4e player looking to start 3.5e

[Cmorr66]

Hey Playground, long time lurker, first time poster.

I've played a fair bit of 4e, I've been invited to play a 3.5e game recently and I'm curious as to what I can expect.

I've been informed by my 4e DM that there are 3 main things that are different from 4e in 3.5:

1 - 3.5 is less balanced than 4e, but has more options available to players.

2 - 3.5 is inconsistent in its valuation of class abilities/feats - a feat can give a skill bonus or allow you to use a spell as a minor action.

3 - You can't make a "mechanically graceful" (my DM's words, I dunno what he means by that) melee character even if I can make a competent one.

Thanks in advance guys!

[TheStranger]

Hey Playground, long time lurker, first time poster.

I've played a fair bit of 4e, I've been invited to play a 3.5e game recently and I'm curious as to what I can expect.

I've been informed by my 4e DM that there are 3 main things that are different from 4e in 3.5:

1 - 3.5 is less balanced than 4e, but has more options available to players.

2 - 3.5 is inconsistent in its valuation of class abilities/feats - a feat can give a skill bonus or allow you to use a spell as a minor action.

3 - You can't make a "mechanically graceful" (my DM's words, I dunno what he means by that) melee character even if I can make a competent one.

Thanks in advance guys!

1 - This is true, but the balance issues don't always come up in actual play. Many people on these boards will tell you that melee is underpowered (or that spellcasters are overpowered, or both). But in many games, it's not really a problem because you're all on the same team and everybody feels like they're contributing. Don't worry about balance unless you feel useless at the table.

2 - Feats do vary widely in their power. Generally speaking, the feats that open up entirely new options are better than the ones that give static bonuses.

3 - I have no idea what this means either. If he means melee isn't fun to play, that's a matter of taste. If he means melee is underpowered, see #1. Personally, I find prepared spellcasting to be an entirely graceless mechanic, but again, it's a matter of taste. However, melee is different from 4e in that melee characters mostly just hit things; they don't have the variety of options that they get in 4e, unless you use the Tome of Battle classes, which many DMs do not allow.

Another major difference, though you may not see it in play, is that 3.5 tries to use a comprehensive ruleset for the entire game world. NPCs are built using the same rules as PCs, and even monsters use the same fundamental mechanics.

[Fouredged Sword]

Look up the tier system. 4e was built with the concept of balancing through mechanics all being the same. 3.5 was not. Some mechanics are innately more useful, powerful, or adaptable than others. Spellcasting tops the list. A short breakdown is basically as follows.

Prepared Spellcasting is more versatile and just as powerful than spontaneous casting.

Things that lack spellcasting rely on the spellcasting of others to remain functional after about level 8, unless you really know what you are doing.

Anything can be done with spells, and a generalist wizard or cleric can fill every party roll. Yes, even that. The things that can't be done with spells can be done with the right feat, and a spell can give you said feat.

If you want to build a melee character, you will find the Tome of Battle (book of nine swords) to be oddly familiar. It was a very late 3.5 book, and is thought to be a test run for many of the 4e concepts. It is one of the best resources for building a melee character of any type.

Battles are deadly, and combat is normally decided one way or the other within a round or two. Battlefield control is god (literally the god wizard is the name of the concept). Lack of healing surges and the prevalence of conditions that make things unable to act effectively makes everything break very easily.

[Eldan]

Let's see.

Casters have the potential to be vastly more powerful than melee, but with most, it takes a bit of experience to pull off. Easily available spells do things that in 4E, you may only know from rituals and even things vastly more powerful than that.
The worst excesses of power are often eliminated by a DM who clamps down a bit on them. What is probably more of a problem is versatility: a magical character who tries can steal and do pretty much any other characters job a few times per day: they can shapechange into or summon something a lot more powerful than the fighter. They can pick locks and find traps better than the rogue. And so on. A good start to prevent that is that every players should define what they want to be good at and other players should try and find a different niche. If you have a melee fighter, don't use polymorph to turn into a hydra with twelve attacks. Prepare spells that help the entire party instead.
But, and this is important, it doesn't have to happen. It is something you should be aware of, however.

Number two is very true. Quicken spell allows you to cast two spells in a turn, Acrobatic gives +2 to two different skills. Weapon Focus gives +1 to attack rolls with one type of weapon, Persistent Spell makes your magic last all day long.
Here's a good general (and not always perfect) guideline: choose feats that let you do something you couldn't do without them. Don't take a feat that gives +2 to something, but a feat that gives you something entirely new.

What he probably means with number three is that melee characters especially will never have as many mechanical options as spellcasters. A wizard can prepare a dozen different spells, while the melee character gets maybe charge, full attack, power attack and perhaps something like trip or disarm. You'll be using your standard attack quite often, while the wizard is slinging around a dozen things that can change a situation drastically.
A melee character can still be competent at what he does, mind you. There's several barbarian builds that can kill monsters several levels above them with one hit. But you can still only do only two or three simple things while the sorcerer has a long, long list.
For a way to avoid that, if you want, look into the Tome of Battle, which some people see as a bit of a prototype for 4th edition fighters.

[Alabenson]

There are very significant differences between 4e and 3.5, to the extent that, as far as I'm concerned, the two editions are practically different games. I'd thoroughly read through the d20 SRD to get a feel for the rules differences, which are too numerous to go into detail here.


1 - 3.5 is less balanced than 4e, but has more options available to players.

I'd have to say that this is entirely true. With enough splatbooks available you can make virtually any character concept you can think of, but not all of the classes are equal in either power or versatility. For a better explanation of how classes balance against each other, take a look at the tier system (http://www.brilliantgameologists.com/boards/?topic=1002.0). (Note, the tier system is not which classes are "better", it's about which classes have the most tools to solve the most problems).


2 - 3.5 is inconsistent in its valuation of class abilities/feats - a feat can give a skill bonus or allow you to use a spell as a minor action.

Again, this is definitely a very accurate statement. It's generally assumed that WOTC really did not understand how game balance worked during most of 3.5's development, and as a result there are many options that are mechanically sup-par alongside some which can be ludicrously powerful.


3 - You can't make a "mechanically graceful" (my DM's words, I dunno what he means by that) melee character even if I can make a competent one.

To be honest, I really don't understand what your DM is saying here. Yes, for the most part melee is substantially weaker than spellcasting in 3.5, but it is hardly impossible to make a melee character that is both effective and enjoyable to play. Given you're previous experience with 4e, I'd strongly recommend that if you really want to play melee that you look at the Tome of Battle, a splatbook produced towards the very end of 3.5's development cycle and generally considered one of the best things to happen to melee in 3.5.

[tcrudisi]

I've played a fair bit of 4e, I've been invited to play a 3.5e game recently and I'm curious as to what I can expect.

I've been informed by my 4e DM that there are 3 main things that are different from 4e in 3.5:

1 - 3.5 is less balanced than 4e, but has more options available to players.

2 - 3.5 is inconsistent in its valuation of class abilities/feats - a feat can give a skill bonus or allow you to use a spell as a minor action.

3 - You can't make a "mechanically graceful" (my DM's words, I dunno what he means by that) melee character even if I can make a competent one.

Thanks in advance guys!

That's a very broad and overly-generalized argument, but on the whole? It's true.

I just deleted a huge post basically affirming what you said because I didn't want to start an edition war. The best advise I can give you is this: Every system can be fun in the right group. 3.5 has many problems that 4e doesn't have (and vice-versa), so the switch will be jarring. Just remember: 3.5 is D&D, even though it won't feel like it. Just go in to the game with the feeling that this is nothing like the D&D you know and that this is an entirely different game (it is), and release any expectations you have of what D&D means. Do all that, and you have a chance of enjoying the system.

But at its root? Yes, 3.5 is all of those things you mentioned. It's horribly imbalanced, most of the options are crap, and melees don't get nice things. All a melee character does is "full attack". It's like having a 4e character with only one at-will power and no other options. It's very ungraceful.

Having said all that, can you still enjoy the game? Absolutely. I enjoyed it for several years.

Want to have fun and see just how imbalanced the game is? Even if you do not understand how they are doing it (because you aren't familiar with the abilities), you will still be able to understand the end result. And it's a fun thought exercise. Read this: http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19869366/The_most_powerful_character._EVER. Sorry, it apparently lost a lot of its formatting with the server change or I just found a bad link.

[Samalpetey]

All a melee character does is "full attack". It's like having a 4e character with only one at-will power and no other options. It's very ungraceful.

Tome of Battle?

[Big Fau]

3 - You can't make a "mechanically graceful" (my DM's words, I dunno what he means by that) melee character even if I can make a competent one.

I think he's referring to the need for most non-casters' habit of multiclassing into several different classes in order to work, and that the default fluff for those classes doesn't mesh very well (which is somewhat true, as the default fluff for most noncasters is fairly poor, but then it swings right back into false because that fluff can be altered to fit your concept).

[MukkTB]

Try Tome of Battle. That gives you halfway decent fighter types. They are moderately 'mechanically graceful.'

[buttcyst]

I started back in the 90s with 2nd AD&D, didn't understand too much about the mechanics then (my DM just told me what to put where and added all my stuff up for me, figured my thaco and the like. It wasn't until 3.5 (I skipped a few years due to no groups... dead gaming time for dnd) that I actually learned the mechanics of everything, and coming from 2e, it was much simpler and required much less explanation (yay, no thaco). I still play 3.5, and continued to play all through the releasing of 4e. I tried a few 4e games and, although the DM is ultimately what made it fun, I wasn't too fond of a lot of the changes. But, there were several mechanics that were simplified as well as a few UA variants in 4e core that does help balance and flow the game along (like the action point thing and the healing surge thing), a lot of 4e was revised to help conserve party resources and spread class versatility between combats. Yes, it does ultimately help games work better and keeps relative power levels and appropriate (for the most part) playing fields, but as a result of the conservation efforts, it makes it so that combat tends to be more long and drawn out due to the recovery and "moving on" stages being reduced to a few seconds instead of 15 minutes of making sure everybody was drinking potions or being healed by the cleric, it really isn't too much longer, just seems it.

I still prefer 3.5 out of all of the editions played so far, mostly because it is very easy to homebrew things into the system, it is very compatible and not too hard to balance in the hands of a good DM.

[Barsoom]

3 - You can't make a "mechanically graceful" (my DM's words, I dunno what he means by that) melee character even if I can make a competent one. I think he meants that to make a competent melee character, an egregious amount of multiclassing and splatbook digging is required.

But that's not really true. One could make, for example, a perfectly competent Crusader with just Tome of Battle, or a Duskblade with just PHB2.

[Cmorr66]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies!

@Tcrudisi.....our 4e DM (who's done a fair bit of 3.5) has told us tales of the dreaded Punpun. Our general consensus was to tell him (in less elaborate words) to "vacate the premises".

In 4e one of my favourite characters was my Dwarf Hammer+Shield Fighter, who basically just sat there in the middle of the battlefield with high Con and Plate Armour, dishing out the hurt.
How easy would it be to replicate him within 3.5e? Alternatively what class/build would suit that style of play?

[eggynack]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies!

@Tcrudisi.....our 4e DM (who's done a fair bit of 3.5) has told us tales of the dreaded Punpun. Our general consensus was to tell him (in less elaborate words) to "vacate the premises".

In 4e one of my favourite characters was my Dwarf Hammer+Shield Fighter, who basically just sat there in the middle of the battlefield with high Con and Plate Armour, dishing out the hurt.
How easy would it be to replicate him within 3.5e? Alternatively what class/build would suit that style of play?
Well, tome of battle has been brought up to death, but I'd probably go with tome of battle. That'd mean a crusader focusing on thicket of blades, and tripping, or a warblade just standing there and stabbing in wonderful ways. Sword and board is one of the least effective combat styles in the game, because the game is very offensively inclined, but a warblade or crusader isn't going to mind the lack of optimization all that much. You could also go all out and add deepstone sentinel to the character, which is basically a fixed dwarven defender. Probably not as good as just going crusader or warblade 20, but it's not going to cripple you.

[Eldan]

An important note about Pun-Pun. He is what is called a Theoretical Optimization or TO character. There are tons of these.

The idea behind TO is that you take the rules to the most stupid extremes. Generally, it is assumed that there is no DM present or that he has no integrity and is some kind of rules computer that can only say yes.

In effect, TO is a form of forum entertainment only loosely connected to D&D. It's a series of funny thought exercises people engage in online and everyone knows that it doesn't have muc hin common with the game itself.

As you sit at teh table, it's best never to worry about Pun-Pun or the Dream of Steel or the Omnicifier.

[tcrudisi]

An important note about Pun-Pun. He is what is called a Theoretical Optimization or TO character. There are tons of these.

The idea behind TO is that you take the rules to the most stupid extremes. Generally, it is assumed that there is no DM present or that he has no integrity and is some kind of rules computer that can only say yes.

In effect, TO is a form of forum entertainment only loosely connected to D&D. It's a series of funny thought exercises people engage in online and everyone knows that it doesn't have muc hin common with the game itself.

As you sit at teh table, it's best never to worry about Pun-Pun or the Dream of Steel or the Omnicifier.

I agree that he is Theoretical Optimization. That doesn't stop him from appearing in games, though.

The reason I stopped playing 3.5 altogether? I sat down at a new table. 4e had just came out, but the DM (formerly AD&D DM) had decided that he'd heard a lot of good things about 3.5 and wanted to try it out. The other players (excluding my wife) were also from older edition D&D. Yet one of them still created Pun-Pun.

I have not played 3.5 since, and I likely won't until I'm getting my future children into gaming and want them to try out all the systems to decide what they like best in a rpg system. (The option that they dislike rpgs? Nah, ain't gonna happen.)

Theoretical Optimization has a way of finding itself into real games. Usually not the full extent (like Pun-Pun), but when someone discovers something like that, usually small elements of it will appear. To what degree is determined by the player since every player has a comfort level with optimization.

[huttj509]

I agree that he is Theoretical Optimization. That doesn't stop him from appearing in games, though.

The reason I stopped playing 3.5 altogether? I sat down at a new table. 4e had just came out, but the DM (formerly AD&D DM) had decided that he'd heard a lot of good things about 3.5 and wanted to try it out. The other players (excluding my wife) were also from older edition D&D. Yet one of them still created Pun-Pun.

I have not played 3.5 since, and I likely won't until I'm getting my future children into gaming and want them to try out all the systems to decide what they like best in a rpg system. (The option that they dislike rpgs? Nah, ain't gonna happen.)

Theoretical Optimization has a way of finding itself into real games. Usually not the full extent (like Pun-Pun), but when someone discovers something like that, usually small elements of it will appear. To what degree is determined by the player since every player has a comfort level with optimization.

If you ever feel the urge to "sneak something past" the DM...rethink your actions.

That's worked fine for me. If I make a strong character, the DM knows it's strong, and can plan accordingly. Same if I make a weak character.

Then again, there's times when tales of oppositional broken comes up, and someone asks "was that ______," and they're always right...so those folks do exist.

[Eldan]

The thing is, he can't really show up at the table. Same with most other TO characters of a similar calibre.

KNow why? Because there's two options.

a) The DM says no.

b) The DM says yes. The game is now over as he instantly solves every challenge. You start the next game.

[RogueDM]

I dunno, I played 4e first, a dwarven paladin, and in the end found I liked 3.5 better. Some of that was simply for the multitude of options available. Admittedly, some of this has to do with personal experience. My DM for 4e, in hindsight, was terrible and didn't know how to handle players who weren't already well acquainted with pnp rpgs. In contrast, my 3.5 DM was excellent and I picked up a relative amount of system mastery in short order.

I didn't find the transition to be a terribly difficult one. 3.5 lacked the MMO-esque melee attack system, but I quite like it. There -are- combat options, just most people don't often take them (feint, disarm, trip, sunder, tumble etc). There is a degree of realism in that. If my only strategy is "I hit it with my axe", then that's what you're doing. Granted, clever tactics are certainly more difficult than in 4 (or with magic).

[Alienist]

In 4e one of my favourite characters was my Dwarf Hammer+Shield Fighter, who basically just sat there in the middle of the battlefield with high Con and Plate Armour, dishing out the hurt.
How easy would it be to replicate him within 3.5e? Alternatively what class/build would suit that style of play?

Essentially it is impossible to create this in 3.5.

In 3.5 the Defender role doesn't exist (in particular 'marks' don't exist), and Fighters (with notable exceptions such as Dungeoncrasher or ubercharger) dish out very small amounts of damage.

You're going to want to get a two handed weapon and power attack, power attack and more power attack, your character building decisions will devolve down to 'whatever gives me more strength'. Using a shield will gimp your damage, and your damage wasn't good to start with.

Alternatively, you could try for some kind of tripping lock-down. You want a Spiked Chain, and pump your number of opportunity attacks through the roof. In this case your combat will go trip trip and more trip. You will trip until you're sick of it, and you had to blow half a dozen feats to get remotely good at it.

In 4th ed terms, it's like Fighters are capped at fourth level, and don't get encounter powers or dailies. And they need to spend multiple feats just to get at-wills.

If you have at least two spellcasters in the party, unless you pump feats and dex into making initiative good* you might never even get an action in combat, since spellcasters are easily capable of doing 60-120% of the monsters health in damage per round, to all the monsters on the field of play at once.

By contrast, as a Fighter you can expect to do 10% of a monsters health in one hit. To one monster. (Caveat: at low levels you can kill monsters in one hit, at high levels you'll think every monster is superman - practically immune to physical damage but with a weakness against magic)

*Of course, if you do this, your damage will suffer. Lol.

In 4th ed Fighter is the best class. In 3rd ed it is one of the worst, and the gap between classes isn't the short hop that it is in 4th ed, it is a vast chasm.

Warblade (from Tome of Battle) is a similar concept to Fighter, except that it gets it's encounter powers restored. Now lets compare that to a spell caster. Using 4th ed terms, at level one a wizard has 4 dailies and no encounter or at-will powers to speak of. Wizard dailies are tied to wizard level, e.g. they do things like level x d6 damage, he gets access to much nastier ones as his level gets higher, and he gets a lot more of them every time he goes up a level.

So wizard power increases like this: level x level x level

Feat support: a wizard can pick up feats that make his spells autocrit every time (Maximise), or that double their area, or that make his defensive utilities last all day.
A fighter can pick up feats which give him a +1 to hit or +1 to damage (but not both from the same feat, that would be OVERPOWERED! Lol lol lol)

But when I say that wizard spells are like dailies, you're probably still not getting it, most people can't really grok raising something to the power of three. By the time you hit middle levels, the wizard has so many dailies that he's firing at least one off every round, and each of his dailies isn't just a 'daily' as you know it, it's more like what would be the cumulative result of everyone in the whole party spending a daily. Now pile his uber-feats on top of that.

[buttcyst]

amidst all of the yay and nay of whether to beware 3.5, remember this, DnD is fun, always has been, probably always will be, mostly because no matter which "system" you follow, it is the concept of the game that makes it fun, options just give you 1 thing, options, optimization typically sends you in super good at a few things and mediocre at everything else... at best. Pun-Pun is fake, and the results of someone bringing that to the table has already been described, not that it can't happen, typically, it wont. 3.5 players are very aware of the "game breakers", non 3.5 players tend to not try them because they are usually just barely within RAW, so just barely that entire threads have been debated for pages as to whether it could/should/would be done. Most 3.5 players come to the table with a basic or slightly optimized or cheesed character and then go from there, don't let the crazy op threads and the broken game threads discourage or influence your opinion too much, roll your dwarven fighter, forget 4e, and smash the poop out of things with your hammer, even if that is all you are good at.

[Cmorr66]

Thanks for all the answers, I think I get the gist of what you're saying. A few more I'd like clarification on.

Tome of Battle seems to be popular, are there any other non-core books that allow the same level of customization/options?

I've also heard crafting is a bit different from 4e, is this correct? I'm unsure if it allows to gain access to more items than normal? Are those feats worth taking?

Cheers in advance!

[Endarire]

This post explains things well (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=15503554&postcount=14).

Also, the MinMax Board (http://www.minmaxboards.com/) people can help you lots. Some of us have been through it all. (Some forumites have been into 3.x since it was released 13 years ago!)

[Eldan]

In general, pretty much every book will add more options to most kinds of classes. Some books cater more to certain types. For a fighter type, you want Complete Warrior, certainly. Maybe Complete Adventurer/Scoundrel if you want a few tricks.

Tome of Battle is a good book because it more or less completely rewrites the basic melee combat system.

[Alienist]

Thanks for all the answers, I think I get the gist of what you're saying. A few more I'd like clarification on.

Tome of Battle seems to be popular, are there any other non-core books that allow the same level of customization/options?

I've also heard crafting is a bit different from 4e, is this correct? I'm unsure if it allows to gain access to more items than normal? Are those feats worth taking?

Cheers in advance!

Crafting is pretty much useless in 4th ed because the items you can craft you don't want, and the items you want you can't craft.

Crafting in 3rd ed is easily broken. It is relatively easy to accidentally break the game with a custom item. Additionally you can stack a bunch of cost reducers and suddenly your 3rd level character is lugging around cruise missiles instead of slingstones...

[Grod_The_Giant]

Tome of Battle seems to be popular, are there any other non-core books that allow the same level of customization/options?
Not quite sure what you mean by that, but...


The Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium add huge amounts of useful material in a nicely condensed format.
The Expanded Psionics Handbook, Magic of Incarnum, and Tome of Magic all add new magic systems, like the ToB added a new melee system.