Ultimate Showdown: 3.0 vs. 3.5

[Josh_Kablack]

But the thing is D&D has ripped off popular contempory works of fantasy fiction for its entire existence - From ripping rangers, orcs and halflings out of Tolkien to ripping greenish regenerating Trolls from Three Hearts and Three Lions to ripping the monk class from Kung Fu D&D has always been about blatant rip-offs.

Attempting to dismiss something solely because it is derived from any currently popular work of fiction, betrays a gross ignorance of the game on the part of the person making such an attempt. I'm saying that anyone who seriously thinks that anything is "too anime" for D&D should be taken no more seriously than someone who says something is "too Tolkien" or "too mythic" or "too comic book" - because they are all the same claim.

[shadzar]

What isn't ripped-off today? With as many things that are created daily, are there any NEW ideas left for people to have?

[RandomCasualty2]

What isn't ripped-off today? With as many things that are created daily, are there any NEW ideas left for people to have?

Everything can be said to be a permutation or variant of an existing idea.

[Leress]

Fighters shooting fire/teleporting is an anime thing.

Anime is a medium that is use for telling all types of stories (Graves of Fireflies, Wings of wings of honneamise, FLCL, Macross, Metropolis)

Last time I checked Pyro and Nightcrawler aren't anime characters.

Fighters shooting fire and teleporting is a fantasy thing.

[shadzar]

Anime is just the term for "cartoon"/"animation" in Japan et all.

What isn't ripped-off today? With as many things that are created daily, are there any NEW ideas left for people to have?

Everything can be said to be a permutation or variant of an existing idea.

That almost sounds like you are saying it is random causality...

[erik]

Fucking 3.5. I hate you.

Weapon Sizes. I hate you.

Screwing the Open RPG crowd by making their products obsolete. I hate you.

Endless minor changes that only serve to confuse me because they
1) are unneccessary
2) are easy to miss
3) are contrary to design demands (screwing the weak, overpowering the strong)
Yeah, I hate you 3.5. Lots.


I was forced to play effing living greyhawk in 3.5 to get my DnD fix after the edition shift pretty much killed interest in the game for my group. I had fun and met new people with LG, but damn, I felt dirty every time I had to touch 3.5 crap.

I tried making an archer for LG in 3.5 and to my dismay, there was no decent fucking archer prestige class available to +1 BAB classes. The best one I found was the Pious Templar. Why? Because he gets a couple fucking bonus feats, a few applicable divine buffs, damage reduction, and backup melee smiting. The blatantly melee-oriented Pious Templar is the bar none best fucking archery prestige class for a non-primary caster in 3.5. Pathetic.

There was plenty more solid material that could have been written for 3e. I would have happily continued buying all their books. Instead I bought a 3.5 PHB and the Spell Compendium and was done buying DnD books forever.

[Tequila Sunrise]

To be honest, while I like that D&D has stolen stuff from anime, I try not to get into discussions about it with people who don't like it. Because out of the anime I've seen, precious little of it is worth my time. Namely, Myazaki, and not even all of his films. I've heard there's other good anime, but haven't seem 'em yet.

(PR's right that ToB is pretty anime-ish. The stupidity is assuming that's a bad thing.)

Never said it was bad. I don't like it, but some people like games where fighters can teleport.

Didn't mean to imply that you made that mistake.

[RandomCasualty2]

Weapon Sizes. I hate you.

I never got the rage against weapon sizes. How do the weapon size rules really even affect the game much?

I always found the 3.0 weapon sizes more counter intuitive. Since a greatsword was normally large. So a greatsword for an ogre was actually huge, even though the ogre was a large creature. A halfling's greatsword was a medium greatsword, not a small one. I found that just really confusing.

The 3.5 system just made more logical sense to me. Where a greatsword for a large creature was called a large greatsword.

[violence in the media]

Any feelings that WotC might be a cool company were decidedly crushed, and it the notion that they were just in it to make a buck was set in stone.

Rationally, it makes sense to recognize that companies are in it to make a buck. That said, I understand where you're coming from. TTRPGs just seem like something that are inherently resistant to commercialization and, as such, should be produced as a labor of love by people not looking to make a living or turn a profit off of it.

Frank, K, Koumei, and others here have turned out higher quality material in their spare time than some gaming companies have ever produced. That is how I'd like to see the "industry" evolve. I'd like there to be actual meetings with actual Mattel suits where someone has to stand up and announce that the most threatening competitors to their product line are hobbyists and fans producing and distributing content for free in their spare time.

[Judging__Eagle]

Keen and Improved Critical no longer stacking.

The reason being that people actually failed to understand the rule.

They thought that a threatened crit would still be an auto-hit (it's not; you can't threaten a crit, if the attack roll is not high enough to hit the target; so, a +1 Keen Scimitar held by someone with Imp Critical still isn't a super awesome weapon. It will crit if the user hits within its crit range, and then confirms the crit confirmation roll.

[erik]

Having weapons be grouped by their inherent sizes (rather than having sizes be some meta term dependent upon the wielder) was elegant and entirely intuitive to myself.

In 3e a halfing cannot use a large sword (greatsword), however they can use a medium sword with two hands (longsword). Easy. You can use a weapon of your size with one hand and a weapon size one step higher with two hands. Super easy.

The only beef I had with 3e version weapons was that the short sword only came in piercing versions, so no one-handed slashing martial swords were available in core for halfings. A small oversight.

Improvised weapons are intuitively obvious for 3e weapons. Since their size doesn't care who wields it, just peg it to some analogous weapon description and move on. In 3.5 it is not immediately obvious what happens when a human and a halfing each attempt to use the same improvised weaponry... I don't know what happens. It doesn't matter a lot because nobody uses improvsed weapons, but it still highlights the lack of intuitivositatiousness in 3.5's weapon sizes. Size penalties for different sized sticks (quarterstaves and clubs) is beyond idiotic and not at all intuitive to me.

Giving reach to halflings with short weapons never made intuitive sense to me either. As much as I love the little guys, I never felt shafted that reach weapon fighters didn't make much sense as small races (yes, you could use a kusari gama or lance). It broke more suspension of disbelief to have a halfling with a smaller weapon somehow reaching as far as a human with a larger weapon. That bit of screwing of small characters in 3e is nothing compared to 3.5's removal of resizing magic weapons/armor and weapon drops being wrong-sized.

The one-handed and two-handed classes of weapons in 3.5 are pretty retarded as well since you can use them with different handedness, and some actions and rules refer to the handedness of weapons without specifying whether it refers to how they are used or how they are classified. More lack of clarity caused by their changing of what was previously an elegant system.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

[Judging__Eagle]

Weeaboo Fightan Magic is a criticism of the book that handing out (or attempting to hand out) powers that can keep up with actual magic makes the game 'too anime'.

No offense, but fighters shooting fire and teleporting is pretty anime. (In before "Death Note is anime!")

Shut up. That shit isn't anime. It's things that anime derived from other sources much older than itself. Anime is seriously ripping off other sources, and saying that anime is the problem just shows your completley unbiased, and therefore useless opinion when it comes to things like "what a powerful warrior looks like".

Your ignorance about this is actually disgusting, considering how long you've been here. I'm actually fucking sickened that you are so short-sighted to lump in "supernaturally powerful warriors" with "anime", and with anime alone.

Seriously, it's like you've never even been on these forums ever in your life if you say something like that.

It's older than that, and you know it.

Cuchullain shapechanges into a monster able to kill entire armies; when he can already fight all day long, fighting a series of non-stop duels. Obviously filthy ancient Irish anime. Burn it with fire.

Roland cuts a mountain in fucking twain because he has to stop an army. Too much Dark Ages Germany Anime bullshit. Must destroy.

Arthur grapples with child-eating Ogres, and breaks their necks in grapples. More examples of dirty Welsh magical sword-wankery anime.

Beowulf swims across the Danish seas with a chainmail shirt on, and loses a chainmail shirt swimming race because of sea serpent complications. However, he did get bragging rights about killing a sea serpent. He then rips the arm off of an immortal scrag, and then goes underwater to kill the scrag's highly advanced mother. Stupid mother-fucking Danish anime there too, what a piece of shit.

Gilgamesh is approached by the goddess of love and beauty, and does't give in to goddess loving, b/c he's got a strong enough will. He was also a warrior king that established a military junta in his own time, in order to consolidate power behind himself. Why won't the cavalcade of all of these compelling anime sources stop? I mean, there's even Sumerian Anime in this mess.

In short. Your post is a lie PR. Please stop lying.

It's not anime. It's that you're too stupid and/or uneducated about the source material to realize that anime is actually underpowered compared to the original source material. However, you "hate" anime, and anything that looks like it could be something you hate, gets your not only bigoted, but actually uneducated scorn.

You say "no offense", but you know what? Saying shit like that is offensive. It's shit like that that ends up with "fighters can't have nice things". It has to be excised at the root; and the root of it is any thinking that prevents equality in terms of power.

As for the reasons why you hate it, I have no clue. I don't hate anything as wide as a whole medium.

However, one never knows. Perhaps I will to completely lose my reason, and decide to hate oh, I don't know, all forms of Journalism, and thus anything about Journalism will equal Fail for me.

[cthulhu]

no-one cares about the difference between 3.5 and 3 - it's just pointless.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I guess whoever first wrote 'weeaboo fightan' thought they were being awfully clever, but how am I supposed to be offended by nonsense, without hearing vocal tone? WTF is a weeaboo?

It's ugly because it accuses people of wanting to fix a persistent problem in roleplaying games (the suckage of non-spellcasters) of having a hard-on for Dragonball Z or Naruto or that happy horseshit.

When we call a book 'Skip Hates Sorcerers' or 'Book of Exalted Furries' or 'Lute and Loot', it doesn't have any greater implication towards roleplaying. Yes, the BoED had some fucked-up views about morality but the book itself is entirely meaningless towards the progression of D&D.

Book of Nine Swords, despite being deeply flawed in many areas, was D&D's first attempt to fix a major problem. When you screech at someone trying to fix this problem with 'your fixes sound like something a WEEABOO would like' you are being a huge douchebag.

I'm not saying you have to like the book; I'm well aware that my post can be construed to setting up a false dichotomy where you ever have to like this dodgy book or hate on fighters. However, Weeaboo Fightan Magic criticizes the people who like the fixes more than the actual fixes themselves.

[RandomCasualty2]

Having weapons be grouped by their inherent sizes (rather than having sizes be some meta term dependent upon the wielder) was elegant and entirely intuitive to myself.

It sorta was.. until you got to weapons for smaller or larger creatures. I always thought it was easier to think in terms of "This is an ogre sized greatsword" and in 3.5, you just say "what's the size of an ogre?" And then that's the size of the sword. 3.0 has a second step since you have to consider the offset.

The 3.0 system seemed weird because it tried to do two things at once. If everything was size based, then why have longswords and greatswords? Why not just have one "sword" category that you sized to different sizes? 3.0 did odd nonintuitive stuff like having a huge longsword and a huge greatsword be the same thing. That always threw me off in 3.0.

3.5 didn't have that level of confusion. A large greatsword was a greatsword for a large creature. A huge longsword was a longsword for a huge creature.

In 3e a halfing cannot use a large sword (greatsword), however they can use a medium sword with two hands (longsword). Easy. You can use a weapon of your size with one hand and a weapon size one step higher with two hands. Super easy.

The 3.5 system was pretty easy too, until you started trying to use weapons that weren't for your size category, which honestly was kinda pointless anyway, since you took a -2 penalty. So you rarely even had to worry about halflings using medium sized weapons.

Improvised weapons are intuitively obvious for 3e weapons. Since their size doesn't care who wields it, just peg it to some analogous weapon description and move on. In 3.5 it is not immediately obvious what happens when a human and a halfing each attempt to use the same improvised weaponry... I don't know what happens.

Improved weapons take a -4 penalty to use regardless, since they're not really built for any size. You just sorta decide what their handedness is based on the relative size. Granted the 3.0 system was rather better with this, but the nomenclature confusion with the 3.0 system was a bigger problem than handling improvised weapons, since improvised weapons just don't happen very often.

I think I've used them like once.

[CatharzGodfoot]

The two sub-editions both had advantages and disadvantages. Thankfully, the advantages on one are almost never incompatible with those of the other, so we can use them both at the same time and ignore the shitty parts. And then house rule half of it all anyway.

It's basically only useful to know which aspect of one edition is superior to the other in as much as we just use the better one. So 3.5e haste and 3.0e shapechange.

[erik]

It's basically only useful to know which aspect of one edition is superior to the other in as much as we just use the better one. So 3.0e haste and 3.0e shapechange.

Fixed yer typoe there. Losing the ability to move+full attack hurt fighters way more than the double-casting wizards.

If people were to compile a book of the best of 3rd edition rules, stripping what good they could from 3.5 and merging it with 3e, that might be something (though I'm not certain what I'd actually want to take from 3.5). However for anyone not willing to put forth that level of effort, it is just confusing to have two very similar editions which are in fact incompatible. You will have people like me confusing spells between editions and doing things wrong when I play either edition now because I have a difficult time remembering which rule is 3e and which is 3.5. In general it seems like the better version is 3e though, so that helps be keep it straight.

For every good change in 3.5, I wind up finding 2 bad ones and a dozen pointless ones (which are actually bad since that just generates confusion). If I could somehow purge the 3.5 rule set from my memory, I would do so.

[Orion]

Judging Eagle,

In PRs defense, I'm pretty sure combat teleportation is an almost entirely modern trope. I don't know of historical sources that depict it the way modern anime and superhero shows do.

shooting fire as a personal combat technique is also not a typical feature of ancient sources that I know of, although of course it happens plenty in western fantasy fiction.

[shadzar]

How modern is teleportation being discussed? As recent as the Time Machine? While it didn't move form one place to another it could move forward in time, then safely move to the place it intended to be, and move back to be there. Kind of how Nightcrawler moves through another space/time to bampf all over.

[Korwin]

On Amazon you can get a new 3rd edition PHB for 15 bucks or a used one for $4.
You can get a new 3.5 PHB for 19 bucks or a used one for $39.

While there was a big selloff in anticipation of 4e, 4th edition's actual existence has not devalued the 3e or 3.5 stock at all.

-Username17

Little OT,
I saw D&D 4ed going at 1$ = 0,5 € at the Essener Spielemesse.
Still didnt buy anything...

[Draco_Argentum]

Book of Nine Swords, despite being deeply flawed in many areas, was D&D's first attempt to fix a major problem. When you screech at someone trying to fix this problem with 'your fixes sound like something a WEEABOO would like' you are being a huge douchebag.

You could say the same about Book of Exalted Furries. 'You like BoED, you fucking furry!' Loot and Lute doesn't really contain an insult and Skip Hates Sorcerers is clearly insulting Skip, thats what makes those two different. Still BoED was shit and to correlation between furry wet dreams and good outsiders is too hilarious to pass up.

[Ganbare Gincun]

As for the reasons why you hate it, I have no clue. I don't hate anything as wide as a whole medium.

I can tell you why right now: because the anime community has become overrun with emotionally immature, borderline autistic fucktards that can't appreciate anything that isn't a carbon copy of the same old Shojo/Shonen bullshit that Japan has been churning out since the beginning of time. The fact that they pirate all the anime and manga that they can get their grubby little hands on without any thought towards compensating the original creators for their efforts further demonstrates a significant lack of character. Finally, the fact that there is an undercurrent of what some would consider to be "sexual deviancy" in the anime community (BDSM, furries) further condemns anime fans in the eyes of many outsiders. Not all anime fans are like this - especially the old school ones - but there are enough of these weeaboo punks running around to give anything associated with anime a very bad name indeed.

[Psychic Robot]

Anime is a medium that is use for telling all types of stories (Graves of Fireflies, Wings of wings of honneamise, FLCL, Macross, Metropolis)

Last time I checked Pyro and Nightcrawler aren't anime characters.

Fighters shooting fire and teleporting is a fantasy thing.

You're arguing semantics. You know what I mean when I say anime--shows like Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Technically, it would be more accurate to say, "Shonen anime and manga," but "anime" is easier to type and everyone knows what you're talking about anyway.

Shut up. That shit isn't anime. It's things that anime derived from other sources much older than itself. Anime is seriously ripping off other sources, and saying that anime is the problem just shows your completley unbiased, and therefore useless opinion when it comes to things like "what a powerful warrior looks like".

Your ignorance about this is actually disgusting, considering how long you've been here. I'm actually fucking sickened that you are so short-sighted to lump in "supernaturally powerful warriors" with "anime", and with anime alone.

Seriously, it's like you've never even been on these forums ever in your life if you say something like that.

It's older than that, and you know it.

Cuchullain shapechanges into a monster able to kill entire armies; when he can already fight all day long, fighting a series of non-stop duels. Obviously filthy ancient Irish anime. Burn it with fire.

Roland cuts a mountain in fucking twain because he has to stop an army. Too much Dark Ages Germany Anime bullshit. Must destroy.

Arthur grapples with child-eating Ogres, and breaks their necks in grapples. More examples of dirty Welsh magical sword-wankery anime.

Beowulf swims across the Danish seas with a chainmail shirt on, and loses a chainmail shirt swimming race because of sea serpent complications. However, he did get bragging rights about killing a sea serpent. He then rips the arm off of an immortal scrag, and then goes underwater to kill the scrag's highly advanced mother. Stupid mother-fucking Danish anime there too, what a piece of shit.

Gilgamesh is approached by the goddess of love and beauty, and does't give in to goddess loving, b/c he's got a strong enough will. He was also a warrior king that established a military junta in his own time, in order to consolidate power behind himself. Why won't the cavalcade of all of these compelling anime sources stop? I mean, there's even Sumerian Anime in this mess.

In short. Your post is a lie PR. Please stop lying.

It's not anime. It's that you're too stupid and/or uneducated about the source material to realize that anime is actually underpowered compared to the original source material. However, you "hate" anime, and anything that looks like it could be something you hate, gets your not only bigoted, but actually uneducated scorn.

You say "no offense", but you know what? Saying shit like that is offensive. It's shit like that that ends up with "fighters can't have nice things". It has to be excised at the root; and the root of it is any thinking that prevents equality in terms of power.

As for the reasons why you hate it, I have no clue. I don't hate anything as wide as a whole medium.

However, one never knows. Perhaps I will to completely lose my reason, and decide to hate oh, I don't know, all forms of Journalism, and thus anything about Journalism will equal Fail for me.

Chill out.

[erik]

This anime digression is interrupting my hate for 3.5.

[Tequila Sunrise]

I never got the weapon size hate either. In fact I didn't even realize anything had changed until it came up on a forum, years after I had switched to 3.5. And I was usually the DM. I suppose one is probably marginally superior to the other, but I can't even summon enough nerdrage to analyze them. Maybe if I played Small PCs regularly I'd have a different attitude, maybe not.