What's the best and worst D&D book you own from any edition?

[innerdude]

What system are you running currently?

From 2010 to 2011, I ran Pathfinder 1e. It was actually a lot of fun, but by the time the characters reached 8th level, prepping for sessions was exhausting. From 2012 until this year, I mostly ran Savage Worlds.

In that time I ran campaigns in a fantasy homebrew setting, a LotR hack, and the Weird Wars Rome setting from Pinnacle Entertainment. Two other GMs ran campaigns in Shaintar (a high-fantasy setting specifically for Savage Worlds) and War of the Dead / zombie apocalypse.

*Edit -- another group member tried GM-ing a GURPS superhero campaign for maybe 4 months in 2019, loosely based in Brandon Sanderson's Reckoners universe, but we were lucky if the game rose to the level of mediocre most sessions. Having tried GURPS in 3 different settings now, I can definitively say I dislike the system immensely.

We also dabbled for 4 sessions in Dungeon World in 2018, which was going . . . okay, mostly, other than it was hard shifting into the right GM mindset, and one of the players (who's no longer in the group) bounced hard off the system.

After 8+ years of almost exclusively playing Savage Worlds, everyone in the group was ready to branch out, including me.

Last year just before Covid hit I started an Edge of the Empire campaign that played just 2 sessions, but was going well. I was actually pretty disappointed we didn't get to keep that one going.

Last week we played our first remote session of Ironsworn (a PbtA / FitD derivative), and it went very well. The plan right now is to alternate between Ironsworn and a Tiny D6 / Tiny Frontiers (space opera) campaign being GM'd by the group member who ran the Shaintar campaign.

We'll see what shakes out this year. I'm pretty sure I'm going to pick up Swords of the Serpentine at some point, and my kids looooove The Dragon Prince TV series, so Tales of Xadia is probably in the mix at some point too.

 

[Bluenose]

I think that's fair. For a lot of people OSR = very stripped down rules. But that isn't always the case see Traveler's charts and system/planet creation method and terminology and Rolemaster etc.

And to some extent the majority of 1970s RPGs don't really qualify as simple (too much influence from 1970s wargames among the writers, I suspect), though equating Old Game with Old School has always seemed unreasonable to me as someone who played in the 1970s. And if the inclusion of a lot of random charts and tables disallow a game from being OSR, then I'm pretty sure the 1E DMG cuts AD&D out of the list. Which is patent nonsense considering how OSR material uses that as one of the main sources (along with Original and Basic D&D).

 

[Blue Orange]

And to some extent the majority of 1970s RPGs don't really qualify as simple (too much influence from 1970s wargames among the writers, I suspect), though equating Old Game with Old School has always seemed unreasonable to me as someone who played in the 1970s. And if the inclusion of a lot of random charts and tables disallow a game from being OSR, then I'm pretty sure the 1E DMG cuts AD&D out of the list. Which is patent nonsense considering how OSR material uses that as one of the main sources (along with Original and Basic D&D).

You do raise a very good point, though--there are a lot more B/X clones than AD&D clones. I suspect one of the attractions of OSR is simplicity of rules.

 

[aramis erak]

So that's my best and worst D&D book that I own. What's yours?

Best, as in one I've used most hours of play: D&D 5E PHB
Best, as in one I used longest: Cyclopedia,
Best, as in one with the best neat ideas: Tie: Voyage of the Princess Ark, Spelljammer
Best visually? (no longer in my posession) D&D 4E PHB.

Worst:
AD&D 1E DMG. Ugly art. Poorly worded. Unclear writing. Convoluted rules. Poorly organized. Good ideas buried under bad ones.

I Never got Book of Vile Darkness, but from what I've seen, it would be the content worst, while AD&D 1E DMG would be the everything else worst.

Edit: I'd forgotten I'd previously responded... The alternate bests differ, slightly.

 

[Alzrius]

The sheer multiplicity of D&D products put out across almost fifty years and several editions makes this a very hard question to answer. I'll tentatively nominate the following:

Best: Return to the Tomb of Horrors (AD&D 2E). This is an epic campaign, starting out with a simple mission to root out some giants, which leads you to infiltrating a college of necromancers, only to then brave the Tomb of Horrors itself, and that's just the beginning! It really contributed a lot to the legend of the original S1 Tomb of Horrors, and has become a classic in its own right ever since.

Worst: WG7 Castle Greyhawk (AD&D 1E). I honestly can't get past how mean-spirited this product is, being one big put-down of Gary Gygax's legendary castle/dungeon.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[S'mon]

But I think the worst is probably "Scourge of the Howling Horde". It's an incredibly dull, railroady adventure, pretty much every stat-block is wrong (including several monsters drawn unchanged from the "Monster Manual"). But worst of all, it was clearly typeset assuming full colour, and then printed in greyscale, with the net result that several of the sidebars are nigh-unreadable.

The copy of Scourge I got had been partially eaten by animals - this was probably an improvement.

Favourite book is the 1e DMG, a timeless classic. I like the 5e PHB & MM a lot, despite some issues (terribad PHB index, hard to find section in PHB, no encounter tables or NPC race mods in MM) - presumably though in some distant future I'll be running a new version of D&D and won't need them anymore. But I'll still be referring to the 1e DMG until I die/am too sick/too senile to play D&D.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

The copy of Scourge I got had been partially eaten by animals - this was probably an improvement.

Favourite book is the 1e DMG, a timeless classic. I like the 5e PHB & MM a lot, despite some issues (terribad PHB index, hard to find section in PHB, no encounter tables or NPC race mods in MM) - presumably though in some distant future I'll be running a new version of D&D and won't need them anymore. But I'll still be referring to the 1e DMG until I die/am too sick/too senile to play D&D.

It annoys me that WotC still can’t get indexing right. Indexes should not refer you to another page in the index. Just give me the page numbers directly. It’s not that hard.

 

[Maxperson]

For the best I'm going to go with 2e's Encyclopedia Magica. Awesome book set.

For the worst it's a toss up between 1e's Dungeoneers Survival Guide and 3e's The Magic of Incarnum.

 

[Ath-kethin]

It annoys me that WotC still can’t get indexing right. Indexes should not refer you to another page in the index. Just give me the page numbers directly. It’s not that hard.

I'm almost certain the the PHB's horrible index exists entirely for the THAC0 reference. Which was not worth it in any way.

 

[Ath-kethin]

I responded to this thread back in its first life, and it's interesting to me how little my answers have changed in the time since.

Out of the hundreds of D&D and TTRPG books and boxes I've purchased over the years, the ones I've USED the most have been the 2e Al-Qadim sourcebox Secrets of the Lamp and the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. If I have to pick one as the Best, it's the Rules Cyclopedia, though it's far from perfect; it's riddled with typos and errors. But for someone who knows their way around a rulebook and a chart, the issues are easy fixes.

Now, as mentioned previously, I've purchased hundreds of books, and I keep buying them to this day. I buy tons of stuff I know I'll never use, tons of stuff I hope I'll be able to use someday, and tons of stuff I find myself using in unexpected ways. C'est la vie.

But there are only two books I've ever actually regretted purchasing (well, three really, but the third is regretting giving money to the cretin who wrote it, and I wish I'd known more about that person before the purchase. The book itself is fine).

Anyway, the two books that were to me an absolute waste of money and resources were Magic of Incarnum and the 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide II. Those two books were so devoid of value to me I felt they represented actual contempt for the audience.

Others like them, and that's fine. I don't hate. But holy moly, I did not find one scrap of value in either book.