Wizards Releases 3.5 Edition System Reference

Randar the Lava Liza writes "Wizards of the Coast have released the 3.5 Edition System Reference Document. Essentially it's the three core rulebooks in RTF format. This includes the 3.5 Edition Player's Handbook, 3.5 Edition Dungeon Master's Guide and 3.5 Edition Monster Manual. All of these are released under their Open Gaming License. You can also read a very interesting review of 3.5 Edition by Monte Cook, one of the original creators of 3rd Edition D&D. He goes into detail on a number of the changes in this new edition."

Comments

It's not quite the core rulebooks....

[Drantin]

Q: What's missing from the SRD compared to the core D&D rulebooks? A: Mostly the "flavor" elements. There are no named gods, none of the spells have significant NPC names, there's no mention of Greyhawk, etc. You'll also note that there are no rules for character creation, for advancing characters in level, calculating experience, or anything else related to the topics forbidden by the Usage Guide.

It doesn't seem to be quite the three core rulebooks, although the missing information shouldn't be hard to find elsewhere...

Re:Is it worth switching from 3.0 to 3.5?

[Outland Traveller]

In true software-development form, 3.0 introduced tons of new, poorly tested ideas. Even the copyediting quality was abysmal. If you turn to the combat section you will find the same information repeated again and again, without any clear organization. In some cases the exact same paragraphs repeat.

3.5 is a cleanup, both on the production quality and on the rule balancing. I think it's much better, I only regret that more time wasn't spent making sure 3.0 was ready. There's a quite a bit of nerfing, but again that is 3.0's fault, not an intrinsic problem in 3.5.