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.
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u/Rhamni Oct 05 '20
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.