I often wondered who died and made Andy Collins a convenient scapegoat - and one who's words are horribly misquoted at times (dwarves and dexterity penalty house rule). Of course, no one died. Andy is simply a guy who has acted as a "face" for the game, especially during the time the revisions came (and his influence in that team effort is somewhat overrated; at least one revision he said he proposed that I wanted to see was overruled*). I guess it's more satisfying to attach a name to a complaint, even if it is unclear who is actually responsible.
DungeonMaster said:
#4 Andy Collins ran the development - I'm sorry not one book that bears his name on the cover isn't horribly broken in some aspect and mindnumbingly dumb in others.
Using that line of reason is rather odd. Most books have such things that might have slipped through, regardless of an "Andy Collins" on the cover or not.
So it's ok to reprint, I don't know TONS of material from other books like PrC, feats and the complete rehash but in a book on battlefields it's not ok to reprint mass combat rules?
I'm both glad and sad about the "no mass combat." I don't think I need to explain why I'm sad about it in a book about adventures during war time. but I'm glad because
a) I don't want the MiniHB mass combat system (and that would be the one WotC would be using). Because it technically isn't even a mass combat system, it's a bigger miniatures game.
b) No one wants
that much rehash. It would not be enough to reprint the mass combat rules themselves - since they are based on the Mini game, you'd have to reprint a significant portion of those rules as well. That's about 80-100 pages of straight reprinting (not even revising, as was done in the Complete series). Battlefield Adventures has 160 pages. Adding that system (with adding the requisite pages) would mean that 1/3 at least is taken up by it. A damn lot for the first book in a new, experimental series.
Maximized+ empowered + clinging + yadda yadda breath weapons isn't "going out of your way to abuse the rules".
Maybe not, but it is "going out of your way to find killer combos," something that does not need "Andy-content" to work.
Andy Collins has made mistakes in his works that can clearly be attributed to him (Steel Predators speak Terran, but are naturally deaf. And yes, saving throws
do follow formulas). But so have many other designers. Such as Monte Cook, who seems to have a nice track record of forgetting the Enchantment subschools (or the idea that a spellcaster chooses which spell will be the spell he'll be so good with in the future at first level...).
* Retroactive skill points, for those interested
