4mo ago

I do not think any of you actually played 3.5 you praise so much

3.5 was edition I played the most. It was a reason why I quit RPGs for nearly a decade because I hated it so much.

Every time I see another meme about how amazing 3.5 Tarrasque is, I remmember how amogn actual 3.5 players Tarrasque was the biggest joke. It was always brought up as definite proof designers have no idea how to make good monster. It was laughably easy to beat. A wizard could casually solo it, the same abilities people now miss in 3.5 amounted to ribbons. It was a laughingstock, forums had 100+ pages discussions how to fix it and general consensus was it';s beyond saving. It was first proof in 3.5 if you cannot use magic you're only good to roll over and die.

I honestly don't know if everyone claiming 3.5 Tarrasque is such a horrifying monster are trying to rewrite history or unintentionally proving what a broken, unplayable pile of garbage 3.5 was, if it's biggest punching bag is actually dangerous in a different, better designed game.

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Look, everyone knows that
<previous thing>
was much better than
<current thing>
because it was
<comparator>
and more
<adjective>
. Just look at how much
<comparator>

<element>
became! They completely ruined it.
Fingers crossed this gets fixed in
<next thing>
.
- < 1 year before release: This will be the best game ever, it will be better than real life. It will replace my life completely, allowing me to live in this world until the end of time.
  Release: This is garbage. This is the worst thing I've ever seen. The
  <original creators>
  are turning over in their graves. Gaming is shit now. Devs fucked up. How could they ever release this.
  1-2 years after release: Silence
  2-4 years after release: You know, I replayed that game, it wasn't that bad, honestly I kind of liked how it worked
  4-8 years after release: That game was honestly one of the best. Back from the old days of gaming before everything became shit. Now it's all terrible. I hope they don't fuck up the next one.
  8+ years: It's probably one of the best games of all time. It wasn't for everyone, but us true gamers knew how great it was. There's nothing that will ever beat it.
  
  It works for movies and pretty much everything else as well. The amount of nostalgia I've seen for terrible movies and shitty PS2-era videogames is astounding.
- I hate how accurate this is.
- Had to view source to see the "insert thing here" things. Some issue with the formatting using < and >, not sure if it's just on the Jerboa app.
  
  I wrote it on a pc, then looked later using Jerboa and saw what you saw. Definitely a Jerboa issue.
- They don’t make nostalgia like they used to.

what I liked about 3.5 was that it was insane, and the system was exploitable in ways the GM could not predict. it let you surprise even a railroady GM. there's a kind of vibrancy that gives to a fantasy world. I think for a lot of people, that was the first time they saw anything like that. it was a tedious 90s/00's kind of good.
it was tedious, and required knowing far too many rules. it was a tedious sprawling 90s/00's kind of shitty. I don't think it was a good system on balance, I just think it's better than any other D&D, unless pathfinder counts.
and you can absolutely play a non-wizard, you just have to be as broken and weird as the wizards are.
- Yeah rogues would literally just walk up to wizards and explode their whole body with a sneak attack and +40 Stealth checks.
  Then they kill the wizard's familiar with their other two attacks.
  Fighters acted like they were poor little victims vulnerable to mean old spellcasters but that's because players don't like taking defensive feats. By the time 3.5 was done there was a build floating around that basically made you immune to magic.
  I don't recall 3.5 spells having nearly as many guaranteed success effects as 5.0 has. It was generally considered, you know, a bad idea to be able to reliably CC ancient wyrms with no hope of defense.
  
  Fighters acted like they were poor little victims vulnerable to mean old spellcasters
  About 14-15 years ago, I was playing in a 16th level game where the DM did NOT know how to challenge us. He put us against an astral behemoth with double hit points and our fighter soloed it in one round, dealing out a whopping 2,500ish points of damage in 7 attacks. One of the toughest monsters in the game, with double hit points, and the rest of the party didn't even get to act.
  Later in that game, we abused gate spells to crash rocks into the Abyss at 80% the speed of light.
  3.5 is ridiculous.
  
  having more variance in player capabilities and unique strengths (this build can fight orcs forever without getting tired!) that can kind of shape a campaign is much better than all the shit that tries to reduce variance and balance, keeping players at similar levels of general capacity just isn't worth the effective homogeneity.

i can also confirm that the tarrasque was pretty universally clowned on for being easy in 3.5e. That discussion is basically what drove the whole "town built around the tarrasque" idea on the wizard forums and enworld. That said, it's probably not as bad as the 5e tarrasque by comparison
- the whole “town built around the tarrasque” idea
  The what?
  
  http://www.saltinwoundssetting.com/2015/04/salt-in-wounds-overview-origin.html?m=1
  A campaign setting about a LE township whose economy is predicated on harvesting the perpetually regenerating form of the Tarrasque. The town is divided into districts based on the massive magical spears that have pinned the creature to the soil. And there's a ton of intrigue surrounding the various political families that are charged with maintaining - and periodically adjusting - those magical spears in order to keep the beast constrained, as well as the different religious, arcane, and druidic factions who have wildly different takes on if/how this process is to continue.
  A very cool setpiece and one of the more exciting ways to describe how industrious adventurers might deal with this kind of creature.
  
  You know how the tarrasque constantly regenerates? Well what if you harvested it for meat?
  
  in 3e, the tarrasque had regeneration, and couldnt die from negative HP. So the idea of building a town that "farmed" an unconscious tarrasque for its meat/bones/whatever was a popular thought experiment for a setting back in the day. IIRC there was also someone who took the idea and published it as an actual book at some point too (which honestly felt kinda scummy to me, since it was basically a big community project/collaboration)

The 3.x tarrasque became a joke, but that was a result of the extensive options combined with people's system understanding - sure a single wizard could kill it, but that still needed to be played by someone who understood the system. It was a system that gave unlimited options, so if you worked out how to combine enough of them you could break the system wide open, and the tarrasque was a great yardstick for that.
Then you come to 5e's tarrasque and it's so badly designed that it's obvious from a glance that a level 1 character with flight can just hover above it and plink it down with a bow. I've seen 3.5's brought up in comparison to that, but not as an example of difficult fights in a vacuum.

Could you give examples? I never heard of it being easy to beat, and I would love a laugh at it being easily handled
- The big one was its complete lack of mobility abilities or ranged attacks, so a party with overland flight could attack it pretty much with impunity. Iirc that was most commonly paired with shrinking a bunch of boulders, carrying them up with you, then dropping them right as the shrinking spell expired. This is all from memory 15 years ago though so details could be a bit sketchy.
  
  so a party with overland flight could attack it pretty much with impunity
  That's true of anything without a fly speed, assuming you're doing all your adventures on a flat plain during the daytime in perfect weather. But the game changes slightly when you're spelunking through the Underdark, racing through a forest of redwoods, or caught by surprise in the middle of a hurricane.
  The drama of D&D is in the circumstances. You're not supposed to have every fight in ideal conditions with a week of downtime to prepare. If you're summiting a mountain during a blizzard and one of the Tarrasque's meaty fists pops out of a cave wall to try and snag someone, or you've accidentally woken this thing up from beneath an ancient tomb full of restless wraiths, that's a very different encounter than squaring off against this lumbering titan as it casually stomps its way across empty desert.
- the usual go to back in the day was to drown it, because it wasnt immune to that in any way. Simply gate it to the plane of water. There was a number of other work arounds like that too.
  
  Killing it by banishing it to another dimension of reality sounds like the epic, high level stuff the Terrasque was made for
  
  The best way I've seen to defeat an enemy without killing it is Flesh to Stone, Stone to Mud, Purify Food and Drink, and then boil the water away. That was more for keeping an enemy from being resurrected, but it would be a cool overkill way to get rid of a tarrasque without using Wish.
- Yeah, I ran campaigns from first through 3.5, never really played 4th or 5th. I'm curious how 3.5 tarrasque is easy to beat with anything other than broken munchkin builds from conflicting source materials that no sane DM would allow, or would be reserved for epic level campaigns. Like sure, when you get to a point where you can casually cast things like hellball, then things like the tarrasque might be easy. But at that point you will be doing the tango with the outer realm creatures and Demi gods.
  
  My personal favorite:
  A 9th level druid (any druid) flies 40ft in the air and upcasts one of their summon animals spells to summon 8 giant owls, then makes them fall prone.
  3.5 falling damage was both clear cut and bonkers. Your Owl MIRV would do an average of 679 damage.
  Not munchkin, not a special build, just the base rules and a default druid. It's even easy to write off thematically as the owls kamikaze dive bombing it instead of just falling!
  The 3.5 Tarrasque didn't have the 5.0 damage resistance to non-magic weapons, it has a flat 15 DR, which was the style at the time, but useless against the numbers falling damage mechanics would push out.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/powergamermunchkin/comments/wjtvch/whats_the_easiest_way_to_kill_a_tarrasque/
  I think a good DM would say the summoned animals aren't magic slaves and simply would not kill themselves doing this, but at the end of the day you could also just do this with large rocks so you might as well let them have kamikaze owls.
- I remember the go to strategy being to summon an Alip, an incorporeal undead that can drain strength without needing a save.
  
  And in 3.5 STR 0 meant your body no longer had the strength to have your heart beat so you'd die with no save.

3.5 was edition I played the most. It was a reason why I quit RPGs for nearly a decade
I've heard this line so many times, from virtually every game system. The system you know the best is always the worst. The system you're least familiar with looks genius by comparison.
I remmember how amogn actual 3.5 players Tarrasque was the biggest joke. It was always brought up as definite proof designers have no idea how to make good monster. It was laughably easy to beat.
As I understand it, the Tarrasque isn't intended to be a direct threat to the players so much as a civilization-wide threat that players have to deal with. If you're just running heads-up against the creature, there's a wide basket of indirect effects and clever builds that can kill or disable it. And when Wish/Miracle are on your spell list it isn't an existential threat to a 17+ level party.
But all of that presumes you're coming into contact with a Tarrasque as a known quantity. You're not stumbling on the Tarrasque unexpectedly or dealing with it as the muscle attached to a more magically or socially savvy antagonist. You're not fighting in any bizarre circumstances or unusual conditions. It's not the Tarrasque that's easy, it's the fact that you're on a message board with a pre-defined set of circumstances and a standard level appropriate set of resources to pull from that makes things easy.
I honestly don’t know if everyone claiming 3.5 Tarrasque is such a horrifying monster
An unanticipated introduction to a Tarrasque, particularly one encountered in unfavorable circumstances, can quickly end in a TPK. Players down on spells, caught napping, managing some secondary hindering conditions, or in an enclosed space (the meanest improvement I've seen a DM give to a Tarrasque was simply assigning it a burrow speed) don't have the luxuries of time and distance to prepare themselves. And that's what makes it scary.
But, again, you can say that about any of the Animal/Beast class of monsters. The humble house cat can one-shot a first level wizard if it gets initiative and rolls well. But the wizard wins with a single volley of magic missiles. The Kraken is a trivial encounter if your players can sit up on an 80' tall cliff and fire arrows at it until it drops. Its significantly harder to deal with when it is demolishing the boat under your feet 600 miles off the shore.
Part of the DM's job is to set the stage for high drama. "You see the big baddy waltzing up to you, take ten rounds to prepare" doesn't get you that.

I feel like people like remembering shenanigans or getting one over a shitty GM, but actually playing it was a slog especially with experienced power gamers at the same as new players. Also apparently enjoy arguing semantics to "win". Bleh

In 3.5, a high level wizard could take it down.
In 5e, you could have a mission to protect an endangered tarrasque from Aarakocra poachers.

I play 3.5 for a few years. One of my groups swore by it. It was... textured. When you call it a steaming pile of shit, I see your point and honestly agree with you. But I will say it was... completely what it was. It wasn't well designed, but it was immensely interesting. 5e is all of 3.x, but with the interesting parts sanded down. In my estimation, that makes 5e the lesser game.
- 3.5e just had some much room to explore. Yeah, some parts sucked or didn't make sense, but I think that really led to some interesting characters and fun moments in games. I haven't played 5e much precisely because it's so smooth in comparison.

The Tarrasque is a flawed creature in all editions. In case of 1e/2e, it's not immune to being stunned or being paralyzed (e.g. Hold Person), giving the party a good chance to exploit its vulnerable period. Later editions have other flaws, most of which can be fixed by giving the Tarrasque a ranged attack (similar to Godzilla, etc.)
The flaws in 3.5e actually involve power scale. There's combinations of abilities that are incredibly powerful, resulting in characters that are pre-planned rather than organically grown - and also meant that some classes were inherently better than others. At the same time, there were feat taxes that were essential for almost any character, which would be cutting into abilities that would be normal.
However, I'd be comparing 3.5e to Basic D&D. In this case, I'd most likely prefer 3.5e, simply because it's more flexible compared to the rigid use of Basic's weapons, but I instead skipped past that and went to both 4e and/or Pathfinder.
- Eh, it's a playable fight in 4e. The biggest flaw there is it's not particularly exciting as an encounter.

I've only played 2, 3 and 3.5. Read the rules for 4 when it came out and was not impressed in the slightest, and neither was anyone else in my group. Haven't even bothered with 5 except in the case of BG3 which uses it so I don't know if it's as simplified as 4 or if the simplicity was simply the video game format.
We never used a terrasque and it's not like I read every monster manual cover to cover. I'd skim through, see a cool picture and if the description of it was cool enough, I'd use it. The terrasque didn't pique my interest by its appearance so I never read anything else about it. I'm a huge fan of Modons though. Fuck yeah! Shapes!

I think what they want is something to be a little afraid of. Yes, the beast as written is easy to kill for the creative but for some dorks it was scary because it existed.

That's when I played too. Following the rules was torture.

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