What made D&D 3.5 so fucking fantastic?
>>44470438
This is the Nth time this thread has been made in (some number I can't be asked to count) days. If you are doing this on purpose in a sad attempt to start edition war trolling, get over it, /tg/ has moved on to other trollable topics.
If you're being sincere, then you should start your thread with a more defined topic and give us a story we can all enjoy about why 3.5 was fantastic for you, and then like minded people can reply.
>>44470438
Come on now, the other one is still up.
I know it's guaranteedreplies: the post, but come on.
is it too soon for me to start trolling with "monks are fine you rollplayers"
>>44470572
The sad thing is I talked to someone the other day who still legitimately believes that. In the same breath he described how the DM has to pit insane monsters 10 CR above the party level in order to present a challenge, and also espoused "barbarians are OP".
I had lots of fun DMing 3.5 at levels 3-10, and like certain things about it, but some people still seriously do believe it's the best thing ever.
Right place and time, basically. Also, the OGL really helped make it popular and boosted sales. The sheer number of derivative products in different genres helped it along greatly.
>>44470438
It wasn't. It was dog shit.
3.5 had great art direction. The tome-like books were awesome, though the later ones might have gotten a little silly in their designs. I also liked the aged pages and the general direction of the paintings and drawings.
3.5 had a pretty good selection of core classes. The only thing I can really complain about is that Wizard/Sorcerer overlap and the Ranger/Barbarian overlap. Otherwise, it's a really solid set, though that's largely thanks to 2e.
It also had an AMAZING monster list. It's almost unfair to compare the sheer diversity of enemies you might face, even ignoring that you could build enemies like characters and even combine monsters with class levels. Just about every monster you could find in folklore was statted out or had its equivalent, and hundreds of original ideas on top of that. Largely a legacy of 2e again, but updated and expanded.
Biggest Spell and Item list of any game since or prior. Not just big, but filled with really fantastic ideas where you could wind up revolving an entire campaign around a particular spell or item.
It also had so many optional rules and subsystems, that you could build just about any game you wanted out of it, and the homebrewing scene was by far the most robust and involved that there ever was or ever has been.
It also had a lot of books that were legitimately fun to read through, with all sorts of lore ideas, adventure inspirations, and mechanical options to help a DM craft an adventure. While it may be easier to use 5e, 3.5 allowed an incredible variety of mechanical subsystems to interact together, keeping different things feeling distinct both in fluff and crunch.
The updated campaign settings were great. While that's once again something that it largely took from 2e, whether you were reading the Manual of the Planes, Oriental Adventures, or the Faerunian Campaign setting, you were reading through an introduction into some of the most beloved RPG settings.
There's a lot of great things about it.
>>44471051
>Biggest Spell and Item list of any game since or prior. Not just big, but filled with really fantastic ideas where you could wind up revolving an entire campaign around a particular spell or item.
Gonna have to stop you there, at least for items. 2e had so many magic items that they made a four book, sixteen hundred page encyclopedia of magic items and it still didn't get them all.
Spell count is debatable, but probably falls in 3.X's favor.
>>44470438
A good marketing and market research team
>>44471163
Someone went ahead and nixed all the specific items, grouping them together and simplifying the Magical Encyclopedia. It ended up as a 184 page item compendium, which was shorter and less dense than the 224 page 3rd edition magic item compendium.
I'll admit that there were a fair amount of omissions, and 2e may still have had more types of items, but it's a bit of a closer comparison than you might have realized.
>>44471445
>Nixed all the specific items
Cutting out most of the content is not an improvement. Cut out the equivalent items from the 3rd edition compendium and then get back to me.
>>44471435
Linking the ttrpgs and the novels, was pretty clever.
>>44471445
I can only imagine that they literally removed most of them, since there weren't many that were "Like the shittier version of this item, but it also does this".
Even the three different entries for Excalibur had different stats, different requirements, and different intended settings (One was literal King Arthur in England setting, the others were more generic).
>>44471481
As in, trimming down "Apron of cooking +1, Apron of cooking +2, Apron of cooking +3" and so forth into "list of potential forms of items and the degree of skill bonuses they would grant.
Similarly, "Item with Protection", "Magical Weapon", and "Item that let you cast a spell" were also simplified, alongside a few other similar groupings. In effect, you could combine tables of forms and effects to produce just about every single single specific item in the magic encyclopedia, you just wouldn't know which adventure it would be found in.
Because, do you really need a separate line for Brooch of Protection 1-4, Buckle of Protection 1-4, Cape of Protection 1-4, Cloak of Protection 1-4, Clothing of Protection 1-4, and so on and so forth?
>>44470438
>>44471877
They don't have separate entries in the actual Encyclopedia. All cloaks of protection go under one entry that takes up about 1/5th of the page it's on, including two tables.
The different items don't always have exactly the same rules, either. Buckles of protection go in a different magic item slot, can only go up to +2, and are twice as expensive as the equivalent cloak of protection.
The other items you mentioned don't exist, and amulets "of protection" are poorly named, but have a different effect, something to do with a specific type of werecreature from the adventure the item was introduced in.
>>44471877
There are exactly 80 (I counted, using the comprehensive appendix at the back of the 4th book) items of protection. Of them, 8 or 9 are the "+X AC/ +X Saving throws" type, and they are all slightly different, with slightly different compatibility and sometimes weaknesses or other effects. Some can easily be cursed, while others can't. Some cost more per point. Most of the smaller ones have very limited max bonus, but they're also the ones that can be stacked. Some can be completely bypassed by magic weapons above their bonus. Others can be bypassed by campaign specific things. Combining them all into a single entry would reduce the total size of the encylopedia by about a page and a half. If you include all of their little options and quirks and an explanation about how some are limited, then you wouldn't gain more than half a page of space.
>>44472141
I understand there's nuances, but what we're looking at in the broader sense is a lot of items that can be grouped together without loosing much in the process.
Also, buckles of protection can go up to +4, and all the items I mentioned do exist. And, while the cloaks are grouped in one entry, we're still looking at a separate line for each bonus, as well as the idea of an entry dedicated to a specific form of an item, when that could just as easily be a line in a chart. It's a lot of complexity that serves purposes beyond the intention of maximizing the amount of diverse magic items you might be able to fit in a limited amount of space.
Ultimately, if we went ahead and generated all the possible combinations of 2e items and 3e items, using all the potential tables that could be combined, and then went ahead and compared them, we'd be looking at one hell of a silly mountain of items and the only satisfactory answer would be "If Wonder Woman and Batman fought, it would be a wild fight."
>>44472654
>Apron of cooking
You probably meant the Apron of Comfort, which protects against heat and adds a small bonus to cooking, but doesn't have any variants with different bonuses and doesn't support your argument because of it
>Brooch of Protection
Literally doesn't exist. There are 12 Brooches in the book and none of them give the generic "Protection" effect.
>Buckle of Protection
"The buckle may be enchanted to a maximum of +2 quality" followed by a two line table which shows a 75% chance of it being +1 and a 25% chance of it being +2. It also costs substantially more per point than other, similar items, probably because it's subtle and can stack.
>Cape of Protection
Does exist
>Cloak of Protection
Does exist, nearly identical to Cape. Combining them would save 1/5th of a single page.
>Clothing of Protection
Nope. There's a dress of protection which is objectively weaker than similar items due to being ignored by weapons with better +#, and a robelike garment that is also pretty bad since it cannot be worn with armor better than leather. There's a robe of protection which gives you a flat AC instead of adding a bonus.
Even cutting down the ones that really are redundant, there's no way you'd remove over 1400 pages. The vast majority of items have descriptions that include no tables, and effects that aren't replicated elsewhere. Even stuff like generic, nameless magic weapons have a page or two of tables instead of an endless list of entries.
>>44473145
I must be looking through a weird edition. But, I'm not here looking for an argument, so I won't press the matter.
1,400 pages is a lot, but aside from the redundancy and less than efficacious formatting, the major issue in trying to compare the two is that there has never been an equivalent 3rd edition attempt. At best, we got the Magic Item Compendium, which in 224 pages only sampled items from sixteen books, which is barely a fraction of the total books published and it doesn't even touch upon the unique items that can be found in modules.
2e had a lot of items. Likely more than 3rd edition, considering that 2e had a lot more published adventures under its belt. But, 3rd edition is not as far behind as you might think from just comparing the Magical Encyclopedias and the Magic Item Compendium, especially if we were to include 3rd party books (which we really shouldn't).
>>44473696
That's definitely not the same encyclopedia I'm talking about.
These are four books, TSR 2141, 2152, 2157, and 2161. The page count carries over from one to another, just like other multi-page encyclopedias,
>>44473974
Ah, I see now, you're going through the first volume of the Encyclopedia Magica (2141), and I'm looking through the first volume of the Magic Encyclopedia (9293).
It seems like the latter is far less dense, which is strange considering it's only two volumes and came later.
Encyclopedia Magica keeps a running total that ends at 6376 magic items. I assume that it counts X of Y +1, +2, +3, ect as one item.
>>44470438
I actually like 3.5, excuse my heresy.
It's very easy to pick up and play. It generally runs well both with prepackaged quests/dungeons and ad-libbed spur of the moment adventures.
It has a very strong collectable element in the form of the books. Even though they released SO MANY books over such a long time period, the books had a surprisingly large amount of content to be used. The Monster Manuals were especially good.
A unified art style. Pretty much all 3.5 art shares a specific kind of style that looks great. This art design was realistic, full of detail, and covered a massive range of subjects. It also extended to the book jackets and the way the pages looked. Really neat.
There's a lot to criticize about 3.5, particularly if you're going into it from the perspective of the jaded ultra-gamer. But they're really missing the forest for the trees, for every gripe about 3.5 there's an aspect of the design that is just fantastic.
>>44475122
That wasn't anything from 3.5, just a random image.
