D&D 3E/3.5 What do 3ed books tell us about 4thed?

[TerraDave]

I have been doing a series of polls on "the Best and Worst of 3rd edition" (vote if you haven't!) and they lead to following question: do ENWorlder prefrences have any implication for 4th ed? Can they help explain any choices made? Should they? And more generally, what 3rd edition books influanced 4th edition, and what should. We know that many had early 4th ed content, but that is not exactly the same thing.

(Just setting aside all those nagging objections about the poll, or ENWorlders...we may not be "average", but we buy a lot of books, and, through or involvement, influance others...)

From this one, the Best of WotC, the top 15 products so far--all of which did well on earlier polls--are (the # is % saying that they thought it was a good product):

Player's Handbook II 60.64%
Unearthed Arcana 57.45%
Draconomicon 48.94%
Spell Compendium 48.40%
Magic Item Compendium 47.87%
Complete Arcane 44.68%
Eberron Campaign Setting 43.62%
Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations 43.09%
Complete Adventurer 42.55%
Libris Mortis: The Book of Undead 42.02%
Complete Warrior 41.49%
Expanded Psionics Handbook 38.30%
Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss 38.30%
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 36.17%
Dungeon Master’s Guide II 35.11%

There are the obvious conclusions: The PHBII, DMGII, Eberon and Forgotten Realms are all here, and we will see all those in 4th ed. Psionics is here, and it has been promised. Complete Arcane is here, and we've got the Warlock and more importantly "at will" magic has had a huge impact. The Complete Warrior and PHB II (still) are here, and more options for fighters has also been a big focus of 4th edition. Magic Item Compendium is here, and it was also supposed to be a big influance. We will see a 4thed Compendium at the end of this year, or early next year.

What about the less obvious? Themed monster books. These are really popular, at least with poll answerers. For 4th ed, they blew up monsters and started over. We know that of course there are dragons, demons, devils, undead and aberations, they have gotten a lot of attention in the previews. But how much of the flavour, or crunch from those books will be retained?

And there is Unearthed Arcana. I guess it is a sign that people were open to doing things differently. It did have some kinda sorta 4th ed stuff, like recharge magic and I think some reserve or other easier to heal rules. But will 4th ed really be that open to alt rules.

But enough from me. What books did you think influanced 4th ed and what should?

 

[TerraDave]

Oh, and did I mention that Book of Nine Swords didn't make the top 30, or probably even 40?

 

[Hussar]

I'm surprised that Bo9S didn't do better, but, I think that it was a book that people either loved or hated, so, it got kinda a mixed reaction.

Seeing Unearthed Arcana up here is no surprise given the location of your polling honestly. EnWorld thrives on tinkers.

One book I know for sure influenced the game that didn't make your poll is the Tome of Magic. Heck, the lost fourth source of the Warlock's mojo was Vestige.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Bo9S and Tome of Magic are both new rules systems books that a lot of folks didn't buy, and probably don't feel qualified to judge - for example, I didn't buy either one, as I didn't want to add new rules systems into my games. My decision had nothing at all to do with the quality of the books.

I'm not sure how much you can draw from the late 3E books. Before 3E came out I was very concerned about the direction of the game because of my extreme dislike of the Player's Options books (I liked some bits, but if 3E had been like that as a whole, I would have stuck with 2nd edition).

 

[Vayden]

It's interesting that Bo9S didn't rate very well, especially since it and Saga Edition are the 2 big "3.75"-ish books. I'm curious about something though - most of the flamewars about Bo9S that I saw were because people didn't like the wuxia flavor of it. I can't judge why people disliked it because my entire group was in love with it (me included). Do people think the book is disliked because of the flavor, the mechanics, or both?

 

[Shroomy]

I think that the ECS had a major influence on 4e setting design and assumptions. For example:

*Less focus on NPCs, more focus on PCs, especially at the higher levels.
*Having monsters without their traditional alignments works just fine.
*Action Points integrated with the core mechanics.
*People will accept planar monsters with origins and planar assignments outside of the traditional Great Wheel schema.

I think it would be kind of interesting to look further at D&D books from 2004-2005 that pre-date the actual launch of the 4e project to see the germination of some of the 4e ideas.

 

[Cadfan]

I agree with Shroomy. I think that Eberron has had more influence on 4e than most other parts of 3e. Eberron's trademark was, at its core, a pulp setting. I think that influence is a bigger factor than any particular experimental mechanic in a book like Tome of Magic or Tome of Battle, because that influence informed how the designers chose amongst experimental mechanics in other books.

There are other books which undoubtedly had some effect, though they aren't on the list. The plethora of dragon-character themed books probably proved that there is a core constituency for dragon characters that wants something more than just a half-dragon template. Of course, this isn't necessarily going to show up on a poll like this, because the question isn't whether the majority of D&D players wanted dragon characters- its whether a suitably sizable minority existed to justify their inclusion in the PHB. I'm guessing the answer was a yes.

Speculation: We will someday see a Combat Compendium as a companion to the 4e Spell Compendium (if such a product exists). The Spell Compendium proves what most of us already knew- people like having lots of spells. They like searching through them, picking and choosing and crafting their character. This might have informed the drive to create a similar aspect to play as a fighting character, which might in turn justify creating books based on it. This is of course pure speculation.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

One thing that was clear to me was that power creep sells. 4E could hold the line on this, but I fear that they will repeat the 2.5, 3E, and 3.5 "Splatbook Power Creep --> System Collapse --> Reboot" cycle. Maybe I will be wrong.

I thought Lords of Madness was the best-written, best-thought-out, and most-flavorful supplement for 3.5. It had its own slight power creep (the overpowered Darkstalker feat), but really just that one thing.

Be careful about seeing only what you like about Complete Arcane as the reason for that book's success. The warlock was a neat innovation, but many other things were somewhat broken (Fatespinner, Arcane Mastery, Sudden Metamagic) or outright disasters. The orb spells (and a couple of other conjuration-as-damage spells) were a horrible innovation for two reasons:
1) The choice of conjuration was an attempt to rules-lawyer around SR. "Oh, it isn't MAGICAL sonic energy, it's NORMAL sonic energy conjured, held together, and propelled by magical force." Please.
2) It was a response to "failure isn't fun." By design, SR is good enough to beat about half of a PC's spells if the PC has no Spell Penetration feats -- except in the case of a golem where it's a poorly-implemented "magic immunity." Not every foe has SR, not even at high levels (e.g. classed humanoids or giants), and even when they do it's not a sure thing.

 

[Doug McCrae]

It shows that ENWorld isn't representative of the D&D player base. It's very DM heavy and those DMs are more likely to be world builders and/or tinkerers than most. That's why 'depth' monster books and Unearthed Arcana are popular.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Oh, and did I mention that Book of Nine Swords didn't make the top 30, or probably even 40?

Hax.