Well, it’s been four years. Honestly when we started the gimmick of doing D&D every 25 episodes we never thought we’d actually get as far as third edition. Here we are though! 3rd Edition D&D and all it’s accompanying rules-as-physics and expansive OGL accoutrements, laid bare for your amusement over way too much time. Thanks again for all the support, dudes! Maudlin, choked up us will see you again next year for tabletop WOW for babbies.
System Mastery 
Monte Cook, one of the lead designers of 3e, used to work on Rolemaster, which in retrospect explains a lot of 3e’s design like discrete skill ranks.
Wait, isn’t raising hand a free action as well ? If so, for skeleton computer model of computation (assuming infinite tape) P==NP==constant_time.
It’s much more powerful then Quantum computers for example :)
Is this glitching only for me or is there like thirty minutes of silence in the middle of the podcast, right after the grapple skit?
First report I’ve heard of that, anyone else?
Yeah, I get a similar thing. Have tried a few things (deleted cookies, closed browser and reloaded, listened to another podcast and come back to it) but can’t seem to get sound back. I could definitely listen past that point originally, because I heard the end of the grapple madness. I paused it and now I can’t get it to work. Gap is from about 52mins to about Candlemaster (1hr 20), which is a shame as I was enjoying this, as I do all your work.
Ok, found a fix. If you leave it to run silent for a bit it suddenly kicks in. No idea why, it only glitches if you click somewhere on the bar at which point it is silent. No idea why it works in the first segment (to which I had listened) and half an hour later to the end (which I hadn’t). I have it back though, so that’s good.
I love how much Jeff hates white people.
And as a black lgbtq person, I approve.
Racism/sexism is not okay. I don’t care who you are.
The spell component pouch was probably the most important abstraction that they added to 3E, because it meant you didn’t have one player constantly monopolizing table time as they checked every room for spider webs and bat guano. It just assumed that, if you have a spell that requires it, then you’ll handle that stuff during down time.
It also had numerous caveats about how you only had enough of the material as you needed for your spells (so it wasn’t actually unlimited), you couldn’t produce anything that had a listed cost (so not chickens, which were a trade good with an explicit value of 2cp), and the item had to actually fit into a belt pouch (so again not chickens, even if you found some obscure spell that required a chicken as a component).
While I generally agree with “any game is better with a good group, a good GM, and people trying to have fun and not abuse it”, I do have to bring up the case of people accidentally walking into issues. I’ve enjoyed playing D&D 3.Xe (admittedly mostly for the weird splat classes) but you can have issues where a character just turns out kinda useless compared to someone else by accident (had this happen in other systems too) like when I built a Kobold Rogue Duelist and just couldn’t do anything of note in fights for my second 3.Xe character. (The first was building a Half-Dragon Fighter, which was hilariously bad even though I just did it for the cool since monster races because it was LV 5 and I had two hit dice and such. Whoops. Also, to bring up 4e, Expertise Feats, enough said.)
That said, any game is better with good people, agreed.
I also managed to build a relatively useless 4e character for my first ever TRPG character. Don’t ask me how in retrospect, I managed (Eladrin Fey Warlock with a _really bad stat distribution_.)
One of my main peeves about 4e was how it laid out all these potentially cool character concepts that actually didn’t work that well in practice until later they made all races have +2 to one stat and +2 to one stat from a choice of two. Before that Tiefling Infernal Warlock and Eladrin Fey Warlock were both awesome concepts that were actually mostly terrible in practice.
3ed is where I quit D&D. I hated it. Seemed like it was geared towards power gaming and the subsequent editions just seemed to prove that. Started playing Hackmaster a year later and enjoyed that a hell of a lot more. Do an episode on that ridiculousness
Half a decade after you released this ep, I don’t care, I will die mad about 3.x fighter, especially when they tried to make them cooler and some internet people called cool martial things “weeaboo bullshit” when I’m just doing things from folklore. How many of them had literally special attacks?! Cú Chulainn did “the hero’s salmon leap,” fuck you. You think Gilgamesh just did basic attack all day? Two fighters beat Fafnir suck my dick suck my dick suck my dick suck m