The Gaming Den

Take all the things 3.5 improved upon 3.0. Ignore everything else.

What happens?

You are left with a partial set of rules?...if anything.

Assuming that the people you game with agree with you as to what is or isn't an improvement, you have a game slightly better than either 3.0 or 3.5 but requiring twice the weight of books as either alone. Further house rules and/or gentlemen's agreements are still required IMO.

I was actually gearing up to make a post on the 3e vs 3.5 thread. I wanted to be charitable to 3.5 and list all the things that I thought were actual improvements.

On the clik sliding scale of 3e to 3.5, I am guessing it comes out like 3e with house rules. I do like a lot of the buffs to the melee classes though, even if they were not enough. More features is better than less.

Definitely the new content in 3.5 would get ported. Dread Necromancer, Beguiler, Scorching Ray...

It would probably be a pretty daunting comparison to lay the two editions upon each other and pick and choose which bits one preferred. There's a friggin ton of changes, many of them clandestine.

• 3e
  basic rules:
  No auto failure on saves.
  
  races:
  gnome favored class wizard(illusionist)
  
  classes:
  Bard: Bardic initiated music as free action
  
  Druid:
  I like the buffed single animal companion, but it is probably too strong since it often overshadows the fighter in my experience. It's a hard call for me. I liked having a pile of utility animals that were not useful in combat later on, so I will keep that version of animal companion.
  Wild shape and that shit is largely made into a shit storm by natural spell and polymorph rulings.
  Spontaneous summoning is an unnecessary boost.
  
  Monk:
  Keep evasion at level 1. Nobody should be forced to dip 2 levels in monk =-(
  
  Paladin:
  keep almost everything the same. except smites
  
  Ranger:
  keep the d10 HD and the old animal companion rules. I do not want to give up polymorph self as a 4th level divine spell. It was one of the few things that kept rangers relevant at higher levels.
  
  Rogue:
  keep the better Uncanny Dodge progression
  
  Sorceror:
  Keep the RAW spontaneous metamagic rule for quicken spell. not the 3.5 shenanigans.
  
  
  
  3.5
  races:
  minor boosts to half-elves (skills), dwarves (stability, and armored movement), gnomes (spell stuff), elves (get both sword profs, who cares?)
  
  classes:
  Barbarian: keep all changes (boosts, mostly minor, but better than no boosts)
  
  Bards:
  basically keep everything except the standard action activation for bardic music. Nix that shit.
  Good stuff: wear light armor without spell failure. Bardic music (Inspire Courage) scaling in power with bard levels, better weapon profs. More skill points, yay.
  
  Druid:
  Nature sense skill +2 bonus. Woot.
  Wild Empathy as a class feature, because I hated exclusive skills and applauded their removal.
  
  Monk:
  Speed bonus, flurry and damage are cleaner formats. bonus Feats are okay.
  Ki Strike and Damage reduction handling is preferred. Sadly Ki strike still and forever is useless against incorporeals =-(
  
  Paladin:
  Take the improved smite evil progression... everything else is inferior to the old 3e paladin. Why nerf Paladins? Why?!
  
  Ranger:
  Take all the improvements. skills, bonus crap, favored enemies, everything.
  
  Rogue:
  Nobody gives a flying fuck about trap sense, but I guess take the higher one from 3.5. Meh.
  
  Sorceror:
  1 charisma skill is better than none I guess. Keep bluff. spell swapping is better than no spell swapping.
  
  Wizard:
  I do not really care about the change to specializations, but suppose that 3.5's version is cleaner.

So far I actually like a lot of the 3.5 changes when tallying them. However a lot of them are piddly shit that are only really good when compared to not even having piddly shit. I even like many of the skill and feat changes of 3.5. It's spells where I am filled with blinding rage since so many things were changed pointlessly or made worse.

I just started writing it up this morning. Somewhat related to the race question.

clikml wrote:Druid:
I like the buffed single animal companion, but it is probably too strong since it often overshadows the fighter in my experience. It's a hard call for me. I liked having a pile of utility animals that were not useful in combat later on, so I will keep that version of animal companion.

To be fair, the fighter's being overshadowed is due to said class's general suckitude, not the animal companion's inherent awesomeness.

So if you just use the animal companion's progression for the fighter class....

The standard operating procedure of 3.5 class rewrites is to give them more stuff over twenty levels in exchange for taking their 1st and 2nd level abilities and knocking them up a few levels. This is actually uniformly bad because if you take 20 levels of Paladin you still deserve to be institutionalized. Even though Rangers get objectively more things over the course of 20 levels, the dip to slap TWF on a Rogue is longer and less worthwhile so he Ranger class shows up in less builds.

But by the time you were line editing things, it would be better to simply redo those classes rather than try to pick and choose aspects of each. I mean seriously, while getting TWF (or Rapid Shot for that matter) at level 1 like in 3e would make a lot more people dip Ranger, that class would still be 10 pounds of shit in a five pound bag. And if you're rewriting the class anyway, you might as well give them stuff that actually matters. Entangle at level 3? I don't know, the Ranger archetype has always been confusing.

-Username17