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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gargoyle" data-source="post: 997223" data-attributes="member: 529">I can agree or at least understand many of his points.  But there are a couple of things on his list of Bad Things I can't help but disagree with:What's wrong with taking good material from earlier products and making it core material?  Even if I own all that stuff, which I do, it's nice to have the best of those products consolidated and made more official.  I'd be extremely upset if core-worthy material from the MotP and the Epic Level Handbook didn't make it into the new books.  I suppose this goes back to "is this a new edition or a revision".  If you see this as a revision only, then I might agree, but as he said 3.5 is clearly labeled as a hybrid of the two.   Given that definition of the product, even if you disagree with the wisdom of making it that way, they clearly did the right thing by including good material from earlier non-core products.  I'm glad the "breakfast" spells are a thing of the past in my campaign.  I feel the fixed bonus on the buff spells makes adjusting your ability scores easier, since it's the same every time, and makes the spells more useful more often.  Players simply have to think and plan a bit more to get the use out of them, instead of handing the DM a list of spells they intend to cast each day at dawn.  But I'll stop beating this horse right now and just agree to disagree. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Stuff I agreed with:Anyway, I found myself agreeing with most of his article  (Although it read like a bittersweet rant/rave, rather than an objective and informative review).  His best point is about the new books being "halfway" between a revision and a new edition.  The biggest problem with 3.5 is that it's in-between a revision and a new edition.  If you look at it as a revision, there were too many changes.  If you look at it as a new edition, there were not enough changes, and some changes come off as band-aids to see you through till 4th edition.  I think I agree that the product's definition was a strategic mistake, and that they should have just started working on 4th edition for a release at a later date, or just release a revision with no actual rule changes.  His second best point is about mastery of the game.  The revision has indeed slowed us down a bit so that we are second guessing some things.  That's probably the worst part of the new books.  The silver lining for my group, and one that Monte with his mastery of the rules wouldn't notice, is that my group knows the rules better than we ever did.  I don't know how many times I've read some obscure "new" little rule in 3.5, and flipping open my 3.0 books discovered that nothing had changed.  I just didn't know the rule that well to begin with. Good work Monte, it was a good read.</blockquote>

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