Retrocloning Dungeons and Dragons 3.0
Retrocloning Dungeons and Dragons 3.0
Though the 3.5e revised edition of D&D 3rd edition was widely regarded as a huge improvement of the game when it came out, over time it became more apparent that it actually was the start of a much greater shift than had been immediately apparent.
I still have a very great fondness for the early 3rd edition books from 2000 to 2002 which I just don't have for those that came out after the revision. The original core rulebooks have never been available in pdf to my knowledge (and you can't even find bootleg scans anymore), but the original SRD files are still around. Unfortunately they are really badly organized and formatted, but there is one website still around that has the content in HTML format, and more recently someone went through the trouble of sorting and formatting all the content as pdf and odt (pay what you want, but it would save you many hours of painful work).
But I am the first to admit that the original 3rd edition rules had real issues and that doing a revised edition was a good call. I just don't agree that all of the 3.5e changes were actually improvements to the game. With the SRD now available as an organized and formatted odt file, it's now really easy to make your own customized version of a 3rd Edition rulebook by just editing whichever parts you don't like.
What things do you think are the most unfun or just broken about the original 3rd Edition rules and how would you fix them?
3 edition was my first D&D and to this day everything is always compared to. Not saying its the best but its my base line.
@Yora There were three absolutely fundamental problems in D&D 3.0.
1: Threat range stacked endlessly. Worse, some 3.0 non-core material had weapons with a native 17-20 threat range, or 19-20/x3.
2: 3.0 Haste was not only unlike TSR-era Haste, but was eminently abusable by spellcasters. Use 3.5 Haste instead, full stop.
3: Polymorph Other did not have any chance of changing the personality of the recipient, meaning you could permanently turn your fighters into giants and such risk-free.
but that should be easy, one would just have to use some of the improvements for 3.0. make a version 3.25 so to speak
I really liked 3.0. I never got around to fully work with it, because my campaign kind of burned through in the end.
actually, come to think of it, the amount of rules in the books was the reason it burned through.
ok, I don't really like 3.0, I just like it better than what came afterwards. there is a reason I switched to B/X clones after