Stuff you wished they did more with

[Amechra]

There are a bunch of mechanics littered around the different books; it was more or less inevitable that some would only show up once or twice.

Are there any one-off things you wish they wrote more of?

Off the top of my head, I wish they wrote more [Ceremony] feats - it was a great idea, but the execution was poor (though even one or two more [Ceremony] feats on par with Blessings of the Godless and Fell Conspiracy would make me a happy camper.)

I also wish they had written more Investiture spells - you know, the ones from FC2, where they gave you a stacking Fire Resistance and some kind of thematic buff related to whatever fiend you're investing yourself with. I wish they had written a couple for Complete Champion, at the very least - they were kinda cool.

ACFs probably could have received a bit more love - as it stands, they kinda lock you into single classing if you want to get anything out of a lot of them. The same goes with classes like the Knight and the Ninja - would it have killed 'em to put a note that PrCs that advance X also advance Knight's Challenge or something?

[Solo]

Truenaming

[Stratovarius]

Truenaming

This. So much this.

And Shadowcasting, to be honest. Support for anything that wasn't in core would have been nice. They came up with whole systems like Incarnum and Tome of Magic, etc., then acted like they never existed across all of their material. The worst example (imo) was Tome of Battle - they finally created something that made martial types fun/decent from a power PoV, and released precisely nothing else for it.

[stanprollyright]

More support/ACFs for Factotum

[Triskavanski]

For me, its support for the unusual classes, like Factotum, Beguiler, hexblade and the like.

I really wish there was more 'multiclass' feats. Like Swift Hunter

Luck feats, Skill tricks, Heritages. Espcailly things that would be put into a hardcover book.



In pathfinder, I wish they would have done more things like Equipment tricks. More feats that evolved or progressed in ability. Word Casting. Racial Favored class bonuses for non PHB races. Race building.

[Nifft]

Incarnum. Totemist was great. Bring everything up to that utility level.

Tome of Battle. It was a brilliant first draft, but it could greatly benefit from a revision and a lot of expansion.

Skill Tricks. Some can be pretty decent, but after playing one or two skillful characters, you've burned through most of the decent options (and thus most of the novelty). I'd like to see more interaction with Maneuvers, which can also feature skill checks -- and interaction with Luck feats, which seem like a good match for a skillful character.

Spells that care about skills rather than just boosting skill checks, or making skills redundant entirely. The lorecall spells had a few interesting ideas, but there's a lot more design space in that direction.

Cohorts as a consistent system, rather than the hodge-podge of feats and spell effects (e.g. animate dead and planar binding) which give you easy minions.

[Shadowhunter]

The things that come to mind are Binders. They have plenty of options for sure (and let's be honest, if you're allowed to play around with Zceryll you don't need anything else), but more Vestiges would have been neat. Also wouldn't mind more Truenaming (even though I dislike the flavor of that classical type of magic) or Shadowcasting either. So basically more Tome of Magic stuff.
More Tome of Battle stuff as well.
Honestly, more Psionic powers to choose from would be neat. They're not lacking good options, but I'd like it if they had more options than they do now. I'm aware Dreamscarred Press helps on that front, but that's not first-party so usually is a no-go for DM's in PbP (the only DnD I get to play).

[Nytemare3701]

Truenaming

I made this a while back.

[Keldar]

Basically everything.   

• There was never a follow up to Complete Warrior.  Fighters could have used some direct improvements.
• They never had the stones to make non-caster feats measure up to the power of metamagic or item creation.  (And if feats were the Fighter's class ability, why weren't a single one of them something you couldn't give to a 9th level character at the highest and it be fine?)
• Too many divine PrCs were deity based, making them of questionable value in many games.
• Druid PrCs all stunk.  Mostly because they made the core class far too powerful.  Animal Companion should have stayed a Ranger thing!!  Greedy Doodads. 
• Arcane PrCs were often unimaginative and didn't even manage to cover many obvious niches.
• Psionics only splat wasted half its space with some asshole's pet nerfs.  Nerfs that never propagated to the non-psionic analogs.
• The only system outside of core to get any support was the Warlock, and its was terribly sparse.
• Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, and Magic of Incarnum never got follow ups.  And two of ToM's systems didn't even get enough play testing.  Truenaming seemed only to exist to distract 339 for a while trying to make a character that wasn't a waste of space.   
• And they never even went past 2 first party settings.  Where was my Planescape, berk?!!
  

Yep.  Basically everything.

[Amechra]

Magic of Incarnum did get splatbook support, though!

... One PrC in one of the Eberron books, a couple soulmelds in Dragon Magic, and (I think) a couple magic items in the MIC count as splatbook support, right?

[Libertad]

1.) Tome of Battle's maneuver system, full stop.

2.) Monster classes Savage Species style.  Yes I realize that some books presented new "racial classes" but I think that we could have used more of them and with better execution.  Fortunately Oslecamo answered our prayers.

3.) Ghostwalk.  Although a lot of folks I know don't much care for the setting, I found the idea to be really cool.

4.) Greyhawk material.  Yes, I realize that they farmed out a lot of stuff to the RPGA, and Gygax didn't want anything to do with 3rd, but WotC was willing enough to release a Gazetteer and an Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk.  A more fleshed-out setting book later on would have been cool.  On a similar note, having a full-fledged Planescape setting book would be cool, especially detailing Sigil.

5.) Those wacky doodad weapons from Sword & Fist, such as the gyrspike and mercurial swords.

[Sleek]

Dual School Spells

There's a few threads on this in these forums.  These spells came at the tail-end of 3.5 and they were very interesting in their multi-utility applications.  And also due to their power level (since opposite schools of specialist wizards made using them a bit more challenging).

[linklord231]

[Mindset] spells, introduced in Races of Eberron.  They give you a small bonus just for having them prepared, and then some other bonus when you actually cast them.  They're like Reserve Feats, but without the feat!  And also far less powerful.

Similarly, spells like Heart of X.  Buffs that interact with your other buffs to make you even buffer!

[Vizzerdrix]

Lantan Artificers.

Spellfire.

Symbiots and the half daelkyr.

Familiars.

[awaken_D_M_golem]

3e <---> 4e conversions
3e <---> 5e conversions
4e <---> 5e conversions


Stuff that pretends Real Life enthusers
matter as new markets to D&D, like:

vampires , werewolves
harry potter-isms , ghosts
etc

[Libertad]

3e <---> 4e conversions
3e <---> 5e conversions
4e <---> 5e conversions

Utterly impractical.  Aside from 5th effectively being a way to sell 3.5 to the OSR market, there's too many differences in Edition changes that you have to go more with the "spirit" than actual conversions.  Frog God Games learned this when making Swords & Wizardry (Original D&D retroclone) of their Pathfinder adventures and vice versa.

Plus Editions are like languages.  Straight conversions will miss all the subtle nuances and not really be a one-size-fits-all situation.

Lots of folk hated 4th Edition for not providing a 3rd to 4th conversion guide, but from what I hear the designers acknowledged that things were too different between them to do it in a concise and practical way.

[awaken_D_M_golem]

3e <---> 4e conversions
3e <---> 5e conversions ...

Utterly impractical ...

Sure, but would you expect anything else of me?
 

4e <----> 5e , "ought" to be a matter of whatever
real game maths they've got ; although doing so
might give away the store (so to speak).

... Lots of folk hated 4th Edition for not providing a 3rd to 4th conversion guide, but from what I hear the designers acknowledged that things were too different between them to do it in a concise and practical way.

That's rather interesting.  The bolding is news to me.
 

[Necrosnoop110]

harry potter-isms

harry potter-isms?

[awaken_D_M_golem]

  ... no no not for me (honest).


Harry Potter d20+ or 5e-ish, would sell something !!

[Necrosnoop110]

LINK: Harry Potter D20