What d20 Purchases to you Regret?

[WizarDru]

Manual of the Planes

Wow. Really? That'd be the first time I'd ever heard of anyone disliking the Manual of the Planes, which I generally hear referred to as (and concur) that it's one of the best or THE best book WotC's released other than the core three.

I don't know why Relics and Rituals is getting bashed so much. I am playing a wizard currently and R&R I & II are my main arcane splattbooks...

Emphasis on "I am playing" and not "I am running". A good chunk of the material in R&R is poorly done, mechanically. It had the virtue of being first, but R&R is not terribly well written, IMHO. I've never opened R&R II, so I couldn't say how that fares...but I don't see as many folks talking about that.

 

[Ao the Overkitty]

Well, the only "recent" book I truly regret buying is Rokugan.

If I look back many years, I'd have to say that the Star Trek :The Next Generation RPG and the Romulan setting for the same game werre complete wastes of money. Star Trek works well on the tv and movies screens, but doesn't translate well to pen and paper.

Books I could have saved my money on:
Word of Darkness: Mummy - While I love White Wolf books and they are great reads, I'll never get to play it. But, as I said, it's fun to read.
Farscape RPG - Another fun little read, I like this book. I really do. But, I'm the only Farscape fan in my circle of friends and don't feel I could run it.
City of the Spider Queen - An interesting mod, and one I've run a bit of (the group got through part 1), I just feel like it was somewhat wasted money.
Draconomicon - A truly neat book and I like it a lot, but I bought it just as i was getting burnt out of D&D and just a few days before I finally decided to give up DMing D&D.


Stuff that I may never get use out of (again), but am happy with:
Forgotten Realms books - was a good setting and I liked the books (had all of them up until Underdark came out). Course, now that I'm no longer DMing, they're just collecting dust on the shelf.
Star Wars d20 Revised - Someday I'll be able to run a campaign. Just have to find the players.
AEG's Evil - If nothing else, this book is full of good ideas for .... evil.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Purchases I regret:
Warcraft RPG
Gamma World d20 (brutally disappointing)
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, and supplements
Masters of Arms
Song and Silence
Masters of the Wild (the other three splats are fine by me)
Spycraft and Shadowforce Archer
Star Wars (both editions) and supplements

Keepers:
The 3.0 and 3.5 core books (though, I'd be glad to trade those 3.0 books in)
d20 Modern (best implementation of d20, bar none)
d20 Modern Menace Manual
Urban Arcana (much as I hate the setting, it's perfect for converting Modern to pseudo-medieval fantasy)
Modern Player's Companion
XCrawl
Dragonstar and supplements
Oriental Adventures
My Dungeon and Dragon subscriptions
Four Color to Fantasy (the PDF as far as I am concerned. I'd like to see a print version)
Mindscapes (I'm not using the psionic combat, but the class revisions are a big help)
edit: Savage Species (how did I miss this?)

I'm actually surprised at how much ended up on the first list-- I'm generally good at not buying things I won't use. A lot of the FR stuff can be blamed on playing with people who used to be hell-bent for leather FR fanatics-- now that they don't normally play in the FR, I'm staring at these books and wondering why they're not catching fire.

Gamma World is a bitter, bitter disappointment. It's thirty-five dollars and three hours of my life I will never get back-- compounded with the fact that older editions of Gamma World were my favorite RPG, and it's actually impossible to play the kind of Gamma World games I enjoyed with these new rules. I'm going to go back to my original plan of designing my own conversion, probably using an adaptation of the 4C2F rules for mutations.

Star Wars is, to me, like Dragonlance. It's an incredible setting to read about, and it has some awe-inspiring sagas that will make you want to play it... but then you realize that your characters are either stuck permanently in the shadows of the original heroes, are forced to play things exactly as the original heroes did, or are simply completely and utterly irrelevant to the game world as a whole. Not very appealing.

Out of my regretted purchases list, I think Spycraft is the best-designed game, but I just prefer d20 Modern.

 

[Dirigible]

I would have not bought:

Forgotten Realms CS
Epic Level handboook.
Manual of the Planes
Psionics Handbook

 

[Ghostwind]

Regrets:
Psionics Handbook (because I never use it)
Deities and Demigods
Savage Species
Tome of Horrors (I have never used it once)

Best of the lot as far as what I use most:
Monsternomicon
Book of Vile Darkness
Villain Design Handbook
Mercenaries
Bastion Press everything (but that's a given with me)...

 

[MerricB]

I regret:

The Maze series by RJK.
Cry Havoc by Skip Williams

The latter was incredibly disappointing.

Cheers!

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Manual of the Planes
Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil
Star Wars OCR
Heroes Guide

 

[Belen]

I would not have bought:

The Quintessential books
Psionic Handbook
Deities and Demigods
Savage Species
Races of Faerun
Relics and Rituals
Creature Catalogue 1/2
Song and Silence
DragonLords
Kalamar setting book

I am glad I bought:

Freeport
Book of the Righteous
Midnight
Legends and Lairs (everything except Mythic Races)
Necromancer modules

 

[Creamsteak]

I was just going over this all last night...

I definitely don't regret BoVD and BoED... or Complete Warrior and 3.5, and I only regret my 3.0 books because they are retired now.

Sorta regret Deities and Demigods and Manual of the Planes (don't use either really)

Mostly regret the Epic Level Handbook (now that I know how saves and BAB work in epic levels, I couldn't care less about this piece. The feats are lame, the creatures do have some winners, mostly boring... and the setting included sucks.

Definitely regret Oriental Adventures, but that was free... Defenders of the Faith was a nice book to read, but never used it... it was free too, so no concerns.

Call of Cthulhu is fun, but I really shouldn't have the book since I'm not a GM for that game.

Worst purchase ever: The Diablo II books...

My Scarred Lands books made for a single fun campaign, but now they sit on a shelf unless I really feel like running a session with that party (the players are all off at different colleges now).

I vaguely regret my gaming frontiers magazines, but 4 for $20 wasn't a bad price, and they do contain a gamut of story ideas to steal and alter.

 

[Katerek]

I have to say that I am surprised by many of the responses to this, there are alot of you that are expressing some of the same opinions that I have voiced over the years.

Thanks for sounding off on this folks!