what book are Gestalt characters from?

[silentspace]

Is it a good book? Do you recommend getting it?

 

[Thanee]

UA. No (IMHO).

Bye
Thanee

 

[Will]

UA = Unearthed Arcana (just to be clear).

I recommend it, myself.

 

[reiella]

It depends alot on your needs.

It adds some neat variants, but really at a glance, the only way you can tell if you'll like it, is to skim over it.

There are alot of different variants that try to present different gameplay styles.

 

[Falling Icicle]

I was actually, to my great surprise, impressed with Unearthed Arcana. I thought it was just going to be full of optional dice rolling and technical stuff like that. But it actually has alot of really good ideas, most of which involve alternate races, variant classes, special abilities, etc.

And item familiars are sooooo cool!

 

[Chupacabra]

Gestalt characters are a great idea for the right kind of party (only a few members), and the section in Unearthed Arcana that presents them is pretty well thought out. Explaining, among other things, how to balance the CR of encounters when dealing with a party of gestalts, etc.

As for the rest of the book, its pretty darn cool. My players are pretty conservative so don't think that I would add much of the new ideas into my own campaigns, but its cool nonetheless. It was a better book than I was expecting.

 

[Piratecat]

UA was tremendously useful for me. I would recommend it.

 

[hong]

UA was tremendously useful for me. I would recommend it.

Seconded. UA is really good for skimming things from. You're probably never going to use all of it, but it'll be a rare DM who doesn't get anything from it.

 

[Hardhead]

UA is generally good. Gestalt characters are blatantly overpowerd though. If you're running a small group (two people or so) and so can't fill up all "slots" like Healer, Spellslinger, Warrior, ect, then it could be good, but otherwise it throws CRs off so far that it will cause a DM tons of extra work.

Anyway, UA does have lots of other neat ideas in it though. I'm definitly going to use the Totem Barbarians and the variant specialist wizards. Maybe the Cloistered Cleric too. I agree with the others about skimming it over. Go to a store, flip through it, see if you like the variants therein, buy it if you do.

 

[Li Shenron]

I second the recommendation for Unearthed Arcana.

The character variants cover races, classes, class features and magic. They are all very good except the races (which are everything but original), but on the other hand the bloodlines in that chapter are very interesting.

There are 2 variants on characters "as a whole", that is they are supposed to be applied to every character and substitute the PHB class set: gestalt characters and generic classes.
Gestalts can be at best a way to try interesting multiclassing a'la AD&D 2ed, and at worst can be a tool for teen players who used to complain that "spellcasters suck because they are too weak", "warriors suck because they can't cast spells" and so on...
Generic classes are useful if you want a game with characters who are more feature-based rather than really class-based (they could have gone further and put a variant with a single class).

Then there are a lot of rule options about many different things: skills, equipment, combat, defense and so on. I am not very fond of these variants, since I like the core rules a lot and I think they are still the best option. But in general I hear that the majority of messageboarders cannot live without variants of house rules so you may want to check out options from this book.