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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 4931970" data-attributes="member: 7635">Here's why. 3e was created fresh off the steaming remains of 2nd edition which, by the end of it, was great a cross-referencing itself into virtual obscurity. For example, the second edition book Faiths and Avatars (about the FR gods) routinely metioned not only the FR boxset and 2e core-books, but PO: Spells & Magic, the Magic Item Compendium Series, the Wizard & Priest Spellbook series, Tome of Magic (for new domains) and references to occasional monsters in obscure FR tomes. The references weren't "unneeded" either; it was common for a speciality priest to grant "At X level, a SP of DEITY can cast Y spell (Wizard Spell Compendium) 1/day", without reprinting the spell in question. By the time they finished, modules, supplements, and setting books cross-referenced so much material (sometimes out of print; hello OA-monk!) that you needed a dozen or so books just to run things as-is!So 3e began with the concept of "3 books, everything else is optional" as a method of eliminating the piles of cross-referencing. If Prestige X needed Feat Y (printed in supplement Z) we're reprinting Y in the book. (Exceptions came from setting supplements, such as Eberron books that assumed you had the Eberron Campaign Setting and didn't reprint WF everytime). So you didn't need Complete Warrior to run a fighter in Red Hand of Doom, nor would the Courage Domain in CW reference a spell found in Complete Divine.(At about year 6 of 3e, this trend began to wear down. Too much stuff was designed "in bubble" and didn't take into account stuff from other supplements, creating Pun-Pun like rule holes where supplements crossed over each other. It also lead to some redundancy (two feats doing the same job in two different sourcebooks), some contradiction (check out the community domain; its never reprinted the same-way twice) and eventually a feeling that supplemental stuff was "better" than core stuff. WotC began using cross-referencing at the end (Magic Item Compendium, for example, references Spell Compendium heavily) but overall, it never got to the level of craziness 2e's books did.)4e is going back to the "everything is fair game" method with two cavaets; 1.) the DDi Compendium/Programs gives easy access to such rules, making things easy to find and 2.) the power-nature of 4e means rarely does a rule have have referenced without the relevant material of it (aka how it works) being next to it. For example, a monster that uses a fireball attack doesn't need to cross-reference the power "fireball", it prints the parameters in the stat-block. However, after 8 years of "You only need the core 3 to use this supplement", 4e's "everything is kosher" method feels odd to some.</blockquote>

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