The 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook Is Pretty Cool

Sometimes it’s easy to get the idea that when I talk about third edition Dungeons & Dragons, I have nothing but negativity about it, which is probably linked to the fact that I am incredibly negative about it. 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons is an impressively intricate game where criticism itself requires a fairly sophisticated engagement. It is, for the most part, and for almost all use cases, a very functional tabletop RPG with a combat system that works reasonably well, and if everyone is on the same page at keeping the game going, isn’t likely to have any meaningful faults.

For the most part, when we criticize tabletop RPGs categorically, we’re always referring to edge cases, because in almost all situations, these are games for sitting down and playing with your friends at a table where you are all more or less able to get along. That lubrication means that games that present as extremely ropey and weak or ill-suited to their task, like, say, Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, are perfectly good at running the kinds of games people are using them for because the game rules are only part of the experience. They are there as a catchment that lies underneath the interaction between players, not as the actual pipework their intentions has to flow through. When Powered by the Apocalypse does this, it’s considered to be fiction forward and groundbreaking. When people use Dungeons & Dragons to do it for 30 years, it’s considered to be a toxic poison that destroys the fandom.

C’est la vie.

Nonetheless, when I talk about the failings of 3rd edition, it is always talking about those edges, those places where the game could break comically, or where the designers were so unaware of what players were actually like that they produced material that I’m reasonably confident was never used. I don’t think anyone has ever played an Urdunir from Races of Faerun in an actual campaign. Still, there are points where 3rd edition’s structure and the way 3rd edition already worked creates a system that I think is deeply interesting and only can work because the rest of the game is around it.

I want to talk about one such example here, which is the 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons book, The Expanded Psionics Handbook. In order to talk about that, though, we need to talk about the 3rd edition Psionics Handbook.

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Wir haben das #DnD3E Spieler Set (Grundregelwerk I) im Schrank. Meine Frau hat das damals gekauft, als #d20 aktuell war. Jetzt habe ich endlich mal das Spielleiter Set (Grundregelwerk II) sowie das Monster Set (Grundregelwerk III) zu einem adäquaten Preis gefunden. Die sollten kommende Woche ankommen, also wird in diesem Haus wohl demnächst auch mal #DnD gespielt.

#pnpde #rollenspiel #ttrpg

3e: Aphrodite Is Watching You Bang

I promised myself when I started this the article was going to be about something in the book and not about the book itself no matter how badly I want to complain about it. And oh I want to complain, I want to complain so bad. The book I’m talking about is 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons’ book Deities And Demigods, and it is a perfect book to complain about. It’s about a wholly unnecessary mechanical concept, it’s overpriced for the value in the book, and it shows more of a weird worldview than anything useful for a game. Deities and Demigods is a spreadsheet-filling exercise for the most unnecessary things in the game and you had to pay $60 for it in hard back.

If I wanted to go in on this book, I would have a lot to go in on.

Anyway, Content Warning, I’m going to talk about real world religion and how it’s all made up, but not just the normal way I make fun of Christians I’m also going to call Greeko gods mythical and Norse gods mythical and that may be a bummer, I guess?

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3E: The Three Stages of The Gish

Character creation in 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons was a beautiful system of intricate complexity, to which I dedicated years of study and serves now as nothing more than a curiosity and a reference point for other designs. Often in the vein of ‘don’t let that happen,’ or ‘if you let that happen you have to be okay with the results.’

The way it worked, fundamentally, was that everyone gained levels at the same time, at the same rate, and you could choose to use that level to advance a class each time. A Barbarian 7 was a 7th level character who had taken 7 levels of Barbarian. By contrast, a Barbarian 4/Fighter 3 was a 7th level character who had taken 4 levels of Barbarian, and 3 levels of mistake.

A focus of this strangely and honestly unnecessarily intense research was a character archetype that we on the Character Optimisation boards described as a Gish.

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What is the most pristine way to play the game?

#DnD #DungeonsandDragons #DnD35 #DnD3_5 #DnD35e #DnD3_5e #DnD3 #DnD3e #DnD3x #DnD3xe

Running a game for 12th level PCs. Looking any any random suggestions of encounters to throw at them.

#DnD #dnd35 #dnd3e #dnd3x

A request for the #ttrpg and #DnD hiveminds!

One of my favorite books to come out of the early years of #DnD3e was a third-party book that included multiple "alternative" flavors for arcane casters. It included mirror mages, with rules for creating the necessary mirrors; rune mages, with rules for inscribing; dragon mages, with prestige classes that would transform the adherent in different ways; and more. The book was stolen from me long ago. I need help finding it again.

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The Colonisation Of Hell

There’s this thing they call the Blood War. Sometimes they call it the battle of Doctrines. Maybe you’ve heard it called the Eternal Struggle, or the Lesser Evils, or in some rare cases the Tanar’ri policing action. It’s setting-relevant, it’s one of those seemingly iconic details of the planar cosmology that forms around all sorts of worlds.

art by Martina Lavrini on Artstation

Here I’d like to suggest that there’s another way you can handle this if you’re willing to challenge the idea of an inherently evil shape to the universe, and the idea that the world polarises around the fundamental ideas of law and chaos.

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https://press.invincible.ink/the-colonisation-of-hell/

#DnD3e #WorldBuilding

3e: Monster Commonality

The 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons monster manual is a weighty tome, a book that encompasses something upwards of 400 monsters. Each monster is presented with a list of game mechanical information that’s meant to present them to the standard interactions you’re going to want, which is how they move, how they kill, and how they die. Then, following that, each entry includes a description of the creature as it exists in an ecosystem, which, consciously or not, frames these creatures primarily as combat conflict encounters, and usually with some degree of moral valence to them.

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https://press.invincible.ink/3e-monster-commonality/

#DnD3e