A Love Hate Affair With 3.5

 I have an ongoing desire to hack 3.5.

Largely as a result of my equally ongoing love/hate relationship with it. 

And I just realised we call those toxic relationships, nowadays... Something I'll have to reflect on...

It's probably just nostalgia. I ran a campaign for about ten years. It was all we played. We new the rules intimately; they became second nature. you know how it is. You get your handful of house rules (like 'No, you do NOT roll to confirm criticals, because that is the shittiest rule ever,') and they become ingrained in your scruffy little gamer souls, your collective game-soul... You have a style of play that is ALL about that system and its quirks and demands and its pay-offs.

And really it was probably never my soul-mate system anyway. Too fussy. Too pedantic about stuff that didn't move anything forward.

But we loved it. 

I loved it.

I loved the skills system. Even though in years to come, the number of times we realised we had all lost track of how many ranks we'd put in anything or why our scores were what they were. Even though 'roll 4 dice and drop the highest' felt intrinsically like cheating. Even though some of the weapons made no sense (a falchion is a two-handed scimitar? Really...?) and there were downright silly weapons in it, like a double flail.... and axe... You could just kind of ignore them, after all. 

The skills list was wonky (I never,  ever thought 'Use Rope' was going to get air time as a skill...) and I don't like so-called Vancian magic (I get why its called that and its as good a name as any, but have you read Vance? Of course not. Nobody, reads anymore, what am I thinking...).

And every now and again, somebody would have to go and grapple or the Cleric would have the audacity to try and do something other that heal people and he'd open the Pandora's box of the Turning rules, and the game would suddenly resemble a genuine medieval mud highway turned to mire in autumn rains and the wheels of your session would grind to a halt...

But. But. A lot of the time it was the best thing we'd ever played.

I didn't even come up playing D&D, by the way. Living in the UK, it wasn't that big. I started out with Traveller, of all things. Progressed to Tunnels and Trolls, moved on to Stormbringer (which I fucking loved...) and then got into Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. Which I adored. It was perfect. I played it through University, and three years living in London and then went a broad. While I was away, the only thing I played was a few weeks of a homebrew d6 game I invented to have something to play while I was living in Columbia. When I came back, I didn't have any of my gaming stuff anymore, so I bought Castles and Crusades. I pretty quickly discovered 3.5 online (which had become a thing recently) and by the time I had a circle of regular players, it was making way for 4E, which meant I could buy a tonne of supplements cheap. Which I did.

So what killed it for me?

Over time, novelty fades and irritants build. And for me there were a few irritants, some of which I've mentioned.

And there was the magic. I'm not a 'Vancian' magic fan. In fact, I've read Jack Vance and I'm not sure how 'vancian' 3.5 magic really is. I don't like 'fire-and-forget' spells. I like ritual and ceremony, curses and picking at the threads of Destiny. I like summoning, but not of badgers... I like necromancy that is more about actual necromancy and less about making a list with the same number of spells as every other so-called s'school'. And I like schools of magic... that mean something.

Yeah, I basically don't like the magic system. A LOT. 

And that's a problem, because you can't get away from it in any edition of D&D that I have played.

In Stormbringer, I thought it was cool that you could only summon things and maybe bind them (1st edition, obviously). In Conan 2d20, I love... well everything. Finding a patron, bribing them/it, having very few spells. And not needed a sorcerer in the party at all if you don't want one. In DCC I love rolling a skill test to see how powerful the manifestation of the spell is, and corruption, and displeasing the gods and some of the Patron-based spells are brilliant. The Black Sword Hack has cool non-corporeal demons, which have to possess people to have impact.

Hellboy 5e has some interesting ideas on magic. (Actually, a lot of cool stuff about a lot of stuff. But that's going to have to be another post.)

So, where does this all leave me?

I have a lot of 'stuff, fluff 'n' crunch' for 3.5, a lot of which I like (including the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, etc) but which I can't easily port it to anything else because, well because. It doesn't translate easily to DCC, despite DCC being built on 3.5. I could run Barbarians Of Lemuria in it, but I  wouldn't be using any of the rules at all, really. 

I'm going to try and hack it into something more manageable. I have the following TWO design principles in mind: reduce cognitive load, not increase; use existing rules where possible, instead of inventing new ones. In other words: Simply, don't complicate.

 These are the main aspects I think I'm going to have to look at:

Abilities (Attributes)

'Races' (which I'm going to re-name), because some of them are a long list of unrelated 'atomised' abilities with nothing convincing or compelling - I'm looking at elves...

Hit Points

Magic

Money (because money in D&D is the most useless, irritating, messed up thing since ever)

I'll create a post on each topic, as I get around to them. Hopefully I'll even get some feedback. At this stage, I'm aware that I'm just writing out into the ether, but who knows...?