What was actually wrong with 3e?

Designers literally had no idea what they're doing. Gaze upon this.
archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cwc/20061013a

>The monk is the only other core class, aside from the barbarian, that has no dead levels. Players always have something to look forward to with the monk, which boasts the most colorful and unique special abilities of all the character classes.

Just giving you a heads up OP.

Sooner or later, your thread is going to be derailed by a raging 3aboo who thinks that D&D being popular excuses it of all criticism and that anyone who does criticize its flaws have either never played it or are trolls hoping to get (you)'s.

If you don't want to engage in a circular argument for the next few days, it's best just to ignore him and pretend he doesn't exist.

They didn't establish stacking rules among other things, that while they weren't necessary in AD&D, with how 3e wanted to sell expansion after expansion and expecting you to have a magic item economy it became grossly necessary to write rules as to why the fighter can't deal a crit on an 11+ with x6 crit rate at level10

>instead of describing what they do.
What kind of ruleset encourage that?
I'm tired of Pathfinder.

Which was technically true. the unfortunate side effect that none of their pwoers were synergystic and thus doomed the monks to heavily situational use of abilities was where they went wrong.

The 12-20 crit range issue was big too, but they didn't realize it was irrelevant.

You can do it with any system if the GM encourages/enforces it.

OSR games. Old D&D.

To-hit bonuses were way too high. Fighters should have had a 3/4ths BAB progression, rogues a 1/2 BAB progression, and wizards a 1/4th BAB progression. Armor Class penalties for size should have been doubled, same with attack bonuses. Actually, the entire system of HD-based attack bonuses is broken, when it comes to monsters. Combat at high levels is an auto-hit-fest, and monsters with multiple attack forms destroys any chance of iterative bonuses actually making Armor Class relevant again. Too many spells that shut down encounters, wizards able to learn basically whatever spell they want, and easy availability of magic items assumed. Action economy is shit and basically ruins TWF builds which already suck enough. Save-or-die spells, summoning, and other such things make wizards too powerful. Too many feats that were irrelevant or just plain sucked. Pointless feat chains. Also started the trend of stats mattering way too much. Now in 5e, rolling for stats is completely gone. It breaks the system to roll for stats.

That said, 4e was also shit despite being far better balanced, and 5e is an actually-decent structure that took the bounded accuracy meme way too far and kept a lot of stupid 4e shit, and turned paragon paths into archetypes and let you get them 10 levels earlier, but whatever the hell. AD&D isn't much better either with all the tables and asisine rules, but OSR is general is better.

>HP bloat
Are you retarded? There is far more hp bloat in 4e and 5e than in 3.5. A 4e character has triple the hp of a 3.5 character at start, and a 5e monster has triple the HP for its CR as a 3.5 monster.

It gave birth to horrible offshoots

To be fair, in 5e everyone deals a lot more damage once they start adding their abilities and such. Our 8th level ranger with hunters mark and +1 bow and giant slayer or whatever is dishing out some 40 damage per round with 2 attacks

>HP Bloat
>Trap options

We've got a live one! Look at this troll go!

>underdeveloped skill system

For fuck's sake, it had an overdeveloped skill system.

Some things were very poorly converted from 2e AD&D. Dragons were give a lot more hit dice in 3.0, but the balor demon was kept at13 hit dice despite being a CR 18 monster. Damage reduction values were too high - either you had the correct weapon and ignored it, or you didn't have the weapon and likely did no damage at all.

3.5 tried to clean up and balance the numbers and standardized some things (3.0 monsters got feats and skills at a different rate than players did). Since WotC is shit at balancing, however, how well they id varies from person to person.

>Living in Ukraine is dangerous

Are you retarded? There is far more crime in south Africa and Brazil than in Ukraine. Brazil has triple the crime of Ukraine, and south Africa has triple the crime.

That's your logic retard.

The HP bloat only comes at higher levels due to the much higher damage dealt at those levels. Either you go back to pre-3.0 era, or you have fighters one-shotting tarrasques because damage and HP do not scale together.
The fact that you even list HP bloat as an issue in 3.5 that deserves mention, is what is retarded here.

There were pretty strict and clear stacking rules in 3.5. Did you mean they were missing from 3.0?
Or that even with those rules, modifier stacking was handled terribly (which is true)?

Wizards of the Coast, as part of their corporate takeover, wanted to make it their own rather than build on what TSR had done.

It's a common corporate move, but the game suffered nonetheless.

DND has always been a cash grab. Games should be free.

Wizards remains the worst thing to happen to tabletop gaming.

Go with GURPS.

>Or that even with those rules, modifier stacking was handled terribly (which is true)?
This, will never forget the guy in my group who did some wacky pathfinder build where he did "aid another" on the same guy three times thanks to some class feature that let him do it multiple times per round and claimed that since it was an "untyped" bonus that that meant it stacked with itself despite being from the same source which I think turned out not to be true but he was giving people Armor Class in the mid-30s at level 5. In a campaign about fighting ogres who generally lack magical ability. And then wondered why I didn't want to DM that campaign anymore.

5E CR is closer to 3.5 CR+2 and the HP bloat in 3.5 is a lot more relevant because not every combat style keeps up with it. It's not a huge issue if you're a pouncing two-handed power attacker, but it's absolutely fucking miserable if you're using a trap option like sword and board or TWF sans bonus damage.

2e. It's still edition which feels most like "real" D&D. 5e does a good job but still carries the 3e taint.

They were missing from 3.0.
Which suggested is what he meant with the OP question.

>It isn't D&D.
>Real D&D is rulings > rules, because of the amount of things you can do in a RPG are limitless most things are decided by rulings in the moment

I agree with everything this user said. When 3e came out, it was like the designers made a conscious decision that this needed to be a game that could be played by two nonsentient robots without any human oversight, and so every possibility that might arise during course of play had to be accounted for and codified within the rules.

The difference is simple.

In 4e, PC's had way more effective ways of dealing damage to an opponent, as well as other options that allowed you to do more with your turn without sacrificing your ability to deal damage, while finally having powers that still allowed you to deal damage even if you missed your attack.

In 5e, because the numbers have been reigned in to deal with bounded accuracy, and situational modifiers have been relegated to (dis)advantage, as well as the fact that PC's have a much easier time dealing damage as well, monster health actually isn't as bad as it was in 3.PF since the numbers that, say, a Paladin, Ranger, or Barbarian can deal easily allows them to chew through most HP pools.

In 3.PF on the other hand, if you were a martial, you were expected to deal damage, but the more attacks you dealt, the lower your subsequent bonuses would be and the more likely you were to roll a 1, which is why dealing damage is so weak and why SoL/SoD were so popular.

And you wanna know how to fix that in like 3 simple rules changes? Go back to the TSR way of spellcasting.

Spells knowable are randomly selected at character creation and stat increase, with a maximum spells known per level.
Casting a spell is always a full-round action, no moves or 5 foot steps.
No concentration checks, if you get hit, you lose the spell.

You put those rules back in and the guy in fullplate swinging a sword instantly becomes useful again, period, because no matter how godlike the wizard's spell, he needs somebody to protect him while he casts it or he's a commoner on a bathrobe.

3.0 had: better SoLs because you only had to spend one feat to get +2 to save DCs, broken Haste that rewards casters more than martials because it gave you the equivalent of two standard actions every round, better Shapechange than 3.5 despite lacking the form's (su) abilities when 3.5's Shapechange is already the best or second best spell in the game, Rangers were even shittier, Druids were simultaneously more and less powerful than they were in 3.5 because instead of the automatic companion increases by level, you had to go out and tame your own companion with a spell that worked on animals with up to twice your HD, which meant the Fighter could conceivably be competing with a Dire Bear at level 6.

Monster health in 5E is virtually the same as it is in 3.5 and the damage per hit is much, much, MUCH lower. If you're comparing good 3.5 combat styles to 5E, 5E will never, ever keep up - its benefit is that its classes and builds are more consistent with each other damage-wise.

>HP bloat in 3.5 is a lot more relevant because not every combat style keeps up with it.
Oh you mean like in 5e where TWF is still absolute shit and Power Attack (great weapon mastery or whatever the fuck that feat is called) still reigns supreme?

>What was actually wrong with 3e?
1. Ivory tower design
2. Breaking point from past edition

That's it, these are the reasons.

TWF(and sword and board) is less shit in 5E than it is in 3.5 and GWM is less of a benefit than the archery one because AC isn't completely and utterly ignorable like it was in 3.5.

The people playing it.

>turned paragon paths into archetypes and let you get them 10 levels earlier, but whatever the hell

Pathfinder Archetypes are exactly old AD&D subclass kits, like Paladin and Ranger.

5e Archetypes are that same idea, but every classes' subclasses swap out the same features for uniformity, and presented in such a way that none of them are officially the default and you never lose features only gain them. They could have just as easily declared Open Hand Monk the vanilla class and said "at 3rd, it swaps out Open Hand Technique for Shadow Arts" the Pathfinder/AD&D way. My guess is it's a WoW XP Fatigue/Rested Bonus scenario. Despite being mechanically equal, one gave better Fee-fees.

And Starfinder archetypes are every class share like 3 subclasses that all swap out the same feature that every class gets.
Which makes it almost closer to 4e's variant multiclassing, but not quite.

GURPS Isn't free, pirate.

Has anyone ever tried to go back and make an AD&D 3.0? Like, a true successor?

I thought that was the issues with 4e?

You mean to tell me 3e is to grognards what 4e is to 3aboos?

You didn't know that already?

I did, but I often ask questions for the benefit of the group. Some people just don't get it unless somebody spells it out.

4e didn't have ivory tower design.

You are absolutely retarded if you think martials have trouble hitting things at any level in 3.5. Save for a couple offenders, the monsters are easily hit by a primary and secondary attack, and even the tertiary and quaternary have a decent shot at it.
>more likely you were to roll a 1
That's completely irrelevant, a nat1 miss is just as likely on every roll no matter what your bonus, even if all four attacks were at the same bonus to hit you'd have the same chance of rolling a 1. 5e has extra attack too so I don't know what you are on about.

A 35 AC balor under attack by a 20th level fighter who at that point by WBL would have 26 Str and a +5 weapon and greater weapon focus, would be attacking at +20+8+5+2 or +35 to hit. His first attack automatically hits, his second hits on a 5+, his third hits on a 10+, his fourth hits on a 15+. That's not bad at all, doesn't even take into account melee weapon mastery and other means of increasing to-hit, or buff spells, or any of that shit. Which if you had actually played 3.5 in any capacity would know that these are often cast before combat (no, not everyone does your theorycrafted SoD spamming). Even if you take off 5 for power attack you are still getting in several solid hits per round.

>GWM is less of a benefit than the archery one because AC isn't completely and utterly ignorable like it was in 3.5.
What? Are you being serious right now? The archery one is only better because you can use it at range without having to get into melee.
>TWF(and sword and board) is less shit in 5E than it is in 3.5
Except in 3.5 you could at least build for it to subpar but tolerable. In 5e it is stuck as the same lukewarm crap it always was.

5e archetypes are not subclasses and neither are Pathfinder's. At least not in AD&D terms. The point is that they are presented as character options when in reality they are just "pick this pregenerated path and live with it"

>who at that point by WBL would have 26 Str
31. +5 tome or 5 wishes in a row.

No, the archery one is better because the archery combat style's +2 to hit makes the -5 to hit a lot less painful.

>people complaining about "ivory tower'

Easiest way to show they don't even know what Ivory Tower is. It's something most basic manuals follow for ease of reference and to keep the book from getting bogged down with advice that can be obtained in other sources. Even 3.5 didn't follow Ivory Tower except for in the PH, and not even that strictly.

Well I'm going for random-generator NPC-tier build. If it was point buy you could start with an 18 Strength which is boosted to 23 from ASIs by 20th level, plus a belt so 29, and yeah the wishes could bring you up to 34, and I can't remember what bonus type the ioun stone is but I think it's enhancement. I know there are other magic items but that's fine. The point is, fighters have no issue when it comes to the numbers game. And if your bonus to hit is higher than the enemy's AC you absolutely should power attack. So that high strength is actually giving you even more damage. Swinging for 2d6+27 thanks to a 5 point power attack (or 2d6+42 if you've got your Strength up to 31 and take 10 off instead) is going to be a pretty bad day for a balor. Fighter's big disadvantage is will saves.

If we're bringing in other class features might as well mention the barb and his reckless attack for advantage on everything, and the fact that melee weapons deal more damage than bows.

>Has anyone ever tried to go back and make an AD&D 3.0?

Yes, when wotc made 3e, there was Hackmaster (derived directly from ad&d 2e).

Is that a joke?

They lost dominance to the utter jokes that are Paizo purely because of their ivory tower design.
They didn't ask what players wanted, or really even playtest a significant amount, they just made it and declared "this is what dnd is now" same as 3e.
Sure it's technically much better designed, and fixes most of the problems with 3 (.5), but in the process largely become a whole new game, that clearly wasn't at all what the majority of players wanted. So until fairly recently Paizo with their bass-ackwards, slip-shod, farce of design had a majority markshare purely because it was the closest thing available and it was free online due to OGL.

PF didn't have majority market share until Essentials killed 4E.

Ivory Tower Design is about System Mastery being important. 4e basically just has 'Put the stat that the class says is key high and you'll be fine' as it's barrier for competency.

>fighters have no issue when it comes to the numbers game.
But they do have a problem with dealing with miss chance, active defenses, and getting in position to full attack unaided.

Ivory Tower just means "provide rules without explaning them".

While the manuals themselves were somewhat sparse with advice, the system was built with almost insulting transparency, with "even a five-year-old can understand this" powers and hand-holding advice for DM's in the DMG.

Except for all the sneaky little things, like "+1 to hit being the single most important bonus", and "if you chose this base of powers such as 'ki' or 'shadow' you have zero support."

It was pretty crazy to read that different alternate options being better or worse, in other words some options being traps, was an INTENTIONAL DESIGN GOAL. And this was WotC, not just Paizo.

That's not Ivory Tower.

Ki isn't a power source.

Yes it is. Directly quoting from the thing that gave us the term:

>Magic also has a concept of “Timmy cards.” These are cards that look cool, but aren’t actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they’ve figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn’t exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others.

>There’s a third concept that we took from Magic-style rules design, though. Only with six years of hindsight do I call the concept “Ivory Tower Game Design.” (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it’s got a ring to it.) This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves — players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones.

Well then he's technically right. If you say you wanna play a Ki character you'll get no support.

mjyoung.net/dungeon/char/clas022.html

Loses: weapon specialization, free stronghold at 9th, easiest entry stats in the game, fighter XP progression

Gains: Beserk state, 1/week shapechange into wolf, bear at 7th, hamfarir animal possession at 12, extra XP if he initiates a combat.

Seems pretty pathfinder to me fambino.

1. Blindfight
2. better saves
3. The action economy needs to be fixed. Personally I am all for adopting the 5e action rules outright.

>Ivory Tower
>a state of privileged seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world.

Like designing in a vacuum completely ignoring the needs/wants of your customers.

Ivory Tower Design is an actual term. See: It's got nothing to do with what you are using it for.

That's the barrier for competency, but it's possible to push the system pretty freaking hard, not as hard as 3.5 mind you, but still.

The main reason why the Ivory Tower design is less noticeable is because the system also strongly encourages a balanced party, and in a balanced party, it's much, much harder to see the difference between a well-built and poorly-built character when they aren't fulfilling the same role

>Extra 1.5 damage on average max.
Oh wow it’s literally nothing.

>Balance is better
>Waaaa I wanna level up wif evverbody else
>waaa hold my hand

Bitch

What were 2e's action economy rules? I don't seeing the term full attack at any point when I was skimming those rules.

1. Required a feat that could've been spent towards increasing their attack/damage.
2. Required resources that would've been better spent on items that increased attack/damage.
3. I agree, the action economy was borked and it made classes that depended on mobility (Rogues, Monks, etc.) weak because it favored classes who stood still.

>It's got nothing to do with what you are using it for.
The dictionary definition of the term?

To add to that WotC created the Open Games License because a majority of the people managing 3e agreed that games should be at least mostly free. They managed to convince a multinational to have one of their larger brands exist under an open-forever content license for a long stretch of time.

Advantage is approximate to +5 to hit. I'd hardly call that an average1.5 damage difference

Blind-fight does not negate miss chance, it just makes it less annoying. 25% miss chance still sucks even if it would have been 50% before, and higher saves do not help you against enemies that buffed themselves or have immediate action abilities.

That's the meaning of "ivory tower" not "ivory tower design"

See, in "ivory tower design" as Monte Cook used it, which is pretty much how everyone uses the term to refer to D&D considering that it's the source of the term, he's not referring to designing FROM an ivory tower, but rather designing FOR an ivory tower

>1. Required a feat that could've been spent towards increasing their attack/damage.
There are a finite number of these feats and fighters have a surfeit of them. If you've played a high level 3.5 fighter or even made a high level 3.5 fighter NPC you would know that there are only so many feats you can take to increase your damage.
You are correct otherwise.
Fighters should have had good Fort. and Will saves. Reflex should have been their weak point, made up for by their high hp.

He explicitly said separate xp tracks AD&D style was also acceptable.

He's talking about two-handed weapon versus longbow or longsword. Ignoring the fact that 2d6 greatsword is much more reliable than a 1d8 longsword or longbow. The advantage, on the other hand, is more of an issue.

Why the fuck for when you can just play real 2e?

That's Ivory Tower, not Ivory Tower Game Design. Ivory Tower Game Design is a term coined by Monte Cook years ago to describe 3e's game design focused around system mastery and not really explaining shit.

>If you've played a high level 3.5 fighter or even made a high level 3.5 fighter NPC you would know that there are only so many feats you can take to increase your damage.
Are we talking the PHB or 3.PF as a whole? Because I'd be surprised if WotC only bothered making a handful of feats that increased your damage in some way. Also, are you counting the feats that allowed you to do more whenever you scored a crit?

Notice how you're conflating two separate things together.

The first part is talking about MAGIC. It even finished the statement with "D&D doesn't do that".

Ivory tower is, short and simple, "basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help."

>but rather designing FOR an ivory tower
People who don't play the game but just Melvin?

That explains PFG in a sentence.

>The first part is talking about MAGIC. It even finished the statement with "D&D doesn't do that".

Doesn't do EXACTLY that. The follow up paragraph in the original article explains how Toughness is a D&D example of it where it looks good to a newbie (As +3 is a lot of HP at level 1) but it's actually shit.

>What was actually wrong with 3e?
In the core rules, full spellcasters outclassed other characters badly starting around level 5 or 6, and the disparity just increases as you go up in level. As you add more sourcebooks as options, that gap just widens with spellcasters getting more options for spell selections, in addition to the rules bloat with new classes, prestige classes, feats, spells, and magic items. (And Wizards of the Coast were churning out books in a hurry, worsening rules bloat.)

>Ivory tower is, short and simple, "basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help."

That's not Ivory Tower Design.

Because 2e did have issues.

But 3e, while it fixed maybe one or two, created way more problems, some in the process, but most completely unrelated.

I want what 3.0 should have been. A 3e to 2e as 2e was to 1e.

Then it's a nonsense term.

No? It's jargon, not nonsense.

I fail to see how an active ability with drawbacks to its usage compares to a passive ability that multiple classes get.

Besides, if you want to see what I'm talking about in action, here's an AC 14 enemy vs two different Fighters with a base +8 to hit.

This is a base 2H Fighter:
.75*11.33+.05*8.33 = 8.914
Archer:
.85*7.5+.05*4.5 = 6.6

The 2H Fighter obviously wins a basic attack war. Now with GWM/Sharpshooter, it's a different story:
2H Fighter:
.5*21.33+.05*8.33 = 11.0815
Archer:
.65*17.5+.05*4.5 = 11.6

It follows that with explaining that toughness has value for low level casters. Toughness was discouraged because it's a passive, boring option, but it's available for extreme instances where characters might end up with very low HP.

>Doesn't do EXACTLY that.

Exactly. By providing rules without explaining them or giving advice, a lot of different things happen, including players figuring things out for themselves having an edge (something that happens with just about any game anyway).

Oh, if only D&D provided more advice, outside of the Dragon and Dungeon articles, the website articles, the DMG and MM, the class-specific splat books, and so on and so on. If only D&D had some sort of... general advice book.

That entire article was actually an advertisement for an upcoming "D&D for Dummies". It's so bizarre that people keep pulling it out as some sort of eye-opening revelation, when it's just a guy trying to drum up the idea that the game doesn't provide enough advice as is, and you'd really benefit from purchasing his friends' book.

It's nonsense pretending to be jargon, much like cooke is a fool pretending to be a designer.

That's literally the quote from the article.