Gothmog
First Post
Hussar said:
For me, the subpar releases have been: Complete Scoundrel, Complete Mage, Dragon Magic, MMIV, Races of the Dragon, and the Book of Nine Swords. I don't buy the FR stuff, but the recent releases have been widely panned by many people (Dragons of Faerun and some mini-campaign/sourcebook I don't remember off the top of my head).
The high point for WotC in the last year has been Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, which is a rehash of an old adventure. The fiendish codexes were ok- something that was needed for a while and a much needed attempt at fluff, but in the end rather bland- and didn't feel very fiendish to me. Dungeonscape and Cityscape look good for novice DMs and would likely be valuable to them, but I found much of those books to be common sense.
I think part of the cause of my dissatisfaction with the way D&D is headed now is that its changed focus and is all about crunch and builds now, and embraces a very gamist mentality by the core rules. Gone is the evocative prose and background of previous editions- instead the 3.5 books read like very convoluted and dry textbooks. And I'll commit heresy here- options are not always a good thing. The game has become TOO bogged down by options, powerups, and cool powerz to the detriment of presenting new and interesting ideas for use in a campaign. If you spend 4/5ths of a book giving new spells, feats, prestige classes, races, magic items, and core classes, and only one chapter (maybe 10 pages if you're lucky) on including the material in a campaign, and the advice is devoid of flavor, the game suffers. This is what has driven me away from WotC products (and D&D in general) in the last year or so. I know WotC wants to focus on their products as a toolkit for D&D, but the more they do that, the less appeal D&D has to me and to quite a few other gamers I have talked to and played with. Some great stuff is still produced for D&D by other companies that are flavor/fluff heavy (the Midnight materials and the Thieves World books are incredible for example). My group and many people I know have moved to other companies and systems that give us what we want (mostly WHFRP, Savage Worlds, and True 20)- solid mechanics AND great flavor/fluff. One is not mutually exclusive with the other.
You make an interesting point, though -- obviously there are a lot of DMs who use the 3.x rules supplements and homebrew settings, plots, NPCs, et al., some of whom are not interested in buying other people's fluff. On the other hand, there are a lot of DMs who really enjoy using published settings and adventures. As a DM, one of my issues with the 3.x ruleset is that its rules-heavy and statistics-intensive nature means that the 'rulesy' aspects of game prep (statting out NPCs, calculating ELs, etc) take up way too much of my time -- and they're not very much fun, either. This leaves me with less time and energy to work on the aspects of game prep that I do like: the aforementioned setting, plot, and character development. That's why I tried using Eberron (and published modules for Eberron) in the first place. Needless to say, I burned out on that pretty quickly because it took all the fun out of DMing (for me). Now I'm back to homebrewing. In other words, I too "am perfectly capable of using my imagination to come up with setting and fluff," but I also like to read other people's work for inspiration. I do not find poorly written, rules-heavy splatbooks to be terribly inspiring. For me, this may come down to a general dissatisfaction with the system (i.e., the 3.x ruleset). I was very enthusiastic when 3.0 came out, and made the switch to 3.5 without too much griping. I own a good number of rules and setting supplements both from WotC and third parties. But the more I DM 3.x, the less I like it. So, has 3E become too much like 2E? In some ways yes, in some ways no. IMO the similarity is that there are a lot of crappy supplements being published, but the supplements are crappy in different ways. In general, you could say that the 2E splatbooks had decent fluff and really, really bad crunch. The 3E splatbooks have decent crunch and very little fluff at all -- and what fluff there is, is pretty lame.
