brynnmclean replied to your post “unexpectedly being asked to join a 3.5 campaign right now where most...”
oh, I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on 3.5e vs. 5e! I've only played 5e, but heard people rave about 3.5???????
Okay, before I answer this I should clarify: I only played 3.5e for about 75 minutes tonight. I did learn to play D&D using 3rd edition, and I might? have played 3.5e in college, but I really don’t remember. 3.5e came out in the midst of when I was playing, but I think most of the people I played with knew 3rd edition best, so we stuck with that. (But then to also caveat that, I’m chatting with one of my HS friends that I still play with, and he said we really ignored a lot of the 3rd edition rules back then because there were so many... so we really didn’t even play it right)
I started playing 5e several years ago and I’ve honestly never looked back. I adore it. It feels so much more streamlined. It’s simple and straightforward, which allows for more focus on roleplay and less focus on math. And my character sheet is easier to read. (technically that could come down to the design of the character sheet, but I think there’s just fewer equations all over the place in 5e, which helps it look cleaner)
I think, all in all, that 3.5 felt more limiting. Allegedly, the people I were playing with said it meant that you could also do more with it, that there were more options or whatever, but I think that might just be because it’s been around longer. And personally I’m not interested in fiddling and min/maxing my stats, I just want to play! If my character isn’t perfect, great. I’d love to fail some skill checks and face the consequences, especially if they’re gonna be hilarious or dramatic and make the story more interesting.
When I first started playing 5e, I was bummed about the fewer skill sets, but now that I’ve been playing it awhile, I think the restructuring of those makes more sense. In 3/3.5, there are a lot of very esoteric skill sets, which you’ll either absolutely need or never use, and it comes down to what the DM is doing. A bit of a gamble when you have to allocate skill points and you might be wasting them. For example, there are Appraise, Escape Artist, Gather Information, like 5 different versions of the Knowledge skill, like Knowledge (Religion), Knowledge (History), etc.
Whereas in 5e, the skills are fewer/broad enough that you can probably figure out which one to use given whatever you’re trying to do and you’re less likely to pick a skill that your DM ends up totally ignoring.
Then there’s like, Attack Bonuses. In 5e, you just have your proficiency bonus, but in 3/3.5, you’ll have bonuses for every little thing, attack, each save, skill points, etc, that all go up at different rates.
Other things I noticed specifically about tonight is that: the spell “Bless” is not as good, and in 3.5, you have to allocate every spell slot. So: if you get 5 spells at level 1, you need to say you’re taking 3 Bless, 1 Shield of Faith, 1 Light of Lunia, rather than just picking your list of spells and using however many you want of each until you max out your spell slots. [Edited to Add: when I commented that “bless” wasn’t as good, my DM said something about how it really is better bc it stacks with other things as the day goes on or something, I didn’t understand what he meant and it just sounded too tedious to me.]
That’s about my limit with what happened tonight -- we didn’t play long, so not a lot came up.
But the rest of the people in this campaign have been playing for 35 weeks, and I play with some of them in my Tomb of Annihilation campaign and my Saltmarsh campaign, and all I ever hear are stories of how bad things go for them. They only heal 1 HP per long rest. They’re level 4 and two characters have died already. It seems like it’s much harder to do anything or get anything done. Seems like they’re kinda excited to be done with 3.5 and get back to playing 5e.
That’s just my two cents. In the end it probably comes down to what you’re used to and the kind of game you want to play.
