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

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

Best; The 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms Source book, which i argue is the gold standard for setting source books.

Worst; Well, Forest Oracle is comedy bad, redeeming it somewhat. So I will second the votes for Book of Vile Darkness.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Best: 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. Enjoying to read and extremely motivating to start a campign in the world.

Worst: 3e Hero Builders Guid Book. Utterly useless, layout-wise a big disappointment after the core books.

Notabene: I don't sell my books...

 

[amerigoV]

Best - a tie for a few

• I agree third the 3e FR book. I was (and still am not) a FR fanboy, but I wanted to get it to see what the designers did to interweave the new rules into a setting. That part itself was meh, but the layout of the book was extremely good. I loved the 3 or 4 plot hooks at the end of each area/country write-up.
• 3e PHB - it got be me back into D&D
• 1e DMG - still a lot of nice nuggets in there

Worst - a tie for a few

• 4e PHB - it was not the rules (the system itself is pretty good the times I played it), it was the layout and writing. It unfortunately was in competition with the Savage Worlds core book for what direction I was going to go. SW just screams "play me" - the 4e PHB is just a paperweight as it just is not a compelling book
• FR Faiths and Pantheons - it cut/paste from the FRCS, maybe added a paragraph to each entry, then added a huge stat block. I thought I was getting a book on the FR religions, not an Epic NPC/monster manual. A counterpart that almost made the above list was Eberron's version of that book - exactly what I was looking for.
• There is a number of late 3e books that I picked up that I really have never read in detail (Complete Scoundrel, Dragon Magic, etc)

 

[Meatboy]

Best is probably the 3e PHB it was the first dnd product I got that I really grokked and it hot me and my pals playing for years.

worst was the sword and fist supplement. That was overpriced and just generally an aweful book.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

worst was the sword and fist supplement. That was overpriced and just generally an aweful book.

Yeah, Sword and Fist is a very strong runner up to this coveted title!

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Best: Strictly speaking I have to go with Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting for 3E but my heart has a special place for Faiths & Avatars which not only launched a huge number of campaigns but brought me back to D&D.

Worst: Underdark Adventure Guide by the grossly overrated Goodman Games and authored by Mike Mearls. For me this book defines the d20 glut and explains why I am not a Mike-Mearls-as-a-designer-fan. When you see 10 or more prestige classes each with their own unique saving throw progression for each of their saving throw categories, you are left wondering why some of the time inventing this little piece of pointless randomness wasn't spent actually making even one decent prestige class.

 

[gweinel]

As best book(s) I would consider the Planescape box set(s). It was the RPG the marked me and our gaming group for the years.
Very close i would put the Birthright box set(s) for the humongous inspiration for my home brew world.
As a honorary mention I could not miss the Oriental book of 3e. A second PH and a game setting together.

Througout the years i am playing i stumbled and many times i bought many really bad books. From these that I bought the first that crosses my mind is the 4e Manual of the Planes. Being a Planescape fan, I found it really unispiring.

 

[howandwhy99]

Best is the 1e DMG I think. That and the players really help define the game for me. (Still haven't been able to afford an original game, but that should be changing very soon).

Worst - I own - is Penumbra's Splintered Peace, which isn't all that bad, but its political rules, the reason why I bought it, are not at all something I would use know. And the adventure isn't exactly exciting if you don't use the abstracted, sort of competitive politicking and dialogue systems. (Actually, that one I'm trying to give away, so maybe not much longer for it either)

 

[evilbob]

worst: the 3.5 Expidition to Castle Ravenloft Adventure.

Ha!

Best: Probably the 3.5 Expedition to Castle Ravenloft campaign (adventure). I've used this book a million times for many different games and I love the style and the detail they put into some of the encounters. Probably some of the best D&D games I've run. To be fair, the layout is a bit frustrating and the typos, editing mistakes, and unfinished ending of the book make it a little infuriating. It's also a straight-up murder machine against the PCs and you really have to be careful of a TPK at any moment (which can be good or bad).

(A close second for best is 4.0's Dungeon Delve. Not particularly well written or well designed, but a fun book that makes 4.0 1-shots soooo easy. The 3.5 Player's Guide is also an extremely well-made, well-written, and well-used book.)

Worst is probably the original 4.0 Player's Handbook, not because I disliked the system, but because 1) when it was printed it was FULL of so many typos and editing errors that I couldn't believe anyone would have signed their name to it, and 2) within months (weeks? hours?) the book was worthless because they changed all the rules. If it had been a PDF that got updated, that would have been one thing, but as a physical book that meant that it was crap. Eventually the game had so many changes the book was completely useless as reference material.


Edit: Actually, I thought of another "worst" book, although I never bought it personally (my GM did, though, and we played it): the first pre-made adventure released for 4.0, written by Bruce Cordell. (Can't remember the title.) That was one of the worst-written, dreary slog-fests I've ever experienced. Talk about showing off some of the worst aspects of 4.0! Our GM ended up scrapping a huge chunk of stuff just because it went on FOREVER with no real purpose. It also had a near-certain TPK written into one of the earlier encounters. Bleh. Terrible design.

 

[Manabarbs]

I'm mostly thinking of player crunch books. Other books just don't leave as strong of an impression on me.

Best is probably Expanded Psionics Handbook (3.5). It's a hard call, but I feel like that book contains the most total overall awesome of any book I own with the least dubiousity. (And the one big smudge of dubiousity, the Soulknife, is still at least cool conceptually.)

Runner-ups are 4e PHB2, 4e Dark Sun Campaign Setting, 3.5 Tome of Battle, and PF Advanced Player's Guide. (This isn't meant as a slight to pre-3.5 editions, I just don't remember any of the books well enough to call them the best.) I also think that the 3.5 environmental books - Sandstorm, Frostburn and Stormwrack - are underrated, but this isn't the underrated books thread.

Worst is also tough, but I think the worst (of first-party releases; I'm not going to drag out some d20-bloat-era book of garbage monsters or something) is the 3rd Edition Epic Level Handbook. It starts with a pretty lousy premise (let's take the very worst part of the game, the high levels where the game doesn't work at all and nobody ever plays, and then add on TOP of that), and then follows up with an uninspiring execution that addresses none of the problems that high-level play has mechanically. It also drops the ball on satisfactorily addressing the big conceptual issue for high-level play, which is what the characters might even reasonably be doing at that level. It's not entirely ELH's fault, on the grounds that it's a high degree-of-difficulty book to do well, but that doesn't stop it from being super useless.

Runners up: 4e Heroes of Shadow (The wheels came off on 4e's generally solid design here, and its layout is annoying and bad); BoVD and BoED.