humble minion
Legend
It's easy to forget how parlous a state D&D was in when 3e came along.
TSR had gone broke and been bought out, it was years and years since 2e and the company had been shambling along creating vast amounts of content - some of which was undeniably excellent - but making losses on a bunch of it. Complete book of Gnomes? The novel line had propped up the corpse for a while but the sheer volume of books by people not called Salvatore had saturated the market and then they were losing money too. And then there were the wild ideas they threw money into to turn it all around. Dragon Dice. Spellfire. Players Option.
White Wolf had taken the RPG baton and was running with it, and TSR was being left way behind. You couldn't even find anyone to play in a D&D game at my university club in 1997. It was Werewolf, or Delta Green, or Ars Magica, or WFRP.
When WotC bought out D&D, the wailing and gnashing of teeth was awesome to behold. They'd turn it into a trading card game like Magic, the story was. You'd need to buy booster packs for magic items, or to play a ranger.
And then 3e came along. And it was [drumroll] a RPG. And it chucked out some serious sacred cows, like THAC0 and negative armour class, and death magic saving throws, so it's not like the designers were being overcautious. All of a sudden, feats were a thing. And skills were suddenly a thing. and dwarves could be wizards, and there were no racial level limits any more, and anyone could multiclass, and half-orcs were back, and metamagic was a thing. And the OGL - sure, it's not exactly a part of the system, but it came with the package and that was daring beyond belief and it changed the industry forever - and it was motivated by the genuine fact that D&D had damn near died with TSR and this was the 3e devs doing their damndest to make sure that never, ever happened again.
It's hard to overestimate how revolutionary 3e was - not from a game design point of view in general, though it DID clarify, systematise, and streamline a whole lot or messy legacy AD&Disms while actually giving players more choices in how to design characters. But in terms of actually keeping D&D a real functional live hobby, and even keeping fantasy gaming as a whole going when WoD and the whole modern paranormal thing was increasingly making the running. And it proved so popular it was still selling in truckloads when 4e came along, and its variant continued doing to after 4e came along.
It had problems, sure. It got bloated with supplements, sure, and the buff-stacking metagame and poor high-level maths really should have been caught in playtesting, but any system where player options proliferate to the VAST degree they did in 3/3.5, and which offers players so many character design choice points, is going to have scope for players to start up optimisation games. It's not like 3e invented min-maxing, though the sheer options it provided allowed the result of that to be more noticable, especially alongside the rise of the internet and forums like this or the old WotC boards, which allowed anyone with a 56.6k modem to dump all sorts of net optimisation builds on their poor unsuspecting GMs.
But i don't think it's even a slight exaggeration to say that 3e saved D&D as a hobby from the fate of, say, Avalon Hill wargames. And there's a hell of a lot of 3e in the DNA of 5e.
So a little bit of respect for the dear departed is in order i reckon. I played an awful lot of 3e, and had a great time, though i wouldn't go back to it if 5e was still an option. But in the context of the history of D&D, it was one of the greatest monumental successes, and deserves to be remembered as such.
TSR had gone broke and been bought out, it was years and years since 2e and the company had been shambling along creating vast amounts of content - some of which was undeniably excellent - but making losses on a bunch of it. Complete book of Gnomes? The novel line had propped up the corpse for a while but the sheer volume of books by people not called Salvatore had saturated the market and then they were losing money too. And then there were the wild ideas they threw money into to turn it all around. Dragon Dice. Spellfire. Players Option.
White Wolf had taken the RPG baton and was running with it, and TSR was being left way behind. You couldn't even find anyone to play in a D&D game at my university club in 1997. It was Werewolf, or Delta Green, or Ars Magica, or WFRP.
When WotC bought out D&D, the wailing and gnashing of teeth was awesome to behold. They'd turn it into a trading card game like Magic, the story was. You'd need to buy booster packs for magic items, or to play a ranger.
And then 3e came along. And it was [drumroll] a RPG. And it chucked out some serious sacred cows, like THAC0 and negative armour class, and death magic saving throws, so it's not like the designers were being overcautious. All of a sudden, feats were a thing. And skills were suddenly a thing. and dwarves could be wizards, and there were no racial level limits any more, and anyone could multiclass, and half-orcs were back, and metamagic was a thing. And the OGL - sure, it's not exactly a part of the system, but it came with the package and that was daring beyond belief and it changed the industry forever - and it was motivated by the genuine fact that D&D had damn near died with TSR and this was the 3e devs doing their damndest to make sure that never, ever happened again.
It's hard to overestimate how revolutionary 3e was - not from a game design point of view in general, though it DID clarify, systematise, and streamline a whole lot or messy legacy AD&Disms while actually giving players more choices in how to design characters. But in terms of actually keeping D&D a real functional live hobby, and even keeping fantasy gaming as a whole going when WoD and the whole modern paranormal thing was increasingly making the running. And it proved so popular it was still selling in truckloads when 4e came along, and its variant continued doing to after 4e came along.
It had problems, sure. It got bloated with supplements, sure, and the buff-stacking metagame and poor high-level maths really should have been caught in playtesting, but any system where player options proliferate to the VAST degree they did in 3/3.5, and which offers players so many character design choice points, is going to have scope for players to start up optimisation games. It's not like 3e invented min-maxing, though the sheer options it provided allowed the result of that to be more noticable, especially alongside the rise of the internet and forums like this or the old WotC boards, which allowed anyone with a 56.6k modem to dump all sorts of net optimisation builds on their poor unsuspecting GMs.
But i don't think it's even a slight exaggeration to say that 3e saved D&D as a hobby from the fate of, say, Avalon Hill wargames. And there's a hell of a lot of 3e in the DNA of 5e.
So a little bit of respect for the dear departed is in order i reckon. I played an awful lot of 3e, and had a great time, though i wouldn't go back to it if 5e was still an option. But in the context of the history of D&D, it was one of the greatest monumental successes, and deserves to be remembered as such.
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