D&D 5E Least Favorite WotC 5E Book?

Stormonu

Legend
On Monsters of the Multiverse. I like that if you hadn't already bought the previous two books, it's nice to get all the stat blocks in one book. I'm neutral about the spellcasting changes; they're easier to run on the fly, but more limiting too. Having a batch of extra PC races is nice, though I wish they didn't use the Tasha's free-reign stat placement. I don't miss the lore, as I generally use my own lore from my homebrew which is mostly drawn from previous editions - getting that page space back for actual creatures is a win for me. It's kinda of a meh+ for me, I ended up getting it because I could give my Volo's & Mord's Foes to my wife who could use those books for her game.
 

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Of the stuff I own its the Tyranny of Dragons adventure. I own most of the other adventures, and even the ones I wouldn't run as a campaign there is material in there that I would use piecemeal (e.g. the giant lairs in SKT).
 

Retros_x

Explorer
The books I didn't buy below.


Eberron - I think it has cool ideas but the steam punkyness and magitech turned me off. I may still pick up for world building study material.
Eberron is easily the best 5e setting book, highly recommend it. The whole design of the setting is so great, because it is build to play adventures in it. It was not build for an author to show off or grew over time in a homebrew, it was designed from scratch to build a world that is designed for adventure. There are so many great hooks, factions, conflicts to arise + fresh takes on fantasy races and tropes. Also its not steampunk at all. There are still knights in armor fighting with swords. Its not tech. They have networks of "message" casters instead of telegrams or radio for example. Somebody just thought "what if low level magic is actually used broadly in a society". In terms of how magic is used it kinda reminds me in how element bending in the Avatar series is used.
 

overgeeked

B/X Known World
Eberron is easily the best 5e setting book, highly recommend it. The whole design of the setting is so great, because it is build to play adventures in it. It was not build for an author to show off or grew over time in a homebrew, it was designed from scratch to build a world that is designed for adventure. There are so many great hooks, factions, conflicts to arise + fresh takes on fantasy races and tropes. Also its not steampunk at all. There are still knights in armor fighting with swords. Its not tech. They have networks of "message" casters instead of telegrams or radio for example. Somebody just thought "what if low level magic is actually used broadly in a society". In terms of how magic is used it kinda reminds me in how element bending in the Avatar series is used.
Eberron is a phenomenal setting. They knocked it out of the park. Baker’s Exploring Eberron is also wonderful. The section on Droaam alone is worth the cover price.
 


Volo's guide.
Yeah it's hard to beat actual racism, especially when it's reversionary racism, like, they had to go back to basically 1E to dig up that racism - the 2E descriptions even are less racist, albeit not by much (let alone 3E and 4E), which is quite a thing.

If we exclude that on the basis it was so bad WotC took it out of print, then the field opens up considerably. I'd personally go with Spelljammer which just really manages to hit a huge number of bad points:

1) Overpriced and underproviding. Significantly more money, for significantly fewer pages, systems, writing and so on.

2) At the risk of being the "The food is awful and such small portions!" guy (which is, I'm sorry, a legit position - you can fail on both quality and quantity), the systems, lore, and so on that that they did provide were pretty low-quality.

3) Managed to basically screw over Dark Sun for no good reason whatsoever. Like, if you're not going to update it enough to remove the (significant) racist elements of the 2E version (largely elided in the 4E one, but only elided, not removed), fine, but don't half-arsedly set it on fire and then panic and put out the fire and say "Oh no, it wasn't Dark Sun we were burning, it was Dim Sol, totally different setting!". I'd honestly have respected burning down Dark Sun a lot more.

4) Managed to put monkey-people in without even thinking "Oh, this might get racist, let's be careful!", the most obvious red flag in the world, and of course, it got racist, on multiple points.

5) It's also just really lame and trite and twee, even by Spelljammer standards. It was always a setting in desperate danger of being twee, and this version absolutely triple-downed on the twee-est elements possible.
 

jdrakeh

Front Range Warlock
Of the adventure books, Princes of the Apocalypse. It's the only published adventure that I've seen multiple groups quit mid-journey. My own group had a blast playing through the lead-in adventures in and around Red Larch, but once the "meat" of the adventure started, we were all bored to tears.
 



Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. It absolutely butchered my favorite setting.
futurama agree GIF
 

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