I play 3.5 for a few years. One of my groups swore by it. It was… textured. When you call it a steaming pile of shit, I see your point and honestly agree with you. But I will say it was… completely what it was. It wasn’t well designed, but it was immensely interesting. 5e is all of 3.x, but with the interesting parts sanded down. In my estimation, that makes 5e the lesser game.
I did the gaybro liches before. It was a PF1 game where 3 of the party members wanted to be goblins. We had an Alchemist (burny), a Barbarian (Bitey) and a gunslinger (shooty). The last player wanted to a be human witch. The player was kind of dumb, but the character got gang pressed into trying to wrangle these goblins in spite of being an immoral shitheel herself. The first adventure (which is the only one they did before the game petered out for other reasons) was they were sent to rescue the local children from an Ogre who was kidnapping them from a village. They discovered that he was very erudite and literate (think Cave guy from Freakzoid) and he was trying to teach the children how to read. The villagers were very angry objectors to the written word. The next adventure (which I had notes for somewhere) was going to pit them against a dragon who had been kidnapping princesses. The players would discover he was a giant nerd, and was treating them well; he just needed them for his army build for wargames against other dragons.
Okay, so fine you get the tone; the liches were two wizards who were like, no homo gym bros in life, who made each other their phylacteries. My plan was to have the players find a diary and they would learn the joke; that was only one of them was gay. The diary would have no surviving identifying marks, so they wouldn’t know which one