Blandest d20 Product?

[wingsandsword]

Hero Builder's Guidebook. . .if you've ever played D&D before it's an epic waste of time & money.

Complete Warrior. . .Complete reprints is more like it. I got the biggest sense of deja-vu that virtually everything in there was either a reprint or had been done better somewhere else (that version of samurai will never see the light of day in any game I ever run, ever. OA samurai is far better).

Enemies and Allies was pretty bland and forgettable. Pages and pages of generic pregen NPC's, when the DMG was filled with a chapter of them already. Maybe I'm just a little over-dedicated, but when I start a campaign I write up some generic NPC's (or have some left over from campaigns in the same setting). What is a typical merchant here like? What about guardsmen, or peasants, or street thugs? A dozen or so simple pregens saves a lot of time, and they always seem to have more flavor than generic off-the-sheft WotC-issued pregens.

I can't completely condemn Book of Exalted Deeds though. Ravages and Afflictions were cheesy, admittedly, and I don't need stats for Archangels and yet more PrC's, but the Exalted feats were nice (except maybe the controversial VoP), and it did have some nice spells. It might not have been exceptional, but it was certainly not bland and forgettable.

But for true, bland, boring, why-oh-merciful-deity-did-you-let-me-buy-this, I'd have to say the Arms and Equipment Guide. Sorry, maybe I was spoiled on Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog, but a book which was just reprinting some items out of that book (without the enjoyable flavor text) and some items from old issues of dragon, in plain black & white (the only B&W WotC hardcover for D&D I know of). I've never even cracked it open for a game. I still have my copy of Aurora's (and convert things on-the-fly if I must), and between that and my PHB, I've never needed more. Anyway, my copy of Aurora's has better ambiance, and is frankly a dang good read. I'd wish they'd have just made a 3e/d20 version, but neat books like that just don't fit in with WotC's current paradigm.

 

[Incenjucar]

Sorry, maybe I was spoiled on Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog

You know, when I was a poor-as-heck D&D newbie who mostly read the books in the store since I could barely afford any of them, that was one I kept going back to over and over and over again.

If only I had purchased it. *grumbles*

 

[Ghostknight]

Hmm, aside from the ones already mentioned, I go wth Tome of Horrors. The redone monsters weren't redone that well, and the new stuff wasn't particularly memorable.

Heh, maybe too much time has passed since I used the Fiend Folio

 

[Thanee]

Hero Builder's Guidebook and Enemies and Allies immediately come to mind.

The only ones that can compete with the Psionics Handbook (3.0, even though I don't like it much, the XPH is miles ahead of this "masterpiece") for the suckiest (official) d20 product ever.

Bye
Thanee

 

[vulcan_idic]

A Friendly, yet dissenting Opinion

I've been quite surprised actually with the list of books listed here as bland as many of them are some of my favorite and moste used books - including the ELH, Dieties and Demigods, BoED, Stronghold and Hero Builders guidebooks - I have found these all to be tremendously useful and engrossing.

The books that make my bland list are ones that I have to labor through when I want to use them. I find them all to be good sources of information and concepts, but everytime I think they might have a solution to my current difficulty I drag my feet and think about goofing off rather than getting ready to game this week, because I know if I go to them I will be fighting to keep my eyes open within about 20 minutes - which is really unfortunate considering the the vast utility (most of them) present...

That being said, my list is as follows:
Kingdoms of Kalamar - where most of the ones without the saving grace of being useful are
The Quintessential Series - not sure what it is, I love their content and I always know they'll be useful, but when I read them I fall into a deep deep sleep
Monte Cooke's Books - Again, tremendously useful - I particularly like Arcana Unearthed and The Complete Book of Eldritch Might, but inevitably upon opening them these too cause slumber to all too soon fog my unwilling brain.

Thats it in a nutshell more or less.

 

[glass]

This is a truly pointless reply, but it has to be said: Tyler Do'Urden. Best Screen name EVAR!

Seconded. Especially when combined with...

Welcome to Fight Club. Lose the scimitars.

glass.

 

[S'mon]

Midnight looks much cooler than it really is. In play, it's about as much fun as adventuring in Stalin's Soviet Union, about as depressing as Call of Cthulhu, and quickly loses it's charm. Still the best Tolkien knock-off this side of Harn, though.

Midnight does need a lot of tweaking to make it playable - I get the impression most of the "ever grimmer" fans on Against the Shadow boards have never or rarely actually GM'd it (never mind played it!) - luckily my GM Stalkingblue has done an excellent job on this, playing up the heroic struggle vs evil and playing down the scavenging for rotten turnips... scavenging for rotten turnips (with a DC 25 Survival roll, if you believe the Netbook) does indeed quickly lose its charm.
However, Midnight does have very strong mood & feel - even if that mood and feel is rather "1984"-ish - so I'd never call it bland. For blandest product I'll vote for the Book of Challenges (*meh*); though admittedly most WoTC 3e materials are incredibly bland, which is why I prefer 3rd-party stuff usually.

 

[Davelozzi]

That's harsh! Although the product wasn't amazing, it was good enough for me to use it as the backdrop for my FR campaign for a year or two.

Me too. Empires of the Sands' first glimpse of Tethyr inspired my game for years. One man's junk is another man's gold, I guess.

Although I guess if you (BiggusGeekus, not RichGreen) went into it hoping for Arabian action, there was cause for disapointment, as neither Amn nor Tethyr had it at all, and even Calimshan is pretty much Arabia-Lite.

 

[wingsandsword]

You know, when I was a poor-as-heck D&D newbie who mostly read the books in the store since I could barely afford any of them, that was one I kept going back to over and over and over again.

If only I had purchased it. *grumbles*

Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog was in many ways the book that got me into D&D, because it was just so interesting. I was in junior high when it came out, and my dad warned me against playing D&D, because the preacher said it was satanic. I was browsing around at a big bookstore, and ran across a copy of that book. It was so dang neat to read through, that I bought it (even with my mom warning me to keep it hidden from dad). I didn't feel brave enough to buy the core books, but I did get the old Black Box Basic D&D set on a trip to a toy store (and keep all the stuff in another box), and the NES port of Pool of Radiance. I then tried to reverse engineer D&D from these three sources (and try and figure out why Pool of Radiance and the Catalog seemed to be talking about a completely different worlds, and try and figure out why Elves and Dwarves sometimes just had the Elf or Dwarf class but there was no Human class).

It's the only 2e book I still regularly use when gaming. It's just great for adding atmosphere to a game.

If you really want a copy, there is one up for auction on eBay right now, for pretty cheap, original cover price or less.

Back to the topic, the Kalamar stuff was also pretty bad. I don't know if I can really honestly vote for it since I didn't buy it (I would look at it on the shelf, browse through it, and realize nothing in the line had any appeal to me). When Ryan Dancey published that article 4 years ago about why TSR failed in part by putting out a lot of campaign settings that were almost identical to each other, KenzerCo should have listened.

Kalamar has no real "hook" to distinguish it from any other D&D world, it was a generic any-system fantasy world that got the D&D label slapped on it because Kenzer paid a fortune for the license, and it's original core book reflected that by not having anything to make it distinctive, it seemed like a generic system-free sourcebook for an average fantasy world. Honestly, what has Kalamar got going for it that you can't find in Greyhawk, or the Realms, or even Dragonlance. I love the Tolkienesque high-fantasy genre, but it's pretty thoroughly covered right now.

 

[Bulak]

Living Greyhawk Gazetteer

That's at least the blandest d20 product I own (IMO).