Editing Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition (section)

==Criticism==
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Some of the criticisms of third edition D&D include:

* Not enough anime powers and [[weeaboo]] artwork.
** Attempted to fix it with the nigh-endless train of prestige classes in the "Complete BLAH" and "Book of Vile/Exalted BLAH" and [[The Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic|Tome of Battle: 9 Euphemisms For My Dick]]... Starting with 6 prestige classes in the 3.0 DMG (16 in the 3.5 DMG), there's 120 more in official splatbooks (349 in the official 3.5 splatbooks), and that's not counting the Epic prestige classes above level 20, or prestige classes introduced in modules, and I haven't even started on the prestige classes mentioned in official settings...
* The Race-as-Class affair was done away with... in theory, that is. Instead there's [[Favored Class|Favored Classes]], which somewhat shoehorn in particular archetypes and sometimes goes against a setting's established lore, but that's hardly an issue for a mono-class character, or a character with a level in every class. 
** The issue is that if you do multiclass with a race's favored class, you now take XP penalties for the other class - a dick move, especially when you're taking a race with a favored class you only want to dip in.
* Racial balance is crap. Human is best at everything by a significant margin and only Dwarfs come close in the core races. Non-core randomly saddled races that were otherwise balanced with humans with a [[Level Adjustment| LA+1]] that rendered them nearly useless long-term, seemingly only to keep "exotic" races away.
*[[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|Katanas are seen as underpowered in d20]], although there are also some who feel it doesn't deserve its masterwork quality and instead feel it should receive [[-4 Str]].
* People who enjoy being fucked in the ass prefer [[Anal Circumference|FATAL]].
* RULES. RULES. RULES. ENDLESS RULES.
** Honestly, regular players don't really have to worry about this as much as 4chan tells you to. All they have to do is tell the DM what they want to do and roll a d20, and then the DM does all the math (or just makes some shit up). A DM, however, will be expected to read hundreds of pages of rules, covering such topic as Challenge Rating calculation, special combat maneuvers, level progression, how to create items, rules for specific items, rules for flight and mounted moving, rules for surviving, tracking, hunting, picking your nose and so on.
** Conversely, the edition was notorious for the sheer fucking overload in options available to players between all the campaign settings, the Complete books, the Race books, and every relevant [[Dragon Magazine]] article, which makes it a near nightmare to get things organized. Part of this can be excused to the relative nascence of the internet and the possibility that WotC was hesitant to sink money into a rules database like they later would. Adding salt to the wound is the knowledge that the SRD only carries the most essential of the rules (Core, Psionics, [[Epic Levels]], Unearthed Arcana's variant rules, a handful of random monsters from later books, and some random non-epic stuff that got reprinted in the Epic Level Handbook.), as the entire intent was to allow WotC to sell supplements while letting third parties make "compatible" content to give D&D a massive marketshare (which worked), rather than ease of use. 
** Many 2nd edition rules were presented as optional, allowing the DM leeway to experiment with his ideas and his group. Carrying over beloved characters from 1st to 2nd edition was no big deal. 3rd edition made this impossible, and canonically standardized plenty of bad and broken rules that made us all want to climb back up into [[Lorraine Williams| Lorraine's warm, life-giving uterus and beg for forgiveness]].
** Action economy became a thing and broke the game in a million subtle ways that are only just being catalogued.  From making movement an action of its own, making a "full attack" a different kind of action from an "attack" (and mutually-exclusive ''with'' movement), introducing complicated reloading mechanics for many ranged weapons, and so on, 3rd Edition and its derivatives made all weapon fighting classes' lives much harder in many subtle ways in the name of giving casters more fun mental homework to do by portioning out spell casting times.  One of the big practical results of this is that nearly everyone who wants to be there wants to move as little as possible once melee combat starts, because any kind of movement suddenly means dropping your (theoretical, again, iterative attacks took big penalties) damage by a big margin, and why many melee builds revolve around finding ways to get around this by acquiring the "pounce" ability that let them get all their attacks off if they charged. It's all complicated and unintuitive in a way that's not really tactically interesting even if you already know it.
* Spells all work differently from one another, so instead of looking up the rules on a type of action, you look up the rules for a specific spell. And then the spell's errata. And the Ask the Sage article about that spell.
* No one can even pretend the various classes are balanced against one another. After 10th level or so spellcasters are so powerful and versatile that the average dungeon crawl is cut short when they use a spell or two to redirect a nearby river into the front door, killing everything inside but the skeletons. For comparison, the fighter is about to get his third attack a round! ...With a to-hit rate so low he'll almost certainly miss with it.
** Classes have never been balanced against each other but this is mostly to do with the fact that the power of casters was kept from AD&D but the drawbacks (slower initial leveling speed, greater potential to kill yourself, highly limited spell slots and several things that made spellcasting hell) were removed. Granted this example is a bit [[Rope Trick Bunker of Doom|exaggerated]] since a smart DM could just quietly change the dungeon to an undead filled one as a middle finger for trying to cheese it or if home to anyone of magical ability, bounce off a ward.
*** Even so, casters are WAY more powerful on an individual basis. Just check the [[Tier System]]. Casters are nigh-always superior in personal combat (oh, trolls trying to mess me up? Well, guess I'll just fly straight up a few meters and shoot them dead), and have the ability to handle pretty much everything else (short of traps... Damn rogue-only abilites (they can usually bypass them or deal with them some other way than disabling them, though)) as well. They even have specific spells/powers for doing "whatever I want" ("Wish" and "Reality Revision" comes to mind). The fact that the Adept, a class made for NPCs in mind and thus supposed to be in every way inferior to the player classes, is STILL a solid and perfectly playable Tier 4, at tier or even ahead of most of the Core SRD melee classes, solely because spellcasting is its primary focus, really says something.
* [[Monte Cook]] drew on ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' for inspiration for the Feats sub-system, and thus incorporated the fact that most ''Magic'' cards are shit and part of the game is picking out the worthwhile ones from the dreck into a game where you can't just easily swap out underperforming components of your character.  As a result, most feats are crap, and if you don't want to [[Netlist| spend time on the Internet looking up tutorials]], you risk accidentally tripping trap options.  This was ''also'' exacerbated by the glut of content for the edition: the marketing boys ''love'' being able to print "Over 100 new feats!" on the back of every damn sourcebook and the design of the game is such that low quality control is practically considered a feature rather than a bug. Qualifications and feat chains were also big issues, with "feat taxes," or low-quality feats you'd never use or feel the effects of often being prerequisites to qualify for good ones later.
** This also applies on a lesser scale, to prestige classes/base classes, with people just remembering the OP bullshit and not the countless low-effort trash ones.  It is also very hostile to new players creating their characters from level to level and practically demands building yourself from session 1 to qualify for what you want.
* Some rules make a lot of sense for the sake of mechanics in combat and gameplay but sound silly in realistic terms... like "the older you get the wiser you get"... and by default the better your sense of sight and hearing become (handwavium: spot and listen checks aren't necessarily about how well you can see and hear, but about how well you NOTICE the things you see and hear, which, in the real world, does often improve with age and experience. For example, we're all much better at telling the difference between the CGI dinosaurs and the physical puppets in Jurassic Park than we were back in 1993). Silly things like these are often pointed out in Rich Burlew's [[Order of the Stick]], an [[Webcomic|online comic]] based on D&D characters.
* It's possible for a wizard not to know about magic, a druid not to know about nature and a cleric not know about religion (including his own).
* Class skills are pretty much set in stone for each class, with only a handful of ways to add skills to your class skills. Curiously, d20 Modern fixed this with its starting occupation system, but unlike many other fixes to 3E of that system, it wasn't included in the 3.5 update.