DnD 3.5e Bare Mininum

THAT'S A PENIS THEY'RE FONDLING

>I've heard 3.5 is good
You've been misled.

Not really. They just added a flowchart.

If you're going to play a generic fantasy D20 game, then Fantasy Craft should be your first stop. It's the D20 OGL stripped down to its bare bones and built back up in a non-retarted way. It has literally only two flaws; the book is dense and a little hard to read (because they needed to save money by only printing a rule once instead of repeating it any time it would interact with another rule) and that not enough of YOU FUCKERS have given it a chance (which would invariably cause you to support the superior game with your money).

I'd suggest 5e if you don't want to do as much learning or homework, and Fantasy Craft if you want a heavier, option-focused game.

A 'deluxe' version that had a different layout would be pretty damn cool.
Or just do a "PDF edition" that does it.
But then again, the OCR in the pdfs is pretty good so you really just need to ctrl + F.

3.5 is by far the worst of the lot. Just plain incompetently designed.
WotC did try its hand at actual game design with 4e, but that got shouted down by angry 3.5 fans. Plus they never really owned up to the mistakes they made in 4e, so the system still needs houseruling badly.
Now they're trying to recover the 3.5 fans they lost while keeping the people they won through 4e, all the while incorporating some of that "hip" new narrative stuff they don't really understand. The result is some aggressively mediocre bland porridge called "5e".

As for older D&D stuff, pop by /osrg/.

Try any other franchise. Literally any other. If you must however, get the PHB and DMG to be able to run the game, but essentially ignore them and the class options in them as much as possible and hand your players the
>Tome of Battle, Book of Nine Swords.
>Tome of Magic
>Expanded Psionics.

Most of the character options in these are viable other than truenaming.

Fantasy Craft is literally only good for the people that like Pathfinder but hate 5e, because it takes the parts of the game those players like and improves them.

For most players 5e is better, or switching to a different system that gives a lot of customization and crunch in a better format than D&D.

this is the best advice in the thread

core is absolutely broken crap

I'll just combine these two comments for my fapping pleasure

d20srd.org/ contains all of core, save for a handful of monsters (because they're copyrighted by WotC. Illithid and Beholders notably) plus the Epic level Handbook (ignore this for it is terrible), Dieties and Demigods (same here), Unearthed Arcana (maybe worth glancing through? I'm fond of the Maximum Ranks variant of skills) and one of the Psionics books (not sure which one, don't use those rules myself)

The site also recently added a bunch of random generators for things like loot and towns and shit, though they only cover material in core. The spell and monster filters are a godsend for actually running a game of 3.5

Yeah sorry, ToB and Psionics are a mess. I understand your desire for better martials, but ToB is such a huge departure from core 3.5 that I would never recommened it to new players.

Psionics is a fucking disaster, especially at high levels. I DM a 3.5 game, the 19th lvl psion often manifests 5 powers in a turn.

Play 5e instead

now observations about the system:
>Any time you see shit about classes being over/underpowered, that's largely based on an assumption that you're playing by the Rules As Written (or as close as reasonable. Nobody actually allows you to drown yourself back to health), and that you're going to be spending a fair amount of time in encounters of CR equal or close to your level, leaning heavily toward individual monsters with a CR equal to the party's level (as if the DM was lazy, flipped through the monster manual and picked something at random that looked OK). These may or may not be good assumptions for your game.

>the CR system lines up with character levels so that there is a sort of soft Tier system, which isn't called out anywhere and means certain character archetypes become obsolete at certain points. In my experience, the tiers are:

levels 1-5: Regular humans, with 1st level being roughly equivalent to Ordinary Highschool Student, 3rd to skilled professional and 5th being essentially the level cap here on Earth.

levels 6-10 is roughly equivalent to street-level supers. You're obviously superior to whatever's possible on Earth, but at the low end of this scale and angry mob is still something your characters give a fuck about. This is also the point at which full casters begin noticeably pulling ahead of everyone else. As a general rule of thumb, if your character cannot fly, cannot teleport and your best attack isn't ranged, and you don't spend a bulk of the campaign in enclosed spaces with lowish ceilings, then you're going to start having a whole lot of trouble with most individual monsters of your level in the Monster manual.

levels 10-15 you start being able to replicate most if not all of the feats represented in shit like Greek or Norse myth. Once you've gotten to this point in 3.5, balance of any sort has gone essentially out the window without very careful monitoring by a very good DM, simply by dint of how many variables are in play

and then levels 15-20 you're in crazytown. A sufficiently motivated full caster can do essentially anything he wants given enough preptime, and there is very little fiction representing what it even should look like, given we've already passed most polytheistic religions. Hindu mythology, bits of the Old Testament, and some of the weirder sci-fi by Zelazny is all I can think of immediately.

In my experience, right around 6th level tends to be the sweet spot for most people, where the "classic" style of DnD actually plays out the way they expect, most character archetypes are useful and nobody's getting completely overshadowed

>and that you're going to be spending a fair amount of time in encounters of CR equal or close to your level, leaning heavily toward individual monsters with a CR equal to the party's level

The bigger problem is the shit that happens when you are NOT in combat. Low tier characters are often in their element in combat.

Play Fantasy Craft instead, it fixes the things you didn't like about 3.5.

This is the most successful RPG system in the world. Jesus Christ.

And once again: this is terrible design.

The main problem really was that they tried to do a full Zero => Godhood scale within a single game, without really considering how differently all those steps should play. There was a pretty good idea of what human scale gameplay should look like, so the levels where you still give a shit about human limits are pretty playable. Above that point, the monster kept scaling, and the casters scaled with them, but people pitched a goddamn fit every time someone proposed that maybe the swordsmen should too.

That sort of scaling is insanely hard to write for, and pretty much every rpg since then has pretty much just picked a power level and stuck to it, not letting whatever advancement scheme they use ever shove you much higher than where you started.

Or you could be Paizo, and just lie and say you fixed all of 3.5's problems, slap some new art on your monkeys-on-typewriters changes and enjoy the fact that there's still a market for a game like 3.5 and nobody's willing to put in the work to compete with you.

Judging by the "work" they've done, Paizo may well believe they fixed all of 3.5's problems.

>implying a huge departure from core isn't desirable

>Fantasy Craft is literally only good for the people that like Pathfinder but hate 5e
I really dislike Pathfinder and 5e's tied for my favorite kitchen-sink-Fantasy system with Fantasy Craft.

>ToB
Naruto is shit, user, and I don't want shit on my table.

Didn't 5E turn mages into really retarded blasters? I could have sworn their revamp of the system changed them from having a bunch of cool spells you could be creative with, if you thought ahead, to XdX / round blasters.

There are cantrips like Mage Hand, Minor Illusion and Message that let you do cool magic shit 24/7, and plenty of other spells you can be creative with at all spell levels.

Play 5e instead. If you want Planescape, read the AD&D 2e Planewalker's Handbook and use the fluff in 5e.

Not really, I think it actually has less blasting spells in core than 3.5 (though that might be because they unified some spells and removed lesser/greater versions in favor of higher-slot effects)

It's more that blasting isn't objectively the worst way to wizard in 5e, since you can't shit out summons or SoL spells quite as well.

3.5 Wizards are far more Naruto than ToB is.

I don't give a shit about edition wars. I just want sauce on that pic.

Your bait is delicious. So delicious I will take it.

Go for 5e if you must play DnD

"I don't want the Tome of Battle at my table, that's weaboo," said the wizard as he flew off into the distance, using magic to make people his friends.

>"I don't want the Tome of Battle at my table, that's weaboo," said the wizard as he flew off into the distance, using magic to make people his friends.
I have heard that friendship is magic.

Magic is magic, user.

Swinging a sword isn't magic.

>Swinging a sword isn't magic
What if it's an axe?

I'd sooner accept ponies at my table and in my game than not!magic sword powers.

>What if it's an axe?
Still not magic.

But it costs mana

>Phb, dmg, mm 3.5
>dndtools

I'd also suggest the unofficial "Bible" books. They do a great job compiling the character options from all the various disparate books

>Waaaah, i don't want martials to be on an equal level of power with my whizzard!

Personally i prefer pf.
In addition to the other stuff people mentioned:

Ease of access on d20pfsrd and archives of nethys.

I like some of the expanded options for pf more than their counterparts for 3.5 (path of war vs tob, ultimate psionics vs xph and cp) witch, alchemist, summoner, magus vs duskblade.

Added chase rules, and slightly cleaned up core mechanics.

Compatible enough that you can convert 3.5 stuff on the fly and continue to use it.

But no means a perfect game, but its aight.

So when you're gming, either everyone plays martials, or noone does, right? Or do you only play