YMMV / Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition

• Alternate Character Interpretation: invoked"Pelor, the Burning Hate". Pelor, the God of the Sun in the default Greyhawk setting, is canonically Neutral Good, but there are actually a surprising number of indicators to the contrary, especially in 3E texts. The example cleric Jozan, who follows Pelor, is shown casting symbol of pain in the 3E Player's Handbook, which has the Evil descriptor and therefore is supposed to be impossible for an NG deity to grant and for an NG spellcaster to cast (this was an oversight, as the image was recycled from 3.0, when all symbol spells were a single spell with no alignment). The post goes on to discuss the Malconvoker Prestige Class in Complete Scoundrel, whose exemplar is also a cleric of Pelor who acts very un-NG (though this is deliberate, as the whole concept of the Malconvoker is a class that deceives fiends by acting Obviously Evil), and notes that consorting with fiends is also said to be an act of evil in the Book of Vile Darkness. Ultimately, the post concludes that Pelor is actually a Villain with Good Publicity: a Lawful-leaning Neutral Evil deity of burning pain and agony masquerading as an NG god of the sun and healing.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Some believe the Hellfire Warlock prestige class was one of these; nearly all warlocks can qualify by its level, and the hellfire bonus puts to bed the most common criticism of a warlock — 9d6 damage at 20th level is piddley, but 15d6 in exchange for a tiny bit of Con damage can still pack a wallop.
  • The martial Adepts introduced in Tome of Battle: the Book of Nine Swords were clearly an attempt to mitigate the edition's Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards problem by creating martial classes with progression similar to casters. They succeeded, with the designs of martial classes in 4th and 5th edition (especially 4th) having progression closer to Crusader, Swordsage, and Warblade. However, the adepts were base breakers for how anemic they made the classic martial classes look in comparison. This is especially true for the Ranger, who lacks a Tome of Battle analogue.
• Base-Breaking Character: The three martial adepts, all of which have this going on. Fans love them for their combat effectiveness, its playstyle, versatility, and being melee classes that can actually hold their own a little compared to casters. Detractors hate them for their Charles Atlas Superpower traits feeling "silly" or "anime", their effective obsoleting of prior classes, their adoption of a system reminiscent of casting, and somewhat weak lore. They're undeniably better than their predecessors, but the division is whether that makes them well-balanced class because the originals were kind of garbage, or overpowered classes due to this being textbook Power Creep.
• Broken Base:
  • Moreso than any other edition, the powerscaling and potential abuse of the rules allows for player characters that far outstrip anything the DM can throw at them appropriate to their level. By the time the party hits level 10, they have access to a huge amount of potential spells, items, and abilities that can debilitate even the deadliest of monsters. This problem is only exacerbated with the prevalence of spellcasters like Clerics, Wizards and Druids, each of whom have the potential to shut down or obliterate any threat that comes their way. Roleplaying fans are thus split on whether or not this is a good thing: on one hand, 3.5 is a true Power Fantasy that offers an absurd amount of freedom and rewards intelligent decision making like few other games. On the other hand, this makes it incredibly difficult for a DM to actually create appropriate stakes for a story or provide a threat for the players to take on, which some argue robs a lot of the game of potential tension.
  • This is the first game in the franchise where Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards became a serious problem. On one hand, caster classes have incredible freedom and can do some jaw-droppingly impressive feats, especially if you really think about your build. On the other, this can make martial classes pretty much irrelevant. Much of the debate around this problem discusses whether or not this is a bad thing, since many players feel like magic classes should be that strong to begin with.
  • The various attempts to bolster martial classes in 3.5 proved similarly contentious. The open enabling of min-maxed non-casters to reach equally absurd levels of damage output or near-magical utility with skills through Combinatorial Explosion of feats, and the introduction of Wuxia tropes like Supernatural Martial Arts, were cheered by some and loathed by others.
  • Some objected to the move of Prestige Classes to more free-form requirements (Ex: Must have the wild-shape class feature vs. Must be a Druid), while others enjoyed the mix-and-match combinations of variant classes and prestige classes that enabled things like a wild-shaping ranger to take a druid-flavored prestige class.
  • For that matter, Prestige Classes generally are a source of more controversy than one would expect, especially since the mechanic's been largely abandoned by all modern successor-states to 3.X as of the second edition of Pathfinder. Fans of the mechanic see it as an example of all that was great about Third Edition and its derivatives, rewarding imaginative and creative use of the mechanics and careful character building with tremendous arrays of interesting outcomes and immense variety, and offered interesting choices at every level that more-linear improvement tracks did not. Critics argue that it represents all that was worst about Third Edition, a punishing road-block to new players that required building for from the first moment of character creation for maximum effectiveness, limiting rather than expanding on player creativity, and that, in a demonstration of one of the biggest criticisms of Third Edition, most of them weren't any good anyway, and fans have rose-tinted glasses about the handful of actually effective and/or poorly-designed and overpowered options they ever actually used. The major third party opinion is that Prestige Classes work better in video game adaptations, where players are managing entire parties of characters and advancement is accelerated over a comparatively short timeframe, and convention or short campaigns involving pre-built characters, which focus less on the advancement aspect and more on the character building aspect, and less well in long-running tabletop campaigns where a single level of advancement could take months of play. A common argument against Prestige Classes is that the first edition of Pathfinder did implement them, but it also featured an "Archetype" system of alternate class features^note which existed in 3.5 but never as extensively as in Pathfinder, and players abandoned Prestige Classes en masse the second there was a viable alternative. (Fans argue that this is because Pathfinder Prestige Classes were overspecialized and underpowered, more about realizing weird and esoteric setting concepts than actually being fun to play, although the core book featured several that were taken straight from Third Edition and none of them were particularly popular.) There's also an argument to be made that the popularity of Prestige Classes was more a function of bland base classes full of Empty Levels than their own merits, and that the base classes getting improved with actual class features in later editions and iterations did more to eat Prestige classes' lunch than any of the alternative systems ever did.
  • The retention of certain skill uses as class-exclusive, such as only Rogues having full capability to disarm magical traps, was especially debated early in the lifespan of the edition. As various entries gradually gave more ways to access these outside their usual class, the debate cooled a bit to mild frustration over "feat taxes" and build requirements.
  • Though often cited as one of the strengths of 3 and 3.5, some players disliked the free-form approach to feats, largely avoiding clean categories in favor of self-contained modular options that can be used in different ways by different builds, and combine with others in emergent ways.
  • The scaling involved in Psionics versus regular magic was hotly debated. Arcane and Divine magic scale based on caster level, but almost every spell has a hard cap (usually a multiple of 5). Psionic casters use a Mana Meter instead of Vancian Magic, with the maximum amount of power points they can spend set by their manifest level. By the time a party is high enough level to exceed the caps of bread and butter traditional spells like Fireball, psionic casters have such a wealth of power points that the theoretical trade-off of uncapped spells—ripping through their power reserve too quickly—is greatly mitigated. In return, they get the purest raw damage output in the game.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • 3rd Edition had "CoDzilla" (Cleric or Druid + Godzilla), in reference to the fact that those two classes had extremely powerful physical and magical abilities that allowed them to dominate the game.
  • Also, spiked chains. While being considered "exotic" weapons meant you had to spend a feat in order to use them, they were so popular with optimizers for letting you cheese opportunity attacks that one variation involving them got a strip to itself in The Order of the Stick.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: A well-recognized problem with Third Edition's design is that the developers deliberately made most character options weak and underpowered so that experienced players could have fun picking out the handful of actually good choices from the sea of mediocre dreck. A consequence of this is that, as the Internet grew into a powerful engine of information sharing, large numbers of feats, prestige classes, and other options quickly became pegged as "must haves."
  • If a Druid doesn't take Natural Spell at 6th level, it's probably been banned.
  • Swordsages get the most maneuvers known and readied of the three Martial Adept classes, but have the worst recovery (spend a full-round action to recover a single maneuver, making it highly likely that you only play every other turn for the rest of this combat). Adaptive Style is supposed to let Adepts swap their readied maneuvers in the middle of a fight, but every Swordsage winds up taking it because it incidentally refreshes ''all' your maneuvers as a full-round action.
  • Master Spellthief is such a feat for the Spellthief class. Besides being extremely useful if you're multiclassed with other arcane classes, it's recommended even for a straight Spellthief since it grants a caster level equal to class level, instead of half if baseline, as well as allowing to cast even stolen arcane spells in light armor.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Because of how well-balanced and unique it was, the Ardent was one of the few fondly-remembered things about Complete Psionic.
  • Fandom finds the other 2 classes in Tome of Magic to be awful, if not impossible to use. The Binder however is considered to hit the "Powerful enough to be fun to play, but weak enough to not be a Game-Breaker", and easily one of the most supported non-core classes by homebrew (possibly the most outside of Tome of Battle).
  • The warlock from Complete Arcane proved so popular it was promoted to a core class in later editions.
  • Meepo the Kobold. This little lizard-dude, originally just a kill-it-for-stuff encounter in the adventure The Sunless Citadel, was so popular that he made an appearance as an NPC in at least one other adventure, featured in a web-exclusive article in which he became a half-dragon were-velociraptor, and got whisked away to another dimension in which he obtained a magical pump-action shotgun. Truly, Meepo is the pinnacle of koboldian awesomesauce. He even makes a cameo in d20 modern.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Fighters. The preponderance of Empty Levels, generic fluff, lack of real features, and general incapability outside of combat give the Fighter something of a poor reputation among casual players and optimizers alike. Generally speaking, Fighters can still work as pure combat characters, especially if more sourcebooks are in play, but they lack the abilities to function well outside of their focus, and their abilities are fairly easy for other classes to copy. Some sourcebooks give them actual unique features, which helps a little, but still leaves them as a rather unfortunate baseline for melee characters.
  • Paladins do possess a number of unique features, and a rather handy ability in Divine Grace, which provides Charisma to saving throws, but their design is frontloaded, getting almost all their good abilities in their first few levels. They do learn a limited form of spellcasting, but it keys off Wisdom, leading to the class having notoriously high stat requirements. Add in low skill points and a Smite that deals less damage than you'd think, and you have a class that feels very undeserving of its notoriously strict Code of Conduct, being overshadowed by both Cleric and Crusader. That said, Paladin is fairly well-served by sourcebooks, thanks to alternate features like Charging Smite, better spells, or feats that let them use their Turn Undead to power more useful tricks, so it's at least functional.
  • Monks are noted for getting many abilities that are either done better with spells or gotten much quicker by other classes (over 20 levels they get the ability to reduce fall damage; that's a first level spell for a caster or 2000 gold for everyone else) and they don't synergize at all (Monks have one ability that makes them move fast, and another that requires them to stand still). In theory, it's meant as a high-mobility class with access to a lot of combat tricks; in practice, you have a class that doesn't hit hard, doesn't take hits well, and struggles to use those same combat tricks, leaving it too passive and nonthreatening to contribute in combat. It gets to the point that when asked to optimize a Monk, most suggestions are to play another class.
  • Tome of Magic's Truenamer centers around passing a skill check (Truespeak) to affect things with utterances (its equivalent to spells). However, this check scales up rapidly as the target gets stronger, at a faster rate than natural skill investment, and it gets higher for a given utterance each time a truenamer succeeds with it. This means that a Truenamer has to invest a massive portion of their build into boosting their Truespeak check, and failing to do so will lead to them struggling to affect anything on-level, friend or foe, with their abilities. Even once the Truenamer has minmaxed enough to pull themselves across that hurdle and use their utterances at will, they're left with a clunky and underpowered set of abilities that suffer from short durations, limited selection, poor scaling, weak effects, generally bad editing, and an additional handicap of being unable to have two of the same utterance active at once. It's not for nothing that the creator of the original Character Tiers refused to rate the class at all.
  • Complete Warrior Samurai, in the original outline of the various Tiers, is so low that it is actually ranked lower than Expert, an NPC-only class with versatile skill selection and no class features. There is literally nothing that a Samurai can do that a Fighter (already considered one of the lowest tiered classes) cannot do better while simultaneously doing many other things better than the Samurai. Its primary combat abilities are a rather weak Smite and receiving the Improved and Greater Two-weapon fighting feats for free five levels after someone building their character around such a style could, and having a weak crowd control ability via an Area of Effect Intimidate skill check. Though the Intimidate feature can actually be specced into somewhat to enable some rather powerful lockdown, even that is easily duplicated by other classes — yes, even the Fighter, with certain alternate class features. The best suggestion for playing a CW Samurai given by many is to get enough levels so that you can trade 10 levels in and become an Ex-Samurai 1/Ronin 10. Or better yet, don't play a Samurai at all.
  • Most of the Far-East themed classes from the Complete series are this way. Shugenja had incredibly limited spell selection to the point that the player chose very little of his character's core abilities. The fact that they were Divine casters (and thus able to cast in armor) was negated by their lack of armor proficiency and by having the worst Base Attack Bonus in the game (for comparison, most Divine casters get the medium Base Attack and medium or heavy armor proficiency). Wu Jen had weaker casting than wizards, and their "Spell Secret" class feature left them Blessed with Suck as it gave them free metamagic feats at the cost of crippling RP restrictions (each one came with a "taboo" that shut off the character's spell casting for the day if violated. And the metamagic feats weren't even the good ones!), meaning it holds the dubious honor of being the only class where Prestiging out is the only way to avoid crippling drawbacks. That said, they at least benefit from the natural casting bias in the game, which can't be said for Ninja — Ninjas are effectively just Rogues but worse, mixing in the worst traits of the Monk and nerfing two of the best parts of the Rogue in its skill points and sneak attack while providing ki abilities that are a lot less effective than relatively common magic items.
  • Due to their limited ability to do anything but heal, Healers tend to get a poor reputation. This is doubly so because healing just isn't held in high regard in 3.5, as in-combat, Rocket-Tag Gameplay is the order of the day and things like Cure Critical Wounds can't keep up with damage, and there are many ways to render out-of-combat healing trivial.
  • While Lurk is a Rogue with psychic powers, the Psychic Rogue is considered better due to not having their sneak attack rely on psionic focus. The class is still pretty good, but most people will point you towards the Psychic Rogue to do the same thing but better.
  • Divine Mind, meanwhile, is just considered downright bad. Aside from dubious at best fluff, it has a hellish early game due to the auras it generates being incredibly undertuned and having nonexistent range, and while it does learn Psychic Powers, it has them shackled to the clunkiness of mantles, takes a hit to its manifester level, and learns a total of nine over its entire advancement. It's telling when the class's sole useful ability is from a web enhancement, and even that's just being able to use an actual good power in Astral Construct.
  • Dragon Shamans are a classic Master of None. Their intended job is as a tanky support character with a bunch of auras that buff the rest of the party and a grab bag of dragon-related tricks. In practice, the auras aren't very strong, it doesn't do support even half as well as a Cleric, its melee combat prowess is mediocre, and even its dragon-related tricks are surprisingly lame. It's especially unfortunate in light of the Dragonfire Adept, which went for the same idea of "class with dragonlike abilities" but went whole-hog with them and came out looking considerably better.
  • The early levels are murder on a Shadowcaster, due to the harsh limitations on their abilities before they start to unlock higher-level Mysteries, as well as leaving them with a very restrictive build. Even once they've started mastering their Mysteries, they still aren't that strong relative to other caster-type classes, though they can at least do their jobs. Even the designer admits it to have come out of the oven early, claiming it to be a victim of poor playtesting.
  • Soulknife is a melee-focused class based on conjuring up a Laser Blade of mental energy... but unfortunately, said blade doesn't do a whole lot of damage, and though it gains weapon enhancements over time, said enhancements are behind wealth-by-level, making them typically worth less than the magic weapons everyone else is using. Aside from that, it also suffers from a similar issue to the Monk of lacking a clear role; half its features seem to want it to be a frontline martial with high HP and a grab bag of combat tricks while the other half push it towards a stealthy assassin with a Charged Attack, but it doesn't have the attack bonus or AC to work as the former or the infiltration skills to work as the latter. On top of all that, its gimmick is outdone by an alternate class feature for the Psychic Warrior.
  • Among prestige classes, this affects most of the "theurge" classes, which attempt to combine multiple types of casting by advancing two different types of it. The issue is that qualifying to become such a class almost always puts you so far behind your advancement in both that you end up as a Master of None, and since you can't actually cast both kinds of spells at once, you end up with merely being able to choose between a whole lot of inferior options. The only exceptions to this are generally those that can plausibly be entered with only one or two levels in one of the two classes involved.
• Obvious Beta: The book Tome of Magic gets visibly less polished as one goes deeper into it. The chapter on pact magic is more or less fine, with only a few occasional errors fixed in errata. The chapter on shadow magic is mechanically clunky, but still functions overall. The chapter on truename magic, meanwhile, is regarded as some of the most unfinished material the game ever saw. Even aside from the Truenamer itself being a deeply flawed class, there are an absolute mess of editing mistakes, missing information, contradictory rules, and unbalanced ideas. The most infamous one is probably that the DCs for the Lexicon of the Perfected Map utterances (representing about 1/4 of a truenamer's abilities) were absent from the book's printing, and had to be added in errata.
• Popular Game Variant: Playing it without house rules is nowadays pretty much unheard of. Popular ones include:
  • Critical hits in (A)D&D were house rule territory. A natural 20 might always hit regardless of the target's armor class, but that hit itself was still a perfectly normal one dealing standard damage with no additional effects by the rules as written. (Now, some magic items like wounding and vorpal weapons would have abilities going off on certain high to-hit rolls, but that was just part of their magic, not the overall combat rules.) Then in AD&D 2, critical hits became an "optional" rule in the book. Unfortunately, one of the suggested options for critical hits was that a natural 20 always hits and deals double damage, so anyone who could only be hit on a 20 effectively had half as many total hit points!
    • So "AD&D 2.5" (Player's Options) got two critical hits options, one of them being a reasonably detailed and unified way to use both Subsystem Damage and Hit Point systems. To handle really big critters (giants vs. zaratan sort of thing) "believably" it needed expansion of size categories, but its uniformity made this trivial.
  • "Confirming" critical hits. PO did it via victim's saving throw. D&D 3 did it via requiring a second attack roll — many players took the opportunity to house rule that part out since it slowed down play.
  • A number of late-run 3.0 books were designed to be easily adapted to 3.5, but still require certain degrees of interpretation.
  • The 3.5 book Unearthed Arcana was nothing but a collection of common house rules as official variant rules. Since it was released under the OGL license it's available as part of the SRD online.
  • Natural 1s and 20s are very frequent house rule targets across the board. Many DMs consider them automatic success/failure on almost any sort of roll, and sometimes add additional effects to be rolled on a natural 20. By default, the only normal rolls affected in any special way by a natural 1 or 20 are attack rolls, saves, and the Use Magic Device skill. (In fact, some books explicitly state that 1 and 20 are not special on skill checks, but many DMs make them special anyway) One solution made a better use of the "exploding dice" probability regression mechanics AD&D2 had for firearms. Another used extra condition "and beat the target number by X", used in PO.
  • Rather than simply an automatic hit or miss, there are numerous homebrew tables for adding extra effects to critical hits and fumbles. Opinions are divided on these, though, as while they might make a fight more colorful, they tend to disproportionately affect the martial characters who make far more rolls than the mages. Some DMs split the difference and prefer to just narratively describe the action (or encourage the player to do so) without mechanically altering the outcome.
  • The 3.x Diplomacy rules are particularly conspicuous, as, by the book, a focused character can persuade a horde of bloodthirsty enemies he does not share a language with to "take risks to aid" him in approximately six seconds. Unfortunately, some common house rules result in things like noblemen refusing to accept taxes from peasants because the deal of "I give you money for nothing" isn't rewarding enough to overcome the level difference.
  • Probably one of the most popular house rules in the 3rd Edition is adding experience points after each accomplishment (eg. defeating a monster) instead of at the end of each adventure (as suggested in Player's Handbook). Obviously the limit of one level-up per adventure is usually omitted as well.
  • The complete inverse is popular, too: ignore all of the math around tracking experience points, and everyone levels up when the GM says so. Removing that bit of accounting saves sanity for both GMs and players. It does, however, interact problematically with magic item creation, spells, and other systems that involve spending experience points. Lots of house rules, in fact, revolve around ignoring unwieldy rules or not tracking cumbersome equipment.
  • Many groups implement more generous ability score generation methods than the defaults listed in the book or allow rerolls when a character is stuck with nigh unplayable stats. This was more common in earlier editions when Honest Rolls Character was the default (six ability scores rolled in order with no rerolls). With 3rd Edition, the rules were changed to favor above average rolls (since the main characters are heroes) and to allow a complete set of rolls to be thrown out if they didn't meet certain minimum criteria. Point buy is also an official rule variant. So now, the Honest Rolls Character is a house rule.
  • Different groups have different rules on when you are allowed to reroll dice. Some say that you have to take the roll regardless of whether the die falls in the toilet, while other groups say that if the die hits something on the table (and you don't like the result) you can reroll it. Of course, the latter rule requires honest players who don't deliberately throw dice at obstacles.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Psionicists were generally hated in earlier editions, and the 3rd Edition Psionics Handbook seemed ready to continue that trend. The Expanded Psionics Handbook trimmed the fat, gave psionics a genuinely unique system, and then built on the foundation of that system. Those familiar with 3.5 will usually judge it as the first time psionics was actually genuinely fun, and considerably more balanced than its casting counterpart.
  • Bards in 3e were designed to be the Jack of All Trades, but ended up being an infamous case of Master of None. 3.5 pulled them out of this, building them into Difficult, but Awesome support casters and silver-tongued charmers.
  • Various Alternate Class Features both improved the Fighter's overall power and gave it actual, unique skills. The two most beloved are the Dungeoncrasher and the Zhentarim Soldier — particularly since they can be used in tandem. Before those came along, a character with more than four levels in Fighter was considered a Scrub; after that, 9th-level Fighters aren't uncommon.
  • Giving Healers access to Sanctified Spells from the Book of Exalted Deeds gives them a fair amount of additional options in combat other than healing (which is perfectly legal by the rules of Sanctified Spells, as Healers are all good-aligned spellcasters who prepare their spells).
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Truenamer's Law of Resistance, which makes it harder to use the same utterance in a day, and the Law of Sequence, which makes it impossible to use an utterance again while an earlier casting of it is still active. If you've jacked up Truespeak enough to not worry about the inherent Game-Breaking Bug, one or both of these is going to be a serious problem in your near future.

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