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Message: <blockquote data-quote="D'karr" data-source="post: 6079121" data-attributes="member: 336">I agree, in past editions I've bought a lot of books that I ended up considering turkeys based solely on their content.  Usually I've never had complaints about the quality of the physical books, just the content.  With 4e I have a complete collection of books, and from a content basis I'm extremely pleased.  The only books I would have complaints with are the "equipment" books, but that is not for quality or content.  It's because I had complaints with the way magic items were "designed" for 4e, MME excluded.  That became a minor issue in the end as I reworked the way magic works for my campaign.Books like Underdark, Open Grave, Plane Above, and Plane Below, were so full of "cool" content that I wanted to see more, even if I was not using it all.  Heroes of the Feywild was a high water mark, IMO.  I loved the ideas in that book, and I would have been very excited to see much more content in books like that.  Heroes of Shadow is still good, it just had some weak options, and the flavor was too limited.  I would have liked to get much more "shadow flavor", if not mechanics.I think it became clear to me, that the HPE series was built with a dungeon crawling D&D paradigm, and they poorly highlighted 4e for what 4e does very well.  One of the biggest problems, IMO, was the use of the Dungeon Delve format for each encounter.  This format "ate up" so much real estate on the page that a lot of "other" cool things could not compete for space.  A 32 page adventure in that format would have a 2 page spread for each encounter, and a lot of space was used for combat.  It made it look like the adventure was only combat.  A bad perception, and one that has unfortunately stuck with those that are not familiar with the system now.  My campaign has so much more than combat, but looking at a published adventure from that "era" you'd think that the only thing 4e could do was combat.Interestingly enough the adventures that came out as part of "essentials" were so much better, in comparison.  I think by the time essentials came out the designers where comfortable enough with the system, understood all aspects of it, and had gotten out of the dungeon crawling paradigm.  Gardmore Abbey, Orcs of Stonefang, and Harkenwold definitely do a lot more than simply dungeon crawling and combat.</blockquote>

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