Building a character as a 3.5 beginner

[Wondermndjr]

I've played 5e for around 3 years now and am joining a group that plays 3.5e. I am not familiar with character building in 3.5 and have heard a good bit about the complexity and variety of options. What would be a good class/other character options for a player familiar with TTRPGs but new to 3.5? Looking to use primarily core rulebooks as I don't know exactly what will be in use.

[Nifft]

3.5e character vary widely in terms of power and effectiveness. IMHO the most important axis for optimization is intra-party balance.

What are the other PCs in your party? Tell us who you need to match, and we can give you ideas on what to play.



If the other PCs are hella strong: Druid or Cleric, both very easy to be effective even with just a single class, and you can more easily correct your mistakes on a day-by-day basis by preparing different spells.

If the other PCs are not that strong: Dragonfire Adept offers a lot of versatility, but not flexible nor easy to change up on a day-to-day basis. Also it's easy to learn and hard to mess up, if you build it right.

If the other PCs are outright pathetic: Bard can make them better, and gives you some fun things to do.

[Silva Stormrage]

Seconding the Dragonfire Adept as a straight forward but interesting and useful class.

3.5 has a lot of complexity for builds but it also has a ton of options. You are going to get more in depth responses if you give more details.

What classes/archetypes are you generally looking for (Pure Melee, Archery, Healing, Summoning, Evocation style damage, Illusions, etc)? What levels are you building for/what is the end level for your campaign? 3.5 builds vary a lot on levels, some builds don't pick up until mid levels while others are good right out of the gate. What style of play is your party going to play (Political, Dungeon Exploration, Sandbox, etc) and what is everyone's general experience with 3.5? A build for a table full of people going from 5e to 3.5 is probably going to be different if your table is full of 3.5 vets and you are the only one who is only familiar with 5e.

A great help in 3.5 is the sheer variety of handbooks online. Just search for "X class handbook 3.5" and you will probably find one that will help. (The dragonfire adept handbook is here (http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=15686.0))

[Particle_Man]

The Horizon Tripper Build is completely core.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?80415-The-Horizon-Tripper-(Core-Melee-Build)

This is a melee build. You use reach weapons to trip people. Because in 3.5 there are more opportunities to use attacks of opportunity, you can trip people a lot, especially once you get the combat reflexes feat.

[SLOTHRPG95]

If you're looking to play a caster, (a) how much 5e experience do you have with prepared casters, and (b) how willing are you to have it get more complicated than that? I've had a few new players coming from 5e, and most felt more comfortable playing spontaneous casters like the Sorcerer, simply since it doesn't involve picking out spells for every single spell slot at every single level every single day. Furthermore, unless your group is rather power-game-y, Sorcerer isn't likely to feel redundant.

If you're looking to play a martial or skill money, and do indeed wish to stick to core, I'd pick one of Barbarian, Ranger, Bard, or Rogue, depending on your preferred play style. Archetypes don't exist in this edition, but those are all classes that keep somewhat interesting, at least at lower levels. At higher levels, prestige classes are your friend, although you should know this edition suffers from linear fighter quadratic wizard a lot more than 5e.

[radthemad4]

Beguilers are pretty straightforward to build at low/moderate optimization (max Int and don't dump Con and Dex, hide behind meat shields (Ignore the 'Surprise Casting' class feature. It's a trap) and cast Spells). They're tricksy casters with spells that are mostly enchantment/illusion themed. They have a fixed list of spells which they know the entirety of (so you don't need to go through the books and pick spells like with a Wizard or Sorcerer*) and can cast any time as long as they have spell slots of the right spell level left. They also make pretty good skillmonkeys.

* Well... you add an enchantment or illusion spell from the Wizard list to your spells known on levels with 'Advanced Learning' on them, but this is one spell at level 3, with an additional one every four levels onwards. Also, getting more spells known is a great way to optimize Beguilers, but they pull their weight just fine in a low to mid op party even if you don't bother to, at least at low to lower mid levels before lots of monsters start getting defenses against enchantment/illusion based spells.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I generally suggest that players new to 3.5 start off with a single class ranger. The class interacts directly with the game's 3 primary mechanical systems; combat basics, skill checks, and spellcasting. Once you've got a feel for things, you can retire that character and build something that interacts with whichever of those systems you like best* or perhaps explore one of the alternate systems if your group uses any of them.




*fair warning: there are a number of people on this forum that are of the inarguable position that the only one of the three main systems that matters is spellcasting. They will tell you that, beyond a certain level, no character that lacks spellcasting is of any value. This is not true. It's hyperbole born from the fact that spellcasters do, certainly, become the most powerful and versatile characters the game is capable of producing -if- you're intimately familiar with how to eke every iota of mechanical might from them both in the character gen and actual play stages of things. Don't let them convince you not to bother with the rest of the game before you've given things a try.

[Willie the Duck]

What would be a good class/other character options for a player familiar with TTRPGs but new to 3.5? Looking to use primarily core rulebooks as I don't know exactly what will be in use.

What are your goals? Do you want a character you will stick with the whole campaign, or one that teaches you as many subsystems as possible? Is contributing your highest priority, or maximizing survival likelihood? What levels does the game intend to go through? After that, you will really need to ask your DM what are their 'table conventions' are, and their expectations and so forth.

[Sto]

I've played 5e for around 3 years now and am joining a group that plays 3.5e. I am not familiar with character building in 3.5 and have heard a good bit about the complexity and variety of options. What would be a good class/other character options for a player familiar with TTRPGs but new to 3.5? Looking to use primarily core rulebooks as I don't know exactly what will be in use.
Your situation is an almost exact mirror to mine was!

When I first started I played a Spirit Shaman, who was a spontaneous caster. Spontaneous casting is a good place for 5e players to start if they want to play a caster. In core, the only spontaneous caster is the sorcerer. Clerics are pretty straightforward characters. They don't have to be a healbot, infact a core cleric is better off just playing anything else. I don't have a ton of experience with the core melee classes, so that's all the insight I can give you.

[AnimeTheCat]

If you start off with a concept, that greatly helps the process of determining what options you select and what options you just rule out entirely. I feel like character creation is less about picking specific options and more about ruling out larger, more comprehensive swathes of options.

For example, if you are playing a fighter, you rule out metamagic feats, item creation feats, and concentration skill enhancement feats from the core rulebook. You also rule out spell focus, and spell mastery. By thinking of it that way, you're trimming down the options available to you as opposed to picking the options good for you from a vast sea of options.

Now, for my opinion on "easy" builds, any build can be easy. Ease of build, or build complexity, it completely reliant on you, the player, and how you fit in to your group, the party. Potent, relevant builds can be as simple as taking the power attack feat and stacking as many attack bonuses as possible to mitigate your penalties from power attacking. For insance, a 1st level fighter can take power attack and weapon focus [select 2-handed weapon] to power attack without penalty* at first level, netting +2 damage for the entire level. It's not complex, it's very simple, and that +2 damage is pretty substantial if you're already rocking a 14 strength minimum, placing your total minimum damage (without weapon choice as a factor) at 5. Weapon Damage +5 is typically more than enough to one-shot most CR<1 foes (and even some CR1+ foes, depending on circumstances and weapon damage rolls).
*This is to mean that you are taking the -1 penalty to attack, but it is made up for by the +1 from the feat, netting you a +0 modifier to your attack based on Power Attack.

Spellcasters tend to get a bit more complex just by the very nature of there being options within options. What I mean is that on top of normal character creation options, you'll also have additional options by the day and by the level in the form of spells prepared that day, or spells known/gained per level. For a simple build, I would recommend against the three primary arcane spellcasters; sorcerer, Wizard, and Bard - each for different reasons. Sorcerers and Bards both have the same problem of being locked in to the spells they select for their entire career, and bards have the added problem of only being able to cast up to level 6 spells with severely slowed spell progression. Wizards have a different issue and that is that they need time and resources to expand their knowledge. The two divine casters, Druid and Cleric, don't have these issues, they get their whole spells lists known and can select their spells prepared from the entire list every day. I would recommend that, for simplicity, you choose a divine caster if you're going to play a spellcaster.

Lastly, if you can think of a concept that you want to attempt to achieve, let everyone on the forums know and we can help guide you by letting you know what options we have seen do well our experience, and what options can lead to very potent and useful combinations that will help you achieve your goal.

[ericgrau]

3.5e core single classing isn't too far off from 5e single classing. You do get more feats but each feat is weaker. Yet therefore it's easier to get a bad combination and screw up. You usually want to build them all around a single focus, or perhaps a primary focus and eventually a secondary focus.

Multi-classing is the bigger difference to look into. It allows infinitely fluid mixing. Multi-classing casters is usually bad because most don't advance casting at all. So casters usually only take prestige classes (classes with various prerequisites and a little more narrow focus) which advance their casting. There are some prestige classes in the DMG for example. As you add on more books, you get more options for regular classes (aka "base" classes), prestige classes, feats, spells, magic items, etc.

Magic items also make a far bigger difference in 3.5e and 5e, and you are dependent on having several of them just to keep up on stats. Casting is less stat dependent so casters get shafted less by poor item choice, but items still help the number of spells they get, mental ability scores, etc., etc. Look into AC, saving throws, ability scores and a magic weapon, sure. But more important than these are 1,001 magical doodads with all sorts of abilities to tack on to your character. Both permanent and things like potions, scrolls or various other tokens for one-offs. Try looking at items sorted by cost to get a wide array of the cheaper ones first. That tends to be much better than one big item.

For all of the above: read, read, read. See your choices, pick what goes together.

See how complicated this is getting already? And I'm just trying to show you the basics. 3.5e is often described as a vast character building engine with an rpg game tacked on to it. So congratz on delving in to the broadest topic imaginable.

Even after doing this 20 times you certainly will screw up, so run your character by your fellow players and/or the forums. The forums will be much more knowledgeable than your fellow players, but also beware that they may suggest to you ideas that are far too powerful to be fair for your fellow players. Try to gauge how far they are going before you overdo it with some forum trick. So overall it is better to run your character by your fellow players, and use the forums for vast levels of obscure knowledge. That said the forums can be a great help with your character build too, as long as you don't get the whole thing online.