The Favourite Official D&D Products Ranked

Looking at EN World's reviews area, where the ratings of commenters are aggregated, it's interesting to look at which are the favourite official D&D books an which are less well-regarded. I've taken the items with 10 or more reviews and ranked them in descending order. Volo's Guide to Monsters is by far the favourite product, with Hoard of the Dragon Queen at the bottom of the list.

1. Volo's Guide to Monsters (95.5%)
2. Tomb of Annihilation (92.5%)
3. D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide (92%)
4. D&D 5th Edition Basic Rules (91%)
5. D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual (90.5%)
6. D&D 5th Edition Player's Handbook (90%)
7. Curse of Strahd (89.5%)
8. D&D 5th Edition Starter Set (87.5%)
9. Princes of the Apocalypse (87%)
10. Deluxe Dungeon Master's Screen (83%)
11. Out of the Abyss (80.5%)
12. The Rise of Tiamat (75%)
13. Tales from the Yawning Portal (69%)
14. Xanathar's Guide to Everything (67.5%)
15. Storm King's Thunder (67%)
16. Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (61.5%)
17. Hoard of the Dragon Queen (52.5%)
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[Gradine]

Surprised the Starter Set wasn't higher, given how popular LMoP was. Also surprised the Basic Rules topped the PHB, if only slightly. I also apparently misread the reception to Xanathar's.

The DMG being the highest core book is also a bit of a surprise, considering how superfluous many DMs treat any given edition's version of that book.

The rest doesn't really surprise. Volo's is easily one my favorite official splats ever (up there with 3.5's Tome of Magic & Heroes of Horror).

In any case, I'm off to try to bump up that number for HotDQ a bit

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Dried]

Tomb of Annihilation is not in the list. Why?

 

[timbannock]

Interesting. I would take this with a grain of salt, but as a general observation, I think the following points are correct:

Volo's Guide was awesome. Really. That's a splat book I read cover-to-cover, especially the in-depth sections on specific monsters. That is the type of book WoTC should be aspiring to publish.

OTOH, SCAG wasn't successful, at all. I am a little surprised that XGTE is so low rated, but, TBH, it also wasn't great (like Volo's). More ... eh. Better than SCAG, but not, you know, really good.

Finally, it would seem that the general impression is that Strahd and OOTA are the two best APs, with the rest falling in a fairly narrow band after them ... except HoTDQ. Don't do that again.

Yeah, I think I have the same feelings across the board there.

The big surprise for me is how high up Out of the Abyss is, as I think it failed miserably in terms of layout/content to make a sensible story, but succeeded beyond my expectations to make both the Underdark and the Demon Lords into a highly gameable, fun-to-explore environment. It's like it's a sourcebook disguised as an adventure, which is also how I felt about Storm King's Thunder...and yet it's closer to the bottom.

Granted, it's only the EN World users being counted in this, so it's far from accurate market-wide, but still very interesting.

 

[dalisprime]

Went through the reviews for XGtE and the 2 star ones seem like blatant trolling. Saying that the material in the book is no good because it was published before as UA playtest is ignoring the point of the playtest.
For one you can't use UA material in organised play. Two: a lot of that material needs fine tuning. There's a reason why the artificer and mystic aren't official yet - neither class is properly balanced.
Then the genius who claims it takes 5 minutes to make a subclass: sure, but the subclass won't be cohesive and very likely won't be balanced. Lastly - it won't be official so AL players which make up a rather large bulk of the playerbase can't use your 5 minute homebrew material.
The name tables probably don't see a lot of use (though really, sometimes they should considering what some people come up with) and reprinting old material stings (though again, AL IS the primary audience for that because of the +1 rule) but it's not a bad book. Doesn't deserve being scored 2 stars or less.

 

[snaggle2th]

Selection Criteria

Tomb of Annihilation is not in the list. Why?

Fewer than ten reviews? (I haven't looked to see. Just going by the OP's criteria.)

 

[MNblockhead]

For the most part, it what I would expect or guess at. But seeing the DM screen in the top 10 really floored me. I found the first few DM screens to be very disappointing. Recent changes have made them more useful, but no iteration of the DM screen would appear in my top 10 list and, based on discussions here and elsewhere, I wouldn't expect it to be on many other players' / DM's lists either. Oh well, I guess my assumption is based on dissatisfied customers being more vocal.

 

[Winghorn]

Some of the results here are a little unexpected, though when I think about it they may some sense. I loved XG2E, but I've seen a lot of negative reviews from people annoyed about reprinted material and not being a standard PHB2.

The only one that truly surprises me is SKT - it seemed to have decent reactions at the time, and I can't really think up any reason for the amount of bad reviews.

 

[kenmarable]

Sure, some rankings might be surprising and many others aren't, but overall, I think another take away is that the worst thing on the list is still over 50%. That's not a great rating, but it could be far worse! So it looks like every single product for this edition has a sizable group of fans.