How did 3.5 end up so poorly designed?

Botched playtesting and stupid ivory tower philosophy were big things.

They tested the game with tanky fighters, healbot clerics, blaster wizards and skillmonkey/backstabber rogues. They kept loading up the Cleric with class features as nobody wanted to play the healer, and didn't realise how busted they got, nor did they use the majority of the more broken Wizard spells. On the flip side, they just had the monsters play along with the fighter rather than giving them any actual mechanics for tanking, and didn't realise how spells could invalidate most skill based characters. This coupled with intentionally bad mechanics inspired by the ivory tower philosophy ended up with a game where very little in it worked as intended and where a lot of it sucked anyway out of some bizarre idea that players should learn to avoid the shit options.

None of this means you can't have fun with it, but anyone calling 3.PF a well designed game is likely a superfan so used to the system by this point that they're utterly blind to its many fundamental flaws.

>much more approacable than AD&D 2nd ed.
Have you ever actually played 2E?
I mean I dislike the system but that's ridiculous, it's a million times simpler than 3.5E.

The reason so many people have 3.PF listed is because they already know the rules. The number of actual r20 games using it has dropped tremendously since 5e came out.

> Inspiring presence is weakened by the fact that it comes with a prerequisite feat.
>The prereq feat is leadership

The internet killed 3E. As much as people will criticize so-called "Ivory Tower" design as inherently flawed, it was a problem that was only really made apparent as people began to share incredibly broken builds and rules loopholes online, rather than discovering/adapting to them organically.

The internet turned players into a monoculture rather than a bunch of small isolated communities, something that thrust the rules into the role of technocratic arbiter on a level far greater than they had ever really intended to be based on the prevailing ideology of RPG design that 3E grew out of. It was never designed for the kind of crowdsourced, decontextualized analysis that it ended up subjected to.

You're full of shit. All the internet did was make the knowledge widespread. It doesn't take someone intentionally trying to fuck the game up to run into CoDzilla.

There's some "hyping 3e" magazine articles that make the rounds in /osrg/ now and then.
In one, a playtester mentions their multiclass Fighter/Sorcerer/Monk being on pace with the rest of their party.

Man, that sounds fucking hilarious. Any idea how to find 'em? I've seen a lot of stupid stuff from the 3e playtests, but it's always fun to have more.

Ask in I guess. There are definitely regulars who have it, but they might not be online yet.

First post best post.

This.
Ivory tower design doesn't work well in collaborative games such rpgs.
It's even worse when the game ends his lifecycle and gets no more support from the producer: in time every combination of classes, races, archetypes, spells magic items an so on come to get discovered and the feeble choices vs the real valid choices became crystal clear (CoDzilla, wizard batman, etc..).

Some peaople will try on bending the system using arbitrary parameters (E6, Tier system) but that only reinforce the notion of a broken game to begin with

Yep. They played the game almost like it was Basic D&D and ignored much of their own content and rule interactions. Which is a shame, because at its core it's not like the system doesn't have potential. Thankfully there's a handful of games that follow through on polishing the SRD into something more consistent. Between M&M, True20, Legend, and Fantasy Craft everybody's going to find something really fun. And that's pretty cool.

I don't fully agree or disagree. Those sorts of interactions would have happened anyways, the parallel boom of forum subcultures just sped it up and, with all of its splat, exaggerated it a bit.

>and ignored much of their own content and rule interactions
To be fair, that's how most people had been playing AD&D.

>Those sorts of interactions would have happened anyways, the parallel boom of forum subcultures just sped it up and, with all of its splat, exaggerated it a bit.
That's mostly what I meant. I'm not denying that the fundamentals for this kind of "failure" weren't already present in the game itself, but that the "meta" environment of 3E warped the way that people encountered them in a way that never happened with, for example, "Dart Fighters" or the Complete Book of Elves in 2E.

Somewhere along the line authority about what the game was and how it was meant to be played shifted away from individual GMs and groups and towards an attempt at a universal acceptance of the right way to play, of ideas about balance and everything supposed to be contained entirely within the rules text, etc...

I think that it's a really fascinating thing that happened, but unfortunately nobody else seems to care or even think it's a real phenomenon, not the least of which the game's critics, who get really irrationally mad if you suggest that there was anything going on other than Monte Cooke's personal war against martials.

Can we please just sticky some detailed blogpost about why 3.5 is bad?

There used to be.
Or maybe it was a 5e hype sticky I can't remember and I'm not sure there would be a real difference between the two back then

The difference IMO is that in AD&D if you don't like a rule or its interactions you can just rip it out, which in many cases can't be done at all in 3E.

>I think that it's a really fascinating thing that happened, but unfortunately nobody else seems to care or even think it's a real phenomenon
Eh, if they think that they weren't present to see the growth of RAWtismos on ENWorld and elsewhere. Truly, the ultimate evolution of the rules lawyer.

It's possible that the reason "nobody else seems to care" is that you open with shit like "the internet killed 3E", though. First and last, 3E killed 3E by being a shit game. I agree that a bunch of fascinating interactions grew up *around* 3E being shit and around its specific flaws, but ascribing the game's ultimate failure to those interactions is confusing cause with effect, and it's going to tweak a lot of people off instead of engaging with you.

Also, dart fighters aren't as powerful as sometimes claimed. You can't throw all your darts as soon as your initiative comes up as though it were a 3E full attack, and you can't throw into melee either, so in practice you'll mostly be getting one or two extra throws in when the sides close with each other compared to somebody who specced bastard sword instead. Even the Bladesinger was nothing like as bad as a 3E Druid with no particular build abuses; it was considered OP at the time for getting an AC bonus and some other keebler shit. That was a big deal by 2E standards, which says a lot in itself.

I want to know more abour this book. is it good?

>ivory tower philosophy
What is this?

Intentionally making some options (fighters) worse than others (wizards) to reward "system mastery", as in, understanding that fighters suck, and you should be playing a wizard.

That's fucking stupid.

Yes, it is absolutely fucking stupid.

Okay, where the hell does this come from? Is it real? It almost looks like a joke.
Why would you try to intentionally re-create one of the worst aspects of a game into another game that doesn't even work on the same base mechanic? Besides, Timmy cards aren't supposed to be flashy but bad, they're supposed to be BIG. Some of them see tournament play.
And why would you (once again) intentionally make your game harder to understand? That doesn't even make sense from a business perspective. You'd want your game to be as easy to play as possible. What the hell?

>What the hell?
The answer to all of your questions is: Monte Cook.

I mean it's pretty obvious. There was zero attempt at class balance, the entire design philosophy was flawed from the beginning, and it was so fucking bloated that it was bursting at the seams with raw sewage.

I've had fun with the system, but it's a godawful fucking mess and was absolutely a fucking mistake.

Welcome to 3.x's development. And yes. That he completely failed to understand the point of Timmy cards only makes it worse.

And remember, this is the same guy who recently sold a load of people a two hundred dollar mystery box on Kickstarter!

All these components make the game look like a horrible mess to play, t b h.

>tfw you're one of the 1001.

Game design theory aside the major sins that affected most games were:
>Removing almost all limitations from casters
>Every single thing about saving throws ruined
>MASSIVE HP bloat, making damage worthless
>Magic item economy completely fucked. Wealth by level is a complete shit show.
>Ability scores completely messed up
>Monsters with spell like abilities go from being rather rare in 2e to being nearly universal, making stat blocks ungrokkable
>Full attack is a garbage mechanic
>Attacks of Opportunity are merely awful

And now I want to know more.

To laugh at the noobs, and feel smugly superior as your character's performance renders their irrelevant.

Yeah. I have no faith in the game being worth playing after the grand 'mystery' is figured out within a day of it arriving.

So do most people who paid for it. Monte sold the game on it being all about ~mysteries~, and if you paid more money you got more secret special information other people would never get!

One fucker even paid ten thousand dollars to learn a secret that would not be told to anyone else. It's insane.

This goes back to the game being a formal set of rules in the first place: Gygax got salty and bewildered when people started calling the company asking for rules clarifications instead of just figuring something out.

I'll admit the internet accelerated that, but I'll also admit you sound like a pretentious asshole. I'm not surprised you have difficulty getting people to agree with your magnificent wisdoms.

And so it's even harder to get into the game, because the rules are purposely hard to understand and the game encourages veteran players to be condescending toward beginners.
Who approved that design philosophy? Didn't they have someone overseeing the design team?

If it was paired with something that complimented it, such as forced multiclass from finite levels
And a non broken Skill and Feat system?
It could have been some radical good design.

I would argue anything is fine for a social game.
But in terms of design? I guess DND will show case every type of failure there is.

>Every single thing about saving throws ruined
It's funny because out of that entire list of absolutely true things, this is the one that makes me assrage without fail. How the fuck they managed to screw the pooch so completely and savagely without even realizing it is beyond my comprehension.

M:tG was always the cash cow for WotC, if the designers were taking cues from it for the much less profitable D&D the higher ups were probably happy with that. never mind that a competitive card game is much different from a cooperative RPG.

My favorite part of this was the clique of Twittards who lost their shit at the idea of a game they couldn't afford to buy, and claimed that his $200 game was an affront to poor people. Like there's nothing else desirable that costs that much?!

Being fair, it is a ridiculously inflated price for the box of tat, and his justification for it was nonsense. But he's allowed to charge what he likes, and apparently enough people thought it was worth that much that they bought into the whole mess.

It was retarded and broken, but lead to the most ridiculously fun and open ended adventures and characters.
My favorite character was a gnome artificer/wizard crossclass with a Bullette effigy, in a party with a druid who had a large ape familiar which had class levels and the feat monkey grip, allowing it hold a weapon one size category larger and plate armor. The druid would cast enlarge creature and the ape would be huge with a colossal weapon.

Shit was so retarded but so fun. High level barbarians using great cleave to kill whole rooms of mobs in one turn. Mages who could fuck literally anything up.

3.5 was fucking baller.

Is this drawing based on a real keep? I've genuinely never seen a castle keep either IRL or in plans that had room divisions like this; they're normally all just big whole-floor chambers, occasionally with a gallery running around the central chamber.

Yeah I'm not really trying to defend it or anything Monte Cook has ever done, they just managed to be even more ridiculous than him.

(That being said though it wouldn't surprise me too much to learn that he had to charge that price to make a profit; all those resin hands and plastic cubes and shit would cost a chunk to make. Even boxes are surprisingly expensive which is why most RPG makers stopped making box sets.)

Thats just what it looks like, if every room had to be used for something, and you also had to draw every room into limited 2D space.

I don't know, I've bought board games with more content and components than that which cost less. Although I guess the printing cost for the books might be pretty high.

To add to this, I feel like the more orderly and restrained rules of 4e and 5e allow for less crazy bullshit and creativity. The more polished and sleeker experience flows better but there's less "holy shit I just had the coolest idea" or "holy shit how did we pull that off" type moments.

The thing is that boardgames sell an order of magnitude more copies (at least) than RPGs, and boardgame companies have their own facilities to produce all the bits or else good contracts with established subcontractors. Monte doesn't have any of that shit, he has to order his limited run like a pleb.

I dunno, he's been in the industry long enough to get the right kind of contacts for it.

>we want to make a game that's formulaic and uses templates to keep rules interactions clear!
>we want to make a game that has obtuse rules text that needs to be 'interpreted' and make it so slogging through the choices is 'rewarded' with the epiphany of how to exploit the lazily-written source material!
People defend this unironically.

There's two ways that design philosophy goes really, and it's very similar to how magic works.
Either everybody doesn't particularly know the system and is inexperienced, and you get "kitchen table" style, where everybody is gradually learning the ins and outs for themselves and slowly everybody achieves "system mastery" at roughly the same time. (This is not aided by the fact that people don't particularly like seeing characters die, and people liking the idea of long-running campaigns. Means people aren't character building and testing enough to make any headway, like one can in M:tG).
OR Some people are more experienced with the game, and the inexperienced players end up being overshadowed. The inexperienced players pick "trap" options, while the people who have "earned" it, pick decent ones. This turns inexperienced players into the people who played a bit of kitchen table M:tG, but when they wanted to play their deck against others on Friday night, they were told it was only legal in Modern and were paired up with the regulars who have been filling out their decks.

Neither is ideal, but at least the first one is kind of exploratory I guess. As you and friends work out what's good and what's not. I don't think it's a good idea unless you're selling D&D as a "run the dungeon/campaign, remake characters and do a different dungeon" type game, where it's all about system mastery and running characters through the meat grinder until one survives long enough.

If you feel you can't be as creative in 4e or 5e that's your failure as a player rather than the system. 5e especially encourages creativity, it just doesn't impose autistic and retarded rules on you, you actually have to use your brain for once.

>"Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it’s not the best choice of feat.”
>“the Toughness feat could have been written to make it clear that it was for 1st-level elf wizards (where it is likely to give them a 100 percent increase in hit points). It’s also handy when you know you’re playing a one-shot session with 1st-level characters, like at a convention (you sure don’t want to take item creation feats in such an instance, for example)."

I used to believe your lies, Veeky Forums. And then I researched beyond the memes. Eat shit.

This. Most people who complain about Ivory Tower don't even understand what it is.

It isn't useful in those situations either.

Actually it is.

>b-b-b-b-but it's not as good as this one feat from that one limited edition splatbook that was only printed in German!

Yeah ok kid. Stay bonza.

3 HP isn't going to help you even at level 1. Anything that was going to down you before is still going to down you. Even stacking it with the toad familiar for +6 HP isn't stopping an orc from assblasting you to near death in a single hit.

'It's helpful in this one specific context most people will never play' is still a fucking stupid way to design a feat. There's no reason they couldn't have given it a more broad functionality while still keeping it useful in that context.