The old rules were incredibly poor in hindsight - but in terms of pure entertainment value, they were kinda fun.
The original AD&D rules were even more fun, in terms of entertainment value. Drunkenness tables? Check. Assassination tables? Check. Crypt Thing? Throat leech? Double-check.
I was a relatively new DM when I started with that, and I made the mistake of applying that particular table literally…
for antagonists. I can tell you that the time one of my PC's failed a couple of rolls and got assassinated with a single hit from an unseen opponent was not one of the best moments in my campaign — especially since the party was at a level where raise dead was totally out of their reach. And that shortly after somebody failing a poison saving throw during a random encounter, causing, you guessed it, instant death.
I learned a lot about gamemastering from Paranoia, Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu, and the Al-Qadim setting. Paranoia taught me that cheating and lying are perfectly OK if the intention is to fuck with people's minds in an entertaining way, Star Wars taught me the concept of script immunity which I have since applied with great success to all my DM'ing, Call of Cthulhu taught me that it's possible to run a fun campaign even though the loot makes you go permanently insane just from looking at the pictures, and Al-Qadim taught me how to put tension into a campaign by offing NPC's.
3E is an excellent balance between silly fun and sensible rules. Sure, it could be improved in a myriad of ways - but nothing comes close to the flexible nature of this class system. Usually, alternate systems go "skill-based" for total freedom, which is either restrictive or completely out of whack in terms of balance.
Now, I'm not going to claim 3E 3.5 is balanced, but it works out ok all the same.
I agree, and would add that it's very easy to re-balance on the fly simply by handing out some bonus feats, spells, or skills, if it feels that something's going out of whack.
I've got a nice example of "emergent balancing" in my current campaign — by the numbers, one of the PC's is way, way more powerful than the others: she had incredible luck with her stats and did a pretty bang-up job of min-maxing with the rest. Trouble is, she's a slave girl belonging to another PC, and because of the social constraints she's only able to use her magical and combat abilities when there's nobody looking — everybody assumes she's just there to serve tea and… other things.
We had a pretty fun session where her master, a
shi (kind of a Chinese samurai; this one is the younger son of a minor noble, and not quite as much into the duty-and-honor thing as his family expects him to be) got himself ambushed by some bandits. He would certainly have gotten captured (which was sort of how I'd planned it) if said slave girl hadn't first cast an Obscuring Mist and then surrepetitiously healed his bodyguards, and after running out of spells, taken up a heavy branch and started whacking the remaining bandits upside the head. She ended up saving the day, and
nobody knew it. (Well, of course, my
players know it, but the characters still think she's just a pretty plaything said knight likes to keep for company in his palanquin.)
During my campaigns, combat is mostly "entertainment filler" anyway, and the challenge is about other things.
But character development is essential to me, and in this way it's pretty brilliant because it combines the flavor of classes, with the freedom of skill systems in a way I've not seen before.
Yup, I agree on both counts.