Introduction

Hello, everyone. This is a separate blog that I have started in order to work on a fairly involved and lengthy project that would otherwise takeover my regular blog, Sprigg's Scribblings, What is it, you may ask? Well, nothing all that impressive; I'm just going to be doing a retrospective on the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which was released 25 years ago on August 10, 2000. And I'm going to be covering...all of it. The rulebooks. The modules. The splatbooks. The campaign settings. The rules expansions. Even the web archives of the myriad of articles that WOTC published over the lifespan of the rules. All of it.

Yes, I'm utterly crazy. But besides that, I never really got into 3rd edition at the time. The group I was with was made up of hardcore old school players who had no interest in getting a new edition, and at the time I wasn't keen on 'new things'. So, I stayed away for a while until a friend of mine interested me in the Neverwinter Nights computer game. Once I was playing that, I decided to check out the books. By then, it was already into the 3.5 edition, so I never really experienced 3e as it originally happened. From what I've heard, it was sort of a bridge between the old school style of play and the newer style that is so familiar to modern gamers. I'd like to test that theory.

So, I'll start off with the Countdown to 3rd Edition articles that appeared in Dragon Magazine in the year leading up to the release of the Player's Handbook. I've got five days to cover that stuff before the official release date of August 10, so I'll cover more than one at a time. Then I'll review the Player's Handbook itself, chapter by chapter. And then we'll see what comes next. I have an Excel spreadsheet that lists everything WOTC released and when, and I've included the full web archive in there as well. There's a lot there.

Well, there's no point in waiting, is there? Let's dive right in.

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Dragon #263

Released in September, 1999, this issue included the first formal and official declaration of the upcoming 3rd edition. The monthly editorial, titled 'The Wyrm's Turn', announced the release date as August 2000 at Gen Con. Research showed me that the Player's Handbook was in fact available for sale on the first day of the convention, August 10th. The rest of the editorial just discusses the massive playtesting (over six hundred non-employees were involved) and how they tried to redesign the game while still keeping the essence of the 1st and 2nd-edition games. The rogues' skill system is specifically called out as being freshly designed.

The game is intended to get to epic levels of play, and combat is emphasized to make the game 'even more action-oriented'. And the issue of power creep is immediately addressed, by which I mean they make it clear that yes, the game is getting a power-up. Exceptional Strength is history, since ability scores won't necessarily top out at 18 anymore.

Finally, they promise new bits going forward as they count down to the new edition. Oh, and miniatures will be a big part of it, too. Not for me, of course. There's a series of video interviews mentioned, but I can't seem to find it even on archive.org, so I'll just have to imagine what they were like.

And that's the first mention of 3rd edition. Moving along...

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Dragon #264

The October, 1999 issue, this one included the first 'countdown' article, which reveals ten simple rules to use in a 2e game to get an early feel for how 3e will play out. The first one is ascending Armor Class. This is one of the most obvious and best redesigns in 3e. The old descending AC system in which negative numbers are a good AC was very difficult for new players to learn, particularly today. I know, because I tried to teach a group of teens how to play 1st edition, and that was one of the toughest parts for them to figure out. So ascending AC is a good thing. And it makes combat much simpler: Roll a d20 and try to get the AC or higher to hit.

Next, level limits are a thing of the past. So are racial class limitations; any race can be any class, and there are no multiclass restrictions either, except for a 20% XP penalty. Humans can multi-class as well, so dual-classing is over and done with, too.

Monks and assassins are back in business as presented in The Scarlet Brotherhood, a Greyhawk supplement that had recently been released. Obviously, the classes would be different in 3rd edition, but at least you could play them now.

The fourth 'new rule' isn't really new at all: Roll 4d6 for your stats, dropping the lowest number, arrange how you want. That's literally Method One from the original Dungeon Master's Guide for creating player characters. It's also Method Five from the 2e Player's Handbook. So...I'm not sure why this one was mentioned, since pretty much every gaming group on the planet was already doing that exact method anyway.

While exceptional strength was done away with, existing 2e characters still had it, so the categories simply get renumbered; 18/01-50 becomes 19, 18/51-76 is 20, etc. This would also affect magic items such as gauntlets of ogre power.

Sixth is initiative. It's simplified so there's one initiative roll at the beginning that sequences everyone in the combat for the duration. I really don't like this rule; it's literally 'taking your turn', and you have to either 'refocus' your action, which means you then go first in subsequent rounds (but miss out on your action in this round), or 'delay', which means you go last. Simultaneous initiative is also possible if two characters have the same initiative. Again, I don't think this was an improvement. Rolling each round allowed for momentum shifts in combat and the possibility of getting a strike in before the opponent even if he went first last time.

Combat rounds are now six seconds long. They were one minute long in earlier editions (ten seconds in Basic/Expert), which made for a lot of pointless sword swinging to get one single attack in. So spells are cast much more quickly (still only one per round), based on the caster's initiative. Longer casting times (rounds or turns) take the same amount of time as they used to.

Spell bonuses are now universal for all spellcasters. It used to be that only priests (clerics, druids, etc.) got the bonus to their spells based on their wisdom scores. Now wizards, bards, paladins and rangers also get these bonuses (although wizards and bards use Intelligence instead of Wisdom). A lot of games did this anyway, at least for wizards, so it's nice to see it become official policy.

Critical Hits make their first appearance, at least officially. There was a section on Critical Hits in the 2e Player's Option: Combat and Tactics book which was explicitly labeled as 'optional', but it's now the standard. It's a simple enough system: If you roll a 20, roll again and if that roll hits, you scored a critical (if it doesn't, you still do normal damage). It's an easy system to implement, which is always nice. Certainly better than the 'dismemberment' tables I remember seeing way back in the day.

Finally, priests can swap out spells for healing magic. The healing is d8 per level of the swapped spell. So, a priest who swaps out a 4th level spell, for example Free Action, can heal 4d8 points of damage. I'll point out that the 4th-level Cure Serious Wounds spell only cures 2d8+1, so you could, by this rule, swap out a CSW for a 4d8 heal instead. That's a pretty significant loophole, and one that no cleric player would have passed up.

So, that's it for this issue's countdown. It gives us a nice hint as to what is coming in the new game, with some very logical and welcome changes (AC, spell bonuses) and some not-so-great (initiative). Over the next nine issues, we'll get more details on some of the changes and how they will affect the game. It should be interesting.