Skip to main content

A Trip Down Memory Lane

"3.5 is the best edition of D&D" - Various 3.5 Fanboys

While pretty much all of my DnD experience has been with 4E, I am now ready to take the leap into 3.5 (as a player of course).  It's not that I had issues with editions (I don't, I just understand 4E best and wouldn't want to try and learn more rules), I just never got the chance to play.

For Free RPG Day 2012, I bought a couple old modules from 2nd Edition, just because they looked cool, and I want a variety of things from all walks of DnD.  Indeed, opening the books and reading through the adventures, I felt an "old school" feel to DnD, something that the DnD Next Playtest had a lot of.  The whole thing gives me a different perspective of how the game can be run, and how things back in the day were done.

My good friend Peachey (who plays Gregg, and used to play Pog), has long been a fan of 3.5 (though he's played all editions, I believe).  He has most of the books, and knows it well enough to DM it.  When P@, (who plays Niz), goes back to school in the fall, we decided we want to put the game on hold and start something new.  This will give me a break at DMing, and allow us to try something new.  So, 3.5 it is.

I really like how the Pathfinder game has taken the 3.5 rules and continued to build on them.  Peachey says that other companies did it to, so there is a real wealth of knowledge out there if you know where to look.  I, browsing through amazon.com and google, found a Pathfinder book that I knew I had to buy: Goblins of Golarion.

The book is basically a 3.5 take on goblins, with a TON of crunch and fluff to help with world building and inspiration (the kind of stuff I love).  So today, I'm sitting, leafing through the 3.5 Player's Handbook, trying to figure out how I'm going to re-build Kov Nitikki and get him ready for his next round of adventuring.

Here's a couple of things I've noticed about 3.5
  • Magic users are weaker.  They cast spells and then forget them.  My 4E Artificer build of Kov used weapon powers, meaning he would get to swing his weapon to attack.  I don't think a 3.5 Artificer build would work for Kov.  It just doesn't seem like him.  
  • Kov has always been more of an Alchemist than an Artificer, so maybe I can buy items and what not to supplement that.  3.5 has a huge skills list, so maybe I can train something to help.
  • Goblins get a huge Dex bonus (+4), so I think maybe something like a Rogue would favor them.
  • I get to roll for abilities scores.  Holy cow, this could be really good, or really bad.
  • I feel like characters have a lot lower starting HP (they do).  
This whole concept is brand new to me, but I think this is why I'm so excited to do it.  It just seems super fun and new.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Revisiting 4th Edition - Fortune Cards

An interesting mechanic that caught my eye as I returned to 4e was that of Fortune Cards. As I previously stated in an earlier post, one of the stores by my house still had a few packs of Fury of the Feywild. Those that have read this blog or read my tweets know that I am huge fan of the Feywild and the fey creatures that inhabit that realm, so when I was perusing 4e things from the past, picking up packs of cards with 'Feywild' in the set name was a no-brainer.                                                                                                                        As I tweeted while writing this post, it's amazing to me that despite the Fortune Cards arriving on scene circa ...
3 comments
Read more

Revisiting the Trinket Lord

As I’ve gone back to dive into the options that are 4e D&D, I took another hard look at something near and dear to my heart: my 4e published article, The Trinket Lord. Published in Dungeon 205 (August 2012), it was another article in the Court of Stars series about the Archfey. With GenCon 2017 occurring right now, I figured it's a good time to talk about such things again.  I had always found the Court of Stars articles extremely intriguing and full of adventure hooks, but when I pitched this article, only two existed, The Prince of Frost (Dragon 374) and the Bramble Queen (Dungeon 185). The Trinket Lord was originally pitched back in April 2012, when WotC accepted article submissions for their Dragon and Dungeon magazines. My contact for the entire process was Greg Bilsland (which was a major “whoa!” moment for me). I consider my relatively short interactions with Greg to have been extremely insightful, as he gave me a good mix of compliments and critiques and helped me ...
5 comments
Read more

D&DNext and the Despair Deck

"Fear attracts the fearful." - Darth Maul In May of 2011 (which seems like forever ago), Wizards of the Coast released a 4th Edition supplement entitled The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond .  One of the coolest things to come in the box set was a deck of 30 cards called the Despair Deck.  The deck, to quote from the campaign guide, "represents the unnatural behaviors and neuroses that can come over those who visit the Shadowfell."  I would like to that statement one step farther and say that the deck represents behaviors and neuroses that come over those who visit any place of horror.  Flipping through the deck, the cards are separated into three main categories: Fear, Apathy, and Madness.  Such traits create good roleplaying opportunities, as well as further demonstrating the horrors that adventurers face on a regular basis.   I thought the Despair Deck was a great addition to special encounters and events for D&D, and I've re...
2 comments
Read more