D&D rules bloat

[pawsplay]

Is there any reason you can't skip a lot of that stuff? I tend to read that kind of thing as "If you have supplement X, this is where you find Y," but then, I don't own a lot of setting specific material.

 

[werk]

Is there any reason you can't skip a lot of that stuff? I tend to read that kind of thing as "If you have supplement X, this is where you find Y," but then, I don't own a lot of setting specific material.

I think that's bloat though, literally. When you buy a book (like Secrets of Sarlona) and can't use 10% of it (a slight exaggeration) because it requires additional rule book supplements (like BoVD) that aren't required by the game system itself. That 10% is bloat. Right?

EDIT: You CAN totally skip it, skip the thing that you purchased with your hard earned money. Just like you can get a plate of food and throw half of it away.

 

[pawsplay]

If the BOVD is never used in published material, then the BoVD becomes 100% bloat, and why buy it? Wouldn't it be strange if WotC didn't use their own material?

Now, I think referencing the BOVD, except in passing, is itself a bad choice. But that's because 75% of the book itself is geared toward variant type campaigns, it's from the Mature line of products, and the book itself is a mess and should receive as little support as possible since no one should be encouraged to buy what is (IMHO) a mediocre product. Obviously, it hasn't occured to some writers that the BOVD is not a "go-to" book for setting material, which is unfortunate.

In principle, previously published material can and should appear. But not owning the book should not cripple you... either supporting material should be republished, allowing you to use that specific item, or it should be skippable.

I avoid spending my hard-earned money when I sense a lot of it is going to stuff I don't want. But I'm not everyone. And you have to realize that you aren't going to like 100% of any given book, which is written, not for you, but for an audience.

 

[werk]

I avoid spending my hard-earned money when I sense a lot of it is going to stuff I don't want. But I'm not everyone. And you have to realize that you aren't going to like 100% of any given book, which is written, not for you, but for an audience.

But I thought that was the rules bloat 'situation' from 2e...that a customer couldn't walk in off the street and purchase a new sourcebook and use it, they'd have to have all the historical baggage for it to be useful. That lack of easy access by new customers is death for a product line.

I don't see as a wide-spread problem yet, especially since I don't buy adventures so I'm mostly blind to it if it's happening. But I do see them pushing their 'optionals' on me. If WotC published "Expedition to the Demonweb Pits (Dungeons & Dragons Supplement) (Hardcover)" and had a fair share of BoNS or BoVD or even Complete Splat or PHB2 material in there...well, we all know how that turns out in the end.

 

[JustinA]

I think that's bloat though, literally. When you buy a book (like Secrets of Sarlona) and can't use 10% of it (a slight exaggeration) because it requires additional rule book supplements (like BoVD) that aren't required by the game system itself. That 10% is bloat. Right?

Can we get an actual example of what you're talking about? I mean an actual quote from the book, preferably with a page reference so I can go look at the context.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

No.

It is true that including all existing WotC-released material in a single campaign would be a pretty daunting task. However, the modularity of the system is working for us.

It is trivial for a DM to add a small number of extras based on personal tastes. It is not even true that if I give class X funky new options based from a book I need to do the same for class Y -- most of the material is close enough to balanced as is that only tiny little tweaks would be necessary (if necessary at all).

Any and all of the 2e Options books tended to have a tectonic effect on the power balance of the campaign. I would much rather attempt to run a Anything-WotC-Goes 3e D&D campaign than attempt to add a 2e Option book to an ongoing campaign on the fly.

 

[Flynn]

Any and all of the 2e Options books tended to have a tectonic effect on the power balance of the campaign. I would much rather attempt to run a Anything-WotC-Goes 3e D&D campaign than attempt to add a 2e Option book to an ongoing campaign on the fly.

Personally, I viewed 2nd Edition's Options books as being a new revision, but I can see that you don't. (I didn't run splatbooks when I was using the Options books.) Still, if you can't use all the core (non-world-specific) books at the same time in v3.5, you're in the same boat as people were in with 2nd Edition. I don't own them all, nor do I care to, to be honest, because there are too many player options, too many alternate magic systems, too many different approaches to the same character concept, and a general sense of power escalation with newer products over old ones (though not to the degree of 2nd Edition splatbooks). That's rules bloat to me. YMMV, and obviously does.

Hope that helps,
Flynn

 

[satori01]

I am with Ridley on this one. Most of the rules bloat are in the forms of options like PrC and Feats, both of which are sets of rules that are simple to incorporate.

This is not like Options and Powers where you can define how to divide up how you would like that 17 in your STR score be applied....gee lets see do I want to do more damage, or have a better Bend/Bars lift gates score?

Racial levels, alternate class abilities, are specific swapping of abilities that are really not that far akin from something a player might approach a DM with for an alternative ability more in line with their vision of their character.

There are a lot of spells in this version, which one could call bloat, but others would call options, on a personal level, I tend to blank on the new spells from PHB II and Complete Mage.

The only place were you have new rules being welded in wholesale would be the new uses for Skills in the Complete X series, (which frankly I ignore, it is never hard to adjudicate on the fly whether a character with X skill can do Y action to explicitly stated in the rules), the Skill Trick abilities from Complete Scoundrel, and the alternative rules from Unearthed Arcana.

In terms of bloat, you could if you let everything go, (with no restrictions), wind up with a character with Flaws and Bloodlines fromUnearthed Arcana, perhaps a dragon influenced race from Dragon Magic , Psionic Feats and Incarnum Feats, and some Martial adept feats from Bo9s, levels in the wonderfully overlapping classes of Wilderness Rogue and Scout, with the feat from Complete Scoundrel that lets you combine the levels of both classes together for certain class abilities, and then throw in some substitution abilities from PHB II or other books.

Funny part is even with all of that madness, you still wind up with a viable character that is easily adjudicated, even if the rest of the group was using 'vanilla' PHB only characters.

 

[Jer]

Do you feel that D&D 3.x is in the same sort of rules-bloat situation that they claimed 2nd edition was in which led to the creation of 3rd edition in the first place?

Allen

No. 3.x supplements may suffer from character power inflation, and there may be some people who like to call lots and lots of character options "bloat", but I don't see it as "rules-bloat" in the same way as 2nd edition was, primarily because the core of 3e is so much more consistently designed that it's very easy to just add an option for a single character without worrying about learning a new sub-system to take care of that character (or altering all of your other characters to deal with the fact that the new character has a new ability).

Take psionics - at one point in the 2e cycle, if you had a psionic character in your group you needed to assign a Mental AC to all of your villains. And if you were using psionic villains, you had to assign a MAC to your players as well. That's a recalculation of every character in the party just because one character wants to use one option, and that was annoying. The rules subsystems are better integrated with 3e so if I have a player who wants to play a psionic, or a binder, or a warlock, I don't have to do anything differently with my villains -- I may need to come up with new tactics, but I don't have to learn a new rules subsystem to deal with my player's concept.

Now, I'm not going to disagree that there's a bit of power-inflation going on. And I'm not going to disagree that there aren't some "filler" feats and spells in some supplements that really shouldn't have gotten past development and into the books, but I wouldn't call either of those things "rules bloat". Wasted potential, maybe. A waste of money possibly. But not anything that adds extra complexity to the game for the whole table.

 

[mmu1]

Yes, I do.

Some of my experiences while playing 3.5 - of players wanting to bring whatever supplement they could get their hands on to the table, then being surprised / put out when I said no, remind me very much of some of my 2E experiences with people being incredibly surprised that the DM (not me, in that case) actually treated the "Complete" books and the "Player's Options" books as, well, optional - and open to DM discretion.

The big problem with the bloat of rulebooks isn't even the fact things get more complicated, but the fact that too many players end up feeling cheated when you say no to something that flat out doesn't fit the campaign or is not balanced the way you'd prefer. The tendency of a lot of people to take the "a good DM never says no, he always works out a compromise" approach also doesn't help with that respect.