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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kaptain_Kantrip" data-source="post: 85249" data-attributes="member: 546">Psion, where were you when S&F was released? The "vast majority" of reactions to the product were extremely negative and there was more confusion surrounding its rules than any other 3e release to date. And I still don't see many people praising it as a shining example of what a class book should be. As to the poll results, I take the greater number of people using S&F as indicative of several things, more than as an indication that S&F is a "must-have" resource:1) Greater distribution and product awareness led to increased sales. Arms & Amor and TQF presumably have much smaller print runs, less advertising to generate product awareness, and weaker overall distribution than WoTC's S&F. S&F is in Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton's, but TQF and A&A are only in game stores so far as I know.2) S&F is "official" (optional) rules that has the Dungeons & Dragons logo stamped right on the cover, so people tend to infer it's going to be of reasonable quality (and been properly playtested, which surely wasn't the case!).3) Everybody ran out and bought S&F anyway, or before they heard it was riddled with errors and/or of questionably utility, because everybody was hungry for new 3e material at the time (befdore the d20 market glut) and the book was hyped through the roof. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />4) S&F has been out far longer than TQF, A&A or WAR.I'm not saying S&F is so bad or broken as to be useless. It's not. Some of the PrCs are intriguing, some of the new weapons and magic items are cool, and certainly the maps and stronghold construction times/costs are useful and well done. My main complaint with S&F is so many world-specific and niche classes and so much obviously "broken" rules culminating in a disgraceful 6 (count 'em, six!) pages of errata (most of which should have been obvious to the author and editor from the start, IMO, regardless of whether the R&D Review Panel was there).That said, do I still use S&F? Sure. I paid my $20 and I'll milk every last drop I can out of it, but it does see much less use in my games than the other WoTC class books and third party d20 material. I found Mongoose's TQF, AEG's WAR and Bastion's Arms & Armor to all be of much more utility in nearly every detail. In short, I felt cheated by my purchase of S&F. I have no such reservations for the money I happily spent on TQF, War and A&A.Anyway, Psion, there's no need to be so antagonistic towards me. I don't pretend to speak for everybody and I'm sorry if I gave that impression.</blockquote>

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