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<blockquote data-quote="Manabarbs" data-source="post: 6217121" data-attributes="member: 6717251">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.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Manabarbs, post: 6217121, member: 6717251"] 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. [/QUOTE]

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