What d20 Purchases to you Regret?

[Buttercup]

I wish I hadn't spent money on the three Fast Forward Entertainment books I bought. What was I thinking? Other purchases I regret:

All the Scarred Lands stuff (I must have a dozen books I will never use.)
Living Greyhawk Gazetteer
Oathbound
Savage Species
Deities & Demigods
Faiths & Pantheons
Lords of Darkness

The things I'm glad I bought:

All the Freeport stuff
Monsternomicon
Book of the Righteous
Kalamar Atlas
Toolbox
MMS:WE
Most of the Legends & Lairs hardbacks
Bluffside
All the Necromancer Modules
Hamlet of Thumble
Nyambe
My subscription to Dungeon

Somewhere in between are the several hundred other products that I haven't yet used, but are still worth their cost to me, such as all the Rokugan stuff, the Dragonstar stuff and the various sourcebooks, monster books, modules and the like.

 

[NewJeffCT]

The original 3 Freeport modules. I bought them based on all the positive hype that I heard. They weren't bad, but nothing special.

Other than that, I have not bought a lot of non official 3.0 or 3.5 stuff that I have disliked. I have stuck mainly with WotC and Kenzer and think all the WotC books are at least decent and all the Kenzer-Kalamar books are good.

 

[PJ Mason]

I'm not at home right now, so this is probably an incomplete list.

All my books from Mongoose
-Constructs (because it sits on the shelf totally unused- and i use a lot of construct/clockwork stuff!),
-Battle Magic (More cool ideas, but none of the mechanics or classes quite fit the bill for me)
-Highthrone (this one least of all, it had some cool ideas)
-Stonebridge (worst of the bunch by far and it was my "Ok, you guys get one more chance outta me!" moment. not good)

FFG
-Midnight - High quality writing and game mechanics, miserable quality book. Yes i KNOW they will replace it. FFG sent me a new book, which promptly fell apart. twice is enough for me, thanks. There other books didn't wow me either. Although their Horizon line shows real promise. Redline was great and their new Characters-as-computer programs (ala Matrix) looks very interesting.

WOTC
-I didn't get all the old splatbooks (whew), but i did get S&F, the magic one, and the divine one. I thought the divine one was the most interesting, but i would definitely not get them if "i knew now" what i know.
-Star Wars - if i had known the book was going to be so buggy and that they would come out with a much better one like, maybe a less than a year later?, then i wouldn't have bought the first one and i wouldn't still be as pissed as i still am about the whole deal. I didn't buy the new one (F that! You guys complain about 3.5 coming after what, three years? sheesh) and after seeing all the new slew of tiny but much overpriced supplements for the line, i think it was for the best!

Others
-Artificer Handbook. If you don't like their altenate item creation system, this book is a total loss. I didn't care for it, so it was wasted money for me.
-Diamond Throne setting book & Siege on Ebonring- After the wonderful Arcana Unearthed, who would have thought that these would be such a huge bore?
-Scarred Lands books (I had about 7 of them). They were all pretty good reading, but the game mechanics were all questionable or just cracked (imho. Thats reason #1 why i didn't like the books and got rid of most of them). Also, by the time all the books came out, i had already created my own versions of the cities and societies in the setting for my campaigns (do you Iron Kingdom guys hear this!!!), so the books really only became mechanic sourcebooks for me - so see reason #1. I still got the Relics & Rituals (a total game mechanics crapshoot, but a friend of my is obsessed with the setting so i keep it around. The spell histories are pretty good and fun to read) and Divine & Defeated was a really well written book and i still like to read it ocassionally. I also liked their divine powers rule set. Great book, but only one in a pack.

Anyway, thats all i can think about for the moment. This is a fairly small portion of my D20 collection, as i can usually find something worth while in anything. I've found that while good mechanics don't mean i'll automatically buy a book, bad mechanics will mean that i will avoid or lambast one.

 

[PJ Mason]

Le ' oops!!!

Double post! Does this mean i am talking out of both sides of my keyboard?

I just remembered the Master of Arms was a big waste o'money.

I regret Spycraft and the other supplements i got for it. The game ended up not being very usuable for the whole group, which was as big a surprise as the Diamond Throne debacle was for me!

 

[Garnfellow]

• Deities and Demigods. Compare and contrast with the Book of the Righteous. I've gotten no use out of D&DG. I find it completely uninspiring. And why couldn't they have better integrated the mechanics with the ELH?
• Dragonlords of Melnibone. Sometimes being one of the first to market is /really/ not a good thing. This was a terrible port of the BRP engine to d20.
• Monsters of Faerun. Yeah, it's got pretty colors. No, it's not worth the pricetag. Not even close.

I'm really not sure about Cry Havoc. I'm gonna give it an honest try, but I am already leaning toward regret on this book -- especially after all the raves I've read on Fields on Blood.

 

[Trickstergod]

Being broke as I often am, I'm not quite the prolific product purchaser as some people here are. Still, I seem to have accumulated a decent chunk of stuff over the years.

Of my collection, there's really only two books I have that I really could do without, and that would be Champions of Darkness (for Ravenloft), and the Faithful and the Forsaken (Scarred Lands). Both are just abysmal, both mechanically and with writing quality. I knew Champions of Darkness would be bad before I got it, but it had some information on the settings Carnival which I thought I might get some use out of.

I didn't. The information on Carnival was minimal stuff that I could have rattled off without needing any book on hand to know.

As for the Faithful and the Forsaken, half of it is about the forsaken elves, who play strongly into why I'm into the Scarred Lands. The books treatment of them is complete schlock.

While I do have both Relics and Rituals (one of which I received as an author's copy, anyway, so it's not like I put any money into in the first place), as well as the Creature Collection, and fully acknowledge that, from a mechanical viewpoint, they're positively awful at times, the actual ideas, writing, concepts, etc, are all quite good in my opinion. They catch my interest and give me ideas, even if I feel I can't just plunk down their spells or monsters into a campaign without a thorough look over. So I don't really regret having any of them, even if they fail nearly utterly in doing what they should do (which is to offer up usable spells and monsters).

Now, there are a few books I have that, if given the choice, I might not buy and instead opt for something of better quality, but I still get use out of and don't mind owning in the first place.

 

[Staffan]

Creature Collection I. I don't think I've ever used a critter from that book.

If I had paid for it, I would have included Tome of Horrors as well. A book that updates lots of AD&D monsters from older editions is a good thing. But, there's a reason many of the monsters in it were NOT updated from the start. I would rather have seen the effort spent on updating good monsters, like many of those from the 2e campaign setting MC appendixes rather than Fiend Folio rejects.

 

[diaglo]

i regret d20.

 

[Kichwas]

d20 Modern: The rules in this are just absurd for unarmed combat, and gun combat. Too much of what should be manuevers is put in feats.

Ravenloft: Bought it because the art on the PC races looked nice, haven't gotten any use out of it.

Player's Guide to Wizards, Bards, and Sorcerers: Some nice stuff, but too setting specific, even though I do get some use out of it.

Scarred Lands staple bound mini-gazateer: Made me realize the setting was not for me.

DnD Gazateer: Living Greyhawk Gazateer made this near useless.

Forgotten Realms stuff: I have a couple of these books, despite my distaste for the setting. Now that I no longer game with any FR-fanatics I wonder what the books are doing on my shelf.

FFG's Mythic Races and Seafarers Handbook. Badly balanced races with poor research in both.

Mongoose's Gladiators: I keep forgetting I even have this...

AEG's Rokugan: Why did I buy this?

Sovereign Stone: The Taan. Once the setting fell apart for me, this book became a dust collector.

Atlas Game's Touched by the Gods: Interesting, but largely useless to me.

There are a few others here and there as well.

 

[Mr. Patient]

For me, the biggest regret would be AEG's Toolbox. It's been generally well-reviewed, and got a special mention from Monte Cook, but I found it to be very, very badly edited (some of the worst stat blocks I've ever seen) and padded with a lot of utterly useless encounter tables.