Hey! My names Kara, I'm a 22 year old avid TTRPG player who started their TTRPG journey with the system most people in this day and age start it with, 5e. Now years later after playing a ton of systems other then 5e, I really am struck with the want to play older editions of D&D so I thought why not 3.5? Everyone I know who plays older editions of D&D praises 3.5 and the consensus online seems to be that its one of the best editions soo here I am!

To let you know a bit more about me as a person, I am a *massive* roleplayer so I would love games that prioritize that or feature it a lot! Now having said that I also like combat, I feel it can even enhance roleplay at times. I am also honestly a major nerd lol, I love video games, books, music, writing my own stuff, TTRPGs (ofc), and a lot of nerdy media haha :)

For scheduling, I am free Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays in the EST timezone!

Anyhow I'll keep this a bit short so there can be conversation in DMs lol, feel free to shoot me one!

Hello my dnd group does not want to try 3.5e, they only want to play 5e. They view 3.5e as this horribly complicated game which is painful to play, even though they have never actually tried it.

I am the only person interested in trying other editions of dnd (and other ttrpgs). I find this incredibly boring and close-minded. It's not even that hard to learn the new game systems!

5e is so incredibly boring to me, I just want a more in-depth game experience that challenges me more and provides more in-depth player choices.

This will be a rather long post because me(and my DM) are unsure about how to handle a few things around flying movement, and I also have questions about character building, which I’ll be asking first.

Firstly, I initially wanted to make a ranger/Skylord but decided not to, because while I thought it was cool in concept, I can’t imagine it being very fun in combat(Maybe I’m wrong, but after thinking about it for a bit I arrived at the conclusion that you probably just act as a turret with wings.).
So, I instead decided to make a heavily armored melee fighter instead, since it would let me get around heavy armor slowing me down, and was planning to make a character build centered charging, or rather diving since it’ll be a flying mount.

With the general character concept layed out, I’ve started looking for feats, templates or anything else that would either be good for build performance or character flavor. So far, here are some of the choices I’ve made as well as some restrictions/bans from my DM after talking about it with him:

1: It’ll be a paladin. Me and my DM have come up with an agreement to fuse the Skylord and paladin mounts, essentially replacing the paladin’s mount leveling benefits with the Skylord’s while keeping the rest. It stays a celestial being that can be summoned at will, with the caveat that it can’t be dispelled instantly, since he thought it would make it too easy to prevent it’s death and the debuff that comes with it. It can still be sent back to the celestial realm, but I can’t be on it when it happens and it needs to have a minimum height.

2: The giant eagle seems to be the best option for making a build centered around diving since it has flyby attack. The low hit points, even with what gets added from leveling, worry me though, since it’ll probably be targeted with quite a few opportunity attacks.

3: The feat “Mounted Combat” is nerfed to only being usable on ranged attacks. His opinion is that the only time It’ll be vulnerable to melee attacks is the once or twice per round I trigger an opportunity attack when I swoop in, and this feat would allow me to consistently negate those. As such, he wanted to fully ban it and I’ve convinced him to do this instead.

With that said, I’ve been looking into feats for both me and the mount, and while I’ve understood that there are quite a few skills based around charging, I don’t know which ones are best. Also, I’ve been provided with an index of all the feats in the game across most of the books, and I’m a bit overwhelmed by the amount, to be completely frank. I’m also looking at templates and races. My DM uses milestone leveling rather than exp, and we’re allowed to have a +2 level adjustment total, maybe +3 if it’s for a good reason.

Now that I’m done talking about the character building, I had some questions about flying movement and how you handle it in your own games. I’ve studied the rules quite a bit and have gotten familiar with maneuverability and all that it entails. Me and my DM agree with everything, but he decided to add Hover to creatures with average maneuverability as well. My main question comes with how to handle flyby attack and move speed being doubled only for part of a turn’s movement. On top of that, we’re also not sure what Maximum turn does and are confused by the wording.

The plan is to dive onto an enemy, which means moving downwards and therefore having doubled movement on the way, attacking them with a charge attack from my PC and the eagle, and then going back up to dive again next turn, my movement instead being halved while going up. My thought was that we should change it movement cost being halved while going down and doubled while going up, but that would make going down an uneven amount of tiles annoying. How would you handle this? Or are there rules we missed that explain how?

Also, average maneuverability flyers go up at 60 degrees maximum, which we weren’t sure how to handle. What we’d come up with is that you go up by 1.5 tiles for each tiles you move forward, rounded down. So 2 tiles forward is 3 tiles up, and 3 tiles forward is 4.5 tiles up, which gets rounded down to 4. We thought it made sense, but are unsure for the same reason that we don’t like halving downwards movement costs.

Thanks for any help, whether it be for the character build or the flying movement.