURPS. They're surprisingly similar games, but GURPS fans seem to have this weird fixation on it. It really isn't all that special, and I see no reason to play it over 3.5 for my fantasy games.

Do you know what the sunk cost fallacy is? Because it doesn't sound like you do with talk of "no support."

Also the "I don't have to pay anything therefore no cost" only applies if you're agreeing that your time is worthless.

I have this weird occasional urge to pick it up again, only somehow make it good. I then remember that my issues with it run deeper than just class balance (which is easy enough to fix with widespread class banning).

Are you implying D&D is a waste of time?

Hell yea family I spent the first half of the 2000s (early 20s) on Aabahran: The Forsaken lands and a couple others. Excellent quest class / quest race / cabal system and brutal PVP. A bit too brutal desu. The game is still up, but it's basically crack cocaine to me.

I think I'll be doing something along these lines, thanks. I've had no clue how strictly people run their games. Good to hear by the book is generally frowned upon.

Pathfinder. It's basically a fork from 3.5 for people who didn't like 4e's rule changes.

Why is 3.5 higher than 5e?

gurps: dungeon fantasy is better d&d then d&d.

And it isn't made for crab-people.

The way I see it, there's no judge at the table to make sure you're following any of the books to a T. That's always been the thrill of 3.5 for me, just how much content you have to pull from, and how open the game is to homebrew.

Bounded accuracy is shit, and level caps are shit.

Sure, you've suck a bunch of time and money and effort into something, and don't want to change because of that.

Except you are actually GETTING things back for the money you spend, - more splats, more books, more tools, more toys. You don't lack for players, you don't lack for tools to work with, and you don't lack for opportunities to use it. Unlike 4e, where youy paid a huge amount of money for an unsupported, broken system that no one cares about except people who paid a ton of money for a broken and unsupported system.

So who sunk money into a worthless system?

What's wrong with bounded accuracy? It keeps the numbers of the game from overflowing into complete meaningless insanity and ensures that the math always remains functional (AC never becomes irrelevant, for instance).

Also what about level caps?

Yeah. It's called pathfinder.

It also makes dice the deciding factor because bonuses aren't even trying to keep pace and makes the skill system a complete fucking shitshow for the majority of the game and for everyone without Expertise. The idea that someone could look at 3.5's stat check system running headfirst into problems because of how low the numbers it worked with were and think "Hmm yes this is a good idea to base everything in the new system around" is mindboggling when it was absolutely one of the worst parts of 3.5.

>tfw live with parents in my 20s
>tfw dad has good job so he bought all the 3.5 books
>ALL of them
>over 100 books, no joke
>3.5 might suck rules-wise but I love it anyway
>have 10 year campaign with family
>make NPCs with different prestige classes for them to go against in their adventures
>want to do a ToB / psionics campaign
>want to run something in Faerun cause we have the books for it
>worried I won't be able to

And bonuses only started to achieve predictable results in 3.5 when the game started to fall in on itself.

3.5 > 5e > 2e > 4e > 1e

>I asked him what you can do in pathfinder that you can't in 5e. No reply.
Play a mystic theurge. Play a duskblade (eldritch knight doesn't have spell channeling). Play a scout (shit class but it was fun getting extra damage for moving). Can't set off a locate city bomb (not that any DM would allow that anyway). Can't crawl up someone's anus. I know half these things are ridiculous but the point is there is far more customization in 3.5 that was removed in 5e to make it easier to play. Except more options does not inherently make a game more complicated. Or even more unbalanced if you're smart about it. Wizards of the Coast thinks that when they make a mistake, their lack of ability to execute an idea means that idea is bad. This fallacy has led to the schizophrenic pendulum of 3.5 --> 4e ---> 5e being a return to 3.5 while 4e was trying to break away from it.

5e objectively improves a lot of things (no retard bonus spells table, attack / saves rolled into one stat, size-based HD, undead have Con score, Dex bonus to ranged damage) but holy shit is it boring as fuck.

What REALLY sucks is Pathfinder. It improves a couple things but makes everything else worse, doesn't have nearly the breadth of content of 3.5, is far less aesthetic, and the fucking SRD being free online for all splats means my players can spend hours wiki-rolling it to find new broken shit half of which is 3rd party and I have to ban.

Nothing is wrong with it in concept, it's just overdone in 5e. Should have been 1/2 level + 2.

You know on the note of things you can't do in 5e that you could in 3.5, the Eldritch Knight. The Eldritch Knight in 3.5 was basically a full wizard that could fight semi-decently, which is something 5e seems to suck out loud at.

I probably would if I knew anybody who wanted to.

Back in it's heyday I played so much I literally had the game and about four campaigns worth of modules memorized, and could just improve an entire 1-20 game on system knowledge and stolen plot elements from pop-culture.

Then 4e and Pathfinder happened. Pathfinder I never got into, because to my eyes it was never anything more than a shittier version of 3.5 as a blatant cash-grab for people who didn't like the direction 4e was taking the franchise. 4e was.... interesting, but I never really got into it.

And for some reason, absolutely nobody I know stuck with 3rd/3.5. Every single one either went to pathfinder or 4th. So I kinda moved onto sci-fi.

Been interested in checking out 5th though. Haven't found a group for it yet though.

Eldritch knight as an archetype instead of a PrC is a REALLY cool idea that I got on board with. Then I learned it kinda sucked, and got really salty at its stupid bonded weapon feature. I fucking hate half the design for 5e, there are so many cool ideas mixed in with so much shit it's unbelievable.

Honestly, I'm annoyed at 5e for continuing the weird character building, char-op minigame of S&P 2e, 3.5, and 4e.

Unfortunately. My DM is stuck in his ways and will only play 3.5 and Star Wars d20.

It sucks. He barely understands the system and doesn't understand magic at all. I hate the game but I have to learn every little rule so that we can actually play instead of reading rulebooks for 4 hours.

Our group consists of two casters and a rogue and he has no idea how to handle us. He won't learn the CR system so he randomly chooses monsters from the monster manual and if their bonus to damage is higher than our health he just removes it.

I tried to get him to switch to 5e just for the simpler and cleaner rules but no. "I don't want to learn new rules and we already made it this far do you really want to change your character".

>They're surprisingly similar games
I'm GMing 3.5 and GURPS right now and no, that's not even remotelly true.

E.g:

>3.5, first level group
Fighter: 'i'll grapple him!'
Me: 'have you any realated feat?'
Fighter: 'nope'
Me:'alright, then aoo it is... (roll) he hit you first, your action failed'

>gurps, 100p hystorical pirate game
Pirateguy: 'i'll smash a bottle onto his skull!'
Me: 'cool. Since you wanna do it as fast as you can count it as an aoa. Roll for it!'

...as you can se the first case (3'5) punishes creative tactics, the second (gurps) actually encurage them.

would you say 5e encourages creative tactics?

I don't know since i didn't have the opportunity to play it so far

Do you think gurps is faster than 3.5?

It's extremely DM dependent, but it beats 3.5e.
3.5e comes with stuff like grapple, shove, and other maneuvers like that castrated in the core rules, and then you need several feats for the action to even occasionally be good.

In 5e, as you can see in image related, how the DM chooses to interpret your creativity is very much up to them, but is based on Grapple and Shove as examples.
Grapple and Shoved are just keyed to the Athletics skill, and don't need anything else to do the job well enough. (You can get Expertise, but that's excessive.)
And since the way they scale is the same the way attacks scale, the comparison is often easier; if you're proficient in Athletics and you're STR based, you're gonna have exactly the same bonus for your grapple/shove as for attacks - and then the comparison just becomes what effect do i want in this situation? 1d10+3 damage, push the dude into the pit, knock him prone, or grapple him?

Yes. It's the best edition.

There are pros and cons.

In my case GMing gurps will require more prep time for a campaign but then the game run smoothly

3.5 game in the other hand is easier to build up but then it get progressively slugghish the more it advance (characters level up and get new stuff to remember. Also the ecounters get more complex due to growth of options)

>Play a mystic theurge.
Mystic Theurge in 5e is as simple as taking Cleric+Wizard levels (or taking the Mystic Theurge path for wizards). You won't suck donkey balls for the first 10 levels either. You won't have spellcasting failure chance in heavy armor if you can use it. You'll actually eventually get 9th level slots.

>Play a duskblade (eldritch knight doesn't have spell channeling).

It has a different "attack and cast at the same time" feature called Action Surge. You also got bladespells and the bladesinger.

> Play a scout (shit class but it was fun getting extra damage for moving).

Virtually identical to the rogue. I think Rogue even has a Scout archetype in one of the UAs, but not sure.

>Except you are actually GETTING things back for the money you spend, - more splats, more books, more tools, more toys

Which take more time and more money.

This is literally the sunk cost fallacy at work.

> Unlike 4e, where youy paid a huge amount of money

I have never in my life paid for any 4e content... Because it came out when I was still a pennyless NEET.

>.. for an unsupported

It has all the support it needs.

>broken system

"broken" in a thread discussing 3.5? Are you serious?

>rest

Why do you repeat yourself? It won't make anything you say any more true.

>You'll actually eventually get 9th level slots.

You could get that in 3.5 with just by not splitting the levels evenly, so you'd wind up with 9th in one class and 6th in the other.

You were lagging behind in slots by 3-4 levels all the way though, which made your save DCs lower. I mean, even a 3-4 levels behind fullcaster is fucking bullshit in 3.x land, but you were still effectively nerfing yourself.

Which just doesn't happen in 5e. If you take 1-3 or so cleric levels you can still get 9th level wizard spells IIRC and you still got spell scaling by slots built in for your low level spells, which is a lot more useful.

And, again, that's without the actual Mystic Theurge wizard, which can just do whatever it wants.

>It has a different "attack and cast at the same time" feature called Action Surge.
This is bad and you should feel bad for pretending that attacking and then separately casting a spell on a class whose offensive spells are absolute shit once every hour at best is equivalent to a class that's better at spellcasting in the first place being able to channel touch attack spells through attacks until they run out of spells. You'd have to be literally retarded to think they're equivalent.

Blade spells are your "channel touch attack spells through weapon attack". Because 5e has these, it doesn't need the Duskblade's feature. It is redundant. Heck, touch attacks don't even exist as a thing, at best it's a "melee spell attack".

>it doesn't need the Duskblade's feature.
Except for all the melee spells that aren't blade spells that would work if it was in 3.5 and it being one of multiple Duskblade features. So yeah, it does need it if you're looking for a Duskblade replacement.

I DM 3.5 campaign, it's currently on hiatus because people are on holidays but we're resuming in October. It's been fun and it's going to be fun.

By the time he gets ones that are worth the action over just using a bladespell (because Shocking grasp sure as hell ain't) he'll have the feature that lets him do a bonus attack after it, which is probably close enough for a game that actually does not want you to fuck with the action economy.

Heck, thinking about it, if you go EK-> wizard after getting that feature, you end up with higher total level of spells than duskblade even.

e b e r r o n

>you end up with higher total level of spells than duskblade even.
And significantly less combat ability than the Duskblade so it's STILL not a fucking stand-in for them, it's just something vaguely similar but shittier.

>And significantly less combat ability than the Duskblade

Everyone has significantly less combat ability in 5e than in 3.5. This is normal, because 5e is a lot less high powered game. An EK-wizard is not far behind at all, when comparing to other characters in 5e (which is what you should be comparing it to).

Congrats on defeating your own argument. When someone says they want a Duskblade, they don't mean "I want a vaguely similar gish that's fucking trash at doing everything the Duskblade does". They want a Duskblade. Dancing around that and then calling the Duskblade theoretically overpowered in 5E(it wouldn't be) is not helping your case.

I still skim through my 3rd edition and Forgotten Realms books. It seems so close to me, that "silver age".

Then I realise last 3rd ed fr books came a decade ago, and the days when we mocked 4th edition is gone, people shit on paizo who was worshipped back then, no one talks about dragonlance, ravenloft, darksun, planescape anymore.

Gods I never thought I woudl be a grognard, grognards were the weird dudes who boasted how butifel AD&D was, not me no. Fuck..

It absolutely would be OP, it has stacking self-buffs, that alone puts it past most of the casters.

EK->wizard does everything a Duskblade does that is possible to do in 5e thematically and mechanically. Asking for action economy breaking shit in a game that actually kinda sorta tries to respect it is futile, just as much as asking for the rest of the broken shit is.

>people shit on paizo who was worshipped back then
>IMPLYING
I was shittalking them during PF's own alpha and long before that because of how godawfully balanced Dragon Magazine content was 99% of the time.

Obviously ported to use Concentration and the like you fucking retard.

In that case, what is missing? Is that extra bonus action cost for blade channeling really that much of a deal breaker?

Kudos to you, there were always complainers but general attitude was positive, similar to occasionally shitted 5th edition today, maybe 10 years later everyone will tell how they hated it since 2015. My biggest beef is with settings than systems

Sad thing is, people talk what is published, that gets more the most, far more than a system being shat on. I do believe there is a reason why Warhammer and WoD is popular, not that I hate them, I like Warhammer I like owod esspecially.

But cut the books, materials and people will forget it, I don't expect obscure settings like ars magica to reach bump limit, but boy it pisses me off to not see planescape-darksun etc threads. They are forgotten.

Ironically forgotten realms is having a comeback, with all the official 5th ed materials, 2008-2014 was truly the dark ages of the realms, now some FR lore videos get a few thousands views.

I'm just sad that old worlds die. Systems come and go, you can play Planescape at any system, but the actual fictions disapperance gives me the grognard rage.

Quick casting, full attack arcane channeling(which is going to be worse no matter what because Duskblade would be a 2 attack class in 5E, but 2 spells on 2 different targets if 2 of them are in melee range is better than being permanently stuck with 1), +X to spell resistance checks, more castings/day in exchange for a limited spell list and less power overall.

There is no way that weapon dice+STR or DEX added to melee spells on a class that is far less durable than actual melee classes is going to break things because two classes with spells dedicated to doing that aren't breaking the game with it.

>aoa.
?

All Out Attack

You can't play Spiderman in 5e :^)

>Quick casting, full attack arcane channeling(which is going to be worse no matter what because Duskblade would be a 2 attack class in 5E, but 2 spells on 2 different targets if 2 of them are in melee range is better than being permanently stuck with 1),

Maybe EK->sorc instead, since Quicken and Twin can do that, Maybe skip EK entirely and go Sorcadin, smites also have a similar effect. You do lose out on being INT based then, I guess.

>+X to spell resistance checks

I'm not even sure what the equivalent in 5e would be. Do you mean breaking through SR, or making saves? Or having Resistance to spells?

>more castings/day in exchange for a limited spell list

Yeah, that's not a thing. I guess Sorcery points kinda do that tho.

>+X to spell resistance checks

Actually, Sorcadin would help here too, they can get +CHA to all saves.

>Play a mystic theurge.
Arcane domain cleric, or Theurgy school Wizard.
>Play a duskblade
Hexblade Bladelock.
>Play a scout
Scout Fighter.

Spell Power is +X to break through spell resistance so it'd be best modeled by ignoring the Magic Resistance feature. Highly situational, but it's better than nothing and gives them a niche that other spellcasters don't get.

Bladelock sucks at modeling Duskblade and you know it.

>It has a different "attack and cast at the same time" feature called Action Surge.
Yeah. Once a day.
>Virtually identical to the rogue. I think Rogue even has a Scout archetype in one of the UAs, but not sure.
Hahahaha no it really wasn't. Holy shit, by that logic fucking Ranger is identical to the rogue.
>Mystic Theurge in 5e is as simple as taking Cleric+Wizard levels (or taking the Mystic Theurge path for wizards).
Could do that in 3.5 as well. Point is 3.5 had a mystic theurge PrC that gave you spells from both classes at the same time.
>mystic theurge path for wizards in 5e
Now that's a new one on me.

>Arcane domain cleric
>theurgy school wizard
Neither of those are even close to the same thing. Both give a domain which is a small number of spells. A mystic theurge had full access to both spell lists and was arguably OP as fuck.
>Hexblade Bladelock.
I fail to find where it can channel spells through it's weapon for extra damage.
>Scout fighter
Doesn't have skirmish. I might as well play a ranger if we're going to be that vague about what constitutes a "scout"

>using different actions for each example
>purposely picking the weak and strong points to highlight your example
Kill yourself. I like GURPS but I want to hate it because of your shitty fucking example.

This is all low hanging fruit too so the fact that 5E can't do most of it unless you squint reaaaaally hard or homebrew everything is embarrassing.

Now for things that actually matter: how about Binder? Dragonfire Adept? Totemist? Factotum? Wildshape Ranger? Tashalatora Psychic Warrior? Master of Many Forms? Literally anything from Tome of Battle? Dread Necromancer? You couldn't include a single one of those in 5E without nerfing them so badly they wouldn't resemble the same class in play, and this is just 3.5. Broaden it to PF and you've immediately got Alchemist, Magus, and Inquisitor. Can't do those either, and I'm not even fucking leaving T3.

Improvised actions in 3.5 suck cock so even if you equalized it 3.5 would still look worse.

>I want to play X
>no, not the concept of X
>not the archetypical representation of X
>I want 1-for-1 identical mechanics of "X" from this other system

Geez, you can't play a Samurai unless there's a class with its name? Can't use a Fighter?
Do you really need a class named Scout with a Precision Strike, instead of using a rogue?

No wonder the fluff/crunch segregation of 4e made you mad. You can't refluff for your life.

Still playing a weekly game we started back in like 2012. Everyone has stuck with it because we all enjoy playing our characters. It's an evil campaign so we are always horrible to each other, much fun.

That being said I think when this game finishes I think I will probably be done with 3.5

Refluffing only works if the mechanics work for what he wanted to do in the first place. How's that supposed to help someone with major issues with the game's mechanics?

In three or four years, 5e is probably going to have a bunch of niche classes that can't be 100% accurately recreated in 3.5 because of unique mechanics

Heck, it arguably already does with things such as the Diviner Wizard and Battle Master Fighter

Very well:

>3.5 first level group
Fighter: 'i'll smash a bottle onto his head'
Me: 'a bottle count as an improvised weapon so it's like you don't have a proficiency on it: roll your attack with a -4. No you can't aim for the head since this rulesystem has an abstract combat resolution, do you remember when i explayned how hp works?'
Figher: '(roll) i hitted him!"
Me: 'neat. You deal 1d3 + str mod. of damage'
Fighter: 'thats all? Did i stun him at least?'
Me: 'nope. Did have i to explain again how hp works?'
Fighter: 'damn, maybe grapple him would be a smarter move'
Me: 'have you any related feats?'
...

You could port those mechanics to 3.5 and not explode the game or have people REEEEEEE about it, though. Plus BM is irrelevant when Warblade does everything it does a hundred times better and more often.

"3.x is so busted, you can't break it further by porting balanced mechanics" isn't exactly a point in favor of the system.

It's not a point in favor of 5E when porting things that balanced 3.5 out instantly breaks 5E, either.

>"3.x is so busted, you can't break it further by porting balanced mechanics" isn't exactly a point in favor of the system.

TOB is one of the most balanced parts of 3.5 you mong.

Full casters, CODzilla especially, were the main issue of 3.5. In general, Gish classes were where 3.5 shined.

I'm saying that a mechanic that's balanced in 5e is very damn likely to be balanced in 3.5, but a mechanic balanced in 3.5 is going to bust 5e.

The games simply have a different power level and core assumptions. How the fuck is this hard to understand?

Not just a lie, but a blatant lie. Nice. Spellcasters in 5E being weaker than 3.5 spellcasters doesn't mean they're not still beyond everyone else from 3.5.