Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gothmog" data-source="post: 3351077" data-attributes="member: 317">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.</blockquote>

Verification