Mechanics vs. Flavor text

[boredgremlin]

I dont need any more crunch. Crunch is a waste of pages in my game and i wont buy any book thats mainly crunch. I mean really, how many spells do you need so that your PC's wizards never have to research one, or how many magic items and monsters do you need so you never need to create one? Crunch is a total waste of my dollars. I can make my own spells, classes and monsters for free. I refuse to pay for something we as a group can create ourselves.

I and my players can make our own classes, prestige classes. and feats. We actually enjoy the creative aspect of gaming and get annoyed when WOTC tries to take our creative control away from our game with some new suplement. At this point WOTC is just looking for a payoff from lazy gamers and DM's.

If i look at a book and it has a lot of fluff, tons of history, culture and goals for the people involved in it, well then thats creative writing and it makes my job as DM easier. If its full of crap, then i dont need it. If you take half to the WOTC books out allready then every usefull class, spells, skill, feat, and magic item has been covered.

WOTC is famous for the slightly altered rip off from 2nd ed too. Well guess what WOTC? I am capable of taking a +2 this from 2ed and making it a +2 that in 3ed without paying you 40$. I bought that book allready and i am not paying you again for the privelege of reprinting old work.

In my opinion WOTC hasnt put out a single thing worth buying in over a year. I have eyeballed them all, flipped through some pages in gaming stores and decided that WOTC has worked too long and hard to take my money for ideas that TSR put out a decade ago. WOTC is lazy, and sloppy. Running D&D is more complex then reprinting ever more expensive MAGIC cards for 10 year olds every few months. And so they have failed serius gamers. They have attempted to rob us by reprinting old crap like we are 8 year olds who can cry to our parents for whatever new thing is on the market, whether its worth having or not.

The D20 system is so simple that if you cant create your own additions you shouldnt be playing, much less DMing. Crunch is easy. Creating a new balanced class or feat can be done in 30 minutes. Making something fit into a culture or creating an entire class or culture from scratch is creative writing. It takes days and involves way more thought and imagination.

 

[Pants]

I dont need any more crunch. Crunch is a waste of pages in my game and i wont buy any book thats mainly crunch. I mean really, how many spells do you need so that your PC's wizards never have to research one, or how many magic items and monsters do you need so you never need to create one? Crunch is a total waste of my dollars. I can make my own spells, classes and monsters for free. I refuse to pay for something we as a group can create ourselves.

On this same thought process...
I dont need any more fluff. Fluff is a waste of pages in my game and i wont buy any book thats mainly fluff. I mean really, how many descriptions and backgrounds do you need so that your PC's never have to make their one, or how many organizations and plots do you need so you never need to create one? Fluff is a total waste of my dollars. I can make my own descriptions, backgrounds, and plotsfor free. I refuse to pay for something we as a group can create ourselves.

The D20 system is so simple that if you cant create your own additions you shouldnt be playing, much less DMing. Crunch is easy. Creating a new balanced class or feat can be done in 30 minutes. Making something fit into a culture or creating an entire class or culture from scratch is creative writing. It takes days and involves way more thought and imagination.

Obviously, given the amount of arguments that rise up over whether something is 'balanced' or not, maybe making rules isn't soo easy...

Then again, I prefer a balance of fluff and crunch. Too much fluff (unless its a campaign setting book) and there's a chance that I won't use anything in the book and thus is wasted money. Too much crunch causes a sort of inspirational void. A nice balance is best.

 

[boredgremlin]

There are only as many arguments about balance as there are because some players cant handle losing or being outshined by someone else in a situation. So any time thier character doesnt look uber in a situation and someone elses does they come on a message board and whine about it, like the other class in unbalanced.

 

[Pants]

There are only as many arguments about balance as there are because some players cant handle losing or being outshined by someone else in a situation. So any time thier character doesnt look uber in a situation and someone elses does they come on a message board and whine about it, like the other class in unbalanced.

That's a false generalization if I've ever seen one, especially considering that many of these arguments/discussions are based upon what people read not necessarily what they've seen happen in game.

See the big Mystic Theurge discussion for a good example. There's still not a general consensus over whether it's balanced or not.

 

[boredgremlin]

People who argue about class balance without ever actually seeing it in action are just wasting time because they are bored.

Until you see a class in action over several sessions you have no business arguing about whether its balanced or not.

 

[Pants]

People who argue about class balance without ever actually seeing it in action are just wasting time because they are bored.

Until you see a class in action over several sessions you have no business arguing about whether its balanced or not.

While experience is always the best test, sometimes you don't even need that.

Something can LOOK unbalanced and still be unbalanced. I'm not going to playtest everything out there personally.

 

[Hussar]

In my opinion WOTC hasnt put out a single thing worth buying in over a year. I have eyeballed them all, flipped through some pages in gaming stores and decided that WOTC has worked too long and hard to take my money for ideas that TSR put out a decade ago. WOTC is lazy, and sloppy. Running D&D is more complex then reprinting ever more expensive MAGIC cards for 10 year olds every few months. And so they have failed serius gamers. They have attempted to rob us by reprinting old crap like we are 8 year olds who can cry to our parents for whatever new thing is on the market, whether its worth having or not.

Really, so, all that insanely broken 2e crap that filled my shelves was just my mistake then. Interesting.

I also missed when T$R published Tome of Magic with Pact Binders and True Namers.

See, I can write fairly well. Well enough for a gaming session anyway. But, what I can't do is come up with an entirely new class, complete with 20 levels of spell selection and expect it to be anywhere near as balanced as what I see coming out of Dragon and WOTC.

Never mind that I simply don't have the time to do this, I'm not really sure if I have the skill. I KNOW I don't have the energy.

Me, I'm the exact opposite. I enjoy creating a campaign setting, filling it with my own ideas and history based on what I like. I don't enjoy tinkering with rules. I don't enjoy having to spend hours statting out some new creature and trying to make it balanced.

Good crunch is not easy to write. There is a vast volume of 3e crap books from d20 publishers that prove that.

 

[boredgremlin]

Actually TSR had a tome of magic. One for wizards and one for clerics. And an entire 4 volume set of collected magic items from their supplements. I have the old one and you know whats funny? Pretty much everything in there has been rehashed in some supplement book by WOTC and passed off as new material.

Nearly all the creatures have been rehashed from 2e as well. Its not that hard to update a beastie, especially the way WOTC does it. All you have to do is maybe recalculate strength and flip over the THACO so that it added instead of subtracted.
Skills are simple based on the critters enviroment, culture and intelligence.
Feats might take some work, but its not like WOTC does much on the either. I mean come on, almost everything in the book has awarenes. Which has got to be one of the biggest feat wasters there is.

WOTC hardly creates anything new. Just some classes and prestige classes. Many of which are either under or overpowered, or just pointless.

 

[beepeearr]

Fluff is good, it what helps propel our imaginations. However, I have to agree that I would prefer to see fluff presented as possible examples, as opposed to being tied directly to Crunch (with the possible exception of prestige classes). The base mechanics of Incarnum are actually pretty good, the fluff leaves me wanting though, particularly most of the totemist's powers? The warlock is another example where some feel fluff is tied to closely to fluff, even the Sorcerer suffers from it with the whole blood of dragons things. When fluff is used more as an example instead of the inspiration for mechanics, they become much easier to seperate.

For instance I really like the Binder and Shadowcaster classes, but the fluff doesn't fit very well with my campaign. Will I use these classes, sure, because I like the baseline mechanics involved with both, but I will have to go in and remove or rework bits here and there to fit thematically with my campaign (particularly the binder, seeing as I do not care for the concept of vestiges, and would prefer more of an outsider (both, good, bad, and neutral) bend to the class.

When mechanics are tied directly to fluff, if the DM or player likes the fluff, then no problems. But if either one doesn't like the fluff, it then becomes more work for the fluff to be removed, and then the question is asked is it even worth it to include it.

Fluff is good, but preferably as examples only (at least in most cases, and in my opinion).

 

[Hussar]

Actually TSR had a tome of magic. One for wizards and one for clerics. And an entire 4 volume set of collected magic items from their supplements. I have the old one and you know whats funny? Pretty much everything in there has been rehashed in some supplement book by WOTC and passed off as new material.

Funny. I have those same books. I look through the original Tome of Magic and I see Wild Mages (pretty much unusable), Elementalist wizards (horribly overpowered) and a bunch of wizard and cleric spells.

I look at the new Tome of Magic, I see Binders (completely original), Shadowcasters (completely original) and Truenamers (have appeared in other forms in d20 supplements, but, mostly original).

How are this book a rehash in anything other than name?

The Encyclopedia Magica books were rehashes in 2e. All they were were reprints of previous material with no original material. It didn't even update the material, simply reprinted it regardless of the rule set it was written in. The Spell Compendium, which would be the closest analogy, reprinted spells, completely updated to 3.5. Again, I'm not quite seeing where you are getting this, other than "WOTC is teh evil".

BTW, I think BOZ might have some words for you about how simple it is to update older monsters.