Bottom 5 D&D and D20 items

[Teflon Billy]

I would likewise be interested in it.

But seriously, I don't know why supplements like this tend to so often be made up of Stannis's "Polymorphed Dragon Bartender" type stuff, but what I want is a bunch of interesting regular joes to populate cities with. A "Blacksmith who's wife has left him, here are the circumstances and here's how it will affect his dealings with the PC's" type thing would be great.

Not the freakshow.

 

[Holy Bovine]

Put me down for what KS, TB and others have said - I would love a book about 'regular joes' that may or may not have had some bad stuff going on in their lives (or some extraordinary good stuff too - maybe that's bartender's wife just escaped from the cluthches of a gang of cutthroats). A few lines of 'fluff' make all the difference in making an otherwise dull NPC someone to remember.

Hell, I remember how my players would seek out Crazy Egor's* - a weapons and adventuring equipment dealer that always seemed to have exactly what was needed but had to tear through about 8 barrels and boxes full of other stuff before he could find it (and you were his best friend if you bought one of his ever-growing collection of tridents)

*yes based off the real life guy who I met once at GenCon many years ago - his stall was the basis for the Crazy Egor's weapons shop I use

 

[Mortaneus]

Hell, I remember how my players would seek out Crazy Egor's* - a weapons and adventuring equipment dealer that always <snip>

*yes based off the real life guy who I met once at GenCon many years ago - his stall was the basis for the Crazy Egor's weapons shop I use

You know egor? Sweet! I met him a few years ago when I was in Rochester. His shop is where I picked up an UNOPENED first edition traveller boxed set. His store ruled.


BTW, if you want a book of NPC's, I think they're working on a book very much like that for Freeport, called like People of Freeport or some such. A friend is working on several submissions for it. It sounds really cool.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

For some of the more prolific game companies, such a book of NPC stats - which i've seen asked for I don't know how many times on these boards - would be relatively easy to do. A lot of the work would already have been done, in some cases. Take Bluffside - THG could take the section of NPCs (especially the various guards), strip out the setting specific material, and voila.

I've said it before, but if everyone would start posting the various "generic" NPCs they've made for their campaigns, we could get this done as a community project.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

I would likewise be interested in it.

But seriously, I don't know why supplements like this tend to so often be made up of Stannis's "Polymorphed Dragon Bartender" type stuff, but what I want is a bunch of interesting regular joes to populate cities with. A "Blacksmith who's wife has left him, here are the circumstances and here's how it will affect his dealings with the PC's" type thing would be great.

Not the freakshow.

THIEVES' WORLD SPOILERS BELOW!

This phenomenon doesn't seem confined to RPGs, either. In the old Thieves' World books, One Thumb, the bartender at the Vulgar Unicorn, started out fairly mundane. Interesting, but mundane. Then the various authors involved with the books simply could not countenance him being "just" an interesting character. Eventually he was turned into a powerful crimelord, using his bartender job as a cover. It got increasingly ridiculous, with him living in a luxurious secret hideout, and with him turning out to be basically an evil genius. Hell, he may have been a wizard by the time the series was done; I quite reading before then.

Basically, writers refuse to trust the reader to like or find interesting a character unless they overwrite it.

 

[JeffB]

Well my top dissapointments....not neccesarily horribly poor..

1) The WOTC classbooks In general. I find most of the prestige classes either too offbeat, or undesireable for my campaign style,and was hoping that they would be more used for "belonging" to something (an organization with the perks of such) than simply as class to get cool new feats and special abilities. Each book does have a few good points, but hardly worth the price tags they charge, at least for me.

2) HBG. Yep cool for newbies; Not marketed as such though either. Expensive for the page count. And I often wonder jut what the actual percentage of newbies that were brought in by 3Rd edition. I see the vast majority of 3E players as established gamers. I can't imagine that even at least 1% of the PHB's sold was for a brand new gamer.

3) The GH gazetter. Not the LGH Gaz, but the 32 pager. Cool product 21 or 22 years ago maybe..The original Folio was fantastic, but it had a better map, better writing, and overall was much more interesting to boot. I know the premise of the item, but the Scarred Lands Gaz did a far better job or providing a really cool setting with a minimal page count.

4) The DM's screen. Flimsy, and close to useless. One of those new mastercreen things with Angramainyu's tables would be worlds better.

5) Deep Horizon. I just thought the plot, and the new race was just plain 'ol silly. I'm not a big fan of the core mods anyway (barring FoF and TSC), but this was by far the worst, especially after Skip had just put out Raider's of Galath's Roost in Dungeon which I thought was really, really good. I had high hopes and was very dissapointed.

From the get-go I was very particular regarding other companies D20 materials, so I suppose that is why 5 WOTC products made my list...In the begining I had more "faith" (if you will) with WOTC. Now I'm just as, if not more, scrutinizing with their products.

 

[Nightfall]

Nightfall: Not much point in me buying Hollowfaust. I don't have an RPG collection any more. Nothing. Nada. Zip. It's all on the auction block, more or less. I couldn't afford to keep buying supplements at the rate I was going, and I couldn't stop myself from buying. So I am selling off my collection. (Or, rather, ThomasBJJ is selling it off for me.) So far, 101 out of 1136 items have been sold. (Not doing TOO shabbily, since we're getting about $6.85 per item.... Haven't sold any of the REALLY rare stuff yet, aside from a few BattleTech Technical Readouts.)

I figure, in a few years when I have the money and am not so totally addicted, I might start collecting again. At that time, I should hopefully be able to pick-and-choose, rather than trying to buy everything. And, hopefully, by then WOTC will be putting out revised books without all the errata.

Well if you change your mind I'm here.

 

[Nightfall]

I know, but the first books still is riddled with errors. I wil say that most of that is because they did not have the full and final rules to design with. I don't discount their skill as RPG writer because of it, but it is a book that no one should buy now. It would be like buy a test model of something that had lots of developmental problems after the final production version are on the street.

I understand. Certainly I'll be the first agree, the book is flawed mechanically. But I guess I could overlook some of that for creatures that I found interesting and different from the usual "D&D" type monsters

Mmm, might be time to go back and take a second look. I must admit the flavor of the campain world put me off as must as the contence of the book. That type of campain is not what I like to run and since I do 80% of the DMing in our group the books don't get used.

*nods* I understand. I do think if you give the book a chance, it might suprise you. Example, something like Taldock's Spell Inhibitor works well if you have dwarves and also like to surprise your players. Or another interesting spell, is for Paladins, Heart of Valor, works well when trying to overtake a large and powerful opponent.

 

[jmucchiello]

Thunderhead Games (part of MEG now) actually seriously considered such a book. We might still do it yet. I, too, would love to have something like it. We even had a name for it - "Uncommon Commoners".

Who else would be interested in such a thing?

The real question is how much would you PAY for such a supplement? How many pages would you expect it to be? How large would each character's write up be? I imagine the character descriptions dominating the page with little mini-stat blocks (Com1, Craft (pottery) +3) or am I way off here?

Although I may not stop my wife from starting this book... I showed her King_Stannis' first post on the idea and she wanted to start. She loves the background characters. I just can't imagine people buying it as a PDF.

Love the title though Kludge.

Joe Mucchiello
Throwing Dice Games

 

[Teflon Billy]

THIEVES' WORLD SPOILERS BELOW!

This phenomenon doesn't seem confined to RPGs, either. In the old Thieves' World books, One Thumb, the bartender at the Vulgar Unicorn, started out fairly mundane. Interesting, but mundane. Then the various authors involved with the books simply could not countenance him being "just" an interesting character. Eventually he was turned into a powerful crimelord, using his bartender job as a cover. It got increasingly ridiculous, with him living in a luxurious secret hideout, and with him turning out to be basically an evil genius. Hell, he may have been a wizard by the time the series was done; I quite reading before then.

Basically, writers refuse to trust the reader to like or find interesting a character unless they overwrite it.

I know what you mean man. I really liked the first couple of books in that series, when it was about total low-lifes scratching out an existence in an imperial backwater.

By the time the story had morphed into being about Avatars of the God of War fighting to save the empire, and lowly bartenders being Crimelords and suchlike, I stopped reading as well.

Again: Power Creep.