So…what the blazes is this all about? Yet another effort to make an HTML version of a decades-old ruleset the publisher doesn’t even support anymore?
Well, yes…and no.
When Wizards of the Coast (WotC) sent Ryan Dancey out to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to salvage Dungeons and Dragons from the financial ruin of TSR, Inc., he was given two directives: “Save D&D, and don’t spend any more money!” He and his team accomplished that mission: the game was revived without changing its essential nature, resulting in Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition. A few years later, version 3.5 was released, cleaning up many of the rough edges.
It was 3rd Edition that introduced the concept of the Open Gaming License (OGL), which allowed certain portions of the game to be used by other publishers royality-free. The idea was that this would lead to more material for D&D players, who would still need the core rulebooks—the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Monster Manual—to make use of it.
D&D 3.5 and the OGL were quite successful, and deservedly so.
Any game publisher operates under the same pressure that academia does: “publish or perish”. Without new material coming out, the revenue stream dwindles, and the publisher ends up losing the bigger game (for them): remaining financially sound and profitable. Eventually, as a game company grows and merges with other companies (as happened to the Wizards of the Coast when they merged with Hasbro) that bigger game can overshadow the ones they are publishing.
This inevitably leads to the curse and blessing of any table-top role-playing game: Yet Another New Edition.
For WotC, that was D&D 4th Edition…and D&D 5th Edition…and D&D 2024…and whatever comes after.
Outside of mathematics, all equivalencies are false, so it was inevitable that later editions of the game would not be equal in quality to version 3.5. One may argue that D&D 4th Edition or D&D 5th Edition or D&D 2024 might be better or worse than D&D version 3.5, but the point here is that they are different.
Why is that important?
Role-playing games are largely storytelling in the second person, present tense, with dice to determine the outcome of actions. (“You strike with your great axe and do 12 points of damage. You slay the goblin. What are you doing now?”)
All stories have certain elements: characters, plot, and setting. The last, setting, establishes the limits of the story:
These are but a few of the considerations of setting.
In role-playing games, game rules are integral to the setting, as they define the limits.
This leads to the inevitable dilemma: change the rules…and you change the setting. Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Forgotten Realms (an official setting for Dungeons and Dragons since Advanced D&D 1st Edition), had to deal with this every time a new edition came out: each new editon would revamp many things, most notably the magic system. The usual way this was handled was to kill and replace Mystra, the goddess of magic, whenever a new edition came out. This would be the cover for why magic worked differently now.
(If Mystra actually existed, Lake Geneva, WotC headquarters, and even Hasbro would be smoking craters now. “What? You’re publishing a new edition? Oh, no, you’re not! I know where that’s going! *Magical nuclear strike*)
For Ed Greenwood, Forgotten Realms started as a passion that became his job. He had to adapt to the new editions—even if, at times, he didn’t seem to like it.
I guess I don’t have that kind of dedication. I’ve made some settings in the past, many of them way too ambitious for me and subsequntly lost to the mists of time. My current home-brewed setting, Yön, is probably my last. It was born of a practice novel I wrote just for myself and never finished back when D&D version 3.5 was at its height, and over time I’ve written a couple hundred pages of setting material—nothing to compare to Ed Greenwood’s file-cabinet-filling efforts, but sufficient to my needs.
When 4th Edition came out, WotC did away with the Open Gaming License, and the rules were different in a way that my group of local gamers and I found…unappealing. We stuck with version 3.5.
When 5th Edition released, it was clear that they had learned from what went wrong with 4th Edition: the Open Gaming License was back, and the rules had been simplified to attract new gamers. We thought more seriously about converting. Ultimately, we decided against it for different reasons. My own main reason is I didn’t want to be “Greenwooded”: stuck in an endless cycle of updating the setting to accomodate new rules.
(Later, I was glad for not switching to 5th Edition: aside from breaking the Yön setting, whose social structures and economies were built around the way magic worked in 3.5, the sheer number of online videos of people demonstrating all the ways to abuse 5th Edition is daunting. All game systems are subject to abuse by the players—Gygax knows I’ve done more than my share of that as a player through my half-century of gaming—but really…)
Yes, the version 3.5 rules are no longer supported by WotC. They are a dead edition. The company websites have long been scrubbed of any mention of that edition, although the Internet Archives, a.k.a. The Wayback Machine, has preserved the bulk of it. Version 3.5 now largely consists of old, fraying rulebooks mouldering in boxes in basements, offered for sale on eBay, or as PDFs on the internet.
Yet…it is still a good game. It is harder to play than 5th Edition (and probably harder than the 2024 edition), but for some of us, that is a feature, not a bug.
A lot of that complexity is from the sheer volume of books that were published for D&D 3.5 over the years, even limiting them to those published only by WotC and not third parties. Rules, errata, rule clarifications, new books with updated formatting, more rules… Every TTRPG goes through that, and in some ways, it is almost a blessing that D&D 3.5 is a dead edition. Latin is a “dead” language and suitable for the use in science because it is dead and not subject to change from evolving use, new slang, colloquialisms, idioms and the like. D&D 3.5 is safe from that same creep now that everyone, especially the publisher, has moved on.
Well, not everyone.
This brings me (finally!) to the purpose of Archive Three-Five: to pull all that together into a user-friendly, organized whole.
This does not mean that I’m simply going to slap everything together and call it a day. Here are my goals:
This will not, however, be a verbatim copy of the rules. Errata will be incorporated, and other errors eliminated as they are found. Rewrites and examples for clarity will occur. Sometimes rules will be clarified, and even the occasional better way of handling a rule will be included. It means that rules added later, such as those for swift and immediate actions, will be in the core rules where they belong, and other rules will reflect that. (For example, casting feather fall is simply an immediate action spell and its text reflects that, since the spell was an immediate action spell before the concept of immediate actions was added.) An effort has been made to mark where such additions and changes have been made with a special paragraph style that puts a green bar to the left of heavily altered or imported material, just as shown here with this paragraph.
In cases where there are unresolved conflicts in the rules, like a spell name used for significantly different spells in two different D&D 3.5 books published by WotC, warning text to that effect will be marked by a red bar to the left of the paragraph, like this one.
What? You’re still reading this? Go out and play!