The Best & Worst of 3rd Edition: Ultimate 3E: Unearthed Arcana, Eberron, Pathfinder

[Hellcow]

Long story short: I love the Eberron Campaign Setting, but right now I value good adventure paths more than good settings.

Makes sense to me. As I just said, I like the fact that Eberron leaves room for DMs to make the world their own... but that's a drawback if you don't have the time to do that. If what you need are good, solid, well-developed adventures and you need them now, Paizo provides that. I'm disappointed that I didn't have time to write an adventure in the Savage Tide, but things were a little crazy back then.

I realize you don't need my permission to like Pathfinder - I'm just enjoying the conversation, and what you said makes a lot of sense. At this stage, all of the products are great, and I'll be happy to see any of them win... so hearing the stories behind the numbers is great.

 

[Dragonhelm]

I wanted to touch upon a few more points here...

-Warforged/Changeling/Shifter. "If I wanted to play a robot/doppleganger/werewolf I would".

I like the new Eberron races overall. I'm not quite as thrilled with the Changeling, but the Warforged and Shifter are cool. The Warforged are what 3e is all about - modularity. One race can be interpreted in many ways. The Shifter also have that 3e feel, and allow people to play their own version of Wolverine (and other feral heroes). Out of all the Races of... books, Races of Eberron was my favorite.

-Trains. "So since there's trains, can I have a car"

Trains are a little weird. It's kind of hard getting used to the technology.

-That there is no Sigil. "How are we supposed to get to Greyhawk and the Realms than?"

As much of a Spelljammer fan as I am, I have to say that not every world has to connect. If the DM wants them to connect, he'll find a way.

But after running through the first part of RotRL most of the old group is now back. Most of them feel that Pathfinder has a "classic", for lack of better term, feel to it.

Yet it is also fresh. When I play a Pathfinder game, it has a different feel than a Dungeon Crawl Classic.

P.S. I have added somethings I like from Eberron into my Pathfinder games though. (ex., Soon my PC's may find themselves up against a small group Warfoged. Created long ago by those that inhabited Runeforge)

One of the marks of a successful setting, IMO, is when fans mine the setting for ideas to use in their own setting. Both Pathfinder and Eberron have offered this for me.

I like active gods. I grew up on Greek and Norse mythology. But FR has that. So with Eberron, I wanted religion to fill the role it does in our modern world - where faith is paramount and it's up to us flawed mortals to interpret the gods' wishes, making a level of schism, heresy, corruption, or simply misguided attempts to do good that you wouldn't expect to see in a world where the god could just pop down and say "UR doin it wrong".

What I like about Eberron's pantheon is that it's different. I see worlds filled with gods left and right. The Realms is so god-heavy that it borders on the ridiculous. I never did get too enthused about Greyhawk's deities. My personal favorite is Dragonlance's pantheon. Still, when I play a new world, I want something new and different deity-wise. Eberron has that.


You know, one of the reasons I like Eberron is the psionics. I'm sure I could use psionics in Pathfinder, but there's no active support for psionics. Eberron has that support. In Eberron, I can have a psionic character without the world being post-apocalyptic (i.e. Dark Sun) or without psionics being an add-on. While one-in-a-million characters can be fun, I like settings where psionics is an active part of it as well.

So I like both Eberron and Pathfinder, and would love to play in both. When I want a game with the pulp fantasy feel and/or psionics, I'll go with Eberron. When I want a game with singing goblins, chromatic kobolds, and some creative adventure paths, I'll go with Pathfinder.

 

[Goobermunch]

Eberron wins, hands down.

--G

 

[WizarDru]

- so things like WizarDru's observation that the RoE was required to get a strong sense of the new races is exactly the sort of thing I want to know.

Just to follow up on that idea: this came directly from my players. The core book made the new races only mildly interesting, other than the warforged, who seemed to get the lion's share of interesting fluff. After RoE came out, our next game had a shifter, changeling and kalashtar in it. RoE had made these races far more interesting...not mechanically, but story-wise.

Another Eberron strong point? The cosmology. I liked the limited scope of other planes and how they interacted with the setting. All abberations coming from the plane of madness, for example, or Sharn having air-magic-aspected zones. These were fun AND flavorful AND had some nice rewards mechanically....which to me describes Eberron as a whole.

 

[Klaus]

I'll add that it took Races of Eberron to make me like the kalashtar (who wrote that chapter, I wonder? ).

Some later Eberron books introduced stuff that were simply quintessential to so many of the setting's archetypes that once they were published you realized how much you missed them. Examples include the Kalashtar write-up from RoE, the Revenant Blade from PGtoE, some of the bits on the Houses from Dragonmarked, the Bone Knight, Dark Lantern, etc.

 

[RealAlHazred]

It's not even a contest. Eberron is my choice.

What it boils down to is this: Rise of the Runelords is a decent adventure arc, and it hangs together with it's background very well, but it's just an arc.

Unearthed Arcana was useful in breaking many people of their D&D dogmatism. But it's essentially just a bunch of ideas from different sources, which are meant to be "pick and choose."

The Eberron Campaign Setting is, for me, one of the strongest campaign books to come out in a very long time. The book is chock full of adventure hooks (every freakin' paragraph!) yet things are purposely left vague to allow for different interpretations of the same events, or people, or ideas. An effort was made to be inclusive, but not in a hodge-podge sort of way -- things fit together very well, and if it can include everything from D&D, it's because it's rich and detailed.

But really, I don't think there are any wrong answers for this poll. Just opinions.

 

[danbuter1]

Of those listed, Eberron is easily the winner.

 

[howandwhy99]

It's a setting, and adventure, and rules to remind you the game belongs to you.

That's actually a tough choice.

 

[Davelozzi]

Unearthed Arcana was a cool book, and I'd be supportive of a similar sort of tool set book to come out when the new edition has been around a few years, however overall it has seen only very limited use in my games and has not been particularly inspiring.

The choice between Pathfinder and Eberron was a hard one for me, as I really like both products, and both were fresh takes on D&D, with Pathfinder breathing new life into a more classic feeling D&D, and Eberron taking D&D to a new, yet completely logical place where it hadn't quite been before.

In the end, I chose Eberron. Many of the reasons have been spelled out by others in this thread already, but basically I felt like the ECS really accomplished the goals is set out...to provide a fun and exciting new D&D world that was over-the-top and action packed, yet still believable and internally consistent, with flexibility for multiple campaign styles. Not all campaign styles, mind you, but a setting need not be all things; it is great at hitting the pulp/noir options it highlighted as well as a few others.

That said, I have really enjoyed reading Pathfinder, and hope to be able to run it the not too distant future. Had I actually had the chance to play it already, it might have got the edge, but its too new for that. I have however had several fun bouts with Eberron (no full fledged campaigns, but we played a short story arc that was a blast).

 

[TerraDave]

Hmm, Pathfinder has kept its lead in overall votes, but in terms of "registered voters", it is just about tied with Eberron.

I am hoping that it won't come to a "hand count". And its is a tight race in any case.