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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6010310" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I found the format to be vastly inferior to the original PHB1 format. The material was padded out with considerable amounts of added flavor text, but it was rather bland and uninformative, almost filler, and 4e books typically ALREADY were pretty heavy on generic flavor text. The classes were mostly decent designs, but they added little to the game. The Mage added pretty much nothing, the e-martial classes create as many problems as they solve, and frankly only a couple of the other classes were even moderately innovative (the Hexblade was about the best, and it is fairly cool). All the classes are playable and I'm sure they DO appeal to someone, but producing this material took most of WotC's D&amp;D output for a whole year, with little to show for it. They could have easily produced a much better adventure path instead for instance (considering they did do a pretty decent job on the adventures in the Essentials stuff). The RC was a pretty handy book, but they could have done that on its own. MV is great too, but again it didn't require putting out all the other stuff. Overall I think Essentials was just a big mistake. If 5e learns anything from that it is again to STICK TO YOUR FREAKING GUNS and just do it right the first time and have the guts to back it up. Rehashing existing material won't buy you much and the time is better spent innovating.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 6010310, member: 82106"] Yeah, I found the format to be vastly inferior to the original PHB1 format. The material was padded out with considerable amounts of added flavor text, but it was rather bland and uninformative, almost filler, and 4e books typically ALREADY were pretty heavy on generic flavor text. The classes were mostly decent designs, but they added little to the game. The Mage added pretty much nothing, the e-martial classes create as many problems as they solve, and frankly only a couple of the other classes were even moderately innovative (the Hexblade was about the best, and it is fairly cool). All the classes are playable and I'm sure they DO appeal to someone, but producing this material took most of WotC's D&D output for a whole year, with little to show for it. They could have easily produced a much better adventure path instead for instance (considering they did do a pretty decent job on the adventures in the Essentials stuff). The RC was a pretty handy book, but they could have done that on its own. MV is great too, but again it didn't require putting out all the other stuff. Overall I think Essentials was just a big mistake. If 5e learns anything from that it is again to STICK TO YOUR FREAKING GUNS and just do it right the first time and have the guts to back it up. Rehashing existing material won't buy you much and the time is better spent innovating. [/QUOTE]

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