Failed promises

[Infernal Teddy]

Well, people, what books have you bought because they sounded way cool, but - when you finally read them - failed to deliver?

Example: for me, it was Ghostwalk. The premise was brilliant, but I couldn't find a way to logicallay build it into a gameworld, without letting it dominate my homebrew or having to rewrite an "official" setting to accomadate Manifest. Plus, I don't think the idea of the ghosts to PC's and back doesn't quite mesh with standard D&D.

So, what about you?

 

[Thanee]

The XPH and Frostburn were both extreme turn-offs with great promise.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Jupp]

Manual of the Planes

I really did wait for that one but when I got the MotP it bored me to hell. Dull writing, unimaginative content..yuck! I didnt even have the motivation after that stunt to buy the Planar Handbook when that came out.

 

[DragonLancer]

For me, the book that comes to mind immediately was Underdark. This should have been along the lines of the environment series, but instead just a bunch of player races, spells and feats with no real info on running games set in the Underdark. Very dissapointing.

 

[Cherub]

For me it would be Complete Fighter...just seemed like a bunch of feats, classes and prestige classes mushed together to craft a poor excuse of a supplemental class rule book...when in fact IMHO it shouldve also been about interesting ideas and concepts and innovative facets for a class that has the potential to be rather 2 dimensional in the hands of an inexperienced player,,,in any case that thurned me off and I refused to buy anymore class or race based supplemental rule books...the last thing i want is more prestige classes and feats...like we didnt have enough of them to deal with let alone keep track of as a DM :\ ...(pardon my gripe - just needed to get that off my chest)...

 

[IronWolf]

Player's Guide to Faerun. I guess I was expecting more...

 

[Frostmarrow]

Manual of the Planes

I really did wait for that one but when I got the MotP it bored me to hell. Dull writing, unimaginative content..yuck! I didnt even have the motivation after that stunt to buy the Planar Handbook when that came out.

Oh, interesting. I liked that one very much and I seem to recall that MoTP is one of the best received books ever. I can still see your point, though.

I'm wracking my brain to give an example of my own but I can't seem to come up with one. Maybe it's because I don't buy stuff I'm not familiar with but I don't know for sure...

Well, 3.5 certainly didn't deliver that's for sure. Here we were expecting a books without all the errata and misprints and what do we get? More of the same. Sheesh.

 

[Shemeska]

MotP was the best 3.x book, it still was a pale shadow of its primary sources from 2e

Deities and Demigods 3e - I can't say what I was expecting, but this wasn't it. Single worst design decision made: deity statblocks in 3e. Ruined the book and I've not picked it up since I bought.

Players Guide to Faerun - I was really looking forward to this book, and it failed on most every level, and the only FR book I've returned for my money back. Updates to spells and feats, crappy cosmology details, metaplot summaries that are useless if you read the novels, and not much more.

Planar Handbook - a noble attempt, decent to good in parts, but it had large shoes to fill compared to the Planescape source material it drew from. What made this get mentioned here were the wasted 30odd pages in the back of the book detailing Planar Touchstones, the single worst implimented idea in DnD in 3rd edition. Powerups to win the game! *cue sound of Super Mario theme music*

Champions of Ruin - Book of Vile Darkness lite, and I was hoping for a bit more detail on more than a select handful of groups that had already been covered before in other 3e FR books. What really got me were stats for beings that the gods of Toril fear but who in the CR 20ish range would be smacked around and left for dead. Oh, and the admitted reason they were put in the CR 20ish range was solely so PCs could kill them, otherwise they wouldn't be attractive targets for most PCs in FR games. That's just sad.

 

[Psion]

DEITIES & DEMIGODS - A freakin' DEITY MONSTER MANUAL! I thought the WotC staff learned their lesson. Argh!
AEG's War
FFG's Dungeoncraft
Races of the Wild (after Races of Stone did dwarves and gnomes proud, I was expecting so much more)
Kenzer's Villain Design Handbook
Mongoose's Strongholds & Dynasties
Mongoose's Chronomancy
Mongoose's Elementalism (these two books smacked so much because the previous books in the series were so good.)
Green Ronin's Bastards & Bloodlines (this one annoyed me because both author and company are typically conceptually excellent.)
Libris Mortis (great 2e products like Van Richten's Guide and Complete Book of Necromancers and the prior book in the series, Draconomicon, left me expecting so much more.)
Did I mention DEITIES & DEMIGODS?


But generally, I find that if I pre-form my image of a book too much, I set myself up for disappointment. I mean, if you are like the dunderhead who pans Draconomicon on Amazon expecting something other than a game book, I don't think the fault lies with the author...

 

[KenM]

For me it was Monte Cooks Arcana Unearthed. All it was was a setting, but they promoted as something else, IMO.