Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6285763" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't know about the later 2e 'Complete' series splatbooks, but in general the 2e splatbook mechanics were pretty lame. Even the first 4 were pretty uneven. The material wasn't written very clearly, a lot of it overlapped and often contradicted or worked poorly with elements of the core books, and frankly a LOT of it was just dead end stuff that nobody would likely ever use because it was either too much trouble or simply not effective. The entirety of the priest book fell into the later category, the classes produced using it were INEVITABLY too much weaker than a Cleric to attract any but some unusual player, which put the DM in the position of his custom classes almost never being played. The fighter and thief books just needed mostly better implementation and suffered a lot from the fact that the AD&D core rules were so scattershot that it was hard to coherently add onto them. As for wizards, I don't think they needed the help. Anything they added there was bound to just give the class of all options even more options. It wasn't that the ideas were inherently bad at all, but ANY implementation detracted from the game in some sense.Flavor-wise I thought there was some good stuff in all of these books. OTOH a lot of it was pretty cliched kind of silliness. I liked some, and just rolled my eyes at a lot of it. That's probably just my taste though. Overall they weren't bad books. HOWEVER I don't think they sold for squat. Maybe TSR published way too many of them, but the last time I checked the FLGS in Burlington VT STILL HAS NEW COPIES of some of these books in a niche at the back of the store!!! They certainly sat on display racks gathering dust all through the 90's and beyond. I'm sure us really active players bought at least some of them, but I think the sales overall weren't that good.</blockquote>

Verification