It was Monday, September 11, 2000.
I actually remember it pretty well. I went to my Favorite Local Game Store and I picked up the new Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. I grabbed the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide and the Creature Collection, the first OGL monster book released. I had to wait a bit longer for the official Monster Manual.
That was 25 years ago this week.
When D&D 3.0 hit the game stores in 2000, I was ready for it. I had been away from D&D for several years and was eager to get back into it. So, D&D 3.0 was the right game for me at the right time. In truth, there is still a lot I love about D&D 3.x, and significant advances were made in terms of game design and lore.
This edition was new. So new that, unlike the past editions, this one was not very backward compatible. This was fine since Wizards of the Coast (now dropping the TSR logo) had provided a conversion guide. The books were solid. All full color and the rules had expanded to fix some of the issues of previous versions of D&D. Armor class numbers got larger as the armor got stronger, as opposed to lower numbers being better. Charts for combat were largely eliminated, the number on the sheet was what you had to roll against. Everyone could multiclass, all the species (races) could be any class without restrictions, though some were better at it than others, and everyone had skills.
But the most amazing thing about 3rd Edition D&D was that, aside from a few protected monsters and names, Wizards of the Coast gave the whole thing away for free! Yes, the books with art cost money. But the rules, just a text dump, were free for everyone to download. It was called the System Reference Document or SRD. It was all the rules so that 3rd-party publishers could produce their own D&D compatible material. With these rules, you could play D&D without the books. There was no art and no "fluff" text, but everything was there.
D&D 3rd edition had an good run from 2000 to about 2008.
I played it quite a bit to be honest and there is a lot about it I still love. It was the game system I used to teach my kids how to play and one I still enjoy going back to. It is also one of the few editions of D&D I never really played much. I was always a DM. So other than a version of Larina and Johan Werper IV, I don't have a lot of characters for 3e. The only time I ever got to play it was at conventions, mostly Gen Con.
I loved the 3rd Edition's multiclassing and, honestly, I loved Prestige Classes. But things got ridiculous at high levels. Ever try stating up a high level character from scratch? But I would still play it if given the chance.
So here is to 25 years of D&D 3.0. You were not the perfect game, but your were perfect for me at the time.
3 comments:
D&D 3.x was the prompt for Echelon, which started as "Keith's D&D". I _really_ wanted to address the high-level build complexity.
... still not finished, _Echleon Reference Series_ kind of got in the way, and I'm _still_ working on that.
I grew up reading my dad's 1e books, but 3e was my edition and I will always love it. It is a bit (to be generous) of a baroque mess, but at its core it's still got the lineage from the classic editions and I wholly think you could run a classic style campaign with it. Part of what made me go to the OSR was comparing my 3/3.5e books with my dad's 1e books and realising that some parts are still the same (the jewelry table was where I noticed it). My biggest problem with it is that it can get very crunchy, and I'm not great at math, which was also what prompted my exploration of older editions. I was wondering if I could tone down the numbers to something closer to 1e, and eventually I discovered that C&C had basically already done that thanks to the SRD and OGL.
3e gets a lot of shade for being the first modern D&D, and I don't disagree necessarily, but I think it was important. Without 3e, without the OGL and the SRD, I think the RPG industry would look very different.
Fair enough that D&D 3.x involved adding a lot of numbers, but the simplicity it added was in making it easy to identify _what_ numbers to add.
AD&D bonus arithmetic wasn't as bad as 3.x because it involved fewer numbers to add up... but it was worse because the permutations and combinations of _what_ numbers to add up were a headache. The only thing I found that kept AD&D bonus math from being as bad is that you didn't often run into the weird edge cases that made it difficult.
... unless, like me, you tried to write a program to help manage your character sheets. Then it became a nightmare...
Post a Comment