Five Things That D&D 3.0 Did Better Than 3.5

Some time ago, I talked about how the D&D 3.0 rules took it for granted that when you attacked someone behind cover and failed to hit them, there was a chance that you hit their cover instead.

That rule fell by the wayside as the d20 System evolved, becoming an optional rule in D&D 3.5 before being discarded altogether in Pathfinder 1E. While I can understand the thinking there, since determining if your cover is struck can potentially slow down gameplay (particularly with the “actually, they dodged out of the way, and so don’t give you cover at all” clause), that’s the sort of thing which strikes me as an overall loss for verisimilitude. After all, having combat where someone can shield you from incoming arrow fire with their body without placing themselves at risk tends to damage immersion.

It’s in that line of thought that I’ve put together the following list of other things that D&D 3.0 did better than its revision.

Obviously, this won’t be true for everyone. Several of the points here are about differences in play-style, for instance, while others prioritize aspects of the game that you might not care about. Still, these are issues for which I think that a credible argument can be made that the revisions instituted were worse for certain swaths of gamers.

#5: No penalty for “inappropriately-sized” weapons

Suppose that your 3.5 dwarf rogue has a choice between two weapons: one is a dagger sized for a Medium character, and the other is a short sword sized for a Small character. In most ways they’re functionally identical: you’re proficient with both, they both deal 1d4 points of damage, and have a critical threat range of 19-20 with a x2 multiplier. While a few differences exist – the dagger can deal slashing or piercing damage, can be thrown without penalty, and is cheaper – they’re basically the same weapon.

Except, of course, that if you use the short sword, you’ll take a -2 penalty for it being an “inappropriately-sized” weapon.

That wasn’t the case in D&D 3.0. Weapons had a size, and if you were of a different size category then it changed your handedness (i.e. a one-handed weapon that was of Medium size was a two-handed weapon for a Small character) and that was it. You didn’t take a penalty just because it wasn’t sized “appropriately.”

To be honest, it’s never been clear what “inappropriately-sized” means from an in-game standpoint. It’s not as though weapons are like clothes which are tailored for someone else. I suppose you could say there’s an issue of balance, but that seems like a pretty big stretch; a female dwarf is a Medium creature, and can be as short as 3’9” according to the height and weight tables, whereas a male gnome is a Small creature that can be as tall as 3’8”. Would that really change how the gnome handled a Medium-sized short sword?

3.5’s artificial penalty for using weapons of a different size category creates an in-character disconnect, where the penalty doesn’t seem to represent anything.

#4: Thematic spell-like abilities for monsters

The issue of page-flipping when running monsters is one of those play-style things mentioned before. There are a lot of GMs who prefer that everything a monster can do be articulated in its stat block. (As an extension of this, some also prefer that monster – and character – stat blocks be truncated enough to fit on an index card.)

The d20 System, however, has never trended in that direction. Being one of the more complex tabletop RPGs, there’s a great deal of information in most monster stat blocks which is fully defined elsewhere. Whether it’s feats, “universal” special abilities (such as energy drain, poison, swallow whole), or spells and spell-like abilities, many (if not most) monsters have things they can do beyond what’s explicitly spelled out in their stat block.

Even so, 3.5 nevertheless saw a number of monsters (particularly high-level ones) whose spell-like abilities were trimmed down from their 3.0 incarnation. In those cases, the editing was done along the lines of removing SLAs with a non-combat focus, so that the GM wouldn’t make “bad” decisions about what the creature could do when facing the PCs in a fight. “After all,” the line of thought goes, “if the creature is only ‘on screen’ for five rounds or so before it’s killed, why would it ever use these powers anyway?”

But that misses out on a lot of powers which enable them to enact the schemes which create the groundwork to send the PCs out adventuring in the first place.

For reference, take a look at what a pit fiend can do in 3.0:

At will—animate dead, blasphemy, charm person, create undead, desecrate, detect good, detect magic, dispel magic, fireball, hold person, improved invisibility, magic circle against good, major image, produce flame, polymorph self, pyrotechnics, suggestion, teleport without error (self plus 50 pounds of objects only), unholy aura, unhallow, and wall of fire; 1/day—meteor swarm (any) and symbol (any); 1/year—wish.

Now compare that to the 3.5 pit fiend:

At will—blasphemy, create undead, fireball, greater dispel magic, greater teleport (self plus 50 pounds of objects only), invisibility, magic circle against good, mass hold monster, persistent image, power word stun, unholy aura; 1/day—meteor swarm; 1/year—wish.

A few of the differences are helpful improvements, such as changing out the comparatively modest dispel magic for the superior greater dispel magic, and the weak hold person for the much stronger mass hold monster. There’s even one or two reductions in power, such as making improved invisibility into just invisibility. But the bulk of the differences are straight-up deletions, and most of those are of powers that aren’t of immediate use in combat.

And yet most of those powers are thematically appropriate for a pit fiend. As the most powerful in the hierarchy of (common) devils, they should be able to detect good so they know who to corrupt. They should absolutely be able to detect magic in order to know who’s got enchanted weapons, magic wands, active spells, etc. when clandestinely surveying an enemy, something they can do with polymorph. As entities of infernal corruption, they should absolutely be able to use desecrate and unhallow. They can supplement their schemes with illusions, beguile people’s minds, and even lay down potent symbols for the unwary.

The 3.0 pit fiend is practically an adventure hook unto itself, while the 3.5 pit fiend is little more than a monster to be fought and killed. If we want monsters to be more than just a collection of stats, then it makes no sense to deny them powers which can most impact the game’s narrative.

#3: Damage reduction that required specific enhancement bonuses to overcome

Enhancement bonuses on magic weapons, i.e. the “+2” in a longsword +2, have long suffered from having a murky in-character representation.

While the numerical aspects of an enhancement bonus are obvious, their nature from a character’s standpoint is a little harder to articulate. It’s not impossible, to be sure: a higher enhancement bonus not only represents more magic in the weapon, but that presumably makes it lighter and easier to swing (i.e. the attack roll bonus), sharper/pointier/more forceful when it makes contact (i.e. the damage roll bonus), and makes the weapon tougher and more resilient (i.e. the bonus to its hardness and hit points).

But there was another advantage to enhancement bonuses in 3.0 which was very obvious from a character’s perspective: the more magic in a weapon, the more monsters it could potentially hurt, since many creatures couldn’t be easily harmed by weapons with weak enchantments.

That’s a fairly evocative image, as a magic sword that’s powerful enough to damage, say, weaker devils (such an osyluth or a barbazu) suddenly being useless when its time to fight their more powerful counterparts, such as a cornugon or a pit fiend. Rather than the DR X/magic values of 3.5, suddenly all enhancement bonuses are no longer the same when it comes to damaging creatures. That helps to maintain their value for reasons other than an extra few points on attack and damage dice.

Ironically, Pathfinder 1E actually made a move back in this direction. By assigning enhancement bonuses of +3 and above the ability to overcome DR of various other types, it reintroduces this bit of functionality that 3.5 abandoned.

#2: No footnote 3 on the Magic Item Gold Piece Values table

This one’s rather specific, but if you were a spellcaster focused on crafting your own magic items, it was a notable change.

While the various types of magic items all have their own cost-to-create formulae, there’s a table which not only aggregates all of them, but provides some additional guidelines on determining how much those magic items should cost (since the gold piece value is used as its own measure of a character’s power vis-à-vis the PC and NPC Wealth-by-Level tables).

But if you look at the 3.0 version and 3.5 versions of that table (which is called “Calculating Magic Item Gold Piece Values” in 3.0 and “Estimating Magic Item Gold Piece Values” in 3.5, interestingly enough), you’ll notice that there’s a difference in the number of footnotes. Specifically, that the 3.0 table only has two, while the 3.5 table has six.

The two listings in the 3.0 table are recreated in 3.5; the first one is split between 3.5’s footnotes 4 and 5, while the second is 3.5’s footnote 6. Similarly, 3.5’s footnote 1 was its own line on the table in 3.0, and 3.5’s footnote 2 denotes that the line it’s attached to is an aggregate of several different armor bonus types which had their own listings in the 3.0 table.

And then we come to footnote 3…

Footnote 3, unlike the rest of its counterparts, didn’t exist in any way, shape, or form in D&D 3.0, and for good reason.

You see, footnote 3 – which represents a price adjustment for use-activated or continuous items based on the duration of the spell used, saying “If a continuous item has an effect based on a spell with a duration measured in rounds, multiply the cost by 4. If the duration of the spell is 1 minute/level, multiply the cost by 2, and if the duration is 10 minutes/level, multiply the cost by 1.5. If the spell has a 24-hour duration or greater, divide the cost in half” – exists for only one reason:

To screw over crafting PCs.

That’s because none of the magic items in the 3.5 Dungeon Master’s Guide take this rule into account. All of the magic items in that book were ported over from its 3.0 counterpart without adjusting their prices for that footnote.

For an example of that, take another look at the 3.5 table linked to above. Notice how it lists the lantern of revealing as an example of a use-activated or continuous item? Click on the link for that magic item, and notice how it’s market price is 30,000 gp, exactly like it was in 3.0. Which is rather odd, since the component spell listed is invisibility purge, a 3^rd-level cleric spell. If you multiply the spell level times the minimum caster level (i.e. 5), times the 2,000 gp cost for a use-activated item, you get the listed price of 30,000 gp.

And yet, according to footnote 3, since invisibility purge is a spell with a duration of 1 minute per caster level, its cost should be doubled. So it’s fairly clear that 3.5 wasn’t practicing what it preached here (and neither was Pathfinder 1E, which copied all of these problems verbatim).

Now, if you’re crafting a use-activated item based on a spell with a duration of 24 hours or more (such as create food and water or endure elements) then footnote 3 gives you a price break. And it technically has nothing to say about items based on spells with a duration measured in hours (such as charm person or mage armor). So it’s not all bad for crafting PCs.

But most of the time, footnote 3 is to a crafter’s detriment, and nowhere does the rest of the game follow the rule it lays down. As such, it might be worth asking your GM if you can ignore that rule and adhere to the 3.0 standard, the same way that 3.5/PF1 items do.

#1: Monsters could take up asymmetrical spaces on the battlemat

This earns the #1 spot because it was a change implemented purely to try and push a greater use of the D&D miniatures line, all of which were made with symmetrical bases.

That, quite simply, was a bridge too far.

D&D has always included necessary compromises between verisimilitude and playability. When those happen, we look for ways to tie the flavor text back to the mechanics, which in this case means saying that “the area you take up on the battlemat represents the area you control in a fight” rather than the literal total of the space you occupy. And so we all made peace with a single human taking up a 5’ x 5’ area.

But having a horse take up a 5’ x 10’ area in 3.0 – which fit with our basic understanding of a horse being longer than it was wide – to having it take up a 10’ x 10’ area in 3.5, all to help sell miniatures? No, just no.

This affected so many monsters; a great blue wyrm, for instance, went from taking up a 20’ x 40’ space in 3.0 to a 20’ x 20’ space in 3.5. Manticores and wyverns shrunk down from being 10’ x 20’ Huge creatures to 10’ x 10’ Large ones. And even with the explanation that long and thin enemies coiled themselves up, it got a bit tiresome to always have monsters such as frost worms take up a 15’ x 15’ space in 3.5, rather than the 5’ x 40’ space they took up in 3.0.

This affected everything from targeting considerations for AoE spells to moving into flanking position without drawing AoOs to how often the rules for squeezing through tight confines came up. And while there were some minor game-play benefits, such as no longer needing to figure out how much of an action it was for an asymmetrical creature to change its facing, those were largely coincidental to the effort to cross-promote compatible figures, which was the primary instigator for the change.

It’s no coincidence that the D&D Miniatures Handbook came out in October of 2003, two months after 3.5 debuted.

So there you have it, the top five ways in which 3.0 was better than 3.5, at least to me. What do you miss about the original incarnation of the d20 System? Sound off in the comments below!