Lack of Interest in MOTW?

[WizarDru]

Reapersaurus was saying that people on the boards *such as* Ranger Wickett (not just Ranger Wickett) are coming up with far more creative stuff than the designers at Wizards on a daily basis. And this material is FREE. .

Book of Eldritch Might from Monte Cook ($5 download or $12.95 softcover) is a much better value, however.

Heh. BoEM is good....it's also got some stuff in it that's horribly broken, too, IMHO. I also think it has some lackluster classes in it. You sound more dissatisfied with the ratio of price to content than the actual content....which is a perfectly valid viewpoint. I don't necessarily disagree.

But as often as not, the issue is whether the content is good...it's whether it's sexy or not. Balanced is often bandied about as a euphamism for lackluster. Sword and Fist has some great prestige classes, IMHO. DotF, T&B and S&S have more prestige classes better suited for NPCs than PCs, which is something of a poor choice, but not an invalid one.

Some people will (rightfully) argue that most of us do not judge third party or fan material as harshly as we judge WoTC. That is true! The reason is WoTC is supposed to be the expert on the matter; they have the most money, best distribution, supposedly the "best" designers, and they created the game system in the first place. Their products should be much better than anyone else's. That they are not, and in some cases, clearly inferior, to third party and/or fan material is shocking and should serve as a wake-up call to WoTC to get their act together and put out the caliber of material we all know they are capable of, yet refuse to do. Perhaps the oft-mentioned corporate bureaucracy at WoTC is the main problem. If it is, they need to restructure the way they go about creating their games and supplements or be left in the "creative dust" of the competition.

The problem is, I haven't really found any of the free content to be substantially any better than WOTCs. None of it applies to my campaign, and often most third party material is just as unbalanced as anything WOTC produces. I like Relics & Rituals, for example, but the prestige classes don't work for me, either on a conceptual level or a balance level. They may be cool, but being a cool idea isn't good enough. The real problem are classes that could be cool, but fail...such as the Dread Pirate, which is just plain DUMB. But the LGJ's DharkaGuard makes up for it, IMHO.

There's nothing wrong with not liking WOTC's stuff...I'm the first to agree that there is better stuff being done by others. My problem is that for every good third party supplement, there are ten bad ones...and I don't have the time or wherewithall to sort them. WOTC's releasals are fairly consistent in quality, with minor problems, which are often resolved in errata. Rangerwickett, in specific, is often touted as having fantastic ideas that beat WOTC's consistently, and IMHO, they really don't. YMMV.

 

[Blackwind]

My group has been looking forward to MotW for quite some time, mainly because there's a certain dwarven ranger who gets grumpy when he has to wait months and months for all the new feats, items, spells, and PrCs that the other classes are getting. As the campaign's DM, I'll be glad when he shuts up. In another campaign, I play a barbarian/druid (named Drakk Blackwind), so I'm looking forward to the book too, mainly for the new feats related to rage and wildshape (nasty combo btw). As for the debate on the WotC classbooks in general, I'll throw in my 2 copper, which might be unpopular here.

S&F: Liked it in general. PrCs were cool, some for PCs, some for NPCs. Loved the exotic weapons. A few good feats. Actually, the combat examples were sort of useful. Problem with this book was all the errors. Lots of errata was necessary.

DoF: Doesn't get used much IMC. The priestly PrCs in the FRCS were more useful and less niche-oriented. Feats don't get used at all, the spells are neglected, and only a couple of the items have shown up in my game.

T&B: Sweetest of the bunch. I liked the stuff on arcane labs and libraries. Even some of the organizations were cool, and mostly I ignore the organizations in these books. Optional rules were cool. A lot of the PrCs were good, as were the spells and items. I wish the rest of the books were like this.

S&S: I play a halfling bard in RPGA so I was disappointed with the lack of bardic material. Nobody IMC is interested in the PrCs or many of the feats. Lackluster book in general, the trapmaking and guild stuff was generally inferior to FFG's Traps & Treachery.

Given all that, I still think the WotC books are way better than the vast majority of the material put out by 3rd party publishers. Most of what's out there is unusable, IMHO. That's fine though, I just don't buy it. What bothers me is when people disparage the WotC material and say that the third party material is 10 times more creative, and that WotC's designers lack creativity. Some of the only good 3rd party books are actually by WotC designers (case in point: Book of Eldritch Might), and, as I said, most of the 3rd party stuff is far worse.

 

[EOL]

Personally (and I am probably in the minority) I would have liked all the class books to be twice as long and hardback. That would have added only 50% to the price and I think the end product would have been a much better value.

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

I am actually not familiar with Ranger Wickett's ideas so can't say how great they are in comparison to WoTC's or anyone else's. I just find a lot of good ideas (either half-baked or fully cooked) on the ENB. I could compile them all into a 96 page print out and easily have a $20 value in new gaming material, all in a few weeks compared to a year or 6 months or however long it takes for WoTC to virtually do the same thing (but drawing from a far more limited pool of writers). That's really neither here nor there, but just something I thought of.

Monte's BoEM is a great value because of the new spells and magic items; I did not detect anything too ridiculously overpowered in the BoEM. The various "mark" spells, greater sleep, flaming corrosion, coldscream, etc., are all great. The feats are okay, but most will never be taken because of the high stat requirement. His PrC's are not anything I'm interested in; I agree they are too narrow in scope. $5 for BoEM is a great deal. $20 for T&B is not nearly as good a deal by comparison.

Relics & Rituals was a great book, though the PrCs were broken. I bought it only for the spells. The rest has seen no use at all. Still its a good value for $25 (hardcover) except for the cheap binding on the spine.

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

Personally (and I am probably in the minority) I would have liked all the class books to be twice as long and hardback. That would have added only 50% to the price and I think the end product would have been a much better value.

This would have been a great idea, except that WoTC had a terrible time finding enough material to fill a 96 page book as it is!A book twice the size would be full of garbage and would take twice as long to come out...

 

[omedon]

I am looking forward to this one more than any the other class book. I am hoping that the mistakes that were in the other books are gone, and that the content is on par or better than tome & blood. I am also looking forward to it because the 3 classes it covers represent the least used and understood of all the core classes. Hopefully we will find some info to help flesh them out.

I am being optimistic though. Hopefully I won't be dissapointed and this will be the first Class book that I buy.

 

[Holy Bovine]

I can't say that I agree Kaptin.

More pages would probably (read:very hopefully, maybe stupidly so ) have resulted in some of the ideas being fleshed out better.

Also maybe they could have done half the classes in one book and the other half in another.

That would have been really good (though we wouldn't necessarily have got them any faster)

 

[Umbran]

I'm shelling it out to get instant, ready to use game material that hopefully I won't have to fuss with or tweak.

Yeah. Instant gratification. Nice concept. Not so great a reality...

Now, think for a moment about this approach. If they produce a product you personally really love, in which every element is wonderful, useable right out of the box. It's as if it was written exclusively for your game...

How many other gamers would find it useful? How many could they sell?

We cannot expect these guys to be able to produce a book that is applicable without fuss or tweak in every single game on the planet. Gamers are way too particular in tehir opinions for that. Quite simply, you're bing unrealistic.

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

I don't think I'm being unrealistic in expecting them to provide me with something ready to go "out of the box." That's why I buy products. To make my life easier, not more complicated. I don't expect it to be tailor-made to my particular campaign, either. But I expect PrCs that are as applicable to PCs as NPCs, plus useful feats, skills, magic items and spells. That's what the books are supposed to represent and they fall short of the mark (T&B excepted). I shouldn't be expected to have to go in and mess around with the material I just paid good money for; that's what the people who wrote the book were paid to do (and failed at).

Again, I don't expect to find everything in the book useful or even immediately applicable to my campaign. I do expect a majority of it to be of use at some point, and some of it to be useful right away. I do not expect a bunch of poorly thought-out/narrowly focused and/or broken material to be in evidence. I expect some, since nobody's perfect, but not 50-75% of the book! That's not asking too much of the WoTC designers, is it?

 

[kenjib]

I agree with the Kaptain. Here are two opposing examples from Sword and Fist to illustrate:

Knight Protector of the Great Kingdom: A very generic concept and easily adaptable to a wide variety of settings. This, conceptually, is everything that the core prestige classes should have been. I can plop this prestige class down into many different campaigns and it still has a lot of flavor and direct relevance to the history of the setting, whatever setting it is.

Master of Chains: This PRC is based around a weapon which never existed in the real world and doesn't really make sense in most campaign settings. Furthermore, even in Greyhawk there is little reason for an organization to exist based on the fact that they all like spiked chains. Rather than being easily adaptable to the more common archetypes that are already present in many fantasy settings, introducing a PRC like this likely requires you to actually change your setting to make this class fit since nothing like this would have existed before the idea of this PRC came to your attention.

The first one is useful and flexible. The second one much less so.