D&D 5E I just don't see why they even bothered with the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.

[delericho]

Comparing the effect of fonts only works if I know how many more words can be squeezed into a page.
Simmilarly, the amount of art per page can also dramtically affect the total amount of information. And there might be irrelevant information in some passages.
The only way to be sure would be to count every relevant word Int the two books and compare totals. But I don't have that kind of free time.

All true, but it means it's difficult to say SCAG has more detail than the FRCS - the data isn't complete. (And, yes, it's unreasonable to expect a complete analysis - not least because the definition of a "relevant word" is necessarily subjective.)

And it's also true that even if the FRCS did turn out to have more*, even that wouldn't mean it was the better book, since the tiny font size and the sheer density of information in that book can be said to reduce ease-of-use, at least for some readers. For most campaigns, a smaller book focused on the right** area would probably be better.

* The key word there being 'if'. I'm making no claim here.
** That's important - for a campaign set in the Sword Coast, I'd guess that the SCAG is by far the better book. For one set in, say, Sembia it wouldn't be - and doesn't claim to be!

Ultimately, I don't think it's really meaningful to claim one is a "better" book than the other, because they do fundamentally different things, and indeed even where they overlap they do them in different ways. Far better, IMO, to judge both on their own merits.

 

[Mergon]

I'd rather see more books like SCAG then more official modules. The modules are extremely badly laid out. Not having each creature needed for an encounter inserted to where you encounter them means having to have 1 or 2 supplements open, sometimes the Monster Manual, plus having to constantly switch between the actual encounter and the Creatures section of the module.

With the amount of flipping you have to do, the modules should never have been made hard cover; the bindings just can't take the abuse of constantly flipping through them.Plus, in the case of most of the DM's I know, and whose campaigns I play in, having to hold the hard cover book open flat with a paper weight also puts far too much stress on the poor bindings so far. In 5 of seven cases with DM's I know, the bindings are already breaking loose.

Please, please, please WotC go back to soft covered bindings and go back to the module design where creatures involved with an encounter are listed right there with the encounter. Or, at the very least includes a set of loose sheet copies of ALL the creatures with the module.

It's gotten to the point where I am so frustrated with the design layout of the official modules that I am downloading converted 5e modules and doing a lot of converting of old modules myself.

Note: for those who have yet to discover it, here is a link to simply the best D&D 5e Character sheet out there at the moment. It has just been updated with SWAG materials:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1234.