Not to disagree with your main point, but ...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ars Mysteriorum
I played 3.5 a few times with the group I played with as a child... it was no longer roleplaying. We depended on dice for almost every interaction and the plot was wafer thin. The adventure called for constant combat to make us ignore the lack of plot (where in the past the games and rules always bowed down to the plot... kind of... we were kids!).
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A role-playing experience depends heavily on the DM/GM and the adventure. If you were using one of WotC's crap adventures, or your DM hadn't gained much experience since those halcyon 2nd ed. days -- and I have no way of knowing either -- then your D&D experience will disappoint. I've been fortunate enough to find a great GM, and we ran through a d20-based
Midnight campaign that rocked.
That being said, the aforementioned GM house-ruled a number of skills (notably Diplomacy) and added his own roleplaying-dependent "bonus-point" system to supplement experience points. I also felt that the game crawled when we entered combat: "uh oh, time to suspend the story while we move minis around and calculate bonuses/penalties/AoOs ... and of course that one guy always wants to grapple ..."
So, I'll have to echo the assessment upthread that D&D 3.5 is mainly a skirmish-level combat game with a unified conflict resolution system, but as a platform for roleplaying it leaves much to be desired. Then again, I was never enamored of previous editions, although at least OD&D/BD&D/AD&D left a big blank that individual groups could fill in with whatever they wanted.
In contrast, BRP -- hey, remember that one? -- and newer generations of RPGs have simple and unified conflict resolution mechanics so you can get back to the story. The same GM who ran
Midnight now runs a
Spirit of the Century campaign, where non-combat conflicts involve only one or two die-rolls per scene, combat moves a lot faster, and characters move all around the area despite not having an actual board. He's also a big fan of BRP, which despite its "simulationist" roots basically involves simple or opposed skill rolls and characters defined more by what they know than how they fight.