Steel_Wind said:
As for some of you making the droll little "Gee...I can do it myself comments"... *Ahem* Climb down off your high horses please.
I'll chime in here to agree. I don't spend money on a pre-prepared adventure so that I can do all the work myself. I want it done for me, because I don't always have time to work out statblocks, figure out tactics, research possible spell lists, etc. I'm a busy guy, but I do like to play some D&D every once in a while. If doing it myself means I get to play half as often, then I'd rather pay some money to increase the amount of gaming I can do.
Not all of us are high school students with tons of free time on our hands. Lots of us have families, jobs, and other responsibilities for which gaming is a restful diversion. If half the time allocated to gaming is spent preparing, that's the sort of thing that drives people like us to take up more "pick-up and go" hobbies like MMORPGs.
Yes, I've been gaming for 30 years too. Yes I can do this myself with a fair bit of work and have done so often in the past. And unlike most of the posters here, yes, I actually do make a decent income from producing D&D encounters and adventures (albeit on the silicon side of the ledger).
See, here's a really good example. Steel_Wind here is a bonafide game designer, and he's got the same time and effort issues that many of the rest of us have. "Get off your high horses" is right. If you naysayers were really serious, you'd eschew Dungeon and Dragon, because you could just write all that material yourselves. For that matter, you wouldn't buy any splatbooks, because you could come up with that stuff yourselves too. So if you're going to drag out the tired rebuttal that we should just do all this modification ourselves, I think you should be making the same demands of yourselves first, or appear as hypocrites.
Furthermore, even if you do play with core-only plus reams of homebrew modifications, that should be an indication only that you should consider yourselves lucky to have all that time on your hands. When I was a teenager I had a lot of time too. I wrote lots of material, fleshed out a campaign setting, and could practically quote from the rulebooks. Then I became an adult, got a life, and had to learn to squeeze in fun stuff where I could. I'd love to have all that leisure time again, but sometimes people just have responsibilities they need to deal with. Should they be excluded from gaming just because they don't have the time to do everything themselves? Of course, the inclusion of these people is part of the reason why Dungeon exists in the first place.
In any event - the editor has spoken with a reasoned response for which I cannot fault him, especially given the stick-in-the-mud responses in this thread which seem aghast at the idea.
I don't see any major difficulties with assigning someone to the task of constructing spell lists for important spellcasters drawn from the Spell Compendium for inclusion in a sidebar. It'll increase the value of that book, increase the value of the module for people with that book, and will take only a small amount of space. I'll voice support for this idea, since it seems like a pretty nice compromise.
