Oh God, I'm about to start DnDFollow

As a beginner, you can probably ignore a lot of those. Most of those books are either setting-specific (Dragonlance, Eberron, Forgotten Realms, etc.), or ones that present alternate rules or new options for the basic material. Some of them are for the older 3.0 rule-set; while they're compatible, some of the specific terms are different, and a few classes were "re-balanced."

To play 3.5, you really only need the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual.

The subsequent MMs added a lot of new beasties, which can be either helpful or overwhelming (ditto for the DMG 2 and PHB 2). The Complete Arcane/Warrior/Divine/Adventurer each presented new core and prestige classes, along with new feats and equipment, for each of the four archetypes (melee, arcane spellcaster, divine spellcaster, skill-user). There's a handful of books presenting environment-specific details (like the desert-based Sandstorm), which can be invaluable if you want your campaign in, say, an arctic setting.


QFT. I've played off and on since 2nd edition, mostly with 3.0/3.5 rules. The 4th edition rules changed everything, even more dramatically than the 2nd-3rd change, and people don't like change.

The most important change, IMO, was the view on how classes needed to work. Previous editions placed more emphasis on HOW the character did things than on WHAT they did. A melee class was more-or-less restricted to realistic abilities, but for the spellcasters the sky was the limit. Melee just swung at the enemy, and the spellcasters were basically useless at low level and ridiculous at high level. Often a high-level campaign would revolve around the wizard, with other characters being marginalized.

4th edition divided the classes into four roles instead: defender, striker, controller, and leader. I almost hate to draw the comparison, but these translate into MMO roles: Tank, DPS, AoE/Debuffer, and Healer/Buffer. The Defender keeps the opponents in one spot and focused on one target. The Striker deals out hefty damage to one enemy at a time. The Controller deals damage to multiple enemies (but less per target than a Striker) or does things to restrict enemies' options (restricting movement with fields of icy spikes, for example). The Leader does things that keep his allies alive and/or enhance their ability to do what they're doing. These roles are much clearer and easier to understand than the old classes.

Combat abilites were changed. Each class has At-Will, Encounter, and Daily powers. At-Will ones can be used as often as you'd like, Encounter powers are usable once per encounter, and Daily powers are once a day. Each class has more options in combat, unlike previous editions, as I noted above. Everyone gets to do more than "Hit the [insert baddy name], and no class is marginalized at high levels.

They reduced the learning curve for 4th ed. My friend and I introduced his younger brother to D&D just before 4th arrived. We played a couple of quick sessions in 3.5, then swapped over to 4th. His brother picked up the 4E rules far quicker than 3.5's. Combat was quicker and more intuitive, and they removed a lot of the confusing mechanics. 3.5 had a lot of "legacy" mechanics from older rules, which were intended to enforce role-playing but really only made things harder for those who just wanted to RP without memorizing an entire library of rules.

If you and your friends honestly prefer 3.5E, power to you. However, I'd recommend at least trying 4E, if nothing else because it's easier to find those books. On a side note, check actual book stores for D&D books. Most big chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders have a small RP section these days (usually near the comic books). Also check Amazon.com and eBay; you should be able to find older edition books there.

Good luck, and above all, have fun!

WH40K has plenty of awesome melee characters. Maybe you should just play DND with tyranids? Idea: make hive tyrant a new druid form. It can fight with the elephant riding paladins.

The game doesn't suffer for it, the game is much better because of it. 4e can easily be said to involve more creativity because everything you do you do under reasonable rules. 4.0 is all about "how can I do this given these constraints." 3.5 is simply "how broken can I be?" when it was so easy to break anything in 3.5.

And what versatility in 3.5? You mean the versatility if you happen to play a wizard or cleric?

4.0 was a complete innovation of melee abilities... have you not read through the martial classes? It was all the old D&D versions that were lacking in melee innovation, using the same system as previous versions and many other table top games.

Edited, Jul 20th 2009 7:34am by Allegory

You can play them, but they're still incredibly limited, and it is somewhat pointless other than flavor purposes. A Cleric is a better Fighter than an actual Fighter. A Wizard does better ranged damage than a ranger, with far, far greater utility.


Then you have someone arbitrarily deciding that rules simply do not exist all the time. $e has rules, but they don't pidgeonhole you into a specific role. They do, however, create reasonable boundaries where a wizard can't be better than everyone else at doing anything.

In one of my 3.5 campaigns I was in an arena like fight at level 8. We had me as a wizard, a sorcerer, a druid, a fighter, and I believe a ranger. It would have been a fairly tough fight for the other people, but using standard wizard spells at level 8 I could solo the encounter. These weren't random spells using obscure rules you'd have to scour source books for, these were basic spells like fly and dominate monster. In fact, I could have solo'd the encounter four different ways, using different sets of basic wizard spells.

In order prevent me from making the entire party obsolete the DM would have to say "your spells no longer work" That is the problem with 3.5 It's broken even when you aren't even trying to break it, and when you do try to break it you get Pun-Pun.

Wasn't that his point? That the DM has to actively make it harder against a specific character? I can see that being part of a good DM if it happens for specific encounters for every character as part of the story, but I'm not sure that's what you're getting at. Or maybe it is. I haven't played since 3.0 so my opinions on the matter are quite limited.

It's not any more broken than most other classes in the game.

3.5 is very easy to break, but it's equally easy to break for near everybody. As long as that breakage is uniform, you're good, simply because the stuff you fight has the ability to be even more broken.

I don't really care how prepared a caster is. Crazy prepared is something everyone can do, and every ability that you've mentioned can be emulated by magical items. If you're actually being crazy prepared, as anyone in power should be, then they can just put a dimensional anchor over their stronghold anyway. Most things later on will have truesight, rendering invisibility pointless (except for concealment bonus, which you can get more of from displacement), and flight won't get you away from ranged attacks.



A DM who doesn't tailor a campaign to the characters is just asking for unwanted crap. So yes, he should have designed encounters with your party's various abilities and tactics in mind. There's no reason at all why you shouldn't have magical countermeasures prepared for wizards; they're common enough. That's the entire purpose of playing pen and paper and not electronic rpgs, is that you have some dude who can inject common sense and unpredictable or unforeseen events into the situations. If your DM isn't creative enough to stop you from breaking the game, then he should spend more time inventing, and less time facilitating archetypes and generic and boring crap.

I mean I can't really say if you had a crappy DM or not, but I can almost certainly match every anecdote that you can provide with another. They aren't indicative of class imbalance; they are indicative of party synchronicity and DM creativity.

But they aren't broken uniformly. Casters can do things far beyond what the martial classes can do. Classes like druid and ranger don't fall as far behind as fighter specifically because they can do some casting, but they still fall quite far behind.

It's not equally easy to break. Wizards have a huge advantage.

But then the wizard could be said to have equally powerful magical items, which again puts him far in the lead.

But he doesn't have to tailor it specifically against any other character, only the wizards. Either way, the game entirely revolves around the wizard. Either the DM uses purely ordinary encounters for a normal party, and so the wizard becomes the only character that really matters, or the DM designs encounters specifically to foil the wizard, in which case he is still the only character that really matters.

All high level 3.5 campaigns are about wizards.

Can you? Did you look at the Pun-Pun link? You can try to write it off as one extreme example, but there are two problems with that. First, no matter how singular the case, a caster giving himself limitless stats, limitless divinity, infinite reach, infinite speed, infinite spot check, the ability to reach through all planes, and the ability to craft his own spells, is completely absurd. In 4.0 the greatest extent to which broken can be applied is a striker who does considerable more damage than a non-optimized striker. Second, that isn't the only absurd example in 3.5. There are more.

Edited, Jul 21st 2009 7:14pm by Allegory

This thread is still alive? Geeze.

I know it's slow, but--

*checks the date*

Wow. I didn't know it was that slow. Apologies for the unintended necro.