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I'm loving this and have read a big chunk of it already (thought jumping all over the place). So much love, time and thought was put into the whole thing. Your view of the game and how you think it is best experienced is pretty in line with mine as well, and we appreciated 3.x for many of the same reasons. I've already plucked your fighter, ranger and sorcerer changes.

And that makes it all worth it.

1. Your monk fix. I know monk sucks as is, and there have been a ton of attempts to fix it. I like that yours addresses AC more than anything else, but this feels like a lot. I'm curious what your thinking was going into all of these changes and what your experience has been with the class since implementing these changes. Also curious what others reading may think? I like all of the changes individually, as a whole it feels overboard when combined with this really big AC bonus. Also, full hit points for Wholeness of body?

And then comes the dirty little secret, which is of course that I haven't really got to playtest. . . anything? Haven't had a game in ages, everyone worth playing with around here is too busy to actually game (I could probably scrape some people together if I really tried hard, but they'd all be strangers, probably coming from different editions, and certainly end up with some that are incompatible with my desired game leading to cuts and further searching or the whole thing falling apart in a waste of time). Though this is hardly uncommon, basically any huge homebrew project (and likely huge chunks of actual books) is guaranteed to have little or no actual playtesting. And many of the changes were made with specific respect to things I did learn from the games I had back when I had a group. So you can generally assume the answer to any "seems like a bit much" question is that if it turns out I went too far, I'll just fix it when it happens. Particularly when you add the caveat that there's stuff for multiple power levels written across years. There are definitely some class tweaks where I go back and think that might be too much, or not enough (I'm getting pretty close to just going full 5e on the animal companion, and if you think Monk has a lot of text check out the Soulknife), it basically depends on what I've been thinking about at the time and how it compares to whatever I wander towards next. That said, upon review, yeah I'm still good with where I left the Monk:

The AC bonus fixes the main problem that martial arts masters are always shows as dodging attacks constantly, which in DnD means AC, so they need AC equivalent to heavy armor *and* shield, plus enhancement. Wis bonus can roughly be the shield while the base goes up to +12, which is only +4 full plate. How cheesy their AC ends up being thus depends on how much extra Dex and how over the top their Wis gets, which is limited by stats, which I limit to Standard or Elite arrays and normal races. So the AC rather than being huge, is basically just where it should be.

The Flurry as standard action is fairly common, fixing their speed vs full attack conflict without running into all the problems of easy "pounce" abilities. These first two are the most important.

The extra movement abilities aren't all really extra: Slow Fall is rarely useful but if you can Wall Walk then it makes no sense to not slow fall, so the only real extra is the Water Step, which is extremely situational. You could easily fit them all into one ability text and they just let you do the thing you should already be able to do just from the speed bonus, run circles around people.

Wholeness of Body as full hit points: yup, it's big. It's also based on the Guardinal version of Lay on Hands, and is repeated in the Paladin changes*. But hit point pools based on tertiary stats or a flat 2 x Level are terrible and simply do not evoke the proper response of "oh no they just healed up/bah I can just heal up" because they can barely handle chip damage. I will admit, if the other changes have sufficiently refocused the game to AC and the enemies in play are not doing big chunks of damage and the Cleric is ending up with tons of spells laying around because they never have to heal, this could become a problem, but I'd rather try it this way first (and in a game where the Clerics aren't "supposed" to heal, it becomes a more necessary fix). At high levels enemy damage output can reach insta-kill on occasion, so any healing ability which can't do your full bar doesn't matter anymore.

*(The Paladin gets full hit points at 2nd level, within dipping range, and that doesn't go away if they multiclass as long as they keep up the code. Now *that* feels pretty extreme even to me, but I'm considering it a reward for actually being the good guy. I want Paladins to be a little OP, and it also helps keep some Paladin oomph distinction going into mounted PrCs compared to non-Paladin entries.)

Abundant Step division: this is another very small set of words to cram into the original text, and the 40' increments keeps it pretty limited. It's a 12th level ability so you're not going into some crazy PrC and I want it to be better than the very lackluster Shadow Jump abilities, with some potential distance to it, meanwhile there are short range teleportation spells that I've not banned (even if the Anklets of Borked are mega-banned), so it has to compete with those. At 12th you have a maximum of 16 uses, which sounds huge on paper, but you have to know exactly where you're going and be able to get there in 40' to actually use it that many times, while during combat it still costs a standard action and there are foes with massive speeds or much better at-will teleportation of their own. If you need to move even 50' each of those times, it drops to 8/day. In the end I think it should be fine next to the two full casters of the party, and since the melee role is tank with a side of damage, teleporting is actually a trap.

That leaves Quivering Palm 1/day, and bonus feat and equipment guidelines, which should all be common and self-explanatory.

Second, this has clearly been a labor of love from 22+ years of playing this edition. I'm curious, is 3.5 still your favorite edition and the one you play? What were your experiences with 4e and 5e if you gave them a shot?

I was willing to try 4e on the "any game is better than no game" principle, but that game only got one session, it was clearly a lark rather than a commitment for the rest of them. But I did not like the system, everything's all the same as far as I'm concerned. Probably very good at what it does and some people loved it, but I did not want.

I'd be willing to play 5e more on its own terms, with some caveats. I hate how they've removed the tactics from their tactical combat game by making everything move+full attack, the skill system isn't a skill system- it's a vague list of competencies that cause the DM to make you roll for things and then fail at what you're supposed to be competent at because a system without standard DCs is not a system, and the "feats" take the complaint about 3.x where you supposedly need a feat to do anything and actually make it real. That said, it's a very hit-point based almost video-game like RPG, makes me think Final Fantasy quite a bit, where both sides just attack every turn, and they completely excised some major problems like "animal companions." It could be a very comfortable resource management game where everybody has some resources, assuming the DM has planned things appropriately (except the very first module they put out immediately broke their own encounter pacing and redlines the party into the ground and most groups I've seen seem to run it even more casually as 1-2 encounter days when the DMG actually increased it to a "6 encounter day"). So sure I'm willing to give it a try, but not run it, 'cause that's not what I'm here for.

Because I am of course 3.x for life, writing stuff down was just a response to having too much stuff and no game to narrow the focus or stop me from writing them down. I've played a little . . . was it World of Darkness, not the New one? Anyway, other games are good at other things if someone's running one, but DnD is 3.x.

Lastly, there are a lot of nods to 3.0 in here, but nothing from Pathfinder. Why did you not make the move to Pathfinder (I didn't, and have several reasons that mostly revolve around tone and aesthetic of the game, art and setting)? While I didn't make the move, there are a handful of small Pathfinder changes that did make it into my 3.5 game. Nothing there influenced you?

There are a very few, very tiny nods to Pathfinder: if you pop all the way down to alchemical items table you'll find a couple items from there, and there might be a feat, or a feat that took some inspiration (there are also some references to/inspiration from Dragon Mag content, which is still Paizo). But mostly no, I never considered a switch to Pathfinder because I didn't like any of its most vaunted changes: simplifying skills so that seeing and hearing are the same thing, simplifying combat maneuvers so they're nearly all the same thing, and feats that make two-handing even more favored. Add on top of that, every class has extra menu feature lists even when they didn't need them and there are endless ACF "archetypes" swapping and/or upgrading everything with everything and then base classes doing the same while also having yet more "archetypes", meanwhile they did things like turn smite into not-smite and even rage is potentially more fiddly than a barbarian should be fiddling and yup there's the usual bloodline nonsense sorcerers of course just to grate on me personally. They made some decent nerfs to a few problem spells, but left others alone, and printed plenty more. I've noticed some changes to monsters, but nothing crazy enough to shift my entire pre-existing knowledge base.

Basically, Pathfinder actually has the bloat that 3.x was accused of, all right there online even. It starts out as a giant house-rules document (so, no better or worse than anything I or others could produce) edited into the PHB for publish as a new edition, and then just keeps getting heavier and heavier, more and more char-op that has to be arranged starting at 1st level to do anything, ugh. Mutliclassing worked, PrCs worked, even 1/2 ranks for out-of-class skills worked, and too much too interconnected stuff turns the game into a soup. The game needs some crisp lines, a skeleton for definition, but Pathfinder just looks like mush to me, and when I do zoom in far enough to pick something out there's almost always something in the fundamental design I don't like. Addition is not the solution to everything, and aside from a couple simulation destroying simplifications, addition is how Pathfinder wants to fix everything.

It's a very surface level understanding with surface level fixes, in my opinion, which ends up just as broken and difficult to use. Perfectly understandable given the time-frame and fact that they were actually publishing a product for money. But yes, with an extra decade or more with no external pressures and a different "target audience" as it were, well clearly I prefer my own work. There are sometimes very small things like an alchemical item, or stuff like the witch's familiars and spells, or the concept of the Aegis class, which I find interesting, but only the rarest I would use as written.

That said, I do have one of the Pathfinder video games, and may eventually play it some day since there won't be any more 3.x based games. . . though I'll probably try Baldur's Gate 3 first.

Thanks again for this awesome work, looking forward to reading and pillaging more of it.

And thank you for appreciating it! I've had some people like bits that have gone into it here and there, but you're the first to take a larger interest