What was rpg play culture like during the days when 3e and 3.5e D&D dominated the market?
Good luck getting people who aren't as interested in the game as you to read a fucking handbook
>>97744931Picrel, basically as we currently have with 5e, with less thumbrinas and more autism, it took me 20 years to get over the trauma and re-appreciate 3.5e as a game. The positive thing is that, ironically, the zeitgeist of that time made me contrarian enough in trying to branch out as much as possible pushing for different games in my group.
>>97744999Tell me more about the autism.
>>97744931Even worse about "we'll just homebrew D&D."
>>97747327[1/2]>Tell me more about the autism.NTA but 3.X was basically peak munchkin, for two main reasons as I see it. The first reason was that the game deliberately broke down the walls between "the PCs" and "everything else" via mechanical standardization. Everything in the game is based around levels or pseudo-levels so it all can interact holistically.Second and closely related to the first, the absolute mountain of content and the availability of PDFs meant that it was trivially easy to make over-tuned characters or just outright break the game on accident because the designers of some obscure splat didn't stop to think about how someone could use one feature from their book combined with features from half a dozen other books to break the game even though the compatibility was very much a feature and not a bug. There were so very many things (items, feats, class features, etc.) that were either broken outright or weren't broken but could be exploited ruthlessly. Pun-Pun is an extreme example of this, but remains an effective case in point.
[2/2]You might say "well, just don't allow [thing] in your game" but that runs up against two issues. First is that a lot of broken, potentially broken, non-broken and useless things were jumbled together so blanket bans tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you say "we're not using Complete Warrior or Complete Adventurer this time" because Kevin the That Guy abused the shit out of those books then you immediately have Kevin yelling about being singled out for being good at the game, Roger complaining because his fighter needs CW and CA to not be awful and everyone else is complaining because there's lots of really handy stuff in CW and CA for everyone. So then what? You don't really have an option besides playing Mother-May-I and at that point the job of balancing every bit of this mountain of content that your players want to interact with falls to (you). Have fun with that.Then there's also the fact that the most common method of making a setting was to basically dump all of the content you liked into the kitchen sink (usually the sink itself was Forgotten Realms, as the only actual setting of any note) and stir until combined. The average game would have shit from literally dozens of different books to varying degrees because "it just werks" was literally one of the core design philosophies of the game. Wizards wanted everything to be universally compatible so that people could cherry-pick content as needed and so they'd want to have as many books as possible for maximum cherry-picking.tl;dr the game has so much content that it broke itself
>>97744931Rangers were jokes
>>97748871You're missing that a big appeal was player side design. Players were expected to not only design their builds but also request items and shit for said builds. You couldn't just throw items and see what players did with them because that wasn't the game, and there was so much content it was hard to judge on DM side what was cool, useless, potentially broken, confusing. You were tacitly supposed to let players decide stuff that took control out of the DM, while also having super rail roady plots. Modern OC D&D was born from 3.5e
>>97748909Yeah but he asked specifically about the autism
Generally better because the internet couldn't poison your fucking players' heads against all conceivable types of play.
>>97748869>Pun-Pun is an extreme example of this, but remains an effective case in point.Pun-Pun is just "Cast Shapechange to turn into a sarukh, because sarukhs are broken". It's not even a "build" it's something any lv17+ wizard can do, all the combos are just to do it at lower levels.
>>97752192Even that's overcomplicating it. Sarrukhs are a playable race, you can be Pun-Pun with the zero-combo strategy of just "be a sarrukh". The only reason people don't do that is because its ECL is so high that you can only do it in epic, and epic is broken anyway.
>>97744931People jacked off to numbers, splatbooks and abusable mechanics instead of playing the game. The height of 3.5faggotry was the Tippyversehttps://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-TippyIt's hard to blame these people, 3.5 was such a broken system that actually playing it was a miserable experience. It broke effortlessly. You could unintentionally build a CoDzilla using nothing but PHB and your normie brain, making the fighter player wonder why is he even there.
>>97744931Pretty awful, especially since everyone and their brother made versions of their game for 3.x. That led 3aboos to bitch and whine to play the shittiest version of stuff like Call of Cthulhu or Legend of the Five Rings if you dared to not run them in 3.x. It was a dark time. 5e is nearly as bad for that but at least there is no OGL shitting up every other game.
Aside for what other anon said i want to highlight another "problem" initiated by 3e: before it there where substantially 2 main playstyles without any hard dichotomy, the (exaggerated) theater kids would simply move to VtM (which, while being structured to be more railroady still retained its structure functionally similar to all other ttrpg) while in d&d (and all other games like, rolemaster, brp, gurps, etc...) retained a spontaneous balanced mix of playacting and gauntlet playstyle, like it was sort of expected to put a minimal effort in enacting characters and letting the system itself guide the game towards its emergent structure. Shortly after 3.x the TGC-type player was introduced to the fray effectively breaking the soft dichotomy, having them interacting with the game on a dissociated plane. This annoyed the shit out of the traditional playerbase effectively starting a big fracture in the hobby and game design manifested by The Forge movement and the OSR movement, basically 3.x is the reason why we have storygames, perpetual osr retroclones and have to constantly regulate expectations when sitting at the table.
>>97754763It's ironic that OSR/2e didn't divide until 3.5 came out.IIRC people just swapped which features they preferred between 1 and 2
>>97744966The bar of entry was part of the point. Not having anyone who wasn't interested meant that every single person involved was interested and not>>97744999The people this Anon is describing.The operative problem that D&D had is the same problem every product has now - engineering it for mass appeal means appealing to retards, because most people are objectively retarded. Even in the educated West most people are still retarded, and that's before you factor in all of the parts of the world that are barely people.Having a good product, be it a game, a movie, a book, music, or even just a theoretical universe based around some lore, means catering to a minority of people on this planet and thus not being terribly profitable on the scale of that which pleases shareholders and potential investors. You'll have a small, dedicated fanbase and your revenue will be driven by hard sales, which is what every company in (Current Year) is trying desperately to avoid because hard sales stopped scaling a long time ago when wages stopped scaling.
>>97744931Easily one of the worst eras of the hobby>Absolute invasion of newfags, far more severe than any earler or later invasion>Said newfags are predominately disfunctional autismos and spastics, brought by marketing that told them that "this is a game for antistocial weirdos like you!">Game itself fosters an entire set of idiotic, counter-productive behaviours and the most literal-minded, obtuse approach to play>Every 3rd party game tries to ride on the gravy train by releasing some half-assed 1d20 reskin that works even worse than 3.X>It's also peak of drow craze and early 00s edgelords on top of it allBasically take all the memes about 5e and imagine them twice as bad, but everyone is fed up with drows and their players rather than tieflings
>>97744931It was ok. D20 System helped promote a lot of minor, original takes.
>>97752658The call of cthulhu book actually has great keeper advice in it, though, weirdly enough.
I don't know how anybody plays with anyone who frequents this site. Between the players accusing the DM of railroading, storyfagging, magical realm, historicalfag, or mudcore, and each other of freakshit, ERP, powergaming, minmaxing, murderhoboing, munchkin, buffalo, Critical Role, rollplaying, Leroy Jenkins, trooning, or TEE HEE HEE MACARONI MACARONI, does anyone aware of this site actually manage to play, or is it only possible with complete noobs to roleplaying who aren't going to have a meltdown every time they recognise a thing as any sort of categorizable category?
>>97761691Could be because my party played before the internet was really a thing, but when I see those descriptions, I think "oh yeah, that one guy", but after we're done bitching here, they're the same IRL pals who we've been playing for years. We deal with it, I guess.
>>97761691People who use buzzwords you listed don't actually play games. Once you filter out that trash, the rest isn't any worse than other online RPG communities, the flavour's just different.
>>97764310This anon is right for the most part.Folks who do everything to jam buzzwords and topics like those into everything are people much more interested in engaging with 4chan.org/tg/ the digital basket weaving forum as opposed to talking about games they're actually playing.
