5th edition Dungeons and Dragons was designed to combat the admittedly horrid path that 4th edition was taking, redirecting from high-numbers minmaxing to beginner-friendly gameplay that exploded, bringing in tons of new players with its appealing simplicity. Some people (including me) who have been playing since before 4e may choose other editions or other systems; as friendly as 5e is, it doesn’t have a lot of depth or replayability built in. This will help explain the differences between playing 3.5 and 5e, for players coming from 5e.

Approachability vs Depth

This is the biggest change between the systems, and is the foundation of most of the mechanical differences. 5e is primarily built for newcomers, so most of the rules are contained in short, easy to remember sections. The broadness of options is vastly decreased, with less classes, less spells, less feats, and much less customizable paths for each class. This means that a new player doesn’t have much work to do to make a finished, balanced character. Essentially, you just pick a race and class, roll stats, and the rest is nearly filled out. 3.5 is primarily built for longevity, so the rules are broad and cover nearly any situation, and there is a broad variety of options with classes, feats, and spells galore. There’s also a large number of ways each class can be built and played, and if that isn’t enough there are TONS of extra books written with additional content to add more options. This means that a new player has a lot to decide, and can make nearly anything they can think of and already have a provided set of rules and options to make it work. In order to make something in 5e that’s outside of the short set of rules, you need to do homebrew in order to create it. In order to make something in 3.5, it’s already got rules, almost guaranteed. 5e encourages you to be clever and get around mechanics to solve problems, whereas every 3.5 solution is contained somewhere in the mechanics. In 5e, you almost need to add extra homebrew content for a game to be satisfying, whereas in 3.5 you almost certainly need to rule some offcore content out. Almost all of the changes in rules are designed to make learning 5e and having your character become really strong easier than in previous editions. In order for you to be successful at 3.5, you do not and should not know every rule. There are intentionally large arrays of extra rules to only be looked at should the campaign go that way, like rules for sword fighting on the deck of a ship in a storm; you don’t need to know that, but instead of needing to make up how difficult that is, the DM can just look in the book where it already tells you.

Bounded Accuracy

One of the major design philosophies in creating 5e is the concept of “Bounded Accuracy”, described by its creator as keeping everything within the world around the same range- the d20. The concept goes as follows: from 1st level onwards, your success in any scenario is based on the roll of a d20. In 3.5, you can get bonuses greater than 20, meaning that although the variety on any check might be 20, the difficulty of a check might be more than any given variety would provide. The example given is an Adamantine vs a Wooden door: to break a wooden door is DC 15, to break an adamantine in DC 35. Even a nat 20 won’t break the adamantine door, and you can’t reliably break it until you have a bonus of 25 or more.

When playing 3.5, the 5e designers ‘felt the need to use adamantine doors’ in order to stop high level players, as they could get strong enough that regular doors couldn’t stop them. In 5e, instead of making increasingly difficult DCs as players get stronger, the DCs stay the same and players really don’t get any stronger. At high levels, a 3.5 character based on strength can knock down wooden doors like paper, but a 5e character really can’t. They can more often break down the wooden door, but they don’t really ever have a chance to break an adamantine one without homebrew enhancements. In addition, in 3.5 a strength based character can perform feats of strength far beyond their weaker companions, but in 5e they really only get bonuses 2 or 3 ahead of their similarly leveled allies. This means in 5e that there is little a high level character can do that a low level character Couldn’t do, they’re just less likely to fail. There is little a strong character can do that a weaker character Couldn’t do, they’re just less likely to fail. In 3.5, a character 5 levels ahead is a few times as capable as the other, and 10 levels ahead can do things reliably that the other can’t achieve in any way. This shows up in a few main ways:

• Ability Scores: In 5e, you regularly improve ability scores, but they rarely get above 20 without special races. This means that almost any martial can achieve 20 STR at mid level, and the strongest warriors in the world really aren’t any stronger. Atop this, the races in 5e are all very similar to humans in ability and scale, whereas 3.5 contains races both much larger and much smaller, as well as much bigger variation in ability scores and no ability cap. An ogre barbarian in 3.5 can get to an STR of 32 or 36 at size L, whereas in 5e you really don’t get the option for either that score or that size.
• AC and To-hit: In 3.5, your bonus to-hit is usually around 1.5 to twice your level if you’re a martial, and your AC should be enough that things similar to you can’t often hit you (aka 30s-40s). In 5e, the attack bonus never really gets into the twenties, and Armor Class never really surpasses the 20s. Tiamat, ultra powerful dragon god, has an AC of 25 in 5e: this means a 1st level fighter with an easily achievable STR score of 18 can hit her, and possibly injure her. In 3.5, she has an AC of 69. You need nearly a +50 to hit her, at all. This is only achievable at epic levels, to the most powerful beings in the world.
• Skill checks vs Proficiency: Your proficiency bonus in 5e is used on all of your skills, which are limited to a short list, shortened to only a few specialized by your class. Proficiency is also used for attacks, which 3.5 uses a separate state, BAB. Essentially, 5e proficiency is a stat for “how good you are at stuff”, and it’s All of the stuff you do, or at least that your class allows you to do. You cannot customize beyond that. In 3.5, your class has a number of skills they use as “class skills”, as in it’s easier for you to learn them, and earns an amount of Skill Points. You can use these skill points of any of a much larger list of skills, including ones not part of your class, providing you with a much larger variety of skills and allowing you to get much better at them than 5e would allow. In 5e, your proficiency goes up to about 12, and anybody else with a similar proficiency rank is just as good as you in that skill, plus anybody with no ranks can still usually have a chance at doing anything you do; in 3.5 you can put 60 ranks into a single skill, and become the single greatest person at doing whatever it is you do and do things nobody else could dream of.
• Numbers vs Power: Obviously, the numbers in 3.5 get bigger, but that isn’t everything. One of the huge changes in 5e is that monsters that pose a risk at low levels can still pose a risk at high levels, if you just use more of them. 5 kobolds is a risk for a party of amateurs, and 10 is a risk for a group of seasoned professionals. In 3.5, a rule of thumb for balance is that 2 monsters of a given level are an appropriate challenge for a monster 2 levels higher. However, after about 5 levels higher a low level monster just can’t do much to bother you. This is because of a number of factors, primarily DR, SR, and the AC balance above (more later). No matter how many kobolds you throw at a 10th level 3.5 party, they really aren’t going to be able to do much. The party can start to ignore their attacks outright.
• Movie Hero vs Myth Hero: The easiest way I can distinguish the difference in feel between 5e is as follows: The 5e hero is like a hero from a movie, where within the period of 2 hours they can go from mild-mannered nobody with no particular talents to unlocking some power and defeating a foe seemingly stronger than everybody else around without being in any real danger along the way except for dramatic purposes. The 3.5 hero is like a hero from a myth, who has incredible and often unique powers that they may have been gifted or earned through years of struggle, and uses them to battle similarly mighty foes and perhaps face a tragic fate in the process, but their successes will be written in history. Which of these you like more, or the relative value of the two, is up to the individual player.

HP grind vs Instakill

Although several numbers change dramatically with bounded accuracy, two sets of numbers really don’t: damage output, and hp pool. Enemies in 5e still have hundreds of hit points like their 3.5 counterparts, and both enemies and PCs deal similar amounts of damage. The distinction is in 3.5, both enemies and PCs have access to a much larger pool of instant-kill effects, including save-or-dies, massive damage, and the like. In 5e, almost all PCs have self-healing effects, and you just need to deal more damage each round to the enemy than they can heal and survive their damage, whittling down their HP pool until they die. There’s still the occasional “rocks fall” type effect, but for the most part your only option is to deal direct damage until the enemy dies. Most of your balance revolves around increasing health, healing, and damage output.

Advantage vs Bonuses

This one is short. Beneficial effects in 5e typically provide advantage, which lets you roll twice- essentially just providing a success, given that almost all the chance of success revolves around the roll. Similarly, harmful effects are disadvantage, forcing a failure. Instead of this, 3.5 provides numerical buffs and penalties, usually flat bonuses but sometimes multiplicative. If you add enough bonuses, you can reach a number, but a low enough score may not be able to be brought up to a success in 3.5.

Save or Die and Disabling

In 5e, most status effects provide disadvantage or minor penalties. This means you are less likely to succeed, but usually can still go about your business. The previously discussed save or die factor in 3.5 means that spells and statuses can crush a character, and prevent them from taking actions normally, effectively disabling them from fighting. Avoiding debuffs and harmful spells is way more important in 3.5 essentially.

Death Saves

A HUGE change that 5e players need to know about: In 5e, you have all your regular mechanisms of survival, but when those fail and you’re about to die, you get a save to avoid dying, and need to fail three in a row before actually dropping. Especially given that this lets you survive long enough to get any of 5e’s abundant healing effects, it means that you really aren’t in too much danger until you fail two saves. In 3.5, you DON’T GET THESE. If you run out of health, and hit -10, you’re dead. It means that enemies killing you is a real danger, and you need to consider it.

DR vs Resistance

In 5e, most enemies either take full damage, half damage to something that would be weaker against them, or no damage at all from it. In 3.5, foes use a different system to resist damage: Damage resistance. We’ve discussed this before, but essentially this means that damage not dealt from a powerful enough source just doesn’t work. You usually need a particular quality of weapon to deal damage, or deal an amount of damage only achievable from a truly mighty blow to overcome the resistance. No matter how many 5-damage stabs the million kobolds make, the DR 10 from Stoneskin just completely ignores it. Similarly, while some creatures in 3.5 have immunity or weakness to an energy type, most have Energy Resistance to a certain degree: only energy effects of a certain power can surpass it. Spell resistance is the same conversation, where you need to be a strong enough caster to affect certain creatures. In 5e, as long as you use the right weapons any creature can deal damage. In 3.5, you need to be strong enough and use the right weapons.

Prestige Classes

5e offers a few pre-built paths for each of their classes, but beyond that your only customization is a few feats and flavors. 3.5 offers a prestige class system, which is an advanced multiclass system that lets you specifically select a feature or ability you want to customize into, and dedicate your character to it. This gives a much broader variety of abilities to potentially acquire.

Feats

In 5e, you have a small set of feats that mainly provide numerical bonuses. These can be traded out for ability score increases, as well. In 3.5, the quality and variety of feats massively increases, and provides a huge expansion in customization and options for your character. This is discussed more in the feats sections earlier.

Choice Paralysis

A concern that shows up in 3.5 more than 5e is choice paralysis. In 5e, you really don’t have a lot of choices, so it’s rare you get too stuck. In 3.5, you probably have more options than you know what to deal with. It’s normal to get caught up with a bunch of different ideas. It might be worth limiting your options at first, starting with only options available in the PHB and expanding to other books as you get more comfortable.

Action Economy

The number of actions changes a lot from 5e to 3.5. The changes are as follows:

• You cannot “dash” for bonus distance, you must double move.
• You cannot move, attack, then move without the feat Spring Attack
• You only get one attack per turn unless you take the whole round to make a Full Attack
• You provoke Attacks of Opportunity for more things
• There are less bonus actions, as a rule
• You do not get nearly as many chances to take Reactions, you need to Ready an Action for that and almost nothing else gives you one.
• You cannot give every attack disadvantage in general, let alone with the Dodge action.

Prepared Spells

Wizards are way stronger, but take actual thinking somewhat. In 5e, wizards pick a number of spells they know, then cast them like a sorcerer. In 3.5, you need to not only pick spells you know in your spellbook, but assign each spell slot ahead of time, and thus think about what you’re going to need. Many other casters function similarly, like clerics and druids. Obviously, you’re going to want to read the Player’s handbook as well. Hopefully this gives you some things to look out for.