auuri

It's Knuckles

But who knows what his true intentions were?!

Who knows

But he's rougher than the rest of them
the best of them
Tougher than leather

I have a really strange love-hate relationship with 3rd edition D&D. As much fun as I've had with it in the past, it's also an incredibly poorly balanced game, and that really bugs me as somebody who's really into game design. 4th edition has a much better game design, but it's also much simpler and doesn't allow for nearly as much mechanical creativity. People also complain that it much more resembles MMOs, but I frankly don't see it.

That said, if you like clerics, you should know that they reign king in 3rd edition, with their only competition being druids and archivists.

As for my favorite D&D moment (which incidentally didn't use a single mechanical rule), our DM had us in a "battle of wits" competition, and the challenge in the final round was to show the princess "something no living man has ever seen." So my character (who's a fighter-type, because that's all I ever play) enlisted the help of another character to have a mock duel with him, which he intentionally lost. He then turned to the princess, bowed and said "I humbly present: my defeat." My character won some golden trophy which he probably ended up eating.

Haha! Awesome. I love things that challenge creative thinking in these games.

I'm not against updating to 4th Edition, honestly.

The Site I used to make my character and help Rick make his had official resources for 3.5 and was fairly easy to get around, so I used it.
And I don't feel like pulling a whole 4th Edition book or anything onto my parent's crappy computer.

I want to play following a bit more of the rules than my friend did.. Not all of them because really... Managing everything down to how fast your character breathes effecting such and such (Hypothetical Example) doesn't seem like a truly needed game mechanic, but Spells cast that have something other than Combat Abilities that would be used to say... Purify Spoiled/Contaminated food, intrigue me for their RP Value.

Unfortunately, those spells with mixed combat and non-combat use are pretty much absent in 4e. In 3e, if you were up against an invisible opponent and didn't have the spell See Invisibility, you could get creative and cast Create Water and track footprints. Nothing like that is possible in 4e, as out-of-combat spells take so long to cast, they are strictly out-of-combat.

As for playing, you could look into finding a D&D group around your area. The WotC forums has a section just for that (http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=347). Since you were talking about how it's hard to make new friends in a previous entry, you could proverbially kill two birds with one stone. And nobody ever complains over a new player who wants to be a cleric - except for a DM who may be suspicious at first.