Heretical Thoughts (Part II)

Was Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons really that bad?

I know that it has a poor reputation among fans of old school D&D, which is really to say, TSR D&D, but is that reputation deserved? Was it truly a bad edition of "the world's most popular tabletop roleplaying game," to borrow a phrase – or does it simply catch a lot of grief for things not directly related to it as a game? 

To place my thoughts in a little more context, let me provide a little personal history. I played Dungeons & Dragons – mostly AD&D – more or less continuously from late 1979 till about 1996 or thereabouts. That's around the time TSR released the "Player's Option" series of books. By that point, I'd already begun to tire of AD&D and had started to spend more time playing other RPGs, but something about the "Player's Option" volumes really vexed me. They were, in my opinion, a step too far, contributing further to my growing sense that AD&D was bloated and directionless. 

During the period between 1996 and 2000, I largely abandoned playing Dungeons & Dragons in any form, in favor of many other roleplaying games. Late in this period, I also began to make my first forays into professional writing. One of my earliest employers was Wizard World, publisher of the magazine InQuest Gamer. InQuest initially focused on collectible card games, but eventually expanded to cover games of all sorts, including RPGs. 

Though I was a freelancer, I was often assigned articles that gave me access to people and materials that would otherwise have been hard to come by. In early 2000, for example, I was given a major assignment: write about the upcoming new edition of D&D. To help me with this, Wizards of the Coast sent me pre-release proofs of the 3e Player's Handbook. I spent several weeks reading the text and giving the rules a test drive with my gaming group. 

This was the first time I'd played any version of D&D in several years – and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Indeed, I enjoyed it so much that, after I'd written the article for InQuest, I kept playing a Frankenstein version of "3e" cobbled together from the proofs WotC sent me augmented by 2e books to fill in any gaps (like monsters and magic items). We continued playing in this fashion until all three of the 3e core rulebooks were released between August and October of that year. 

Third Edition brought me back to playing Dungeons & Dragons after a long hiatus. For that reason alone, I find it difficult to bear any ill will toward the edition. Then, as now, I had qualms about certain aspects of its design – its emphasis on "system mastery," for instance – but the fact that it reminded me just how fun D&D could be is a huge point in its favor. 3e simultaneously felt fresh and vibrant while also remembering its roots. Unlike late Second Edition, which was, to put it charitably, a chaotic mess without any clear sense of what it was about, Third Edition proudly advertised itself as a "back to the dungeon" edition. This restored to D&D a much-needed focus.

Of course, this wasn't the only way that 3e remembered its roots. A careful reading of the text of its three rulebooks revealed just how much of its verbiage it shares with previous editions, particularly when it came to the descriptions of spells, monsters, and magic items. This might not seem like a big deal, but it would prove to be very important. That's because Third Edition was the first "open" edition of D&D, most of whose contents (via its System Reference Document, or SRD) were made freely available for use by other publishers through either the Open Game License (OGL) or the D20 System Trademark License (STL). For the first time ever, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons was offering a royalty-free means to produce adventures, supplements – and even whole games – compatible with D&D.

The SRD and OGL quickly proved themselves very important and not just to the plethora of game companies that sprang up like mushrooms overnight to support 3e. By opening up the mechanical and conceptual "guts" of Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast inadvertently gave birth to the Old School Renaissance. As early as 2004, independent publishers were experimenting with using the SRD and OGL to create RPGs that resembled earlier editions of D&D. The rest, as they say, is history, with the OSR quickly becoming both a movement and a genre, not to mention a permanent part of the larger hobby.

Now, one might reasonably argue that neither of these qualities has anything to do with Third Edition as a game either. That's a defensible position, though I don't completely agree with it, as I'll soon explain. However, I think historical context is important here. After the mess that was late Second Edition, 3e was a surprisingly clear, rational, and accessible restatement of the classic RPG. Most of its major deviations from TSR era D&D, like ascending armor class or new saving throw categories, served good purposes, even if I am no longer wholly on board with many of them. Nevertheless, they worked and facilitated play that, in my experience anyway, was quite reminiscent of how we played D&D in the early to mid-1980s. 

That's the important thing for me. Had Third Edition not played at the table as well as it did, I very much doubt that I'd have stuck with it. 3e brought me back to Dungeons & Dragons precisely because its designers wanted to produce a "modern" game that played enough like its predecessors that earlier materials were roughly compatible with it. Wizards of the Coast even released a short conversion booklet intended to help 2e players convert characters, magic, and monsters to the new edition. This demonstrates, I think, how seriously WotC at the time took its role as the new custodians of the original roleplaying game. The company wanted to retain old players even as it hoped to reach a new audience.

Of course, Third Edition had a lot of flaws. Like 2e, its presentation left a lot to be desired, particularly its absurd "dungeonpunk" art style. Likewise, several of its new mechanical elements, like feats and prestige classes, soon overshadowed everything else, to the point where the elegance of its core rules design began to buckle and burst. By the end of its run, Third Edition was every bit as bloated and directionless as its predecessor, to the point that I once again abandoned official D&D, this time for good. Fortunately, the SRD and OGL made retro-clones of earlier editions possible and my abandonment of WotC's subsequent versions didn't mean I couldn't keep playing a version of Dungeons & Dragons I still enjoyed, even if it now bore names like Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry instead.

In the end, I don't see how one can reasonably claim that 3e was either a bad game or a bad edition of D&D, except on the basis of very narrow criteria. I'm as curmudgeonly as they come – remember that I hate plush Cthulhus and fake nerd holidays – and even I am no more willing to indict Third Edition for its worst excesses than I am to indict First Edition because of Unearthed Arcana. From my perspective, 3e injected some much-needed vitality into Dungeons & Dragons at a time when it needed it most. This not only ensured the game's continued pre-eminence among RPGs, but also laid the groundwork for the OSR. That's a legacy well worth celebrating. 

That said, 3e's art really did suck.