So, tonight I made my first new D&D character in a while! Some friends of a friend have been playing in a campaign for the last five or six years, and now they had an opening. Never being one to pass an opportunity to play, I jumped at it.
Have you made a character in 3rd ed. D&D recently? I can tell you I haven't. I bought the book when they were new, never got on the revised bandwaggon, and ran a campaign for some years. I don't even remember how long time it was! Five years? Three?
I at once felt how some things in that game didn't make sense, already at the character generation step. Many skills are kind of wonky, and the cross class system is clunky. Also, the feat tree is something of a mess. The fact that I got to generate a level 8 character to be on par with the rest of the party might have made it fiddlier than usual, though.
Tinkerer as I am, I started thinking how you could streamline things. How about you take out the hierarchical system for the feats, making it all flat? How about you remove some skills like Use Rope and Escape Artist and merge agile manoeuvres into a few sensible skills, and social interaction skills into active and passive ones? There are many loose ends to start pulling on! I still really like the idea of metamagical feats, though.
I ended up with a multi-classed human Rogue 3/Wizard 5 character. It will be interesting to see how it feels in play!