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<blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4058317" data-attributes="member: 710">Splat Books are inevitable. WotC wants to earn money, and gamers hunger for more options - some of them they sure could build themselves, but it's alot of work, and why not concentrate on playing and give WotC the money to do the work for you?The problem with splat books is that the persons writing these books do not know or understand the system well enough to see all unwanted implications. Certain effects weren't even known to the original designers, they were emergent properties of the game system.If you never used a single splat book, but would try to generate your own monsters/NPCs following the MM and DMG guidelines, you were not guaranteed satisfying results. Even applying some standard MM templates applied to some standard MM monsters lead to unbalanced monsters!Most of this knowledge today is hindsight. Few would have been able to predict this on first seeing the system. (But there are still bad things that might have been easier to spot: Your Dodge example is interesting here: Why take Dodge at all? The feat sucks. The only reason someone takes it is to qualify for other feats or PrCs, but it's next to useless on its own. The feat exists to reward &quot;rules mastery&quot; - someone that mastered the rules it is bad and would never take unless it's required for some feat prerequisites. A non-rulesmastery player might give this feat to his Bard or his Rogue and only very late notice how bad it is...)My hope is that the underlying assumptions of 4E are better formulated - and better reasoned then in 3E. Directly looking at how things affect the &quot;math&quot; of the game goes a long way to do this.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mustrum_Ridcully, post: 4058317, member: 710"] Splat Books are inevitable. WotC wants to earn money, and gamers hunger for more options - some of them they sure could build themselves, but it's alot of work, and why not concentrate on playing and give WotC the money to do the work for you? The problem with splat books is that the persons writing these books do not know or understand the system well enough to see all unwanted implications. Certain effects weren't even known to the original designers, they were emergent properties of the game system. If you never used a single splat book, but would try to generate your own monsters/NPCs following the MM and DMG guidelines, you were not guaranteed satisfying results. Even applying some standard MM templates applied to some standard MM monsters lead to unbalanced monsters! Most of this knowledge today is hindsight. Few would have been able to predict this on first seeing the system. (But there are still bad things that might have been easier to spot: Your Dodge example is interesting here: Why take Dodge at all? The feat sucks. The only reason someone takes it is to qualify for other feats or PrCs, but it's next to useless on its own. The feat exists to reward "rules mastery" - someone that mastered the rules it is bad and would never take unless it's required for some feat prerequisites. A non-rulesmastery player might give this feat to his Bard or his Rogue and only very late notice how bad it is...) My hope is that the underlying assumptions of 4E are better formulated - and better reasoned then in 3E. Directly looking at how things affect the "math" of the game goes a long way to do this. [/QUOTE]

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