Wednesday, January 22, 2025

D&D 3.5E

D&D 3.5E started the whole Pathfinder thing. Of course, Pathfinder has gone its own way these days, but if you want the original game, as it was in the early 2000s, you can still get this in print-on-demand. The PDFs are also very useful, and you can always get those printed spiral bound if you want those in a hard-copy format.

The system is broken, so you will be house-ruling, patching, and disallowing many builds that break the game. This is par for the course for any Wizards game, though. Caster power is insane, especially with summoned creatures, so you may want to put in some sensible limits as characters reach higher levels.

If something feels like cheese, you must fix it as a group to make it work better for everyone.

What I like better about D&D 3.5E, even more than its clone Pathfinder 1e, is that the game feels more focused on miniatures and dungeons. The skills are more map-focused than Pathfinder. Pathfinder is a generic 3.5E set of rules designed to sell adventure paths. D&D 3.5E is more D&D and is a tactical miniatures dungeon battle game.

Pathfinder 2 returned to the map, and the team worked hard to balance it. This is a laudable goal that shifts the game's focus back to the tabletop. 5E is too theater of the mind for me, and the multiple action types make the game's combats a slog to get through. But Pathfinder 2, at the moment, is stuck in the mud of pulling in both sides of a political argument, and the community frankly sucks right now. Suddenly, in my communities, people I had never seen posted were spamming flame-bait posts and inciting fights. Nothing kills my excitement for a game more than a toxic, negative community that pulls in external rage from the larger culture.

I still like this game and want to learn it, but the negativity has spoiled it. I am putting it aside but will keep my subscriptions for the following year. They still are a good company at the forefront of keeping the hobby open and accessible, but their team members need to show more discipline and not grandstand and use the game their team works on as a weapon for petty social media fights.

In the meantime, nobody really cares about D&D 3.5E, but the true fans and the community here is an excellent place for people who care more about a game than fighting. It is a small community, and most will be focused on Pathfinder 1e, but the original rules of D&D 3.5E are still superior in many ways.

And the D&D 3.5E DMG is a fantastic thing, along with all the world-specific sourcebooks for prestige classes linked to the game's worlds, something we have never really gotten in this depth and level of support since. If I were playing in the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or Eberron - you bet I would be playing D&D 3.5E, the game built and designed to support these settings.

The last, best sourcebook support for these D&D settings is in D&D 3.5E and nowhere else. Wizards gave up on supporting their settings, and shockingly, they are asking us to buy D&D 3.5E sourcebooks to have setting information.

My answer: Why not play the version of the game these sourcebooks are designed to support? There is nothing wrong with D&D 3.5E, especially compared to 5E and all its problems. If I am stuck "fixing a game," I would much rather do that in the better-supported version for these settings than the one that pretends to support them.

If you want to weather that Pathfinder 2E storm and take a break from the drama, pick up D&D 3.5E and the world sourcebooks and see where this all started. Grab a copy of Hero Lab, the D&D 3.5E module, and the community-supported resources.

You may find a game and a few classic settings you like better.

You may love prestige classes and character planning.

And there is nothing wrong with D&D 3.5E that an intelligent group can't fix.

D&D 3.5E is excellent.

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