Essentials - Will you be getting it?

[bouncyhead]

There's been a lot of chat about Essentials: Will 4E players be adding it to their games or switching altogether? Will non 4E players give it serious consideration? A perfect opportunity to gather some entirely unscientific poll data for us to post to and fro about until the end of time...

 

[Zulithe]

I have to say I am tempted. Amazon has the Rules Compendium for $13.46 and you are getting 320 pages, which is pretty nice. Heroes of the Forgotten Lands, same price, 368 pages. So for the price of LESS than the MSRP of the original player's handbook you are getting double the content (sort of, minus half the races and classes!)

And when you think about it... Heroes of the Forgotten Lands contains ONLY 5 races and 4 classes yet has more pages than the original player's handbook, which contained all of that and a lot more. It seems quite expanded.

One question I have is the paper quality. Is it the same paper stock as the hardcover manuals? Is it full color? I hope so.

So as it stands now, I think I will pick up the first 2 books mentioned above, and play it from there.

I admit, I will miss the hardcovers but it is forgivable for what will hopefully be a more accessible product

On the flipside, if you are a new player and want to play a Tiefling Fighter... now you have to reference 3 books just to do that one thing! A step down from the old way of doing things... we'll see how this works out.

 

[wedgeski]

I play 4E regularly and Essentials will be added to my game simply by virtue of appearing in the online tools. But, I don't have any intention of buying the off-the-shelf products (and neither would I if I didn't use DDI, I suspect; I don't in most cases think the game needs these extras).

 

[DragonLancer]

Nope. Pathfinder is my game of choice.

 

[Zulithe]

Was doing some more browsing around on amazon... wouldn't be surprised if this were already spotted somewhere, but I got a kick out of it.

Under the Product Description section of the Essentials products, they are listed as:

Wizards of the Coast; 4th Revised edition edition

That's it guys. No more 4.5e jokes. It is clearly... 4th Edition revised!

 

[jonesy]

Oddly phrased and rather limited poll options.

Essentials look good, and we'd get them, if we continued with 4E. But we probably won't. 4E is, at the moment, one of the least interesting RPG systems we've tried. I mean, we've played frickin Twilight 2000 more this year. And Pathfinder is just too good, and our number one choice.

 

[Kaiyanwang]

Nope. As explained in another thread, even if Essentials raised my curiosity, I'll stay with Pathfinder.

 

[hopeless]

Regarding the essentials

Very probably will pick up the red box set if only for nostalgia than anything else.

Will see where this goes from there since I have the phb1,2, dmg, mm1 & 2 with two of the player's guides but have little interest in the campaign settings and none whatsoever in dark sun.

Nerath of whatever they call it however does interest me but not if it requires buying into ddi to keep it up todate and the three packs of power cards I bought was only because I had been playing a character of that type.

This Saturday should give us some of the answers we want since the red box won't even be released until the 7th of September as I understand it so Chris Perkins gm extraordinaire will have his work cut out for him given who he's running the game for!

 

[AJCarrington]

It seems quite expanded.

I am planning on picking this up as well - really like the idea on having the "core" game info in a smaller, condensed package. It should be remembered that these books are a smaller format than the core books - hence, a direct page number comparison may be misleading.

AJC

 

[Verdande]

It looks like most of the people who are picking up Essentials are already sold on 4th edition. Surprise?

I don't really see how it's supposed to convert people, but I suppose that time will tell. In the interest of saving myself time, I'll link my blog post yet again, and give you the executive summary: If I didn't particularly like 4th edition, what is supposed to get me to switch? All I hear is excited mumblings about "Will you get it?", "Is Essentials tempting you?", and "Will it get you to switch?", as if it's the end-all be-all of gaming.

Let me give you an analogy. Essentials is mint ice cream. I do not like mint ice cream. Some people do like mint ice cream, and that's fine with me. Sometimes, people try and convince me to get mint ice cream. "Look at the price! It's so much cheaper than it used to be!", or "Look, it's made with natural sugars now so it will taste slightly different!" I still don't like mint ice cream. Stop asking me about it.