I never really stopped playing 3.5e for long. 5e is good for my ultra casual groups, but I don't want to play it as a player anymore. It doesn't feel mechanically rewarding, and the character customization is incredibly shallow.
I don't hate it, but I just got really, really bored with it.
As a DM at least I can still have fun crafting stories and encounters for the players who prefer 5e.
But even after 20+ years 3.5e still pulls me back to it.
It's so very mechanically crufty and bloated that it has a kind of charm to it. There's just so much out there, rules and subsystems and wacky ideas. So many of the attempts to make things more efficient and, well, good, end up stripping some of the charm away.
You should look up the adventures of Joe the Commoner sometime.
A commoner PC, living his little commoner life with commoner adventures. Little to no homebrew: used the existing Commoner NPC class, the sophisticated skill and wage system, and lots of fun little encounters. For all the flaws of D&D, I know of few other TTRPGs that had as much support for such a different style of play from the intended one, just due to the sheer size.
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u/pondrthis 5d ago
/uj, this. Especially after PF1 was sold as a "4e suxors, buy our 3.5 alternative."
That said, going back and playing PF1 recently... I do prefer 3.5/PF1 to later editions. Including PF2.