#3er — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #3er, aggregated by home.social.
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I've had started to write out monster stat blocks for six colors of dragons in three age categories each, because in D&D 3rd ed. you have to assemble any dragon from several tables instead of getting a stat block like for any other creature.
The only thing still missing was distributing skill points. And I'm definitely going to need a spreadsheet for this.
An old silver dragon has 372 skill points to distribute. (A number I had to calculate myself.)
3rd ed. dragon stats suck!!!
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I put together a monster list for running a D&D 3rd ed. game in #Kaendor
Bit of a strange selection, with some really classic D&D monsters on it, and many others complete absent. And some cool ones from AD&D that I think 3rd ed. neglected way too much, or cool new monsters from the MM that not enough was done with.
I like it.
It has character. -
Apparently, when you're looking for D&D 3rd edition books on ebay, you now have to plan for paying 100€ per book.
#3ER -
Aboleths in D&D can move on land, but in 3rd edition they are not amphibious so they have to hold their breath while being out of water. With the very generous rules for holding breath and high Con, that gives them 40 to 45 rounds before they pass out.
Unlike most aquatic creatures, they do have a land speed of 10 ft., so they can use the run action. This would allow them to make it nearly 500m over land before they pass out.
And that's how it got into that fish pond.
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Perhaps the weirdest mechanic in D&D 3rd edition I've ever seen is the Air Elemental's whirlwind ability.
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/elemental.htm#airElementalWho wrote this?
Who signed off on this?
What GM is going to try using this in an encounter with a pretty generic, non-boss, one-off monster?
Who is even trying to understand this when coming across it?
I really wonder what fraction of air elemental encounters actually had the air elemental use this ability against the PCs?
This is bad!
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How come I've never heard people talking about how much broken the #dnd3e spell glibness is?
1 hour of flawless bullshitting as a 3rd level bard spell.
If your lies have any shred of plausibility, you will fool anything that doesn't have a Sense Motive bonus +10 higher than your normal Bluff bonus. Which as a 7th level bard is going to be nobody.
Irrelevant in a tactical skirmish game, but this sounds like the most broken mess I've ever seen anywhere.
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How is it that #dnd3e has a bazillion classes and prestige classes, and an dozen alternative magic systems, and I still seem to have to stsrt from scratch just for "wizard is learning new spells from Yog-Sothoth"?
Alienist from Complete Arcane is supposed to be that, but all that 10-level class does is to let your summon monster spells summon monsters with the pseudonatural template instead of the fiendish template. So lame...
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Making some tweaks to the Economy Engine for use in my own campaign.
By the DMG, a village of 500 people has items up to 200 gp for sale and can buy 5,000 gp of treasures off the PCs before there are no more coins to trade.
Looks good, but it would also have for sale 50 chain shirts, 100 scale armor, 500 leather armor, 2500 daggers and spears, 300 horses, 600 donkeys, ...
That probably should be cut to a fifth to actually have any scarcity.
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New Site Post: The Economy Engine, v.0.1
https://spriggans-den.com/2024/01/31/the-economy-engine-v0-2/I made a thing.
This is a spreadsheet based on the guidelines for the availability of equipment items in any village or town in D&D 3rd edition. Just enter the population number at the top and it auto-calculates the types and amounts of items that are for sale, and the amount of coins the merchants have to buy treasures off the PCs.
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Having an ongoing discussion about supposedly game breaking spells in D&D 3rd ed. that allow players to ignore the dungeons. And I think the main point in a very short form is this:
As GM, the goal should not be to make utility spells useless. The goal should be to make obstacles a bit more complex, so that spells turn from a one-step solution to get past them into one tool that is part of a three-step solution.
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I've been putting together a list of recommendations for new players for picking feats in a D&D 3rd edition wilderness sandbox campaign. Just to cut down the amount of information to take in to be able to pick one feat for 1st level.
I used to run this game a lot in the day, but recently realized that me and my players were always pretty bad at understanding what is good and what is bad.https://spriggans-den.com/feat-recommendations/
I'm curious what other people familiar with the game think of these?
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@Fywillan @james Well, it's certainly not the game mechanics.
I would say it's probably the lineup of spells and monsters. 3rd edition covers everything you had in AD&D, without having to play with the AD&D mechanics. Not that 3rd edition mechanics are great either, so pick your poison.
Most spells are in 5th edition, but not the same. And while most monsters are in 5th edition, many lack most of the abilities that made them more than bigger, reskinned ogers.
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And I do feel like there's been a big recent surge in people being excited about 3rd edition again.
Which might be related to 5th edition maybe, kinda, possibly coming to an end and a kinda new edition being released.
Interest in 1st edition and B/X really surged when 4th edition came oit and many people had a serious think about what they actually want to get out of D&D. This might be similar.
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I love John Frazer's reviews of old White Wolf and 3E #dnd books, and this one about the Races of the Wild 3E splatbook is a particular wheeze:
http://www.itcamefromthebookshelf.com/2023/11/d-35-races-of-wild.html
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Looking back, I feel that the single one most well regarded and mentioned thing in the entire Unearthed Arcana book for D&D 3rd edition was a cleric variant that has only light armor, d6 hit points, and a low attack bonus.
And it gets a little bit of scribe-themed stuff in return. But mostly people just seem to like it for being a non-War-Cleric.
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New Site Post: Speeding up play by Delaying
https://spriggans-den.com/2024/01/07/speeding-up-play-by-delaying/There are few things in playing RPGs as tedious as watching other players take several minutes figuring out what action they want to take on their turn when they got distracted and didn't pay attention to what happened in a fight over the last few turns.
What if you don't have to? Why not have the next player skip ahead in line when a player isn't ready to take this round's turn yet?
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Sudden untested idea to improve encounter pacing in D&D 3rd edition games:
When it's your turn in a fight and you need more time to consider your turn, Delay and let another player or the GM make their next turns first.
It could very well end up with all PCs regularly ending up on initiative count 1, but it's still something I want to try. The rules specifically have an initiative mechanic to let another player go first.
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Why does this have so many favorites?
It's not just this post, but seemingly any time I write something about 3rd edition and giving it a more 90s-D&D feel.
It's like there's a considerable audience for something I thought I'm the only one who cares about it. Between 5th edition, Pathfinder, and AD&D 1st edition traditionalists, I long assumed any appreciation for material from this time had completely evaporated over a decade ago.
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D&D 3rd edition has the big advantage that I both understand how it works and know most of those rules by memory. But stylistically, I'm much more in love with 2nd edition, which I would want a campaign to feel like.
So, plan for today: Replace all the creature tokens for a 3rd edition in Foundry with Tony DiTerlizzi's images from the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual.
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Does anyone remember any really good non-WotC #dnd3e books from the 2000-2005 period?
There was a lot of crap, but I remember it as feeling like very earnest and passionate crap.
Was there anything good that still had that spirit of 90s RPGs, before the shift to Eberron-Dungeon Punk, that anyone would recommend?
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Getting back into the #dnd3e character building game by making ready stat blocks for generic low-level NPCs to enable random encounters, and I am noticing that this is really a drastically different experience from custom tailoring PC builds.
When you only get to pick two feats, and know that these are all this NPC is ever going to get, going for the quick +2 bonus to a skill, save, or weapon attack nearly always becomes the sensible choice.
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Red hot new D&D 3rd edition idea:
Make a boss monster by stacking two normal monsters on each other.
Treat everything as if there were two monsters that always stand in the same place. Any effect that targets one of them affects both of them. But they both have their own initiative count and actions.
All damage targets one of them first. Once that one is out of hp or otherwise suffered instance death, continue with just one normal monster.
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New Site Post: Shadows of Kaendor
https://spriggans-den.com/2023/12/29/shadows-of-kaendor/The introduction to my #Lore24 campaign setting.
A D&D 3rd edition world build around the Manual of the Planes, Expanded Psionics Handbooks, and Lords of Madness, with strong influences from Bloodborne, Hollow Knight, and Thief. (Despite being set in a 6th century culture.)
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Having returned to D&D 3rd edition with new enthusiasm after more than a decade, I've been checking out the Giant in the Playground forums again.
Great to see a 3rd edition forum still have a good amount of activity. But most of the threads are still exactly the same stuff that had me run screaming into the night at the end of my Pathfinder years.
Low level, PHB only for me, please... 😧