From another thread:

EDIT: 3.5 being a long term co-operative game, one could easily spend the first session discussing character concepts and makimg sure they are around the same level. Fighters were unplayable only if somebody brought out the big guns (anything with a full spell list).

I completely understand what you mean here, but I'd call that a fundamental failure. If you can't put a fighter and a wizard in the same party, then you're not playing a swords- and -sorcery game but rather a swords- or -sorcery game.

It's also highly doubtful it was broken by design. Most of those interviews sound awfully like 'um...we totally meant it!'. Few people are willing to publicly admit their incompetence in what they do for a living. Take eexamples like sean K. Reynolds, who have proven repeatedly they had no idea how the stuff they worked on really worked.

Monte Cook talked extensively about two principles that, IMO, should have gotten him fired in the design phase of 3e:(1) Some characters (i.e., anyone without a 9-level spell list) improve linearly as they level up, and some (wizards, clerics, druids, and sorcerers sometimes) improve exponentially.(2) In RPGs, just like in M:TG, there should be good and bad game elements. This requires players to learn to tell the difference between good and bad game elements, and that sort of system mastery is an important skill in an RPG.It's possible those were post-hoc justifications for (really) bad design, but he was very confident about it, started talking about it very early in the lifespan of 3/3.5, and designed the same principles into other games.I mean, at this point it's all sort of moot. (It's also off-topic, but since the OP is a naked assertion without any backup, I'm not too worried about that.) But it's why I preferred 4e to 3.5.

I never played 3.5, so I can't comment on it. I will say that- as someone who GMed a 4e campaign, the non combat stuff was a train wreck, and the combat seemed marginal.

In my mind, a good dungeon is one in which exploration is rewarded by learning the history of where you are, and learning that history is rewarded by making it easier to solve the riddles and traps of the dungeon. In 4e, all of this is represented by... Rolling a D20 and taking a modifier. *yawn*. Yes, as a GM I could and did design around this problem, but it _was_ a problem, and I _did_ need to design around it.

That ties into the combat design as well. Character levels are represented by bigger numbers. Unfortunately, defenses are also represented by... Bigger numbers. So combat constantly involved rolling a D20, and hoping for a target number in the same 4 number window (16-22) and adding an ever-increasing bonus. Clever positioning or thinking added the same +2 "Combat Advantage" modifier. *yawn*

I will say that I _loved_ the powers system, and enjoyed having each player and monster's skills laid out as an algorithm for the player to choose between and roll for. What I would have liked was more variation on combat advantage, skills with different triggers, and skills with variable effects. I loved how much positioning mattered in the game, I just wish they'd done more with it.

As one of my players said "I wanted Descent with a good social layer. I got... Not as good descent with no social layer."

I was big into 3.0 and 3.5 (wrote for the Ket/Tusmit regions of Living Greyhawk campaign) so I can talk a bit about the 3.0 and 3.5 system.

The biggest mistake that prevent the game from going anywhere great right from the get go was porting the spell system over from 2nd Ed. That was their biggest mistake. That set the power skew right off the bat.

There were some good concepts that liked about it.

- I liked the bonus only modifier. You only got a bonus to do something, not a plus or minus calculation.

- The skill system in that you could have many different skills and that would add flavour to your abilities. The Rogues were good at having many skills and you needed them to do non-magic stuff sometimes.

- Warriors were maxed/min'ed the easiest and the most bland. All you needed to do was work on a way to get the most damage done in one swing. Take the feat "power attack" and double your strength bonus on the attack. Was fine for PC's but lookout if a giant with a level of something took that feat. 1 hit could do 40+ points of damage easy!

I didn't even touch 4th after I went through the 3.0 got upgraded to 3.5 then to 4.0. I switched to Beta of Pathfinder at that point. They didn't dismiss 3.5 but only adjusted some things to try and keep it playable.

4th edition had some neat points in that they tried to make it so that every class did proportional damage as the levels went up. The wizard got to use magic missile all the time as its main offensive weapon but the game became so boring when you only had 6-8 skills to make rolls on.

I got out when I I was looking at having to convert to 4th edition to continue on with campaign writing. (they started up Living Forgotten realms or something afterwards and I didn't want to invest the time + money on a new system which was essentially a new game).

I moved in 2008 so I haven't had a game group since (tried to start one up but it fell apart after 4-5 sessions). Now I'm in to X-wing and gaming is back in my life and I left that train wreck of updates behind me.

- The skill system in that you could have many different skills and that would add flavour to your abilities. The Rogues were good at having many skills and you needed them to do non-magic stuff sometimes.

The skill system didn't work so well IMO, for 3 reasons mainly:

-The inclusion of pure fluff skills drawing from the same pool of resources (skill points) as the useful skills. Consider 2 identical twins (same stats, same class), Alf and Bob. Alf likes to read books in his free time, so his player RPs that as stating Alf reads books in his free time. If he does that well enough he might even get a few Knowledge skill points from the DM. Bob likes cooking, so his player will likely feel the need to put some skill points into Profession (cook). Therefore, Bob is now worse at adventuring than Alf for no other reason than his choice of hobbies.

-The underlying mechanics, coupled with stat advancements and class/cross-class skills led to an ever increasing gap between guys putting all their resources (high stats, maxed skills and or buff spells) behind a certain skill and guys who didn't. Past low levels there was little point in putting just a few ranks in a skill, unless it was for prerequisite.

Also, from the Wave 7 thread

4E sucked Donkey balls.

Pathfinder has been our home since.

I'm willing to look at 5th or whatever they call it. Though I'm tempted to NEVER buy anything from them again because they (Hasbro) took a good product in 3.5 and simply destroyed it so they could recreate something with their Stamp on it. When they started printing the 3.5 books again and they outnumbered their supposed great 4th edition on bookshelves in FLGS you know that they SCREWED it up BAD!

Eh well sorry for thread hijack lol

3.5 had a lot of room for improvement, some of which was already happening toward the end (Tome of Battle, Incarnum etc.). It was however impossible to get rid of the already broken published material (like most of the PHB casters and spells), they had to start over if they were to do a better job.

They were doing a pretty good job of starting over up to a point: ToB was based on an iteration of 4e development, and AFAIK Star Wars Saga Edition (IMO best RPG system WotC ever designed) was also based on some 4e ideas.

Then something went wrong and we got the actual 4e

I think that 4e did a great job of evening out the relative combat effectiveness of the classes as they gained levels. Since that was one of the primary complaints about earlier editions, I think it's laudable that they both A) acknowledged that it was an issue, and B) effectively addressed it. They also did a great job at making combat approachable and highly tactical; not an easy thing to do (my only complaint there was that diagonals no longer cost 1.5 squares of movement; while simpler, it made it much harder to effectively screen squishy casters since traveling at a diagonal like > cost just as much movement as a straight line like | ).

The main problem I had with 4e was that the combat system encouraged putting blinders on and picking which power card to execute this turn. While players certainly could be all "I want to kick the barrel down the stairs, then hop the railing onto the table," I found that was pretty rare (especially with newer players, which is sad because otherwise 4e was highly approachable for new players). When combined with the lackluster skill challenge stuff and the somewhat same-y feeling of a lot of the classes, I felt the result was that our gaming groups had to put extra effort into making the roleplaying part actually happen.

That said, I think that the strengths of 4e more than compensated for the weaknesses. Similarly, 3.0 (didn't ever play 3.5) could be fun as long as nobody read the charop boards (I'm glad I wasn't aware of them at the time).

I agree with Vorpal about 5e; they tried to pack too much retro in, at the expense of doing some interesting things with the mechanics. Instead of burying superiority dice in one option for fighters, they could have just made that be the rogue mechanic for sneak attack dice, etc. They also fell back into the dark ages of the 15-minute adventuring day by making the majority of the spellcasting classes reliant on once-per-day powers. 4e handled that dwindling of effectiveness as the day wore on much, much better. Sorcerers should have had been able to have low-level spells cast at-will, mid-levels be encounter/short rest, and the high level stuff be daily, IMO.

Stuff like that.

Having played since 3rd grade, around 1984 I would say 3.5 was actually my favorite edition.

For me the game was the fluff not just the mechanics. Of course you have the framework to create characters and their abilities, skills, combat etc. There was a exponential curve on magic users, but magic users are crazy fun and imaginative.

The whole key for 3.5 is a DM that keeps the melee characters well equipped as you level with items to equalize as best as possible to magic. Mechanics like polymorph that needed tweaked are easily house ruled.

The success of Pathfinder is PROOF that the majority of DnD gamers really agree with this perspective if you ask me.

Yes, 4th had innovative ideas of movement and giving everybody "Magic" powers made sure all players powered up fairly evenly. But taking away skills, the fluff and imagination of the game coupled with watering magic down killed 4E.

A RPG that allows maximum creativity for the players wins over mechanics of movement or even actual perfect character balance. People LOVE magic. Nerfing magic in DnD was a death sentence for 4th edition.

So, by edition:

3/3.5 : As I said elsewhere, the design decision of having linear fighter-classes and quadratic caster-classes more or less doomed the system for my taste, even if it weren't for some of the other holes in the system. I played the hell out of it for a long time, but there was always tension between what I really wanted to do (play valiant swordsmen, cunning assassins, etc.) and what was most effective in the system (play a cleric or wizard).

4e : I more or less endorse everything WickedGrey said. 4e has a lot of issues around… I mean, basically everything that's a power or class feature works brilliantly, at the cost of everything that isn't a power or class feature working terribly. That was an acceptable compromise for my group; we played freeform Imaginary Tea Party between encounters, and ran encounters as a tactical wargame.

However, it's also worth noting that during the 4e period, WotC delayed and otherwise screwed up their online support literally for years--support that should have been available from day one. They also continued to move from a staff of in-house designers to mostly freelancers, with weak and inconsistent editorial direction. That hurt the development of the edition as a whole.

D&D Next : I've heard good things from a few people, and one of my old groups plays it now. I don't know enough about it to criticize it directly, and I do intend to take one of the posters from the other thread up on the invitation to poke through the free quick-start rules.

However, there are a lot of red flags there. They're back to a paradigm of "Fighters are like this , and wizards are like that ." They tried to re-hire Monte Cook. They continue to rely, as far as I know, mostly on freelancers. They still, again as far as I know, don't have really robust online support and tools for the game. They seemed throughout development not to have learned the lessons of either Pathfinder or 4e, and assumed that if slaying sacred cows in 4e turned players away, then bringing all the sacred cows back would win the players back. I think I'm just… done with D&D.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So these days, when I get the chance to play RPGs, I mostly play Fate. It's a lightweight, classless system with great support for innovation on the part of players--easier to play and easier to run, even if it doesn't have the kind of tactical play I really enjoy (I have X-wing for that). Sometimes I play Cortex Plus games, too--Marvel, Firefly, and Leverage. I'd be willing to break my rule against 3.5/d20 system stuff to play a Saga Edition Star Wars game, too (although I'd rather hack the Force into Cortex Plus or Fate, and have a pretty good idea how I'd do it).

The whole key for 3.5 is a DM that keeps the melee characters well equipped as you level with items to equalize as best as possible to magic. Mechanics like polymorph that needed tweaked are easily house ruled.

The success of Pathfinder is PROOF that the majority of DnD gamers really agree with this perspective if you ask me.

Polymorph was also.one of the lesser problems of melee classes (since it could be used to buff them too). What realy hurt melee classes were range:personal buffs (Bite of the WereX line, Wraithstrike, Divine Power etc.), the whole Bear riding a bear while summoning bears shtick of the druid and general poor design choicesb(fighter is supposed to be good due to full BAB and feats for example, but everyone gets feats, feat chains are short enough to be achievable by all, fighter only feats suck and you can build character with enough BAB to get max attacks AND 9th level spells).

I'm also highly doubtful handing out more kagic items to non-casters is such a viable solution. Anything a fighter can use to get good, acleric can use to get even better and in most groups loot will be spread more or less evenly.

Regarding Pathfinder's 'success', depends how you define it. If their goal was 'make profit' or 'compete with 4e', they have succeeded. If they aimed to attract a majority of 3.5 fans, then they have IMO failed spectacularly.

As far as I can see it, PF embodies most of the stuff I hate about 3.5:

- Widening gap between martials and casters (casters got nerfed a bit in a few places, martials got nerfed a lot across the board)

- Incompetent designers. Even beyond Sean K. Reynolds and his questionable ideas, PF desugn team has constantly produced gems, like feats that simply don't work (like Prone Shooter or Monkey Lunge).

- Toxic anti-optimization atmosphere, fostered by designers themselves and forum staff, starting drom from the mass bans during beta.

EDIT (About 5e):

As somebody who's played 3.5 constantly for about 5 years, has discusssed 5e extensively woth friends (most of them are playing 5e atm) and has read 5e from cover to cover (thinking about getting bwck into playing time permitting), I don't think 5e is better than 3.5, nor worse, just has different strong/weak points.

Here is my 2 cents about 5e:

Simplicity: means both easier to learn, but also less depth than 3.5. While that's to be expected since so far only core is out, I feel it has less depth than 3.5 core.

Balance: big plus, but not enough IMO. While sime classes are not rendered obsolete by the simple presence of other classes, the floor to ceiling distance is still big enough that an optimuzed character will still leave a non-optimized one in the dust.

Greater emphasis on DM authority: Huge plus with good DMs, huge minus with bad/inexperienced ones.

Unclear rules: 5e has a ton of vague rules that requires DM adjudicating without any clear hints of what RAI would be. Whether it's just sloppy writing or intentional anti-CO writing (the active 3.5 COBboards were the origin of most of the flak toward 3.5 balance, which in turn led to the ill-fated 4e. When half of any build is 'ask your DM' there's less substance for CO forum talk) is debatable.

And lastly, my biggest gripe with 5e: they carried on what I think was the absolutely worst idea from 4e: PCs are not part if the world. They operate by a specific set of rules that are vastly different from 'monster' rules. For example, as a PC Fighter you can't by the rules face off against an Orc fighter of similar ability. Your fighter abilities are PC only.