Were the 2e class books really that light on crunch though? Every one of them had about twenty kits- all with some crunch. New spells and magic items. There's an awful lot of crunch in the 2e class books.
I went back and took a look at the Complete Fighter's Handbook, Complete Thief's Handbook, and Complete Book of Dwarves for perspective.
They do have more crunch than I remember. Also, like most TSR products, I wouldn't consider them up to today's quality standards. But I think there is something in the philosophy, and even the type of crunch that made it less dominant.
It seems that the philosophy was primarily about how to implement that class/race more fully and completely in your campaign. "Here's everything you need to know about dwarves to play a solid dwarven campaign."
The type of crunch tended to focus more on world simulation than offering new powers. I found kits really interesting reads--although I didn't like them mechanically. For most of them, the drawbacks seemed more restrictive than the meager benefits. (As I said, not up to modern quality standards.) But the flavor and campaign ideas I got from reading through them was great. And kits were at least as much fluff as they were crunch. A list of which proficiencies or secondary skills were required or recommended (maybe forbidden also), and the remaining mechanics fit within a single column of a 3 column page, with probably 2 to 4 additional columns of fluff. So that's around 1/5 to 1/3 of a kit being crunch.
The fighter book, the first in the series, had a ton of combat options that expanded the game (this is where levels of weapon specialization debuted). The books after that didn't follow that particular model, probably because the fighter had already handled it. The thief's book seemed to have less crunch, and again, it was stuff particular to a thief like campaign, and it felt really embedded in the world and campaign, rather than a simple list of cool stuff for player or DM.
The dwarf book was great. The sorts of crunch it included were things like optional ways of distinguishing subraces (and the introduction or reintroduction of a couple subraces), and things like dwarven siege weaponry. Stuff that really helps a dwarven culture come alive. And of course, the reason it helps so much is that it was deeply embedded in the campaign and world discussion.
There were also tables for randomly determining things in the thief and dwarf books (didn't notice it in the fighter's book, but I bet there was at least one).
That being said, they weren't all created equally. Of the books I had, I think the Complete Priest's Handbook was the weakest. But then, I felt the same way about the Complete Divine in 3e. Something seems to make good divine splatbooks hard to do in D&D.
Contrast that level and type of fluff with 3e splatbooks.
In the Complete Arcane, there are 53 pages of nothing but prestige classes. Because they are so tied to the crunch of the class, even reading the class fluff didn't inspire me the way it did in the 2e books, where you could skip the crunch and just adopt fluff on the kits for greater immersion. Then we come to what would have been the jewel in the 2e splats: the ____ campaign. The Complete Arcane's campaign chapter is a solid 27 pages long, and glancing over it, it
seems to have decent content. Why don't I like it? I can't say. Too little too late, maybe? Feels like an afterthought instead of a focus perhaps? I honestly am not sure, but I can say that it didn't feel worth it to me that way 2e splatbooks did.
Some of it's just nostalgia, granted. But I think what we should be considering is that when we talk about 2e splatbooks, what people remember is the fluff. When we talk about 3e splatbooks what people remember is prestige classes and feats. I think that says something.
I hold out hope that D&D has learned its lesson on splatbooks and intends to keep its profits flowing through leveraging of the brand name instead.
The main drawback is whether this would lead to layoffs after publication.
Yeah. Transmedia can be a great boon if it keeps crunch bloat of the tabletop game under control. I still shake my head when I look at the list of some of the layoffs that WotC did. I mean, Jeff Grubb? In the TSR era it seemed like his name was on the cover of half or more of the books that came out. What were they thinking?
