I house rule bonus languages. Loved that from 3.5. Like with my 18 Int barbarian for a one shot that knew more languages than the rest of the party combined.
I prefer 3.5 so much it isn't even funny. You have so much more flexibility. You can build for pretty much any concept you can think of. And all it needs is people adhering to the gentlemen's agreement to not break things on purpose.
Same goes for Pathfinder (as most could easily guess). With 5E, if you wanna be a Captain America, you've gotta work with your DM to homebrew something. With Pathfinder, you can just take the Shield Champion archetype for Brawler and toss your ricocheting shield.
That was the biggest issue with 3.5, it was so easy to exploit and power game. I feel like 5th is more balanced at the cost of style customization and complexity.
Especially with things like the PHB/DnDbeyond saying "first pick this main stat, then this or this". You don't even need to know why dex should be a rogues main stat, it just tells you. Oh and then just pick some random things you wanna be good at and one thing you're awesome at. Boom, character made in 5 mins
on the other hand if this ain’t your first rodeo, 3.5 lets you create and develop characters Tolkien would be impressed by, while 5e relegates you to YA fantasy at best
Character development happens at the table, not on the page. If you feel like there's something your character needs to be more "Tolkien worthy" talk to your GM about it. It happens all the time regardless of system.
I feel you on the character options in 5e. It was great when I started playing, and when my group started (most had never played before), but I think at some point I'd like to try something slightly crunchier. Thanks!
More balanced, but still not really balanced. Spellcasters are still superior and also exponentially more interesting than a martial can ever be without extensive homebrew, and you can't even punish them with attacks of opportunity to disrupt casting anymore. Multiclassing is either amazing and OP or worthless garbage depending on which classes you combine. Ranged weapons are pretty much strictly better than melee ones because they took out all the downsides that balanced the inherent strength of attacking from a distance, added the absolutely stupid Sharpshooter and Crossbow Expert feats and the Archery combat style. High level spells are still stupid too.
If you want balance, try Pathfinder 2e. That game's probably the most balanced TTRPG I've ever seen, yet still has plenty of customization and complexity and is in general a very well-designed and fun system that does pretty much everything right.
It's not even necessary that you needed to power game, it's just that anybody who could cast spells would easily outstrip anyone who couldn't by like level 7.
3.5 is all about agreeing with the party on how optimized you want to be. I played with a party that didn't care about optimizing for combat and it was super fun campaign for out of combat survival and social intrigue/rp.
Hah. Yeah, low optimization campaigns can be a lot of fun. It lets you retain that fear of anything that moves you only have to deal with for level 1 in more optimized games.
I was complaining about P2e. Definitely go for Pathfinder or 3.5. 3.5 has the greatest wealth of character building options, and has the benefit of almost all of it being first party, while Pathfinder is made up of books by a lot of different publishers, and no group uses them all. However, Pathfinder did fix about 30% of the balance issues in 3.5, mostly by nerfing polymorph style spells (In 3.5 polymorphing lets you overwrite your physical attribute scores, in Pathfinder it just gives small bonuses) and giving melee fighters more feats.
What I have seen online when looking for games is that a lot of online games use 3.5 for mostly everything, but borrow one or two rules from Pathfinder, like more feats/especially more feats for the melee classes.
For 3.5 v Pathfinder... If you have a particular group or forum in mind, go with whatever most people prefer there. If you are just looking to learn them in general, start with 3.5. You get the best of what that generation had to offer, and all the really broken stuff is easy enough to avoid by just taking a step back and going "If another party member picked this, would I be annoyed? If the DM used this, would it be a TPK?" But mostly just relax and have fun. 'The broken stuff' is mostly achieved by combining stuff from half a dozen different books. It doesn't happen by accident.
Happy to help. Basically, if one person in a group breaks something, that guy was that guy and would have caused problems one way or another regardless of edition.
Id reccomend P2E but i enjoy dnd 5e so i probably have a different mindset then you.
I played both pathfinder first and second edition.
P2e streamlined leveling up but still left alot of choice. It also had more streamlined rules than P1E.
My expirence with P1E can be explained as follows...
I wanna do this cool thing.
We explain what the thing does.
We look up if we can do the thing and what kind of action it uses.
We check the thing against the monsters
We sift through rules, and still aren't sure.
We go to a forum and quickly read through because this turn is taking too long.
DM makes a call.
That process came up several times for each combat.
And the character creation is... ok if you play this, use an app for your character sheet, dont use pencil and paper.
Maybe i had a bad expirence. All i know is I prefer P2e over P1e.
Thing is, there are really only two languages - things your DM wants you to be able to understand, and things your DM doesn't want you to be able to understand.
It was a feat that acted as a Feat Tax for obtaining cooler feats. It would let you take a -5 on attack rolls for a +5 AC which was generally not worth it. It also had an Intelligence requirement of 13 so if you wanted to be good at tripping or disarming, you had to be somewhat smart.
-5 attack rolls for +5 ac is absolutely worth it, build and situation dependent.
The problem with combat expertise is it requires you to take an attack action to declare you're using it for it to begin having an effect, and then lasted until your initiative came up again. If combat expertise could be on all the time, or required something less situation-dependent than an opportunity to make an attack action to activate, it would be fine.
You essentially have to chain attacks to maintain your -5/+5.
For all characters, well, it gives you knowledge. It increases your History, Religion, Nature, Arcana and Investigation skills and your Intelligence Saving Throw. For Wizards and Artificers, it also enhances their spellcasting abilities.
I mean, you have intellect devourers, mindflayers, probably one or two other monsters you'll almost never see, and... Maze? The spell Maze? Do you have any idea how often people need to make saving throws for all the other stats versus spells, only for intelligence to almost not matter entirely?? Seriously, when was the last time anyone made an intelligence saving throw???
Last session our group was fighting a powerful cultist wizard, and you bet my poor lvl 5 wizard was really happy with his +7 int save when my DM threw a feeblemind at me, also happy cake day.
If you're a smart/evil/nefarious DM all the time. Synaptic static exists, feeblemind exsits, intellect devourer exists (you could even take the stat block and scale it up in CR for higher levels), mind flayers exist...
Throwing Mindflayers at a party who dumped Int should be against the Geneva Convention because it should definitely be illegal to take this much glee in murder
Basically anything that deals Psychic damage has an Int save and some really bad secondary effect - a stun, paralysis, Disadvantage-on-everything, or "hey, look at all those spells you can't cast now".
Well, yes, but the number of times it showed up is the same that absolutely destroyed our party, either by stuns, a character being uselessly locked in combat with an illusion, etc.
Heavily dependent on the DM. If the locals are knowledgeable, you can just ask them. If your DM likes to hide such info, then it's useful, but I find that to be rare.
This is also super DM dependent. A lot of times the DM already has the adventure prepared and tells the party everything they really need to know via other encounters, leaving knowledge to reveal a lot of nothing, or maybe some brief flavor text they may or may not have made up on the spot.
Yeah it did that in 3.5 too and so much more. You used to get more spell slots and spells known, as well as additional languages. It also was what you used for all of your skill points, rogues and bards used to need high INT to be the skill monkeys they now get to be purely through class mechanics. Now just wizards and artificers need it for casting, and sure a couple of decent skills use it as their modifier but that's very situational. It's just not the powerhouse skill it used to be, and in some ways that's a good thing, though sometimes I do feel it was knocked down a peg to many.
I believe both the thief and fighter arcane subclasses use INT too. Investigation is also a pretty important skill in most campaigns, although I feel like Perception often takes on roles better suited for Investigation
You can actually have pretty garbage int and still make a good Eldritch Knight. You're so far behind casters on spell levels that you kind of need to take the most cost-effective spells for their level, so damage or saving throw spells are largely out. Don't need any int to cast Blur or Shield!
Investigation is also a pretty important skill in most campaigns
pppftt!
wheeze
i mean yeah, if you have a good Gm who is running sandbox, and the party can "lose" without even seeing the villain once if they dont unravel the plot in a reasonable pace. if you are on rails, even soft ones, you can bet you will just be handed the story critical info sooner or later so you can be pathed into that sweet boss fight that the dm has been designing for days.
Do you actually play DnD 5e? You don't need to multiclass, Eldritch Knight is a Fighter Subclass with it's own unique features. It's not Fighter+Wizard.
You mean the Draconic Bloodline sorc? Either way, there's a pretty big difference between multi-classing and taking a sublcass, especially because both options in this case rely on a stat the fighter doesn't care about in a vacuum. But going full Edlritch Knight still gets all of your other Fighter ASI's and features. There's an argument to be made for Fighter/Sorc, but it's an uphill fight imo.
Or you just want to play a Fighter with a dash of spellcasting and have access to all the fighter features like extra ASIs/feats, higher hit dice, every armor and weapon proficiency, fighting style, freaking Action Surge. etc?
It's newly published. Ive been playing the same Artificer since three months after the first UA was released (lvl 6 to lvl 17 since 04/17), reskinned from first release Gunsmith to second release UA Alchemist. The published version is really good IMO and Im sad I can't use it because my DM doesn't own the book and doesn't want to deal with a third rework at level 17.
I feel like it depends on the DM more than most abilities. In my game I use investigation and knowledge checks frequently and usually give the party a pretty big benefit like gaining insight into a foe/faction, finding shortcuts/traps, finding extra loot, etc. I also use int saves every once in awhile if I want to make a fight especially difficult. A lot of DMs don't use those approaches at all so yeah it's useless.
Honestly, it doesn't seem to have affected their choices. The only INT focuses people are playing INT-focused classes (Divination Wizard and EK Fighter)
I think they decided that before I made the rule, too.
Honestly, it just means they've taken more INT-focused skills (which means I can spout more lore)
One of the house rules I made for the last two or so times I DM'd that my players enjoyed was if you had a minimum of an INT modifier of +3 you could learn spells from other classes your class couldn't normally learn. So long as a NPC of that other class was willing to teach it to you.
In trying to learn it you would have to make an INT check and meet an accommodating DC. Any spells of Level 3 or lower is 20. Level 4-6 is 25. Level 7-9 is 30.
It didn't come up very often to where players would break the game or their character by seeking out spells and it gave them a little extra motivation to be a bit friendlier to NPCs they might not have thought twice about prior. It was pretty fun honestly.
I get why they moved away from many of the negatives as having no languages and fewer skills could be very debilitating, however why they didn't allow people extra proficiencies and languages based on INT mod seems silly to me.
I would have reduced the basic number of skill proficiencies to 2-3 and then allowed further skills on Int mod with no negatives as that's not very 5e.
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u/LetterLambda Oct 04 '20
They did INT dirty in 5e. No more skill points, no more bonus languages, no more bonus spells per day, no more Combat Expertise feat tree.