I was going to come here and repost a post I made elsewhere. Where my post elsewhere seems positive considering the rest of the thread over there, in contrast with the prior posts here, it will seem like I am busting Paizo in the chops. That being the case, let me preface this with the notes that I am really excited about the prospects of future volumes and would like to see more.
Finally got my copy yesterday.
I got more out of it as a "3.5 Dragon Compendium" than "pre-3.0 dragon conversion". The collected feats and magic items are really cool, and the bloodline feats have always been some of my favorites.
Of conversions of favorite articles, I really gotta give cudos to
Toxins of Cerrelon and
Good Hits and Bad Misses.
Toxins of Cerrelon was one of my favorite old articles. I used it in my old game in place of the then-lame D&D poison system. They manage to do a great conversion. I will use this.
Good Hits and Bad Misses, despite the fact I probably won't use it, is a good conversion. It manages to work around the issues of "no save instant death" and "differing weapon critical statistic." Though my take on this works better for me (it that is also takes into account damaging effects that don't have criticals, and lets me dispense with a cumbersome table), the fact that they worked around the new system plus captured it in a single page photocopyable table you can clip to your DM screen is a good thing.
The class section, which I had the highest hopes for, managed to hit my class design pet peeves on all cylinders. Heading up this list is
core classes for specific concepts. I guess this, if anything, is a dragon classic. But just like the flurry of new classes in old dragons, I won't be using most of these either:
- Battle Dancer - The least of my worries and the coolest core class of the bunch, it still hits my "too specific to be core" pet peeve. But to be fair, we wouldn't need such a class if the monk also wasn't too specific, and we had a more generic "unarmed martial artist" core class like that in Beyond Monks... which I'll be using instead.
- The Jester shares a similar problem. Its also a playable class, much more so than the original. But it even has less excuses to be a class of its own next to the bard. It's abilities are almost different flavor text for the same abilities.
- Mountebank - I have no idea what they were thinking with this one. As in, they neither captured nor conveyed a concept that clicked with me. The original concept doesn't seem like it is something you couldn't do with the (much more flexible than the 1e/2e thief) rogue class. At best, if you take Gygax's mention of "illusion" literally, it sounds like it could be a prestige similar to the arcane trickster. But they changed the concept by throwing in a "demonic" spin, and they also threw in a picture with this one from a totally unrelated article, Mind Lords of Talaron (one which I use in my game, but has no relation to this concept.) I've defended this compedium from all too typical whines of "but there were better choices to pull from out there". In this case, I have to join with the chorus. They tacked the name of a concept with a class that had little to do with it and tacked on art that had nothing to do with it.
- Death Master - I thought the original death master was a bit clunky, but I had a feeling they would streamline it nicely for 3.5. And they did. So what's the complaint here?
1) They cast it as a servant of orcus, a specific demon lord. To me, that spells "too specific to be a core class." (Fortunately, NG did a prestige class version of the deathmaster downloadable for free on their site.)
2) The reason that was used to dismiss the Plethora of Paladins article as a candidate for conversion here was that there were other outtakes on the concept, alignment variant paladins, both in unearthed arcana and in the Dragon. Well guess what guys. The concept of a "more necromancer than necromancer" was already done as well - in the Dragon, in Unearthed Arcana, and in Heroes of Horror. What's good for the goose is much better for the gander, guys.
- Urban Druid - bleh. Hate the concept.
- Sha'ir - Okay, this is pretty cool. Of course, it sort of highlights how weak the sorcerer is, but that didn't bug me with the Psion, either.
Prestige classes - okay. Nothing special. A general complaint is that none of the extended-spellcaster PrCs is really worth sacrificing 1/2 your spell level (which is easily enough resolved/house ruled.) More specifically, the
Cerebrex's class abilities at the high end assume that spells are "memorized". (And this was not taken from a pre-3e article...)
Er, I guess that's all. I'll still get use out of it, but not as much as I hoped.
