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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 8631190" data-attributes="member: 1465"><p>I think I am one of the few who went back from 3.5 to 3.0 back then (as a DM, because to keep playing as a player on other tables I pretty much had to accept that everyone else had moved to 3.5). Somehow, to me 3.0 always felt like a cohesive whole "designed organically", while 3.5 seemed a large set of patches decided individually without much regard to the game as a whole. </p><p></p><p>An example was the demotion of Spell Focus from +2 to +1. In a typical core 3ed game this feat was a boon for Sorcerers who, because of their limited amount of spells known, were more commonly focused on a theme or school, while Wizard always ended up a bit more generalists (even when choosing a specialization) due to the large number of spells known. So at least in my experience, a Sorcerer would more likely than a Wizard end up casting the same few spells over and over, therefore benefitted much from that +2 on a chosen school, while the Wizard always ended up having to cast a little bit of everything, and needing to spend more feats on multiple schools to keep that +2 bonus just as often. Then the problem came with the Greater Spell Focus feat which added another +2. People thought that +4 was too much <em>in a vacuum</em>, and then WotC cut in half the bonuses of both feats in 3.5. First of all, if you didn't own Tome & Blood (the book with Greater Spell Focus), you essentially got punished for nothing, because Spell Focus wasn't broken. But anyway <em>in the bigger picture</em> of a 3.5 revision which effectively boosted every single class <em>except</em> the Sorcerer, halving Spell Focus only exacerbated the divide in favor of the Wizard. </p><p></p><p>Then eventually, one unexpected blessing for staying with 3.0 was that of course they stopped releasing books specific for 3.0, because all books after the release were technically for 3.5. Certainly you could have used 3.5 books in 3.0 if you wanted to, and often with only very minor modifications. But at that time most players were obsessed with compliance to official rules, so it was extremely easy to say "we play 3.0 so we only use 3.0 books". So while when playing in 3.5 games I had to watch people add dozens of new books <em>per year</em> to mix feats, prestige classes, spells etc. to make the most broken build, in my own 3.0 games the amount of character material remained forever limited.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 8631190, member: 1465"] I think I am one of the few who went back from 3.5 to 3.0 back then (as a DM, because to keep playing as a player on other tables I pretty much had to accept that everyone else had moved to 3.5). Somehow, to me 3.0 always felt like a cohesive whole "designed organically", while 3.5 seemed a large set of patches decided individually without much regard to the game as a whole. An example was the demotion of Spell Focus from +2 to +1. In a typical core 3ed game this feat was a boon for Sorcerers who, because of their limited amount of spells known, were more commonly focused on a theme or school, while Wizard always ended up a bit more generalists (even when choosing a specialization) due to the large number of spells known. So at least in my experience, a Sorcerer would more likely than a Wizard end up casting the same few spells over and over, therefore benefitted much from that +2 on a chosen school, while the Wizard always ended up having to cast a little bit of everything, and needing to spend more feats on multiple schools to keep that +2 bonus just as often. Then the problem came with the Greater Spell Focus feat which added another +2. People thought that +4 was too much [I]in a vacuum[/I], and then WotC cut in half the bonuses of both feats in 3.5. First of all, if you didn't own Tome & Blood (the book with Greater Spell Focus), you essentially got punished for nothing, because Spell Focus wasn't broken. But anyway [I]in the bigger picture[/I] of a 3.5 revision which effectively boosted every single class [I]except[/I] the Sorcerer, halving Spell Focus only exacerbated the divide in favor of the Wizard. Then eventually, one unexpected blessing for staying with 3.0 was that of course they stopped releasing books specific for 3.0, because all books after the release were technically for 3.5. Certainly you could have used 3.5 books in 3.0 if you wanted to, and often with only very minor modifications. But at that time most players were obsessed with compliance to official rules, so it was extremely easy to say "we play 3.0 so we only use 3.0 books". So while when playing in 3.5 games I had to watch people add dozens of new books [I]per year[/I] to mix feats, prestige classes, spells etc. to make the most broken build, in my own 3.0 games the amount of character material remained forever limited. [/QUOTE]
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