"DnD 3.5 When does it break down?" Topic

So I've heard that past a point, DnD 3.5 (and DnD of any other version for that matter) breaks down past a certain level. We also see a prolific amount of supplements for arcane this, and thievery that out there that adds rules and spells and the like that eventually breaks the system. You see this sort of phenomena on games systems in general when there are these large amounts of special rules.

So I ask, when does DnD 3.5 game system break down?

If you only play the core rules, would there still be balance issues?

I've played some and generally like the system but I've only played to about 4th level.

John

It only breaks down when sales slump, so they reinvent it.I don't think I have gotten a character above 8th or 9th level myself.

From my experience it's in the level 12+ range that things start to get wacky (the exact tipping point probably depends on GM's and what's in the party). The biggest issue, imho, is that spellcasters completely outstripped non-spellcasters and hybird classes, in both defense and offense. Then the GM tends to trot out monsters geared for fighting spell casters and that leaves the non-spellcasters without much of role to fill.

A lot of supplements are interesting, but there's probably too much *stuff* to really know exactly what breaks the game. I suspect that some combination of stuff from "Unearthed Arcana" and 'The Complete X' would totally turn the game on it's ear.

-Will

I too have found levels 12-15 to be where campaigns fizzle and the need to reboot becomes clear.

There are multiple issues, including the spell casters outshining everyone else with clerics and druids having the potential of being the worst. This is hard to nail down though as it depends very much on player decisions and varies group to group.

The other big issue is a paperwork overload and again it is in that 12-15 spread that most DMs throw up their hands in frustration.

Once you can no longer pull encounters out of the Monster Manual with little prep, 3.x DMing becomes a full-time job to support a 30-minute fight. Levels 12-15 were this point for me.

The character sheets for 3.x also become inadequate between lvl 10 and 15.

roll the dice and its all down hill from there. Just say no to D&D past 2nd edition

13th level is when 7th level spells hit. All over but the crying. Either the PC's destroy your badguys while barely lifting a finger, or you obliterate one of the PCs in one round.

I never played 3.5, but we did play the original 3rd edition (core only), and it seemed to work just fine through about levels 9-12, when I stopped. My brother ran a campaign through (or close to) level 20, and he said that after level 12 or so there was a real "sudden death" creep – in other words everyone was so powerful (monsters included) that sudden death effects were the norm.

I also prefer older editions, however there is a free 3e variant called "E6" that essentially limits 3e to level 6, and then allows the gaining of Feats afterward. It has received a lot of praise for balancing things out, while keeping the 3e mechanics.

I started getting bored as soon as melee types were rolling 3 attacks a round, plus cleaves and what not. That would be about 11th level. I never found that spellcasters started ruining things, because most melee classes could match them in raw damage, round by round.

E6 is a very interesting idea which I have never tried. Another thought I've had is to start "epic levels" after 10th level. Though the epic spellcasting system in 3e is awful, the idea of requiring spellcasters to burn feats to gain more spell slots and spell levels after 10th level would help a lot. Also, capping iterative attacks at 10th level would speed combat up quite a bit. You'd have to rebalance a few monsters, but I think it'd be worth a shot.

Here is something interesting, especially those here that played the white box game many, many years ago. The original game included levels up to about 12 level. you topped out between 9-12 level depending on the class. Spell levels were limited to 6th level for most casters and each level had about a dozen or so spells to choose from. You had actual titles for your level. 4th level was "Hero". 8th was "Super Hero". 9th was "lord". That was for fighter. The wizard stopped at 11th level and was known as an "Arch Mage" or some grand title like that. Things always seemed to work and the rules were simple enough as to not evoke to many arguments. You could reach that 5th or 6th level and not feel like a peon.

I wonder if the original designers (Gygax and Arneson) knew something that we don't? It just seems that the game, in every incarnation, breaks down at this level.

Oh, you could keep going after that; the Greyhawk campaign PCs certainly did, from all accounts, into double-digit levels and beyond. AD&D published rules that implied unlimited advancement in certain situations, though greatly slowed after 9th-10th level in most cases.

re: Greyhawk and Blackmoor

Both added more rules and detail in the TSR/WotC fashion but really added interest to the game…especially Greyhawk, wheich added stuff like weapons damage and a more detailed attribute system. This is where DnD really started to come into its own as a pure RPG. You still largely topped out at 9-12th level by not gaining more hit dice but you could gain levels to 18th (I think). And yes, it was slow going for anyone who wanted to try…

Good question. I have a 15th level character who gets to run about occasionally. He doesn't seem to be particularly broken, although I suspect part of that is due to careful GMing.

We've a more-or-less 12th level group running now. The fights tend to bog down, and as noted, if one doesn't find a way to neutralize the spell-caster effect they can really dominate a fight.

One thing is to give monsters spell resistance. When I feel particularly bitchy, I stick a bunch of innocents in the scrum, and penalize the party for injury or death of non-hostiles in the way.

For me it's right about the time we start making characters. There's so much to keep track of, so many rules, we spend more time looking stuff up and making calculations than actually gaming.

In AD&D we seemed to top out @ the same 12-15th Level. Not sure it is a symptom of 3.5 or just D&D

We've gone to beyond 25th level without problems. I tend to run things a little more carefully, though.

One thing I did notice is that the encounter charts are guidelines, and not hard and fast rules. You really need to build your encounters around the group and their abilities.

With a DM that is able to create a campaign befitting "epic" characters I think you can go on for some time. At a certain level the characters are so powerful that they are rightly important people.

However … the basic problem with all level based games is that the focus on level rather than ability means you have to keep adding levels or the game stagnates. I prefer skill based games like CoC myself.

I was reading the opening intro to Queen Of The Spiders last night… and noticed it mentioned that characters over 15 or so didn't belong in dungeons and more properly ought to be off running small countries.

Our current group is in the 12-13th range, and still going strong. We have another group that has some characters in the 14/15th level area. They are still OK (recently recovered from a total party wipeout, in fact). I actually think in many ways with 3.5 it is easier to challenge higher-level characters than it was with 1st and 2nd edition.

Most recent nasty fight for the c. 12th level group: made four orc fighters as 8th level fighters, with basic magic armor and weapons (inferior to party equipment). Made them vampires, using the straight-forward rules in the MM. The result was a good old fashioned nasty fight.

The group I DM has 7 active players with an average level of 11th. If you'd ask them I bet they would say they were still very challenged even with higher level spells.

I limit the magic items in my campaign so they really mean something. It is not a "oh another +2 sword, just throw it on the pile" campaign. I think that helps.

I have also been DMing since I picked up the Brown Box set the week it came out so that probably helps as well. I've participated in some out of hand campaigns that tend to get boring rather quickly. I think I have a good handle on what to avoid doing.

Pretty much as soon as the mage hits third level spells. Spellcasters are just flat out better than anyone else. You can get pretty creative. Damage output doesn't matter. The druid and his animal companion are better than any fighter. The mage could pretty much duplicate a thief if creative enough. The cleric is a spellcaster and a tank, even in an antimagic field.

Read stinking cloud, ray of exhaustion, haste or even fly or dispel magic. It only gets worse when you get to 4th, and solid fog, polymorph, evard's tentacles, or enervation will have your DM cursing your name. Two mages will make him cry. You cloudkill, the other guy has wall of stone or force.

This is just the PHB. Off the top of my head, for a game I didn't really like and only played to hang out with friends and drink their beers. Add in other books, appropriate feats and magic items and classes, and it only gets worse for the other archetypes. Best thing we did was chip in to give the fighter a ring of free something or other that let him move through the tentacles and solid fog. The combats were essentially over after turn one, but somebody still has to stab them, and we didn't want him to just twiddle his thumbs during a fight. He being a fighter and all.

Is it possible there is a mathematical explanation for the lvl 12 ceiling? Perhaps at that point hit points outstrip weapon damage enough that spells (which tend to continue to increase proportionately to level) begin to dominate the game. The guy that a house cat could dispose of takes over the game, whereas the fighter still dishes out the same order of magnitude of damage he did at the start.

I always thought it was a bit stupid in the original game that a crossbow does d4 damage. Or d4 + some pathetic mod if your inclined to look it up… Or you can devise some complicated crit-hit system and make everyone hate you whenever you try to use your crossbow.

Approaching the fighter problem I always thought maybe at a certain level discrepancy a monster should have to make a saving through just to survive anytime the monster is within the reach of significantly more powerful fighter.

3rd Edition, & 3.5 are both way better than previous editions as far as handling the high levels goes… because the core game mechanic stays the same: an open-ended D20 roll, +/- modifiers.
(This beats 2nd ed.s multitude of different rules & rolls hands down.)

The problem is as Venusboys says: there's no way a 15th-level character should be listening at a door, behind which an orc guards a chest. A fifteenth-level cleric should be a high priest, and scheming how to become pontiff… a fifteenth-level fighter should be leading an army, looking at the map and deciding which border to storm across… the fifteenth-level mage should be building his own dungeon, devising traps and interviewing monsters. ("How are you at wandering…?")
Once you reach those sort of levels, characters are major figures in their setting: the Arthurs, Merlins, & Hercules' of their worlds.

Core only? I think the knowledge of the GM and the nature of the players will dictate where things break down.

D&D isn't a competitive game, it's a cooperative game. Those that point at Sleep and Color Spray and claim that a 1st level Wizard beats a 1st level Fighter every time are mostly right, but that ignores the fact that your party isn't supposed to be having the Wizard and Fighter duel it out for King of the Hill.

But, if the player of the Wizard "novas" off his spells in the first encounter, he will leave the other players feeling unneeded. And then if the Wizard refuses to move onwards until he regains those spells, things get dull and repetitive: Wizard nova followed by narcolepsy to regain spells, and not much for the rest of the party to do.

I've seen every argument against this that exists:
The GM should throw wandering monsters at them!
– The Wizard is (low level to high level) in a Rope Trick, or Invisible, or Flying, or teleported back to his keep.
The GM should make quests with time limits!
– This works, once. And then it becomes an obvious railroad. Or the Wizard simply refuses to accept any quests with a time limit. "After all", he'll ask, "your entire campaign isn't based around this single quest, is it?"
The GM should throw enemy casters at the party, to balance the Wizard!
– And this simply aggravates the issue. The rest of the party is useless against the Invisible Flying NPC Wizard of DOOM, while the PC Wizard sees just another opportunity to show off how potent full caster classes are compared to non-casting classes.
This can go on and on, and the only thing which the exercise achieves is to cement the fact that the classes are horribly unbalanced and that a Wizard doesn't even have to try much to appear to be optimized compared to any non-casters in the group.

So the answer to "when does DnD 3.5 game system break down?" is 1st level, if you're talking about a breakdown of class balance with regards to each player getting equal "spotlight" time during the game.

This is not a certainty, and the players may push this off a while due to a simple lack of a deeper knowledge of the mechanics of the game. And a group which is more into role play might avoid the issue for quite some time beyond that. But eventually the Wizard will discover that he has a few spells which are quite effective over and over, and then the tipping point will be reached and play balance and playing balance are both out the window.

The highest my main group ever got to was 9-13. The rules started to bog down and each combat round was a rulebook page turner. But then I was a pretty stupid GM, lol.

My friends didnt like high level play much. Usually they would retire their characters around 7-8.

To me where it breaks down is when a world you could struggle to beat at 7th is still a struggle to beat at 20!
It seems sort of like comic book suspension of reality.

I am currently deployed and have found a group of players for 3.5 recently(2 months – about 8 games sofar).

The group itself is quite varied; The DM has been playing for about 15 years, I started with AD&D(stopped before 3.0), one player was a white box player when he was in college back in 76, one played only one game of 4.0 and one was still playing 3.0 in a campaign back home.

We have made it to level 4 and sofar we have just made it into a situation where we have "leveled" as a group. I mean that the GM has got the challenges to the right skill level for us, and the players have fallen into a good stride of playing their PC's.

I see that we kind of self regulate the magic and it helps, our mage is the oldschool player who plays as a bit of a aristocratic elf only uses spells when a must. I have a half orc rogue/sorcerer. My Cha limits me to only 0-1 lvl spells and I am capped out. I know it's not the optimal spread for me, but that isn't how I want to play.

We has found so far that we have auto balanced out the the group on our own. The closest thing we have is a bit of a powergamer pally. But he is the youngest player and newest and I have already seen him start to grow out of it as a player.

I doubt we will get to 12th level or above before the end of the deployment but I don't see much of a problem for us.

dropzonetoe,

You are playing in my dream group! It sounds like you guys have got it together. We have a group playing 3.5 that I play in infrequently. The last time I played, the characters did not fight optimally. It was a sort of a grief encounter and not a boss. The most of the players got to go before me and I ended up standing around the whole fight. Did I mention I play an Elven Fighter!? The magician of the group is a Half Orc sorcerer (maybe a straight wizard, dunno) with an 18 strength. He typically wades into combat and he typically spends part of the fight unconscious. It slows the game down. It sounds like you guys are a bit (a lot) more together.

John

I also find that 3.5 breaks down during combat, character creation and leveling up. WotC came up with a simple and elegant task resolution system then adds a bloated "feats" mechanic on top of it.
Last group I played DND in was 3.x, we spent the first session creating characters. Granted if you know the system well you can create a character in about 30 minutes but if you have the group I was GMing for, the kind that weight each decision and point spent to the nth degree of micro management or ask the same question 20 different ways because they can't remember what you said to another player 5 minutes ago.
Once we got started the role playing and just general adventuring went well up until some poor monster came wandering along. Then the group would spend so long trying to kill it that often they would forget where they going or why.
Leveling up was its own special kind of hell because the player could make decision, wittingly or not, that could turn your campaign upside down. If a player took the right combination of feats your carefully crafted encounters would be little more than bumps in the road.
I feel that the problems with 3.x was that it tried to cover ever situation possible with a rule, allow players to quantify ever character quality and action with a rules mechanic and appeal to a new generation of role players that have cut their teeth on CRPGs.
CRPGs aren't about character personality and story telling, they are about getting gear, punching up character stats and accomplishing goals along a linear path to an end game then roll credits.

John,

I was surprised to be honest as the first few games were really us getting out feet wet in the rules and trying to mesh between wildly different playing styles.

Our last game left the group trying to protect the elvish heir from dark elf assassins hired by his aunt. The combat played out perfectly and I didn't even get a shot off in it. Our Pally got to rampage around in HtH. The half-elf ranger got to play around with her bow, till she went to back up the pally. The Mage hung back using a few spells as needed. I holed up in the bedroom with the heir. My hold portal spell at the ready and preparing to be the last line of defense. It never got that far, but the group did take a beating before driving them off. One of the slain leaving the clue as to who hired them.

That was a far cry from the first 3-4 games where we were jockeying for combat roles, group leadership, and trying to find if we wanted dungeon crawls hack-n-slash or a more story driven game.

All in all after taking a decade long hiatus from playing
and thinking that 3.5 was not going to be fun with no Thac0 and my stack of "complete" books, I have to say I quite look forward to my game every week now and 3.5 hasn't been the letdown I was expecting. I guess it helps that we are looking for just some fun and not looking to min/max our chars with uber-gear and lots of special rules.

DZT,

Your Mage is a stud and plays as a Mage should play. Too often I see the caster just burn through spells as fast as he can. Then he is spent and we get the old, "Hey guys! Lets rest here. I need to med so I can get my spells back." How annoying. I suspect you all move at a pretty good clip because your casters aren't firing off spells like a Cowboy firing his six-gun!

John

I totally agree, Acarhj. The D&D mechanics are all about proper resource management; you're going into a very dangerous place with limited spells, hit points, and supplies. A large part of the challenge (and the fun) is achieving your goals while using a *minimum* of these resources.

DMs who let parties rest unmolested overnight in dungeons aren't doing it right.

The game is also designed so that parties are supposed to be able to go through 4 or 5 equal-CR encounters without needing a rest- if the Wizard needs to rest after each encounter they are *definitely* being too lose with their spell casting.

-Will

3.x starts to break at 6th level (when casters get their 3rd-level spells), and can get unplayable at 12th level, depending on the players.

Let me tell you about the Mage in my last 3.5 game. He was a drow wizard. At 12th level, he had *14* hit points (due to that 8 CON). Yet he had a good chance of solo-ing dungeons due to the feats he'd taken.