Is this you(r GM)?

[Herremann the Wise]

Hi AltID,

It sounds like the biggest issue you have with the DM is him tangenting off from the goal(s) you were heading towards. The players in any game will usually have a big goal that they are trying to achieve - even if it is just to become famous or better. More likely however, there is some evil/good guy/group that the party is trying to take care of. If the purchasing of new books swings the party away from this into other adventure "vignettes", I can imagine you would have a serious lack of continuity. The fact that it is so lamely or poorly done by your DM is making it laughable and destroying any chance of verisimilitude in the world he has created - and thus is destroying.

In some ways, I am most likely guilty of this myself. I purchase a new book, I'll normally sift through for a really good idea to throw at my PC's - the necrotic stuff in Libris Mortis is brilliant and the Eldritch Giants and Confessors in Monster Manual III are just down right nasty [I would suggest that they are a CR16 rather than a 15]. However, the difference between myself and your DM perhaps (and I hope) is that I don't change the end goal or try to distract from it too much. The fact that my group are high level - 16th, a few 17th and 18th - makes it a lot easier to chuck some of this stuff in without it becoming unbelievable or ridiculous. I imagine with a lower level campaign where your PC's can't instantly teleport wherever they want repeatedly, the change of "creature genre" would become jarring and highly contrived.

I would suggest keeping your DM focused on the players goals rather than his own. It always makes for a more enjoyable game.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Kalendraf]

I've seen exactly the type of DM you describe. It can be extremely frustrating when continuity suffers due to the DM wanting to work in his next purchase ASAP.

Though I purchase my fair share of books, I don't think I suffer from this symptom quite as badly. I try to work in material from the books where they make sense, but I strive to not disrupt the continuity of the game. So while I try to allow books like the Complete series in as quickly as possible, it generally takes me quite a bit longer to work material in from most of the other ones I purchese.

Case in point: Monster Manual 3. I picked this up about a month ago, but I have yet to use anything from it. However, I am definitely planning to use something from it eventually, perhaps even in one of the next few sessions. But this will more than likely only be for 1 or 2 encounters, while the rest of the adventure's primary encounters will be drawn from the other core books.

 

[AltID]

I would suggest keeping your DM focused on the players goals rather than his own.

Suggestions on how I might acheive this?

 

[cybertalus]

My DM does this some. MMIII and Libris Mortis have been very common sights during the game sessions since he got them. Though with MMIII I think he was trying to race to use the new monsters before the monster-memorizing player got the book and had it memorized. The DM lost that race.

My DM also has Frostburn and Eberron, and so far we haven't suddenly detoured to the Arctic, or moved to a lost continent that happens to have robots and monorails.

As DM habits go, there are far worse ones to have.

 

[francisca]

Nope. Not at all. If anything, I'm on the other end of the spectrum. I carefully consider everything, and it's usually the players trying to convince me to do anything but the core, especially when it come to player oriented crunch, such stuff in the Complete series.

 

[scourger]

the bane of new games

My issue as a DM is new d20 games. In the heady days when 3.0 was relatively new, I bought many, many new d20 games. I've (painfully) learned to pare the list down to a smaller (but still unmanageable) number of games that I really want to run in the scarce time available to run all the great remaining games. Luckily, many of the new games had no (or way too few) modules to be worthwhile and/or presented so many rules changes as to make them unplayably unwieldy. Combined with my player's antipathy for such games, ranging from simple disinterest to outright boycott, I've recently parted with a lot of those games (as well as settings and modules).

There just isn't enough time or interest for everything.

Now, I look at a new gaming purchase as an expenditure of entertainment dollars--like renting several movies. I read it and decide if I'll run or use it. If so, I keep it. This is the exception. If not, I sell it on eBay for $1 so that someone else can get some gaming goodness out of it. This is the norm. I'm more discrening, but some stuff just looks so cool I can't pass it up. (Relics & Rituals Olympus is the most recent example. It is a gorgeous book, and I'm enjoying reading it. I doubt I'll keep it, however, as it does not present the kind of Greek campaing I would want to run if I had the time and the players to do it.)

 

[Fenes]

I don't do this. I usually buy a lot of new books, then don't use anything out of the majority of them until much, much later, when I happen on it.

Case in point, today I used the "Secrets of the Lamp" pdf I had bought a year or two ago, since the party managed to get to the City of Brass. In another campaign I will use a prestige class from Secrets & Societies in 2 levels or so, and I have had the book since about a year or more as well.

 

[dontpunkme]

I do this from time to time with a new pc that happens to be a member of a new prestige class once in a blue moon. I tend to do it quite often with Monster Books (MM1,2,3, FF, ToH1+2). I did piss off my players quite badly with a few of them (namely Abyssal Ghoul-FF, Sarkiths-FF, Razor Boar-MM2, and the Rukanyr-FF[and a great way to take away a magic sword that you probably shoudln't have given out in the 1st place]). I tend to through these out there whenever I get annoyed at the players for using metagame knowledge (b/c one of the players has MM1 memorized) to help beat a foe I may throw at them. I don't think it ruins continuity because I'm pretty good at making sure the beasties stay in the right ecosystem.