D&D 3E/3.5 What are the major differences between 5E and 3.5E?

[Olaf the Stout]

My group is still currently playing 3.5E. However, I anticipate that we’ll be switching to 5E sooner or later as both DM’s in our group (me and 1 other person) have bought the Starter Set and PHB and will be getting the MM and DMG.

I’ve read a bit of the PHB, but not a huge amount of it. At our gaming session last night I was trying to give the rest of the players a quick summary of the major differences between 3.5E and 5E. Just off the top of my head, some of the things I mentioned included:

- 5E rules are simpler compared to 3.5E, but DMG will likely have a number of different modules to make your game closer to the various previous editions of D&D
- Advantage/Disadvantage as compared to a number of different bonuses and modifiers.
- Wizards prepare their spells for the day, but can choose the level the spell is cast at when they cast it.
- Feats are less frequent, but more powerful now, often the equivalent of 2-3 feats in 3.5E.
- Forgotten Realms in the default setting.
- Dragonborn and Tieflings are PHB races, as is the Gnome again.
- Halflings have bobble heads and tiny feet.
- The concept of backgrounds and how they can help you flesh out a character.

What other things would you include in this list to try and show a 3.5E player what the major differences between 3.5E and 5E are?

 

[Sword of Spirit]

- Forgotten Realms in the default setting.

Pet peeve: Forgotten Realms isn't the default setting in the way Greyhawk was for 3e core or that deliberately vaguely defined Nentir Vale world thing was for 4e.

The PHB includes quotes and references to multiple campaign settings, including Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and others. Heck, the intro quote for the entire elf race section is from a Dragonlance book!

They provide Forgotten Realm human ethnic groups, specifically called out as an example, and they hit the Forgotten Realms examples a little more strongly than they do the others, because the current adventure product line is entirely Forgotten Realms.

They've called it their "flagship" setting.

So if you want to call that default or core or whatever, that's up to you. But compared to the last two versions of D&D, the only default in 5e is "setting inclusive."

EDIT: Sorry for not answering any of your questions, and there will hopefully be some better posts on here by the time you get back. But, you know, pet peeves are pet peeves.

 

[Andor]

Bounded accuracy is a big one. It means the difference between a Fighters to Hit roll at 1st and 20th level is likely to be 9 (+4 Prof bonus + 2 stat and +3 weapon) instead of 30+

Collarary to this is that monsters remain useful over vastly greater ranges of PC levels. An Ogre is a good boss monster at low levels and not to be sneered at at high levels.

Wizards (and all other casters) do have more flexible casting, but they pay for this in a few ways.

1. They now have drastically fewer slots, especially at high levels.
2. The new concentration rules mean any given caster is maintaining 1 and only 1 buff or debuff at a time.
3. Spell damages scales by slot used, rather than caster level. So a 5th level mage and a 20th level mage casting a fireball out of a 3rd level slot do the same damage. The 20th level mage can use a higher level slot to get more juice from it though.

Bards don't suck anymore.

You have to read the rules carefully, you can get tripped up by 3e expectations in things like damage, crits and AoO.

 

[Negflar2099]

Personally I would suggest you stress how different the multiclass rules are. For me (since we're on the subject of pet peeves) the multiclass rules in 3e were game breakingly bad. I had so many PCs who dipped a toe here or took a level of that over there that by the time they were done they were less a party and more a support group for people with multiple personality disorder.

In 5e by contrast there seems to be plenty of reason to stick with one class (or two at most). Otherwise you're going to delay or completely miss out on attribute increases/feats and you'll miss all the cool powers that are later in the trees. Also, there's the reqs for multiclassing which finally make the whole make sense to me (seriously how can a character with a 2 intelligence learn wizardry in two weeks? ).

Depending on your players that's where I would suggest you focus.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Pet peeve: Forgotten Realms isn't the default setting in the way Greyhawk was for 3e core or that deliberately vaguely defined Nentir Vale world thing was for 4e.

The PHB includes quotes and references to multiple campaign settings, including Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Eberron, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and others. Heck, the intro quote for the entire elf race section is from a Dragonlance book!

They provide Forgotten Realm human ethnic groups, specifically called out as an example, and they hit the Forgotten Realms examples a little more strongly than they do the others, because the current adventure product line is entirely Forgotten Realms.

They've called it their "flagship" setting.

So if you want to call that default or core or whatever, that's up to you. But compared to the last two versions of D&D, the only default in 5e is "setting inclusive."

EDIT: Sorry for not answering any of your questions, and there will hopefully be some better posts on here by the time you get back. But, you know, pet peeves are pet peeves.

No worries. Half my players really have no idea what the Forgotten Realms are anyway. So it won't mean a lot to them either way. I know a bit about the Forgotten Realms, but I've never really ran or played in a campaign in the setting.

Our campaigns in the past have either been in Greyhawk or in a generic neutral setting (using the Greyhawk gods). The other DM in the group grew up playing in the Greyhawk setting and the other players are definitely more on the casual side and aren't super-interested in setting fluff.

 

[doctorhook]

My group is still currently playing 3.5E. However, I anticipate that we’ll be switching to 5E sooner or later as both DM’s in our group (me and 1 other person) have bought the Starter Set and PHB and will be getting the MM and DMG.

I’ve read a bit of the PHB, but not a huge amount of it. At our gaming session last night I was trying to give the rest of the players a quick summary of the major differences between 3.5E and 5E. Just off the top of my head, some of the things I mentioned included:

- 5E rules are simpler compared to 3.5E, but DMG will likely have a number of different modules to make your game closer to the various previous editions of D&D
- Advantage/Disadvantage as compared to a number of different bonuses and modifiers.
- Wizards prepare their spells for the day, but can choose the level the spell is cast at when they cast it.
- Feats are less frequent, but more powerful now, often the equivalent of 2-3 feats in 3.5E.
- Forgotten Realms in the default setting.
- Dragonborn and Tieflings are PHB races, as is the Gnome again.
- Halflings have bobble heads and tiny feet.
- The concept of backgrounds and how they can help you flesh out a character.

What other things would you include in this list to try and show a 3.5E player what the major differences between 3.5E and 5E are?

Here's some additions and corrections:

• Dragonborn, Gnomes, and Tieflings are all in the Player's Handbook, but listed as exotic races;
• Feats are less frequent, but also optional and character-defining (like a mini-class). Few-to-no feat-taxes currently exist;
• Subclasses can make a huge difference in your character concept, e.g.: Rogue (Assassin) vs Rogue (Arcane Trickster);
• Multiclassing has minimum requirements for each class;
• No character is crippled from the start. Every race/subclass combination is viable, and very few shine above the rest (and even then, very little).

Happy gaming!

 

[billd91]

Options for customizing a character are still substantial but exist in a broader sense and are less granular than 3.5e choices (like skill ranks, feats every levels or so, etc).

 

[Tony Vargas]

What other things would you include in this list to try and show a 3.5E player what the major differences between 3.5E and 5E are?

Most casters combine prepared and spontaneous casting /and/ at-will cantrips, including marginally effective attack cantrips. The exceptions are the Sorcerer, who's still just spontaneous, but gets some rationed free metamagic, and the Warlock, who gets at-wills and high-level dailies, but re-charges the bulk of his magical ability with a mere 1-hr rest instead of overnight.

Spell damage (and a few other things) scale with the 'slot' used to cast it (so you must cast a magic missile in a higher-than-first level 'slot' to throw more missles, or a fireball in a higher-than-third level slot to do more dice of damage). Conversely, Save DCs scale with character level, not spell level nor even caster level.

Instead of BAB, everyone gets 'proficiency' that goes from +2 to +6 over 20 levels. This applies to attacks, save DCs, /some/ saving throws, and trained skills. FORT, REF, and WILL are called CON, DEX, and WIS saves, respectively. There are also STR, INT, and CHA saves, but they are rare. Each class gets proficiency in one of the 'useful' saves, and one of the others. So you're going to have two important 'bad' saves at high level, unless you multiclass or use feats to shore them up.

Feats are /much/ 'bigger.' You only get a feat every 4 levels and must give up a stat bump to get it, but one feat is like a whole 3.x feat-/tree/.

Fighters get two more stat bumps than everyone else, the first at level 6, instead of bonus feats.

Fighters get old-school multiple attacks in a single standard action (simply called an action), instead of needing to make a full-round attack, and all attacks are full-BAB, not iterative - yes that makes them pretty high DPR even without much system mastery applied.

AoOs, and some other sorts of actions are consolidated into a single 'Reaction,' that you can do only once per round. A lot of cool things use Reactions, so you have to be careful not to have them get in the way of eachother.

Swift and other actions are consolidated into a 1/round 'bonus' action. For instance, you use your 'bonus' action to cast a spell that also lets you attack on the same round, or attack with an off-hand weapon, or a lot of other things, creating a bit of a bottleneck.

There are no wealth/level guidelines and magic items are strictly a DM-distributed resource. You can forget about tailoring items to 'builds.' Characters started above 1st level still just get 1st level gear.

MCing is slightly different: caster levels stack, to a degree.

Monsters aren't generally built using all the same rules as PCs, they have simpler stat blocks, more like earlier editions, though they /do/ have all six stats.

PrCs are gone.

You have a choice of 'background' (mostly what you did before you started adventuring) that determines some of your skills, some of your starting gear, and a perk of some kind.

 

[eryndel]

All good stuff in this thread... one thing that I didn't specifically see called out is that there are now a lot of cool toys among the classes. 3e core classes tended to be sparse, relying on feats, skill points, or spell levels to round out the leveling up experience. Prestige classes helped ameliorate that by typically being designed to have one new toy every level or two (although not always). It seems like in 5e there's something new going on just about every level. Pure casters probably have the sparsest "cool toy" progression because they have spell progression, but even a wizard still has class abilities at 1 and 18, arcane tradition abilities at 2/6/10/14 and ability bonus/feats at 4/8/12/16/19. The levels where they don't get a class ability are odd, where they get a new level of spells. Non spellcasters, on the other hand, generally have something going on every level.

- Halflings have bobble heads and tiny feet.

It was noted in the 5e art thread that the proportion issue might be a matter of perspective (looking down on the halfling). So I like to think it's not that they have tiny feet... the feet are just very far away.

 

[mcbobbo]

Another change vs 3e - the gotchas are gone. Druids don't cease being druids if you trick them into wearing metal. Paladins don't fall by a difference of opinion. And if they do stray, there's no specific requirement for a spell casting. They can just declare they feel bad about it.

You're proficient or you're not with weapons and armor, and spells in armor is AOK. But proficiency in skills and tools is just a modest buff, not a requirement. So everyone can use thieves' tools if desired.

Eschew materials was replaced by focus items.