r/DungeonsAndDragons35e

Hello folks!

So, my friends want to try 3.5e (they played only 4e and 5e/5.5e when D&D is concerned) and i've decided to DM a simple sandbox for them as soon as i've finished our current campaign arc.

My idea is to make a simple mini-setting, something like 12~15 hexes with a bunch of interest points, a few dungeons, rumours and dangerous monsters to hunt in the wild, pretty simple sandbox emergent gameplay stuff. My inspiration would be the Dalelands of Forgotten Realms (Mistledale, maybe).

That being said, i'm torn about which splatbooks to allow in this. I don't want to go "PHB" only, but i also dont want to open the floodgates all at once. I'm a long time DM, but it's been a LOT of years since i've run 3.5e, so my knowledge about the diverse splatbooks is rusty.

My idea was PHB + Tome of Battle and maybe one more splatbook. What do you guys think? Any recommendations?

So my awesome girlfriend read my mind (not kidding - gave me this on THE DAY I thought to look for one) a cool DM screen with inserts, so I can put whatever I want in them. I'm going to be running 3.5 for the first time, AND DMing for the first time in like 20 years (and I'm super excited to do it).

Any suggestions about what I'm going to want on my DM screen? The obvious things, the less obvious things, the hard to find things ...

So... for example: We have a lv20 Cleric. Being lv20, the Cleric is kinda dirty rich, he bought himself a +1 heavy fortification (+5) spell resistance 17 (+4), which give the armor an effective bonus of +10. Still, he felt like that wasn't enough, and decided to cast "Magic Vestment", which he thought that it would give him an additional +4 AC as enchancement bonus (combine with the +1 of the armor, hitting the enhancement bonus cap of +5). How does the spell works in this situation? Does it gave him nothing since the effective bonus (enhancement + special ability bonus equivalents) are at max? Or does he still get his +4 to AC?

If possible, i would like to make the same question with a +10 effective bonus weapon and the spell "Magic Weapon"

Thank you in advance!

Is it normal for players to tell you how to DM or tell you that you have to follow the campaign source book to the letter? Basically they want me to DM it and use the same npcs and encounters in the adventure book. Keep in mind the book specifically says that players should NOT read the next part since it’s the adventure and for DM only and my players have read it all, and want me to do it the same way. Is this normal? Can you help me with what the usual DM / player balance is and how I should proceed?

The idea sound interesting to me: Leveling 2 classes at once, taking the best aspect of each classes at that level. But what about the actual play of it? Is it a horrid to balance/running a gestalt game from the DM's side? And how does it feels to play a gestalt character?

Recently been reading a lot of 3.5 after gming pathfinder for years and finding really cool stuff to port over to pathfinder, especially as it seems relatively easy to convert back and forth with a few adjustments.

Would love to know what feats or spells or even classes and subsystems people think are really awesome and should be ported over! A lot of the 3.5e ideas seem really neat.

I'm DMing for a group of fairly casual players, and while they are definitely enjoying 3.5e, they're not really well versed in all the mechanics, and I tend to help them with their character sheets and builds basically. As our campaign progresses there's been more and more monsters I've been wanting to introduce, but many of them have character sheet altering effects like ability damage that while simple to understand require several numbers to be recalculated on the sheet (DEX alone would affect AC, touch AC, range attack rolls, reflex saves, all of the dex skills, etc.) Again, while this isn't hard to understand, it's book keeping, and it's amplified by the fact that my players don't really know the sheets well enough to erase and replace the numbers--or if they do it still slows the pace of the game a lot which they find unfun.

I've thought of replacing these types of statuses with others that provide similar but easier to manage effects, although I'm worried it'll break the balance somewhere in there.

So my question is, how do you run these types of effects without leading to constant updating of sheets over and over throughout the session?

P.S. this issue extends to other types of ability affecting conditions like exhaustion, entangled, etc.

EDIT: I should mention that we play on discord and their character sheets are PDFs (but not the auto-calculating kind)

Alright, so, in the book Secrets of Xendrik, and the Dragon Magazine issue 345, there are these things called artifact spells. They can only be learned with a high enough Spellcraft check from studying the place they're found. Once you learn it, you can cast it exactly once within the next year. You can't make a scroll of it, you can't make a wand of it. If you don't cast it within that year, you lose it. After you cast it or lose it, you have to go back to the source to relearn it. The spells are generally more powerful than most people can cast at this level because of all the restrictions.

Now.... I swear I remember one that, once learned, so long as you didn't cast it, only caused you to age one day for the year that it stayed in your head, after which time you'd have to relearn it. If you cast it, it no longer protected you from that aging. Except... none of the spells in either Xendrik or Dragon have this effect. Does anyone else know of anywhere else they might have come up with Artifact Spells, and particularly the one I'm looking for?

Are there any left? I was in one a few months ago but it seems to have disappeared.

It's been a few years since I actually played a game of 3.5, but something that always bugged me about it was the level adjustment mechanic - and I'm wondering if people have hashed out anything new about it?

My main issue is that the benefit of a +1 Level adjustment may seem worthwhile at level 1, but those benefits start being less relevant as the cost goes up every level. Just as an example, a Tiefling gets a bunch of Resistances at 5, which is super useful at low level but less so the higher you get. And their ability to cast Darkness? Is that really worth paying level 20 exp costs just to get to level 19?

Has anyone found a work around for this sort of situation yet?

One of the player at my table is hosting a lv10 oneshot next week. I'm planning to play a Duskblade, with medium armor and heavy shield. For weapon, is there a one handed weapon with reach i can use? If not, then i'll go with the good old longsword

Hi everyone, we have gone over the feedback to our proposed AI content rule and found that the vocal part of our community is overwhelmingly for a complete ban of content that has been created with generative AI tools. As a consequence, our new rule is rather succinct:

No generative AI content

Content created wholly or in parts by generative AI models (e.g. Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) is prohibited in posts and comments.

Please notify the mods if you use AI-based tools for accessibility reasons.

While AI is still somewhat detectable in images, it is harder to spot text written by AI. Please use the report tool to flag suspicious posts for a detailed review by us.

This rule is taking effect immediately, but we will not apply it retroactively.

If you have suggestions or any other concerns please leave a comment below. Thank you all for your feedback on this.

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EDIT: To address some concerns raised in the comments we have added the line "Please notify the mods if you use AI-based tools for accessibility reasons." to the rule. This ban does not aim to prevent people from participating in the community in general.

Hi all, I am new to 3.5 and I am looking for some adventures. So far I have looked through Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde and Red Hand of Doom. Mainly looking to see if there are any kind of 1-20 adventures, officially or 3rd party.

Thank you!

So I took endurance as a feat tax for a prestige class and I completely forgot about the sleeping in medium armour text for it. My dwarf is an armour smith and my dm lets me use other players known spells for crafting requirements. I was wondering if I were to craft a medium armour set for the express purpose of sleeping in are there any fun shenanigans I can get up to?

When I was DMing, I play it as silent actions so no voice would be made if the PC or enemy is using a reasonably small weapon (aka. Light weapons) or a natural weapon, and it only become visible and noticeable if someone is seeing the one being sneak attacked. So my PC basically got one sneak attack (as the surprising round action, and additional full sneak attack if they win the initiative) per enemy until busted.

But recently when I played Neverwinter Night, I tried a rogue and found that whenever I did a sneak attack, everyone in the room just suddenly rush on me.

Wondering which way is the supposed way to play sneak attack out. I know it can be triggered via flanking, but it would be too boring if that’s the only way to utilise it properly.

Since we have had a few posts with potentially AI-generated content recently, we should start a discussion on how to handle such content as a community.

Generative AI is, no doubt, an impressive tool that allows its users to create art that would previously have been beyond their capabilities. The technology is being pushed on everyone who is using the internet, so it is not surprising that people eventually start using it to generate content for RPGs. Some of that content might in fact be useful to players in here.

Of course, this all comes at a rather hidden cost. The most powerful AI models to date have been trained on web-scraped artworks without permission by and/or compensation to their creators. Now the existence of generative AI tools threatens the livelihood of artists that indirectly trained them. A drop in art commissions from individual players might be bearable, but if corporations start to use the same trick, as they now frequently do, artists stand to lose the financial basis that enabled them to create some of the art we enjoy. This problem affects many professions to a certain degree, from visual artists to writers to even programmers. It is up to us here to decide which, if any, kind of AI-generated content we want to allow on this subreddit.

Other subreddits have come to various conclusions on this. For example, r/DnD completely bans AI content and any mentions of it, while r/DungeonsAndDragons allows non-commercial AI art with a special flair.

For our subreddit we would propose to take a bit of each. Wholly AI-generated content, where images and/or text are pretty much unedited LLM output, would be disallowed. See the recent incantation post, where the post text as well as the image contain strong hints of generative AI (e.g. em dashes, gpt-image in metadata, etc.). In contrast to that, the Occulta Mainfesto webapp was created using various AI tools to speed up certain parts of development, but seems to be, at its core, human creative work. We propose to allow such work under the condition that any AI use is declared in the post and that it uses an "AI" flair to allow uninterested redditors to filter such posts out of their feed.

As moderators, we aim to create rules that lead to consistency in post evaluation, so that we don't just remove things based on our gut feeling. While we come up with a concise, yet general formulation, we want to ask you all to weigh in on the topic. Before adding a new rule we will put it out for community review.

- The r/DungeonsAndDragons35e mods

If so, what keeps you coming back compared to other settings you could use and what have some of your campaigns been like over the years?