Looking at D&D v. 3.5

Update note

This review is not like my other reviews because, well, a revision to the D&D Core Rulebooks isn't like just another product. The issues surrounding these updated books, which should be released next week, are too complex for me to simply award my standard 1-to-10 rating. So what I've written instead is an extended essay that looks at the new books.

This article has three parts. First comes some background about D&D 3.0 and 3.5, which helps put my opinions in context. The second is a long discussion about what I believe should and should not have been in 3.5 as a revision. The third part examines some of the particular changes and rates them on their own merit.

In a nutshell, here's what I think: This revision is too much, too soon. In fact, it's much more than just a "revision." That said, most of the changes it presents are good. The bad changes, thankfully, won't have a huge impact on your game.

But, before I really get into the review, let me say that I'm aware that it's a touchy situation for me to even be writing this at all. Aside from the fact that I'm friends with most, if not all, of the people who worked on 3.5, there's an obvious bias on my part, having worked on 3.0. It would be very simple to dismiss any of my negative comments with, "Oh, that's just sour grapes talking," or, "He's just trying to convince you to buy his competing product, Arcana Unearthed."

Let me address these quickly:

Sour Grapes: While it's true that I worked on 3.0 and am very proud of it, there's a much larger, more realistic bias going on that you might not have considered. I am very much attached to D&D, in whatever form it takes -- not only as a gamer, but as a publisher. If I'm going to make a living producing books that support D&D, I need for D&D to be good. In fact, a part of me is saying, "Shut up and pretend it's all golden so people will buy it and keep playing." That would be a deep dishonesty, however. I do hope that people keep playing the game, and, in fact, I hope 3.5 does well, for Wizards of the Coast's well being (both for my friends there and for D&D's sake).

Still, you only have my word that I'm trying to write around these inherent biases, which make me lean both ways at once. You might want to read the review anyway, and form your own opinion. I can, for example, offer a few insights into some of the 3.5 changes as they relate to the 3.0 design process.

Arcana Unearthed: You've most likely heard me say it before, but I'll say it again. Arcana Unearthed is not "my 3.5". It's not meant to make you throw out your old Player's Handbook, it's not "what Monte would do with D&D if he could," or anything like that. It was planned and announced before 3.5, and it is only a coincidence that it is coming out at the same time as 3.5.
Lastly, let me point out that I'm going to try to keep my review focused only on the 3.5 changes, not on D&D itself, as I have an obvious policy against reviewing anything I worked on.

The Beginning of the Story
A few weeks ago, in an interview at gamingreport.com I said that 3.5 was motivated by financial need rather than by design need -- in short, to make money rather than because the game really needed an update. I said that I had this information from a reliable source.

That source was me. I was there.

See, I'm going to let you in on a little secret, which might make you mad: 3.5 was planned from the beginning.

Even before 3.0 went to the printer, the business team overseeing D&D was talking about 3.5. Not surprisingly, most of the designers -- particularly the actual 3.0 team (Jonathan Tweet, Skip Williams, and I) thought this was a poor idea. Also not surprisingly, our concerns were not enough to affect the plan. The idea, they assured us, was to make a revised edition that was nothing but a cleanup of any errata that might have been found after the book's release, a clarification of issues that seemed to confuse large numbers of players, and, most likely, all new art. It was slated to come out in 2004 or 2005, to give a boost to sales at a point where -- judging historically from the sales trends of previous editions -- they probably would be slumping a bit. It wasn't to replace everyone's books, and it wouldn't raise any compatibility or conversion issues.

Here I sit, in 2003, with my reviewer's copies of the 3.5 books next to my computer, and that's not what I see. It's not difficult to see how that could have happened, however. The business team for 3.0 (and I'm talking about Ryan Dancey and Keith Strohm here) are gone. Skip's gone. Jonathan's working on miniatures games. I'm gone. It's an interesting truism that in the corporate world, where long-term planning is a must but the length of time an employee stays in any one position is short, business teams and design teams rarely last long enough to see their plans come to fruition. Thus the people to propose something are almost never the people who implement it.

So, one has to surmise that the new business team determined that sales were slumping slightly earlier than predicted and needed 3.5 to come out earlier. One also has to surmise that someone -- at some level -- decided that it was to be a much, much more thorough revision than previously planned. Some of this is probably just human nature (two of the 3.0 designers were out of the way, and one would only work at Wizards of the Coast for about half the design time) and some of it is probably the belief that more revenue would be generated with more drastic changes. The philosophy of 3.5 has changed from being a financial "shot in the arm" into something with significant enough changes to make it a "must-buy." Perhaps they thought to strive for the sales levels of 2000. Perhaps there was corporate pressure to reach those sales levels again.

Revision or New Edition?
3.5 is aptly named. It is neither a revision nor an actual new edition, but something in between. "3.5" implies something that's not quite 3 and not quite 4, and that's accurate. This is not meant to be a compliment, however.

You see, while some of the changes are merely revisions, many are also completely different rules. Despite what Wizards has said, there are conversion issues between 3.0 and 3.5 (your gnome illusionist with Spell Focus and boots of haste is going to be a fairly different character in 3.5). Many of the changes, some of them even good ones, are ones I would never have allowed in a "revision," but only in a new edition.

Allow me to clarify. If I were in charge of the world (or at least D&D), I'd make sure that in a revision, there were no actual rules changes that could retroactively alter a character or a campaign. Changing the price of magic item, clarifying an unclear rules, even adding a new piece of equipment or tweaking a spell is not going to significantly alter anyone's character or campaign. But if I'm running a 3.0 game (which I am) and was going to switch over completely to 3.5 (which I'm not), I'd have to deal with all kinds of changes to the game. Suddenly it costs a lot more to bring someone back from the dead. Suddenly dwarven armor is made of adamantite rather than mithral. Suddenly devas are called angels. Suddenly half-elves are the best diplomats in the game. And so on. You might see some or all of these things as good changes -- some of them are. But in my definition of a revision, they just shouldn't be part of these books. This is 4th Edition material. I shouldn't have to change my campaign just because Wizards needed cash.

Is the game significantly better because random action has been renamed to lesser confusion or that word of recall is now a Conjuration school spell? Was the Alchemy skill really ruining so many games that it needed to be recast as Craft (alchemy)? Are chaotic weapons better now that they're "anarchic?" The fact that endure elements now only protects against extremes of temperature is okay, but is it better? It's difficult to think of a justification as to why.

When we were designing 3.0, one of our guiding principles was, "If you're going to make a change, make it clearly a change." The reason for this guideline is that subtle changes are confusing. New editions shouldn't be any more confusing than necessary. Revisions shouldn't be confusing at all. Changing spell names, changing feat names, switching around the skills, and so on are subtle changes. Why are subtle changes bad, particularly for a revision? Because they trip players up and encourage bad decisions. "I cast bull's strength," a player states, confident that he knows how the spell works, because he's cast it many times before. The DM opens up the Player's Handbook and runs the new spell write-up, which is just different enough from what the player remembered to completely change everything.

During the design of 3.0, one of the things that we realized was a huge strength of D&D is a concept we called "mastery." Mastery, in this context, is the idea that an avid fan of the game is going to really delve into the rules to understand how they work. We actually designed 3.0 with mastery in mind. For example, we created subsystems that worked like other systems, so that if you knew how one worked, you'd find the other one easier to understand. But I digress.

Anyway, the changes in 3.5 are so pervasive, and some of them so subtle, that any mastery people had achieved is gone. "Oh come on, Monte," one might reply, "the changes aren't that bad." I'm not even talking about "good" or "bad" here. The problem is that there are just enough changes that a player has to question everything. Even if fireball didn't really change, after you've had to re-learn how wall of force, flame arrow, and polymorph work, how can you be sure? Welcome to the game sessions where you've got to look everything up again. With 3.0, it was our plan to get people past that stage as quickly as possible. Obviously, 3.5 demonstrates that plan is no longer in motion and that mastery has been abandoned as a goal. With 3.5 coming out this quickly with this level of change, you can be sure that in three years, 4th Edition will have as many or more. And the cycle of learning and relearning will simply continue.

I've heard current D&D designers and editors say that once they got used to 3.5 and tried to go back and play a 3.0 game, they couldn't remember what had and hadn't changed or how anything worked. If that's true of the designers, why is Wizards inflicting this confusion upon the audience?

But aside from the subtle changes, the "revision" also has some major changes. Virtually every monster is different. Your specialist wizard character might need to be redone. Your bard, ranger, and monk certainly will be. Damage reduction has been completely overhauled, as has size and facing for creatures larger than Medium-size. What on earth are changes of this magnitude doing in a revision? Changes of this magnitude seem to suggest only two possible explanations: (1) That these rules were so broken before that the game was unplayable; or (2) That the amount of change in the books was artificially increased beyond what was needed to force the player base to buy all new rulebooks. I've seen no evidence of the former, despite years of working professionally with the rules and paying attention to feedback on message boards and in personal email.

What We've Been Given
But you're going to buy 3.5 anyway. This is the D&D we've got. So let's talk about the actual changes that are going to occur to your game. I'm not going to make a comprehensive list of all the changes -- that would take many, many pages -- but rather talk about those indicative of the whole.

The Good Things
I'll start with the things I really liked. Some of these might cross the line I discussed above regarding the differences between revisions and editions, but let's move past that and take them on their own merits.

In no particular order:

* It now costs half as much for wizards to scribe spells into their spellbooks. The cost in 3.0 unfairly penalized the wizard for adding new spells to his repertoire. The 3.5 price allows the wizard to more adequately dwell on his strength, which is having a huge list of spells to draw upon. It took a lot of play to realize this, and I wish we had realized it earlier.

* Rangers and barbarians have more interesting abilities at higher levels. It comes as no surprise to regulars at montecook.com that I regret that we didn't spend more time in particular on the ranger. I've created two variant rangers myself. The 3.5 ranger shares a few things in common with my variant rangers, but also does some interesting new things. Basically, the 3.5 ranger can go off on two tracks-one for archers and one for two-weapon wielders.

* Bards have more of their own unique spells (and are a better class to play in general). Much like with rangers, I have felt in the past that the bard is somewhat underpowered. I don't think the bard was as bad off as the ranger, but he needed a bit of a boost. When I did a variant bard in Book of Eldritch Might II, I created a whole new subsystem for magical music. I said back then, though, that of course the Player's Handbook had no room for such a thing, even had I thought to do it way back when. The 3.5 designers did the next best thing, though, and gave the bard more spells unique to him such as glibness, song of discord, and sympathetic vibration.

* There are rules for special familiars like pseudo dragons. This is the kind of really interesting thing that makes D&D so great, and is, in my opinion, great DMG material.

* Sorcerers can change out their known spells when they become useless (or simply were bad choices). Not much more to say about this. It's just good.

* Druid animal companions advance as the druid does. While the druid could always get better companions, it's a better flavor issue to have the same ones advance, so that you can grow attached to them. It's more personal, and it synchs up better with the leadership/cohort rules.

* Githyanki and githzerai are in the Monster Manual. I'd wanted them in there in the first place, but they were saved for the Psionics Handbook. They're very interesting monsters and deserve to be right there in the D&D spotlight.

* Demons and devils are tougher. The big problem with fiends in 3.0 was that they had a lot of cool powers but didn't last long enough in the fight to use them. Now they are truly formidable foes.

* Monster skills and feats are more standardized. There were methods for generating monster skills and feats in 3.0, but they didn't work like characters and they all worked differently from each other, based on monster type. Now, I'm certain that the change was made to help facilitate monster characters -- monsters with classes -- but I like it more because it's more cohesive.

* Harm and heal are more balanced. Harm being the more broken of the two -- a real dragon-killer -- these spells now have level-based limits on how much they harm or heal.

* Blade barrier is now playable. It was a messed-up spell before, something that simply slipped through the 3.0 cracks. A clear goof on our part. And now it works nicely.

* Some potions are now oils, helping the logic of what can and can't be a potion. Again, clearly one of those things I would have liked to go back and do myself, this is all handled quite elegantly now. I was never satisfied with the fact that flavor issues -- based on what had and hadn't been a potion in 1st Edition and 2nd Edition -- unnecessarily narrowed the options for what spells could be made into potions. (Here's a "behind the curtain" secret about potions-nothing about the limiting of potions, price-wise, has anything to do with balance. It's all flavor. There's nothing unbalancing even if you wanted to make potions of magic missile. It's just weird.)

* The glossaries and indexes are even better. They just are. The glossary explanations can get a little wordy, but most of the additional verbiage is really helpful.

Now, you'll notice three things when reading the above points. First, these are some big issues, and they're all good. These good points not only outnumber my criticisms, but they are far more significant issues. Second, each of them points out a shortcoming of 3.0, which I worked on. They fix mistakes we made-that I made. Third, some of these good points contradict much of what I said above about the changes of 3.5 being too great and too pervasive. I still believe that to be true, but once you get past that matter of principle and simply look at each change on its own merit (as in, if they'd come about a few years down the road in a new edition rather than in a revision), they are demonstrably good.

The Bad Things
Putting aside the stuff about what should or shouldn't be in these books, there were a few of what I would call actual bad design choices made in 3.5.

In no particular order:

* Facing (now called space) is now always square. In order to facilitate miniatures play (apparently), horses are no longer 5 feet by 10 feet when you put them on a grid, they're a 10-foot square. The horse has to "squeeze" to get through a 5 foot wide space. Three 9-foot-tall ogres require a 30-foot-wide passage in order to walk abreast. D&D, with its already abstract combat system, did not need this extra layer of abstraction. Not to mention the fact that this changes game play in strange ways, such as how many of the charging ogres you can get with your fireball spell.

* The game has an even stronger focus on miniatures. 3.0 had a strong focus on miniatures, but we wanted to at least address the fact that you might not want to play the game that way. But everyone in the Wizards of the Coast offices does, and so now you have to as well. And Wizards has a new line of miniatures to sell you. Seriously, though, for those wanting to play the game sitting on the couch, the game now offers a new barrier for you. The Combat chapter in the Player's Handbook now reads like a miniatures game. More and more of the game stats use "squares" rather than feet (or both). This is a huge step backward toward the "inches" used in 1st Edition.

* Now weapons are organized by handedness rather than by size. Perhaps the worst change and almost certainly the largest step backward 3.5 has to offer, the new way of handling weapons causes a lot of problems. As you know, in 3.0, weapons were categorized by size, and that size was compared to your own size. So a weapon of your size was a one-handed weapon for you, a weapon one size larger was a two-handed weapon, and a weapon one size smaller was a light weapon. Now, weapons are categorized by handedness, and they do different damage based on size. Thus, it's no longer the case that a longsword is effectively a greatsword for a Small character and a short sword for a Large character. Now, there is a small longsword, a medium longsword (and by implication) a large longsword. So what's the difference between a large longsword and a medium greatsword? About 20 gp. Aside from that bit of humor, though, there's actually a serious design problem here. Because in 3.0, a halfling picks up a magical longsword and uses it in two hands -- no problem. In 3.5, that longsword (presumably a medium longsword) is -2 in the halfling's hands because it's the "wrong size." The DMG doesn't hint one way or the other, but logic assumes that you've either got to roll randomly to determine the size of the magic sword in the treasure hoard, decreasing the chances that any given character will actually find treasure he can use -- and that's not fun. It's more complicated, it's clunky, and it hurts game play.

* The NPC tables in the DMG are now more open ended, and thus less useful. The NPC tables used to be there when you needed a 7th-level fighter or a 13th-level rogue right then and there, in the middle of a game. They came completely statted up and equipped. Now, if you want to use them in that way, you've got to stop in the middle of the game and decide which weapons the fighter uses and spend 8,000 gp on gear for the rogue. Thus, they are useless for the original goal. I guess the designers felt the charts were "boring," because you got the same 7th-level fighter every time. Now, they are clearly meant to be used as pre-game development aids to help make NPCs. Unfortunately, each 7th-level fighter is still going to be an awful lot like every other one using this method. What's more, if you're not in the middle of the game, there's no reason not to just make one up from scratch (or use one of the excellent character generators out there, many of which are free online).

* The duration for ability score enhancing spells has been drastically shortened. Talk about changing the way the game is played. Cat's grace used to last an hour per level, mostly so you could cast it, adjust your stats, and not have to worry about it until you rested (again, it was that way to make game play easier and more fun). Now it lasts one minute per level, which means it sees you through one encounter, or two if you rush in between them. These spells have been rendered nearly worthless -- in particular a spell like endurance, now bear's endurance, for extra hit points are far more useful over the long term than just for one encounter, particularly for those who really need it, like wizards.

* Lots of the new feats are the kind that just add a +2 bonus to two skills. For this we paid $90 for new books?
* Inevitables are now in the Monster Manual. I (and a legion of 2nd Edition Planescape fans) miss the clockwork modrons these guys supplanted for some reason. Chalk it up to personal preference.

* Taking levels of a prestige class now apparently forces you to pay multiclassing XP costs. Whether intentionally or by accident, the prestige class chapter no longer states that they are free of this cost.

* Some of the new prestige classes are uninteresting (eldritch knight, mystic theurge) and poorly designed. A cleric just falls into the requirements of the hierophant and any 5th-level sorcerer can become a dragon disciple. The requirements for the eldritch knight are also a joke. I won't rehash the whole mystic theurge debate here, but I will complain that there are far too many spellcasting prestige classes -- conceptually, having the archmage, the loremaster, and the Red wizard seems rather silly.

* Lots of the "new" material in the DMG is just pulled in from other products -- prestige classes from the various 3.0 supplements, a big chunk of the Manual of the Planes, and the traps from Song and Silence. Lots of D&D fans already own this material.

* There are no playtester credits. At all.

Things that should have changed, but didn't:

* Caster level is still a prerequisite for magic item creation. This was an error in the 3.0 DMG and remains. You still have to be 17th level to make a 1st-level pearl of power.

* Speaking of magic items, while the rules for pricing magic items have changed (in some cases, particularly those of constant items or 1 round/level spells), most of the prices haven't conformed to these changes.

* Keoghtom's Ointment: Why is this a wondrous item and not a potion/oil?

* Still no good guidelines for creating prestige classes, just more of them in the DMG.

* And the big one: The vast majority of the art in the books is the same. So we're expected to plunk down $90 for three books that cost us $60 three years ago, and most of the art is the same?

In Closing
If a lot of the changes I take issue with had appeared in a supplement full of optional rules, this would be a very different review. But this isn't just the latest book from Wizards of the Coast, it's Dungeons & Dragons. I'm sure polar ray is a fine spell, but is it so important that it needed to be in a new version of the game? I'm partial to some of the spells in my own Books of Eldritch Might, but does that mean they belong in the Player's Handbook? I say no.

And ultimately, that's why I decided to write this review. These are the D&D Core Rulebooks we're talking about. If Wizards needs a must-buy product, they should put out a cool mega-adventure by Bruce Cordell like Return to the Tomb of Horrors, not change around the game we all know how to play.

There are good changes here, and some much needed errata-fixing and clarifying. There's no doubt, that at some time, we needed a revised set of books. It should have been the revision as planned three years ago, however.

However much I might disagree with the timing of this release and the magnitude of the changes, though, the fact is that none of my criticisms of the new material are so damning as to wreck the game. D&D is still a good game, whether it's 3.0 or 3.5.

Should you buy 3.5? Frankly, of course you should. The books are out, and if keeping up with future D&D and d20 products is important to you, you'll want to know what's up. And, once you finally get up to speed on the changes and toss out the bad ones, your game will be fine. In some ways, it will be better than it was. I predict that the majority of existing players out there will buy 3.5, and then house rule some of it back to 3.0. House rules, in fact, will become much more varied and prevalent from this point on -- but that's a whole 'nother article.

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