PHB2 comes in at number 28 on USA Today top 150 list

[thecasualoblivion]

I am going to have to start shouting this from the rooftops.

People, for the love of Crom, if you want to play a Conan-style non-magical furious barbarian, play a Battlerage Vigor Fighter. It perfectly models that sort of character.

That the D&D Barbarian is overtly magical is not a bad thing, since the game already has an option for a martial berserker/savage fighter.

Conan is in the game. He is a Fighter. Deal with it.

Don't give me the whole "Conan didn't wear armor" nonsense. This argument proves nothing except that you have not read the stories. Depending on his circumstances, Conan employed no armor as well as every type of armor from a hide jerkin to full plate.

This "you can't play Conan in D&D" meme must end. Immediately.

Also, if you remember, the big battle at the old ruins where "two stood against many" in Conan the Barbarian(starring Arnold) saw Conan wearing heavy armor.

 

[D'karr]

Also, if you remember, the big battle at the old ruins where "two stood against many" in Conan the Barbarian(starring Arnold) saw Conan wearing heavy armor.

The first Conan story ever written, "The Phoenix on the Sword", has Conan the King wearing quickly donned "heavy armor" as he battles Ascalante and his men and shortly after the Ape Demon.

 

[ScottS]

Interpretation 1: The book market is cruddy, and 4e books and the others on the top 10/25/100 lists are selling "least cruddily"?
Interpretation 2: 4e books are actually doing OK in some objective sense, due to a "people still went to the movies during the Great Depression"-type effect?
Interpretation 3: 4e books are actually doing OK in some objective sense, because their main consumers are generally in an income bracket which puts them above the effects of the recession (i.e. they're still mostly adults and "graybeards", despite the ENW polls and WOTC's business strategy)?
Interpretation 4: The Recession Is A Lie?!1?!1!/1!!

 

[Remathilis]

Interpretation 4: The Recession Is A Lie?!1?!1!/1!!

No no no, The cake is a lie!

 

[ScottS]

I often confuse the words "recession" and "cake", perhaps due to their similar spellings. Thank you for the correction.

 

[Felon]

Good for D&D asa whole, good book, but:

a) Lack of druid heals (or rather way it is in the PHB2, bugs me, either remove them, or add a few more in!)

Multiclass as a cleric, and you got it. This is the option for any of the classes that were "streamlined" into one role (like how avengers co-opted paladin smiting and invokers co-opted clerical wrath-of-god firepower).

I know what you mean though. Once WotC decided AoE attacks wouldn't be the exclusive province of controllers, and decided that leaders should have both buff and debuffing powers, the significance of the controller role really fell into question. They basically became leaders that can't heal.

 

[Felon]

I am going to have to start shouting this from the rooftops.

People, for the love of Crom, if you want to play a Conan-style non-magical furious barbarian, play a Battlerage Vigor Fighter. It perfectly models that sort of character.

That the D&D Barbarian is overtly magical is not a bad thing, since the game already has an option for a martial berserker/savage fighter.

Conan is in the game. He is a Fighter. Deal with it.

Don't give me the whole "Conan didn't wear armor" nonsense. This argument proves nothing except that you have not read the stories. Depending on his circumstances, Conan employed no armor as well as every type of armor from a hide jerkin to full plate.

Passionately shouting your point-of-view from the rooftops doesn't make it the only valid viewpoint.

As to Conan wearing (or not wearing) armor...well, the post you were replying to didn't actually mention anything about armor, so that's coming from out of left field. At any rate, seems to me that the people who think of Conan as a guy who runs around in a loincloth have a pretty good basis for that image--namely, hundreds of comics and magazines and Boris Vallejo novel covers. For better or worse, the scope of the character has grown far beyond the small canon of stories REH wrote.

This "you can't play Conan in D&D" meme must end. Immediately.

You can play a character named Conan, sure, but that's about it. The bottom line is that D&D isn't a metasystem. It's not intended as a toolkit that allows you to faithfully recreate characters from fiction with a high degree of accuracy. The notion to the contrary--that a barbarian class should be based directly off of Conan and a ranger class should be based off of Aragorn and a wizard class should be Gandalf, etc--is the meme that I'd like to see end.

 

[RyvenCedrylle]

Coolness.

Let's roll a D8 to that! I want to roll a 4.

 

[Shemeska]

Interpretation 1: The book market is cruddy, and 4e books and the others on the top 10/25/100 lists are selling "least cruddily"?
Interpretation 2: 4e books are actually doing OK in some objective sense, due to a "people still went to the movies during the Great Depression"-type effect?
Interpretation 3: 4e books are actually doing OK in some objective sense, because their main consumers are generally in an income bracket which puts them above the effects of the recession (i.e. they're still mostly adults and "graybeards", despite the ENW polls and WOTC's business strategy)?
Interpretation 4: The Recession Is A Lie?!1?!1!/1!!

Interpretation 5: Book sales have an initial spike due to a group of hardcore 4e fanboys possessed of their own brand of pro-4e nerd rage which motivates them to go out and buy the books the moment they hit the shelf. That subpopulation aside, the sales quickly drop down after one or two weeks, with little staying power among the normal gaming public.

Of course it's only a possibility, and there's really no way to prove any interpretation without seeing the sales figures that none of us not bound by NDAs have any access too. Very little can be taken from this all, save that the PHB2 in this case sold well its first week relative to the other books in the marketplace.

 

[Dannager]

Interpretation 5: Book sales have an initial spike due to a group of hardcore 4e fanboys possessed of their own brand of pro-4e nerd rage which motivates them to go out and buy the books the moment they hit the shelf. That subpopulation aside, the sales quickly drop down after one or two weeks, with little staying power among the normal gaming public.

Of course it's only a possibility

I think even this is giving that particular interpretation too much credit.