That First 3e Campaign

Thinking back, my first full 3e campaign had a distinctly different one from the rest - at that point we didn't really have a full appreciation of the system and so we played it basically like we had 2nd edition - in particular, PCs didn't make or buy magic items, they found relatively few such items, and they were consequently much less powerful.

By midway through that campaign, and certainly by the time we began the next, we had a much clearer idea of the system, and everything was much more optimised. And so we played the game the way it "should" have been played.

Thinking back, though, my feeling is that that first campaign was probably the most satisfying of them all, and it was precisely because of that "2nd Edition" style of play. (It's also worth considering that 5e plays an awful lot like a "better 2nd Edition", which is probably one of the reasons that I find it both so satisfying and so frustrating!)

The thing is, the initial 3e offering was balanced on the assumption of 4 PC parties consisting of the "big four" classes, and with no particular assumption of particular feats or magic items. Which held reasonably true at low levels, held in that first campaign, but was very quickly made mock of both as more books were released and as players learned the game. And that "emergent gameplay" was actually something built in to the game.

Except that that "emergent gameplay" didn't actually make the game more fun overall. Yes, it was satisfying for players to learn how to optimise their characters, and theygot the benefits that came from more powerful characters. But they advanced at different rates, harming balance, and it meant that the internal balance of the game really suffered. And that in turn meant that the DM had to disregard the mechanisms built in to try to build encounters and had to work hard to be at least as good with the mechanics as the best of his players.

3e started off as a fair amount of hard work, and only became harder to run as time went on.

That first campaign had its problems, and it was somewhat fortunate that it ended when it did (which turns out to be 9th level - with the PCs rising to 10th after the last session, if we had ever bothered to level up the characters), but it was also probably the most satisfying 3e campaign I ran, at least in terms of the ease of running the game.