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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Damon Griffin" data-source="post: 744990" data-attributes="member: 3568">Although it is very hard to keep up with information that is scattered across several books, my problem is not with the WotC books, it's with the third-party publishers.If I'm playing a wizard or sorcerer, I may want the PHB, Tome & Blood, and perhaps the FRCS and/or Magic of Faerun.  I don't need the other books you have listed.  If I'm playing a Ranger I just swap out Masters of the Wild for Tome & Blood.  I don't need Song & Silence, Defenders of the Faith or Sword & Fist for either character.  It's not hard for me to keep up with two to four books.My problem is when in addition to those I've mentioned, I also want to have ready access to the spells/feats/magic items in Relics & Rituals, Relics & Rituals II, Spells & Spellcraft, the Books of Eldritch Might, Kingdoms of Kalamar Player's Guide, the Netbook of Feats, etc.Your PHB2 proposal won't do anything to address the much larger problem of keeping track of character options in third-party publications, and if it doesn't address that, it's no good to me at all.  (Mind you, I can't suggest a solution to the third-party tracking option, either.)There is the additional problem of immediate obsolecense, a problem which will usually plague any book that tries to be a one-stop collection of "all of the" (feats, spells, whatever).  The reason for this is obvious:  they're still being produced.  Even if you limit the collection to just those things actually appearing in WotC sources (which is by far the most practical approach, and what you were suggesting in the first place), new products are coming out all the time.  Virtually every issue of The Dragon is going to have some new feat, spell or prestige class.  Regional sourcebooks will have such things as well; if your PHB2 were compiled and hit the shelves next month, it could include material from the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, Magic of Faerun and The Silver Marches...but what about The Unapproachable East? or the next book after that?When dealing with an in-print, still-growing RPG, you cannot have a "complete" collection of options, you can only have something that is complete as of a certain date.  So when do you get PHB3?  Or do you just put out PHB2 and then do annual "compendium" style updates to it?There's no getting around it: there are always going to be several books you're going to want to look at.  There is no practical way of condensing them into one book, unless you intentionally limit the scope of those options to only a small subset of the books already in print...and that doesn't make the book useful, it only allows it to be printed.How many 3e players would want to be told "You can use any option from this list of WotC products, but no other source is allowed?"  No doubt gaming groups willing to live with such a restriction would love to have your PHB2, because they really would be able to find everything they needed in one place.  But groups that are going to continue to make liberal use of third-party books are going to gain very little by purchasing a PHB2 that makes several of their existing WotC books redundant.</blockquote>

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