Why do people hate 3.x? It took us out of the RPG dark ages and I don't understand why people sperg out about it

Why do people hate 3.x? It took us out of the RPG dark ages and I don't understand why people sperg out about it.

baito des

"Judge a fish by it's ability to climb..."
Sure, what it did, it did okay. But d20 and dnd 3.5 are not fully realized rpgs any more than Kraft dinner is fine dining food.

Because despite not being a very good system it was held up as the posterboy of the hobby. Far too many people swear by it when there are games that do everything it can do but better.

Like what?

go away you fucking sperg

>waaaah everyone with differing opinions is b8ing me!!

Back to tumblr.

...

>you're autistic if you call me out on being a sheltered little faggot

There's only one way out of your shame user.

Dungeon Fantasy.

>3e
>took us out of the RPG dark ages
>didn't directly start the RPG dark ages
It's bait but I don't care. It's just too yummy.

Gave awful DM advice, which grew many awful DMs, who flowered many awful games.

Any actual examples or are you just talking out of your ass?

>dark ages

You mean niche ages? Because these were great and the influx of people can fuck right back off

In the off chance this isn't bait I'll bite, what do mean by the dark ages? What do you like about 3.X?

People wouldn't sperg about something if they didn't care about it

OP's terminology is a bit confused.
3.5 took RPGs out of obscurity ('s "Niche Ages" is a pretty good term for that) but at the same time, plunged them into the Dark Ages.

What's your thoughts on 5E? It seems like there's the same phenomenon only more pronounced

Not as terrible mess as 3E, rules-wise, but subscribes to about the same dark age philosophy and all that play it should be taught better games to go for.

Honestly I prefer 3.X if only because the bloat if you can handle it allows for more option, that and I've always felt that my problem with the 3.X and 5E was that they were built to run games that I didn't want to play personally

I view 5e primarily with disappointment and disgust. Started out promising, then turned out to be what amounts to a scam.

Not really convinced that 5e has boosted the popularity of RPGs. And it doesn't seem to be quite as toxic as 3.5.

3rd started the RPG dark ages, which can best be summed up as "everything needs a D20 variant."

It had its good points though, without it OSR gaming would never have been a thing.

Naga please. If anything it brought about a dark age, 3.x plunged us into the d20 glut which nearly destroyed all diversity in the hobby. When 4e came out it seemed finally the Dark Ages were behind us but Paizo had to shit out Pathfinder and the 3aboos live on.

At my local store and online it seems like most people are getting into TTRPGs through 5E, that could just be me though, I don't have any concrete data

OP there were a lot of issues with 3.5. This was obvious to even me when I started with the game at age 15. It's still a lot of fun, and it will always be my favorite D&D edition. 5th edition is pretty good, with fewer flaws, but there is also less game so its flaws are more obvious and thus more obnoxious.

Here are some issues with 3rd:

>save or die spells
>quadratic wizards
>attack bonuses way too high
>bad number balance in general (proficiency was a step in the right direction but too extreme)
>not enough options for certain martial proficiencies

That said, the only thing in 5e I really like are the dex-to-attack with light melee, dex-to-damage with ranged, and Eldritch Knight fighter (despite it being shit, apparently). The Battlemaster fighter is just kind of dumb, a lot of the archetypes are shit, everything is dumbed down to damage now, so DPS is king. Mind flayers can't kill you properly, there is zero potential for insta-death so if you have high HP you have nothing to fear. The game is pussified but it's still fun. The art / aesthetic style is too glossy and generic, I loved 3.5's art, like pic related. It just felt like D&D. Same with AD&D. But 4e and 5e just felt like generic fantasy art. Better than anything I can draw, of course, but still.

Well, sure. But that's just brand name inertia, rather than any quality of 5e.
And afaik, 5e hasn't spawned an OGL that will spaw-- wait, let me look that up real quick...

Oh.
Ohh...


Fuck.

>out of the RPG dark ages

WTactualF?

3.X is the skyrim of pen and paper. It has brand recognition. It isn't a terrible starting point for the hobby especially since people outside the rpg hobby associate it with ttrpgs entirely. That said people latch on to it like it is the entirety of the hobby the only rpg to exist (looking at you I'm running a gundam game in modified 3.5 thread that happened several months ago)
It's almost entirely combat focused
It's poorly balanced
It's glitchy as hell
And of all of the things people think it is capable of, it really only does itself alright, outside of its specific experience it falters hard

Meanwhile you could be playing literally anything else. Preferably something which does what you're looking for better.

...

Wait, how many other games have been made in the 5E system?

None that I know of yet, but it can only be a matter of time.

Ultramodern 5, Adventures in Middle-Earth, probably a couple others that I'm forgetting but those are the two big ones.

>Why do people hate 3.x?
For it's hateable flaws.

>It took us out of the RPG dark ages
If you say so, Chief.

>I don't understand why people sperg out about it.
Because they are spergs, either for it or against it.

This is not hard, OP.

So it HAS begun...

For some reason I don't feel like it will be bad as 3.X

Of course, 5e doesn't have anywhere near the destructive and corrosive potential 3.5 had, thanks to the vastly different market situation.

Was 3.0 really that bad? I never see anyone talk about it at all.

It took us out of the RPG golden age.

Honestly, 5e homebrew is easier to make and easier to balance. It's a hundred times easier to just build what you want for 5e than it is to wade through splatbook after splatbook of mostly feces to get what will usually be a highly questionable and possibly-not-even-viable version of what you want for 3.5e/pathfinder.

There's a reason why nobody ever considers downgrading from 3.5 to 3.0 despite ongoing edition wars about everything else, user

Yeah but it's not even
>'Remember how shit 3.0 was?'

It's more like it never actually existed

It kind of didn't, though. It's less of an edition shift and more of a video game update. Talking about 3.0 as opposed to 3.5 is kind of like talking about a version 1.17 of Diablo: there's little point at all.

I know 5e was a really big seller. The player's handbook was a NYT bestseller among all nonfiction for a fair bit. No idea what the actual conversion rate of new players is, though.

I heard that a lot, but it's mostly because I hung around Neverwinter Nights modding community.

And on Veeky Forums there's no point in beating a dead horse aside from pointing out fun mechanical abuses like infinite STR sick wizards or bag of rats giving you 20 extra hits.

3.0 really only had two major differences from 3.5:

magic item bonus specific DR ie: Dr 10/ magic +2 means your weapon needed to not only be a magic weapon, but it needed to be a +2 weapon to get past DR.

And the big one: Haste was comically broken. It effectively gave extra turns.

When 3.5 was released, people called it a glorified Haste Nerf.

>any more than Kraft Dinner is fine dining food

You shut the fuck up
t. Canadian

>Dungeon Fantasy
No thanks, I prefer sanity over GURPS.

3.5 gave us Legend, so as far as I'm concerned it's a good thing.

>he thinks GURPS is more complicated than D&D

ayy lmao

Anyone want to figure out the sales figures and conversion rates for various games? I know a bit about statistics but probably not enough to do this justice

I've played both, 3.5 is astronomically simpler.

Seeing 5e as it is now after some of the great shit we had in the playtest still depresses me.

What was so complicated about GURPS?

Practically everything. I tried it in high school, it was such a cluster fuck I never looked back. If there have been new editions that make it playable I honestly don't care.

It's just 3.5e with overall worse UX and slightly weaker classes. Differences are mostly a slew of quality of life and balance tweaks, and some editing. A lot of it is minor; a major difference is that rangers got bumped a hit die size. That's the scope we're talking.

The main issues of third edition were much deeper, and are present in both.
The issues are mostly, from my perspective:

- Terribly limiting and overly specific action economy and basic action options (trip, disarm, etc.) - generally lots of waffling and a high burden of knowledge with very little gain. Mostly just serves to needlessly hamstring and discourage imaginative action descriptions without a huge degree of system mastery first.

- The way the feat system interfaces with this (can't wipe ass without 8 levels of feat tree investment)

- The way classes and feats and spells are fundamentally structured. e.g. excessive bookkeeping, trap options, classes with near-zero utility and not much to do but wait around, deceptively worded features that seem good at first glance but are actually pigshit (trap options and ivory tower game design in general), total lack of class balance that gets worse with higher levels, MAD,and many other disparate but serious failures of game design.

- DM rulings strongly discouraged in favor of endless rules lawyering. (This is an aspect of the way the game is typically played, but I don't know if it came from the books or just the community.)

- Perhaps also, arguably, the way class skills function at higher levels vs lower levels (as one example, investments in non-class skills as well as racials and other smallish skill bonuses become largely worthless when doing adventures of a certain level of challenge or higher, resulting in the vast majority of, say, high level elves actually being incapable of being highly alert.)

Oh, you must've played 3e if you're talking about highschool. 4e is a massive update, and it's definitely less complicated than D&D in all regards, but it's unfortunate that you don't want to try it out. However, nobody plays 3e GURPS anymore, so saying that GURPS is more complicated than D&D is disinformation.

>uses per rest
>looking for a diffrent die every time something deals damage
>all the combat manouvers having diffrent rules
>a bunch of spells that will break your campaign in two if you don't pay attention
>keeping track of inflated HP and DC on everyone
>bullshit minutae +1/-1 buffs on everyone and everything
>having to wing compensation or mechanics of players making non-standard characters (like them missing a limb)

>astronomically simpler than just rolling 3d6 under a value from your character sheet 99% of the time

Ayy-fucking-lmao

High school was '98 to '02 so if that's GURPS 3e then yes.

3d6 under a stat value wasn't the GURPS I played.

Yeah, 4e GURPS is better than 3.5 D&D in my opinion

I think the main problem people have with it is that chargen takes forever

Then by all means, 4e is a completely diffrent game. Find a PDF of Basic Set and give it a read.

That's why I recommended Dungeon Fantasy, since it has a bunch of templates that take you all of 10 minutes to go through, especially in a program like GCS.

Yeah, 4e came out in 2004. 3e was shit, nobody'll deny that, but 4e really is a huge improvement.

5e is honestly a pretty good game.

I'd be more impressed if they ever actually finished it.

But chargen taking hours is fun, (at least for me)

Yeah, I mean, GURPS is super simple if you ignore everything but its resolution mechanic. It's not like character creation involves going through reams of options, just setting up the game involves going through two densely packed rulebooks just to pick the appropriate rules, or that the game itself is full of fiddling +1/-1 mechanics either, no siree.

GURPSfags are the third worst RPG fandom (first is Pathfinderfags second is 4rries).

I agree. Chargen as its own sort of game is a lot of fun (for me), but not everybody wants to play it. Thankfully, templates exist, even if they are retina-searing abominations. I can't wait for DF boxed set to drop in October so there's a true intermediatry between GURPS Lite and Basic Set, since DF uses tactical combat (which Lite doesn't have, at all), but telling people they have to read 3+ books to understand the game (Lite, Campaigns, and DF) really makes GURPS a hard sell.

That's fair, but to me the base system and classes are goo enough to be worth the effort of finishing it myself.

>reee normieeessss

>character creation
You got points. You spend said points however you want, be it stats, skills or advantages. There's no steps or phases. Just start off with a concept and pick and choose what fits said concept. Shit's easy yo.

>just setting up the game involves going through two densely packed rulebooks just to pick the appropriate rules

Depends on the game, obviously, but I've ran my first games on nothing but Basic Set just fine. I don't even know what second book you are talking about, unless you mean a combat cheat sheet.

>or that the game itself is full of fiddling +1/-1 mechanics either, no siree.
It ain't. Magic costs and diminishing probability of success means there isn't a million buffs applied every single time combat happens. The only calculation bullshit that happens regularly is the abstraction of fainting and telegraphed attacks, and that's always a 2-for-1 thing

I'd rather have my hobby be grognard-only rather than infested by people glued to their phones and not paying attention, thank you very much

It killed entire publishers, though some of that was the first recession and the rise of the internet. It also strangled just about every other system off the shelf. There was an explosion of fresh ideas and systems while 2e was in its death throes that went ignored the moment 3e came out. Everything became a d20 clone and sucked shit because of it.

Personally, I just don't like how it presents options like it's generic fantasy but there's no way to tweak it to taste without rewriting everything. That and nothing does what it says it does or what you would expect it to do.

>You got points. You spend said points however you want, be it stats, skills or advantages. There's no steps or phases. Just start off with a concept and pick and choose what fits said concept. Shit's easy yo.

That's actually a detriment, because there's no clear way to setup your character and it's easy to screw yourself at a later stage by investing too much in one area. Compared to a game like Savage Worlds, GURPS chargen is an accounting course.

>Depends on the game, obviously, but I've ran my first games on nothing but Basic Set just fine. I don't even know what second book you are talking about, unless you mean a combat cheat sheet.

The basic set is two books, you dingus, and just the basic set alone is packed with variant rules; you can't run it just "by the book" because you have to tailor it to your game.

>It ain't.

BULL FUCKING SHIT. "I aim my assault rifle for a +3 to attack, using autofire for another +2, taking -3 for range, -2 for lighting, and another -whatever because they're moving." is a totally reasonable sentence in GURPS. It's every bit as chock full of fiddly bullshit as 3.5.

It's like GURPS is a cult or something, and its faithful are obligated to lie about their game in an attempt to gain converts.

That's actually backwards. It was literally the same situation as the dark age of comic books, where everyone was doing MATURE, and EDGY superheroes, because that's what one successful comic did.

Except Watchmen was actually kinda good while 3rd edition's success is unrelated to its quality.

It's somewhat dated now, but for its time, it was haute cuisine.

>"I aim my assault rifle for a +3 to attack, using autofire for another +2, taking -3 for range, -2 for lighting, and another -whatever because they're moving." is a totally reasonable sentence in GURPS.
But it isn't necessary. That's the key point here. You don't have to be penalized for shooting at a moving target if they're not using the high speed movement rules, for one, which means shooting at human targets moving at human speeds doens't incurr a penalty. You also don't have to use the granular range penalties from the SSR table, either; Action! 2 has range bands that greatly simplify them to four grades of penalty, going 0/-3/-7/-11. As for lighting, that depends on if the GM is using lighting penalties - it's entirely reasonable to not include them, and most people stick to a general band of -3/-5/-7/-9/-10 for torchlight/full moon/cloudy night/tunnel/utter darkness.

That isn't to say GURPS has a lot of modifiers available, but they're available, not mandatory (unlike 3.5e).

>I aim my assault rifle for a +3 to attack, using autofire for another +2, taking -3 for range, -2 for lighting, and another -whatever because they're moving.

Fair enough. Forgot about that since I'm running an iron age fantasy campaign that didn't come up much aside from one archer character.

>That's actually a detriment, because there's no clear way to setup your character and it's easy to screw yourself at a later stage by investing too much in one area. Compared to a game like Savage Worlds, GURPS chargen is an accounting course.

I disagree. Absolute freedom is always preferrable to handholding that stilts player creativity in chargen. It's hard to fuck yourself over, even if you don't diversify, simply because you can improve whatever you lack with points you gain, especially since getting a new skill is just 1pts. And to be perfectly honest, suboptimal builds were never a problem in my group, but I know that's a fallacy.

>The basic set is two books
Oh hey, you're right. This is the first time I actually googled up Campaigns. Been running with Characters and some extra books for fluff ideas

Actually, no, scratch that last part. It's just that I got both in the same PDF and never actually bothered to look at either cover

AUGH! You fucking deny on one hand that you have to tailor the game to your desires by plowing through two dense rulebooks, and then you go "BUT LOLZ YOU DON'T NEED TO USE THE RULES!" FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU!

You fucking GURPSfags wouldn't admit a fault in your game if it was stabbing you to death.

>You fucking deny on one hand that you have to tailor the game to your desires by plowing through two dense rulebooks
... I didn't, though? If you want to play with that much granularity, you're more than welcome to. I don't. And, yes, you can choose which rules you want to use. That's how you tailor the game to your desires, which is GURPS' intended function: being tailored to run the game you want to run.

>You fucking deny on one hand that you have to tailor the game to your desires by plowing through two dense rulebooks

You mean that thing I said you have to to do?! SHOCK AND FUCKING AWE?! You changed my mind GURPSfag, I'm gonna go offer my ass up to Steve Jackson right now!

Here's an idea: use none of the rules because GURPS is trash meant to stimulate the interests of insufferable pedants and nothing else.

It wouldn't be nearly as hated if it didn't cause the entire hobby to be inundated with D20 games. Shortly after D&D 3 came out, nearly every game on the shelves was using the D20 system. For those who didn't like D20 or enjoyed checking out new systems, it was a really shitty time.

...

>DENSE BOOKS DENSE BOOKS DENSE BOOKS

Have you actually ever seen a dense book in your life because I'm slowly doubting that. The line spacing and page framing are more than generous in Basic Sets.

Also nobody is ever telling you to read through every single advantage, disadvantage and skill description. That's what their names are there for. So you can skim through and find what is going to be relevant or not in your campaign.

Anyone who doesn't have a problem with this wasn't there. It wasn't just that everything was d20, it's that most of it was fucking terrible and ill-fit on top of it.

>Absolute freedom is always preferrable to handholding that stilts player creativity in chargen.
Constraints breed creativity.
Absolute freedom is detrimental if you don't come to the table with a fully fleshed-out character concept.

>constraints breed creativity

I heard the same argument used about D&D martials and it's bullshit every time.

>nobody is telling you to actually read the book

Kek.

Except it's true. There are several examples of creatives that were at their best when put under constraint. George Lucas comes right to mind.

Well, yeah. That because it's used in an inapplicable context.

>reading every single thing in a modular system

Are you honestly that autistic.

>Absolute freedom is always preferrable to handholding that stilts player creativity in chargen.

But you don't have absolute freedom. You're still limited by the constraints of points. What you call handholding is what I call proper design. But hey, I guess those other games wont let you play a psychic muffin with a crippling addiction to auto-erotic asphyxiation, so they're just not good games.

Except it isn't an inapplicable context. I've seen vastly more creativity out of the D&D optimization community than I have out of any GURPS player.

>actually reading the book when playing an RPG

Are you honestly that autistic.

Do you also read through the entire Monster Manual in D&D and memorise it?

No, but I do read through the entire core mechanics of the game and do my best to memorize them, which things like advantages, disadvantages, skills, etc. absolutely are.

Seriously, the great defense GURPSfags have mounted in this thread can be summed up as "you don't have to use the basic mechanics of the game" and "you don't have to read the books." Well good fucking job, why don't I just play Risus?

>It took us out of the RPG dark ages and I don't understand why people sperg out about it.

Neither having done important things in the past, nor having been a huge improvement over what came before make it a good or useful thing by modern standards.

The world today would be an unimaginably worse place if the catholic church never existed, but that doesn't make attending mass this Sunday sound any more appealing.

>but for its time
No. It was dated even then.

>WHY DO I HAVE TO READ THESE TWO BOOKS TO SET UP A GAME REE
>You really don't, they're much broader than a single campaign will allow
>HA, PATHETIC GURPSFAGS

Stick to a single line of reasoning instead of being a two-fronting cunt, please

3.x is a gateway RPG of the worst kind. It's a bad system, a clusterfuck of rules and writing that isn't very well done by any aspect, but which attempts to compensate for its weaknesses by adding in excessive system mastery and RULES. The normal user can see this as the shit it is, and may enjoy it, hate it or be indifferent to it, but all the while recognizing that the game itself, regardless of their opinion, is plain bad.

However, these very aspects that try to smear over the shit of its core make it a breeding ground for aspie, unsociable underageb& faggots who engage in every kind of faggotry both online and in the real world. The superpowered casters all trying their hardest to look cool, the spells, peculiar, colorful races, the whole CoDzilla faggotry and everything about the 3.x world fuels their escapist fantasies, while the min-max character backgrounds, emphasis on character optimization, and overall opaqueness of the system make it fit just right with the mary-sueish drives of your average preteen and his sense of unwarranted self-importance towards the world. Exactly the kind of shit that makes little kiddies and underageb& retards eat this shit right the fuck up.

3.x is basically THE game to attract the most hated RPG fanbase known to D&D, which is why, regardless of individual opinions, it is the responsibility of every user to troll the fuck out of this edition and everyone who likes it, and ensure that no 3.x threads ever encourage the newfriends to show their faces here.

>GURPS can do anything, you just have to tailor it to you needs!
>You shouldn't have to go through two massive books of options every time you want to run a game.
>Lol, you fucking faggot, you don't have to read the book.

This is what GURPSfags actually believe.