when will 3.5 grow boring?

[CyberThread]

How long until 3.5 grows boring for your?

[Dalasio]

Easy answer! Never.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Depends on the person? I find it mostly boring for myself, as a game. The most entertaining part of a 3.5/Pathfinder session for me nowadays is the group I'm playing with, and not the game. :smallsmile:

[HaikenEdge]

Easy answer! Never.

QFT (this is just for the character limit)

[zingbobco000]

How long until 3.5 grows boring for your?

This question depends on the person, personally I love DnD and hope to never get bored of it. I've been playing for 6 solid years now, and I hope to continue for much longer.

[ArqArturo]

Depends on the person? I find it mostly boring for myself, as a game. The most entertaining part of a 3.5/Pathfinder session for me nowadays is the group I'm playing with, and not the game. :smallsmile:

Bears repeating. Also, as a mental exercise, both systems are awesome.

[NichG]

It both has and will not, I guess? I haven't played/run by-the-book 3.5 in years. I have played/run heavily modified versions of it that might well be called completely new systems. Specific things in 3.5 are certainly boring to me right now, but if you include mods to systems then basically things only get boring when you stop creating new things/ways to play.

[ngilop]

never s previously stated.

there are people still playing the earliest editons of any RPG,

and with the sheer volume of support material 3.5 got due to the srd I doubt it will ever be 'boring'.

for me its not a whne but a how and its ot 3.5 the game its the way its played.
I want a challenge, not a superman cakewalk or an impossible quest. a challenege that I have to struglew but still decent odds that if I do everything yaay win.

games that are the forme do not interest me and I shall be bored.

[Snowbluff]

Depends on the person? I find it mostly boring for myself, as a game. The most entertaining part of a 3.5/Pathfinder session for me nowadays is the group I'm playing with, and not the game. :smallsmile:


Bears repeating. Also, as a mental exercise, both systems are awesome.

This for me, too. I prefer 3.5, but I tend to dabble in other systems like 4e if the table is one I enjoy.

[Azoth]

Aspects of it have already become boring to me, but as a whole I still enjoy the game greatly. I am always looking for some combination of abilities to make character archetype's work the way i want them to, and then seeing how they fair in play.

3.5 has also been a huge help in letting me see balance issues and shortcomings in design features. This is invaluable as I am currently working on my own D20 system as a hobby. It's a great reference material, so i doubt I will become bored with it anytime soon.

[Blackjackg]

Usually around the sixth round of combat.

[zingbobco000]

Usually around the sixth round of combat.

Really? The 6th round, of your first encounter, it's boring?

[StreamOfTheSky]

I suppose it will grow boring eventually, but after nearly 15 years (if you include 3.0) and untold hundreds...more likely thousands of hours playing it, planning it, discussing it, reading it... I'm still not bored.

If anything, I'm frustrated and disappointed because I've had a dozen or so build ideas on the backburner for years, but my standards for a game I'd be willing or able to play them in mean they get left on the shelf. Most often it's because the combo takes too high a level to come together, but often it's also just inhospitable rules for a martial, like rolled stats and hp, low wealth, extremely limited book sources allowed, crit fumble rules (if I play in a game w/ them at all, it sure as hell isn't as a martial), etc...

It's so hard to find a decent game/DM who's also using 3E that has openings and a time slot I'm able to play in (I'll never do PbP...never...)

[Blackjackg]

Really? The 6th round, of your first encounter, it's boring?

I was being overly specific as a joke, but basically yeah. From early on in most combats until the end of the combat, I'm bored. It's an unfortunate aspect of the system. It's repetitive. The non-combat aspects of the game are, to me personally, much more interesting.

[zingbobco000]

I was being overly specific as a joke, but basically yeah. From early on in most combats until the end of the combat, I'm bored. It's an unfortunate aspect of the system. It's repetitive. The non-combat aspects of the game are, to me personally, much more interesting.

Ok, I respect your statement.

[Knaight]

For me, personally? I think it was 2006, maybe 2007. It's not a system I particularly like, and while I do know it fairly well (Lingua Franca and all that) and I'm perfectly willing to play it, I still find it dull.

[Pex]

3.5 specifically - When Pathfinder was published. It improved the game enough for me I will miss the new stuff to have to go back to a 3E game. Same thing happened when 3E was first published. After a year I played a 2E game at a convention for nostalgia sake and was frustrated like crazy because I didn't have or couldn't do stuff 3E brought to the game and hadn't played a 2E game since.

3E system in general - Only if I find a better system for my taste, which does not yet exist.

[Talar]

Any game can be fun if you are with the right group of people. The thing I like about 3.5 is the amount of options I have and combinations I can make.

[Zombulian]

I'm hoping never. If only because of the sheer amount of time I've spent becoming literate in this game >.>

[Vortenger]

Likely never. I still (occasionally) play 2e DnD, Palladium, Rifts, & GURPS. I enjoyed 4e as the most in depth (and balanced!) board game I'd ever played. I'll try out Next and hope it replaces 3.P for me, but I doubt it. 3.0 grabbed me early, 3.5 made it significantly better, and just when I thought I was ready to be done with the system, Paizo got the rights and now writes me new content regularly.

As long as I have new content to add to the already robust 3.5 framework, how can I get bored? Old and new combine to make synergies that are unexpected and beg to be tried in game. Like Stream, one of my big beefs is that I have a bunch of character concepts to try and only so much time to do so.

[Kamin_Majere]

Realistically I'll probably die before it becomes boring.

I have about 12-15 years worth of preconstructed adventures still waiting to be played, add on that another 7-10 years worth of home brew that is still going, and pathfinder is still pumping out entire adventure paths. Even taking the small figure (12+7) i'll be 53ish before I run out of materials to use even if there isn't another 3.x release ever. Seeing as Paizo and others are still making stuff i'm pretty sure i'll be able to be put in a casket with a few untried adventures.

So with adventures still being made and me adding in my own stuff I will more than likely be able to play 3.x until my death. So my answer will be never, or relatively speaking forever to me :)

[Windstorm]

the system mechanically to me has become boring, since I have achieved a pretty decent level of system mastery that is most of what I'll ever need for practical op. however its precisely because of that level of system mastery that the game itself will never be boring as a whole, since it allows me as a player and DM to explore character concepts and make them work that I could never do without it.

If I ever do stop playing 3.5/3.P/path, it will be because of inability to find a table, not because the game got old :smallbiggrin:

[T.G. Oskar]

Realistically? I'll find D&D 3.5 boring when I can't find anyone to play with. Or if I'm tasked with being the DM for way too much.

The reasons are pretty simple to explain. If I can't find a group, I can do so much analysis and homebrew until I realize I can't use it with anyone else. It's not fun to build homebrew or to create interesting characters when you can't use them with someone.

Now, the usual answer to that is "if you can't find a group, then build one." That's also a big problem, but for an entirely different set of reasons, the key one being: exhaustion and disappointment. Building a story for many characters is harder than building a story for one, much more when you start running out of ideas. It's always good to have someone else take the DM mantle and let you play for a while, as when you reach the point of mental exhaustion, you eventually end up half-assing scenarios and depending way too much on quirky or bizarre random battles to make things work. Furthermore, by the time your group knows more about the game, you end up having to constantly match wits with three or four people, having to tailor the challenges to the whole of the party and often missing the mark. Playing a one-shot, a different campaign, or even a different system altogether oftentimes resolves that, but it risks dropping the original campaign (that's why one-shots are great, and why having your people motivate you is essential). Once you reach the "event horizon" of ennui, you simply can't continue and your players will notice, probably get constantly angry, and eventually leave the table, which leads to "no group" and therefore quick boredom.

I'd love to say "never", but these two situations are real ways to eventually get bored. It's one reason why eventually MMOs grow boring despite not getting stale; it's never as fun to do the quests (old or new) without a party to play with. With a constantly refreshing group who has one or two DMs on board (not ALL DMs or ALL veterans who don't like DMing), you can rotate the stories well enough to make the game interesting, because you can combine character building (in a roleplay and optimization level) with different approaches to stories (which eventually may solve the predicament in one of your own campaigns, probably motivating you to retake the mantle eventually) and allows all other players to make different characters.

As for PF...I've invested a lot of money, a lot of time spent mastering the system, and I don't find PF as a better-made 3.5; in fact, the more I look into it, the more I start going with "this is something 3.5 did better" or "this is something I'd like to see ported". Few things really are the opposite. Then there's the conflict between the PF version and what I've brewed, which is lesser but complex to handle. Thus, I can't say I'll ever switch (I'm quite happy with 3.5 right now), but I can't say that I'll completely ignore PF either (I'll play if necessary, and maybe treat it as I'd treat a 3rd party source). That's another reason why I couldn't find the 3.5 rules boring: Open Game means there's always "new" content for it.

[eggynack]

I'm not really sure. I'm at a place right now where this stuff is my primary hobby, and despite the continuing growth of my system mastery, it feels like there's always more to learn and understand. moreover, some of that stuff I'm learning feels like it's at least somewhat new to the community, which is a place I'm always really happy to be. Still though, I've been faced with hobbies that consumed similar levels of interest before petering out over time. I usually don't leave behind the stuff completely, and I never leave behind the knowledge, but it becomes less. I'm still very much attached to this stuff because of handbook work, but after that's written, posted, and edited to some degree of perfection, I expect to reduce my level of attention at least a little bit. Maybe transition a bit more of my focus to editing stuff, because I've been having some fun with that lately. That's all probably a ways down the road, though.

[BWR]

System-wise I grew bored of it before Pathfinder came out. PF rekindled my interest for d20 for a couple of years. I still play 3.5 because one of my groups is pretty much exclusively a 3.5 group (despite the DM not being very good at it. He was good at 2e, but had the hardest time learning the ins and outs of 3.5: 2 years after we started playing 3.5 he was still asking how to calculate spell DCs).
I'm not particularly interested in trawling innumerable sourcebooks for build material and detest using someone else's ideas, so I'm stuck with making interesting characters and not caring too much about the mechanics. I like D&D, I love lots of the settings, and am having a blast running old BECMI adventures for my PF group, I have fun playing 3.5 with my other group, but the system itself isn't particularly interesting any more.

[Grayson01]

Easy answer! Never.

This! 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

[Ansem]

Until they make a new edition that's an actual improvement and that can rival 3.5 in terms of gameplay and material.
So far none of the others have succeeded in this.

[Qwertystop]

Honestly, for me it's the games more than the systems. If I could get enough of a handle on a different system to be able to play a game in it, I'd look for games for that system. At the moment, though, I just don't have the time (and the majority of PbPs on here are 3.5), so I stick to looking for 3.5 games because that's what I know how to play and what I can usually find.

[squiggit]

I was being overly specific as a joke, but basically yeah. From early on in most combats until the end of the combat, I'm bored. It's an unfortunate aspect of the system. It's repetitive. The non-combat aspects of the game are, to me personally, much more interesting.

I sorta feel the same way, which is odd because I really like building combat characters, but it's hard for me to actually enjoy the battle in practice. I basically can't play a class like a fighter because the combat is so painfully rote.

Not necessarily a knock on 3.5 though, since there's very few systems that have a combat system that really pull me in (4e I think being the only system off the top of my head where I looked forward to fighting). The mechanics are convoluted and interesting enough to keep me interested in tinkering with it and using it as a framework for RP though.

[Slipperychicken]

I could totally see myself being a hidebound 3.5 grognard by the time the 6th and 7th editions come out.

[The Oni]

I feel like that question is sort of akin to "when will books grow boring" since there's just soooo much stuff in it. Between the 3.5 material, the d20 material that's compatible with it, the Pathfinder material that can be easily adapted to it and the ease by which a DM can produce homebrew.

[Squirrel_Dude]

Already kind of bored of 3.5 and PF to be honest, but that's mostly from exhaustion from dealing with a system where it feels like I have to cajole with cattle prod into functioning properly.

[Tommy2255]

Anyone want to play d&d for the next quadrillion years? (http://www.quickmeme.com/img/cc/cc72f694dc59e92b2d222304240eb49c4489292bb87fd2088e b77d051181fc4d.jpg)

It's a simulation game at the base of it. It gets boring when you run out of ideas for different adventures and imaginary worlds to simulate.

[TrueJordan]

Well, when I realize that playing tier ones or twos and break the game at higher levels just isn't fun. Seriously, on any of most of the higher levels of higher tiers it just stops being fun when you can just wreck everything on your first turn.. And yet, I'm unable to stop optimizing, so my best bet is to play tier 3s or lower and just frown as the rest of the party overshadows me.

Ideally, everyone is tier 3 or lower, except with a cleric/favored soul/someone to heal at lower levels.

So when will it stop becoming fun? When encounters seem more mathematical than anything else, and we know exactly what to do to win each encounter (or run away, if that's impossible)

Seriously, though, tier ones break the game. With a druid at level 16, I solo'd a great wyrm gold dragon (albeit with some preparation time, but that was only because I teleported out and then back into the cave).

[JusticeZero]

Depends on the group. If you are dealing with a bunch of core only unimaginative types who think Fireball is overpowered and Glitterdust is a joke spell, and who think fighting through the MM in alphabetical order is interesting, you will get bored fast.

[Kamin_Majere]

Anyone want to play d&d for the next quadrillion years? (http://www.quickmeme.com/img/cc/cc72f694dc59e92b2d222304240eb49c4489292bb87fd2088e b77d051181fc4d.jpg)It's a simulation game at the base of it. It gets boring when you run out of ideas for different adventures and imaginary worlds to simulate.If Gary was the DM at least you would never get bored with your characters... they wouldnt live long enough :)

[Dawgmoah]

How long until 3.5 grows boring for your?

With my current investment in D20/DND 3.5 rulebooks and items I see no reason to migrate off to another DND style system or edition.

So I will stop playing in December of 2022 when I retire from work and put away most of my hobbies.

[Temji]

I don't see it ever happening...

always a different combo to play, and even if I stay with the same character, the setting//challenge changes all the time... this is an awesome game

[Chaosvii7]

Depends on the group. If you are dealing with a bunch of core only unimaginative types who think Fireball is overpowered and Glitterdust is a joke spell, and who think fighting through the MM in alphabetical order is interesting, you will get bored fast.

Even then your mileage will still vary based on two simple factors; The people you're with and the rate at which they learn more and more of the system. Out of the group I play with at my FLGS, the only people with extensive vocabularies of sourcebooks and material are the DM and I, and everyone around us is still making these kinds of discoveries as we play. Which is perfectly fine, and satisfying to both participate in and watch - I'm very much for equalization of power among the parties I'm in, so I rarely step above and beyond a relative power level and try to keep most characters as low-op as possible because I'm not 100% interested in making the world's next Pun-Pun; I've become more interested in watching the people I game with become as knowledgeable about the system as me, if not more so.

It's been 5 years and we've barely scratched the surface, so I have a feeling that this can carry on long enough for me to take my enjoyment to the bank(If only I could pay people in D&D sessions) and the grave.