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[COMPLETE] Looking back at the leatherette series: PHBR, DMGR, HR and more!
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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8332522" data-attributes="member: 8461"><p>More than once over this series of retrospectives, I've played the "I was remembering this wrong" card. But heading into <em><a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17191/CGR2-The-Complete-Gladiators-Handbook-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>CGR2 The Complete Gladiator's Handbook</em></a></em>, I found myself in a new situation: I had no memory of what was in this sourcebook at all.</p><p></p><p>Given that this was one I knew I'd picked up and read this one quite some time ago, that wasn't a good sign going back to it now.</p><p></p><p>Of course, I was well aware that this was "the fighter book" for Dark Sun. While it might be focused on the gladiator class, even without recalling its specific contents it was easy enough to figure out that - as a martial class - the sourcebook would have to have a lot of content that other martial characters could make use of as well. Moreover, as this book's sales page notes, there were several Dark Sun sourcebooks that were unusually clear in demarcating what class group they were for (even if quite a few of them came out after CGR2). For instance, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17194/DSS2-Earth-Air-Fire-and-Water-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>DSS2 Earth, Air, Fire, and Water</em></a> was the priest book, covering (para-)elemental clerics, druids, and templars. <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17199/The-Will-and-the-Way-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>The Will and the Way</em></a> covered psionicists. <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17207/Defilers-and-Preservers-The-Wizards-of-Athas-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Defilers and Preservers: The Wizards of Athas</em></a> was about...well, you can tell. Even <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17183/Dragon-Kings-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Dragon Kings</em></a>, despite its name, was a book for all characters of high level. <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17182/DSR2-Dune-Trader-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>DSR2 Dune Trader</em></a> was basically one big introductory sourcebook for its new trader class (which was eventually migrated over to the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17203/Dark-Sun-Campaign-Setting-Expanded-and-Revised-Edition-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Dark Sun Campaign Setting (Revised and Expanded Edition)</em></a>, and even had some unofficial expansion in Gygax Magazine #5). Even <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17208/Psionic-Artifacts-of-Athas-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Psionic Artifacts of Athas</em></a> had a clearly-delineated role, as it was the "magic item book" for the campaign setting in all but name.</p><p></p><p>Of course, the trader class notwithstanding, this left Athas's bards and rogues out in the cold. But that's a sacrifice I feel comfortable with them making.</p><p></p><p>So what's actually in this book? Honestly, exactly what you'd expect...and that's kind of the problem.</p><p></p><p>My issue with the gladiator class is that it doesn't do a very good job of differentiating itself from the mainline fighter class. It <em>tries</em> to do so, both with a stricter narrative definition (an arena fighter) and a tighter mechanical focus (improved usage of weapons, unarmed combat, and armor), but I'm dubious about how well it succeeds. Even then, that's largely because the class is unabashedly "the fighter, but better," as evidenced by its higher ability score prerequisites.</p><p></p><p>This leads to one of my earliest complaints about this book, which is that it doesn't reprint the basic gladiator class information from the Dark Sun campaign setting. Now, I feel like a huge hypocrite saying that, but hear me out: the PHBR books were focused on expanding classes from the <em>Player's Handbook</em> (and those that weren't, such as <em>The Complete Barbarian's Handbook</em> or <em>The Complete Ninja's Handbook</em>, had their class information right there anyway), which was the book you <em>knew</em> would be right there anyway, making reference a minor issue at best. You could say that's true for the Dark Sun campaign setting as well, since where else would you use CGR2 if not a Dark Sun game, but that doesn't seem the same; most of the time, you're not going to be flipping through the booklets in the boxed set the way you would the PHB.</p><p></p><p>But I digress. We start off which a bunch of kits which are okay, but nothing too spectacular. I mean, several of them have interesting abilities (e.g. how the Blind Fighter kit is generous with overcoming the penalties for not being able to see, or the Jazst's ability to kill via numerous small cuts), but overall there's only so many ways you can create niche themes in what's already a niche-themed class. I did like how the kits had "special notes" at the end with various tidbits (even if they were sometimes head-scratchers; female gladiators with the Arena Champion kit sometimes receive special accolades from the fans...what does that mean, exactly?). More notable was the quick overview of NPCs with each kit at the end. While lacking even abbreviated stats, the small-scale nature of Dark Sun meant that these names and descriptions were a good way to generate some quick NPCs on the fly.</p><p></p><p>The gladiator abilities chapter is short, and doesn't really expand on the gladiator class's abilities all that much, which isn't surprising. Instead, it mostly focuses on new non-weapon profiencies, which are presumably part of the Warrior NWP group. Unlike a lot of splatbooks, there aren't a lot of these here, which is probably why this entire chapter is only four pages long.</p><p></p><p>The subsequent chapter is where it starts to get interesting, because it's basically the original <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16862/Players-Option--Combat--Tactics-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Player's Option: Combat & Tactics</em></a>. It introduces a not-inconsiderable expansion to the combat rules, along with new weapons, new armor, and more, including gladiator-specific expansions to the martial arts rules from <em>PHBR1 The Complete Fighter's Handbook</em>, which makes me wonder how well they sit next to the tweaks and revisions from <em>PHBR15 The Complete Ninja's Handbook</em>. It's fairly modular, and I suspect that using the bleeding rules or hit locations would do a lot to play up the brutality involved in a Dark Sun game.</p><p></p><p>It's after this, however, that the book rapidly lost me. I don't mind lore, but a section on the arenas of each city-state was enough to make my eyes glaze over. I've always found this sort of information to be more fun when taken piecemeal, like if I was trying to find all of the information I could about Draj, then the section on Draj's arena would be useful. But reading about all seven back-to-back was just enervating.</p><p></p><p>There are rules for actual arena games - as well as discussions of the practices, norms, and conventions surrounding those games as well (e.g. gambling) - but to me that misses the point. Way back when I was overviewing <em>The Complete Fighter's Handbook</em>, I mentioned how playing tournaments always struck me as boring compared to adventuring; the same principle applies here. Yes, a gladiatorial death match against killers and monsters, with an angry crowd watching (all of whom have some sort of psionic power) isn't your usual jousting match, but it's also not the same as defeating a group of raiders attacking a settlement or thwarting a sorcerer-king plot, either. As such, it should be no surprise that the chapters on gladiatorial campaigns and various arena games just didn't do it for me.</p><p></p><p>Overall, this book comes across as doing the best it can with what it has to work with, but in the course of doing so is forced to tacitly admit to what strikes me as a cardinal sin of class design: it works best when it's the center of the campaign. Playing up the idea of having the gladiator fight as a method of public entertainment is one thing, but with roughly half the book talking about running gladiatorial sessions (or associated activities), tournaments thereof, and even entire campaigns around that theme, it seems all too easy for such a setup to overshadow characters playing other classes (unless they're gladiators without the gladiator class, which might work, but gladiator characters have some decent niche protection in that regard).</p><p></p><p>And for that matter, does anyone else think that's kind of a waste of Dark Sun as a setting? Rikus and Neeva were both gladiators, but they stopped participating in performance combat early on in the Prism Pentad, moving on to bigger and grander adventures. I suspect most PCs will feel the same way early into a gladiatorial campaign.</p><p></p><p>This book's new rules are okay, but looking back on it now, it's easy to see why it slipped my mind so easily: it's putting a lot of attention on a campaign framework that I found markedly uninteresting.</p><p></p><p><em>Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.</em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 8332522, member: 8461"] More than once over this series of retrospectives, I've played the "I was remembering this wrong" card. But heading into [I][URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17191/CGR2-The-Complete-Gladiators-Handbook-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]CGR2 The Complete Gladiator's Handbook[/I][/URL][/I], I found myself in a new situation: I had no memory of what was in this sourcebook at all. Given that this was one I knew I'd picked up and read this one quite some time ago, that wasn't a good sign going back to it now. Of course, I was well aware that this was "the fighter book" for Dark Sun. While it might be focused on the gladiator class, even without recalling its specific contents it was easy enough to figure out that - as a martial class - the sourcebook would have to have a lot of content that other martial characters could make use of as well. Moreover, as this book's sales page notes, there were several Dark Sun sourcebooks that were unusually clear in demarcating what class group they were for (even if quite a few of them came out after CGR2). For instance, [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17194/DSS2-Earth-Air-Fire-and-Water-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]DSS2 Earth, Air, Fire, and Water[/I][/URL] was the priest book, covering (para-)elemental clerics, druids, and templars. [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17199/The-Will-and-the-Way-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]The Will and the Way[/I][/URL] covered psionicists. [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17207/Defilers-and-Preservers-The-Wizards-of-Athas-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Defilers and Preservers: The Wizards of Athas[/I][/URL] was about...well, you can tell. Even [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17183/Dragon-Kings-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Dragon Kings[/I][/URL], despite its name, was a book for all characters of high level. [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17182/DSR2-Dune-Trader-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]DSR2 Dune Trader[/I][/URL] was basically one big introductory sourcebook for its new trader class (which was eventually migrated over to the [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17203/Dark-Sun-Campaign-Setting-Expanded-and-Revised-Edition-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Dark Sun Campaign Setting (Revised and Expanded Edition)[/I][/URL], and even had some unofficial expansion in Gygax Magazine #5). Even [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17208/Psionic-Artifacts-of-Athas-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Psionic Artifacts of Athas[/I][/URL] had a clearly-delineated role, as it was the "magic item book" for the campaign setting in all but name. Of course, the trader class notwithstanding, this left Athas's bards and rogues out in the cold. But that's a sacrifice I feel comfortable with them making. So what's actually in this book? Honestly, exactly what you'd expect...and that's kind of the problem. My issue with the gladiator class is that it doesn't do a very good job of differentiating itself from the mainline fighter class. It [I]tries[/I] to do so, both with a stricter narrative definition (an arena fighter) and a tighter mechanical focus (improved usage of weapons, unarmed combat, and armor), but I'm dubious about how well it succeeds. Even then, that's largely because the class is unabashedly "the fighter, but better," as evidenced by its higher ability score prerequisites. This leads to one of my earliest complaints about this book, which is that it doesn't reprint the basic gladiator class information from the Dark Sun campaign setting. Now, I feel like a huge hypocrite saying that, but hear me out: the PHBR books were focused on expanding classes from the [I]Player's Handbook[/I] (and those that weren't, such as [I]The Complete Barbarian's Handbook[/I] or [I]The Complete Ninja's Handbook[/I], had their class information right there anyway), which was the book you [I]knew[/I] would be right there anyway, making reference a minor issue at best. You could say that's true for the Dark Sun campaign setting as well, since where else would you use CGR2 if not a Dark Sun game, but that doesn't seem the same; most of the time, you're not going to be flipping through the booklets in the boxed set the way you would the PHB. But I digress. We start off which a bunch of kits which are okay, but nothing too spectacular. I mean, several of them have interesting abilities (e.g. how the Blind Fighter kit is generous with overcoming the penalties for not being able to see, or the Jazst's ability to kill via numerous small cuts), but overall there's only so many ways you can create niche themes in what's already a niche-themed class. I did like how the kits had "special notes" at the end with various tidbits (even if they were sometimes head-scratchers; female gladiators with the Arena Champion kit sometimes receive special accolades from the fans...what does that mean, exactly?). More notable was the quick overview of NPCs with each kit at the end. While lacking even abbreviated stats, the small-scale nature of Dark Sun meant that these names and descriptions were a good way to generate some quick NPCs on the fly. The gladiator abilities chapter is short, and doesn't really expand on the gladiator class's abilities all that much, which isn't surprising. Instead, it mostly focuses on new non-weapon profiencies, which are presumably part of the Warrior NWP group. Unlike a lot of splatbooks, there aren't a lot of these here, which is probably why this entire chapter is only four pages long. The subsequent chapter is where it starts to get interesting, because it's basically the original [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16862/Players-Option--Combat--Tactics-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Player's Option: Combat & Tactics[/I][/URL]. It introduces a not-inconsiderable expansion to the combat rules, along with new weapons, new armor, and more, including gladiator-specific expansions to the martial arts rules from [I]PHBR1 The Complete Fighter's Handbook[/I], which makes me wonder how well they sit next to the tweaks and revisions from [I]PHBR15 The Complete Ninja's Handbook[/I]. It's fairly modular, and I suspect that using the bleeding rules or hit locations would do a lot to play up the brutality involved in a Dark Sun game. It's after this, however, that the book rapidly lost me. I don't mind lore, but a section on the arenas of each city-state was enough to make my eyes glaze over. I've always found this sort of information to be more fun when taken piecemeal, like if I was trying to find all of the information I could about Draj, then the section on Draj's arena would be useful. But reading about all seven back-to-back was just enervating. There are rules for actual arena games - as well as discussions of the practices, norms, and conventions surrounding those games as well (e.g. gambling) - but to me that misses the point. Way back when I was overviewing [I]The Complete Fighter's Handbook[/I], I mentioned how playing tournaments always struck me as boring compared to adventuring; the same principle applies here. Yes, a gladiatorial death match against killers and monsters, with an angry crowd watching (all of whom have some sort of psionic power) isn't your usual jousting match, but it's also not the same as defeating a group of raiders attacking a settlement or thwarting a sorcerer-king plot, either. As such, it should be no surprise that the chapters on gladiatorial campaigns and various arena games just didn't do it for me. Overall, this book comes across as doing the best it can with what it has to work with, but in the course of doing so is forced to tacitly admit to what strikes me as a cardinal sin of class design: it works best when it's the center of the campaign. Playing up the idea of having the gladiator fight as a method of public entertainment is one thing, but with roughly half the book talking about running gladiatorial sessions (or associated activities), tournaments thereof, and even entire campaigns around that theme, it seems all too easy for such a setup to overshadow characters playing other classes (unless they're gladiators without the gladiator class, which might work, but gladiator characters have some decent niche protection in that regard). And for that matter, does anyone else think that's kind of a waste of Dark Sun as a setting? Rikus and Neeva were both gladiators, but they stopped participating in performance combat early on in the Prism Pentad, moving on to bigger and grander adventures. I suspect most PCs will feel the same way early into a gladiatorial campaign. This book's new rules are okay, but looking back on it now, it's easy to see why it slipped my mind so easily: it's putting a lot of attention on a campaign framework that I found markedly uninteresting. [I]Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.[/I] [/QUOTE]
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[COMPLETE] Looking back at the leatherette series: PHBR, DMGR, HR and more!
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