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Message: <blockquote data-quote="balterkn" data-source="post: 3355018" data-attributes="member: 46546">The main difference between my 2e and 3e experiences with the multitude of books?Player involvement in crafting the whole game experience.(and i concur with the OP, my 3e collection is looking rather like my 2e collection on the bookshelves - lots of books!  About the same volume – note what follows are statements of observations, none are statements of “good” or “bad” things about the two editions)The 2e groups understood many of the splatbooks were broken, thus we'd have great pre/post game discussions about a new splatbook, what parts were broken (and would be ignored) and which parts enhanced the game the players and DM wanted to play.  However, this required players who understood the differences between meta-gaming out of session and playing in session (and also considerable reading time and a desire to learn how to balance a game).  Also, despite the product brokenness, we generally revisited many of them for more of the evocative ("fluff") text to get inspiration for characters and adventures (inspiration != use as written).In 3e, generally the splatbooks are considered to be cannon-consistent more often.  Hence, the only discussion is "do we let the whole book in" - no detailed discussion about the finer points of portions of each book.  The rules in the book are generally internally consistent, thus it is hard to take anything piecemeal from a book.  The (general) simplicity of the rules integration makes the products generally more accessible to all players (less experience with game balancing needed to evaluate a book).  Many books, if determined to be "out," are never revisited.  The "fluff" text has been generally less inspiring to me and my players.Ultimately, while mechanically the game is easier to execute with the plethora of 3e books, the quality of the involvement from the players in shaping their game seems to have decreased.  I attribute that to spending more time on rules than descriptions that inspire imagination.  Looking at adventures, the ratio of stat blocks to adventure text seems to be declining (more spent on stats than setting), similar with the splatbooks - higher ratio rules to description (more rules and description).  I didn't have much a problem doing sufficient prep work for adventures in 2e such as looking up stats in the monster manuals or building the occasional more interesting replacements for the “Ftr 4, AC 4, HP 32, #Atk 3/2, THACO: 15, D: 1-8+3, longsword+1” (forgive errors in this line, it's been a while) line in an adventure.Some may say that not discussing the rules is a good thing.  My observation is that by discussing the rules, we were continually evolving the game into what we wanted to play, as opposed to feeling like we were having all-or-nothing rules points.  Thus the players “owned” their campaigns more, by deciding that they want the rules for equipment maintenance in one campaign, but not another, because that's what they wanted.  Of course, this meant that 2e groups were not as easy to move between mechanically.FWIW - YMMV</blockquote>

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