Tabletop Roleplaying Games · Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons 3.5
High-Fantasy
Wizards of the Coast
Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 (D&D 3.5, written D&D v.3.5 on the books) is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game of dungeon delving and heroic adventure, published by Wizards of the Coast in July 2003 as a revision of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. The 3rd Edition rules were designed by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook and Skip Williams in 2000. The revision was intentionally a small one, focused on common complaints about aspects of play, which is why it carries a "half edition" number. The basic rules are fundamentally the same as the 3rd Edition rules, and the changes are mainly to balance. It runs on the d20 System, the engine released with the Open Game License (OGL) that let third-party publishers produce D&D-compatible material, and it became the basis of Paizo's Pathfinder Roleplaying Game in 2009.
The system is a revision of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition (2000), and it was succeeded by Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, announced in August 2007 and released in June 2008.
Description
Players take on adventurers built from a race and a class, and the Dungeon Master (DM) runs dungeons, monsters and campaigns. The game means deep, granular character-building alongside the dungeon crawl. Every class, skill point and feat is a deliberate choice, and by mid-to-high level a character sheet can run to several pages of interacting rules. The game rewards system mastery, and it is tactical in a literal sense, with grid-based, miniatures-supported combat in which precise movement and positioning matter as much as raw numbers.
The game asks a table for bookkeeping. A huge library of official supplements means there is almost always another build option to chase, and tables who enjoy that will get a lot out of it, while those who want a light evening may not.