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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kitsune" data-source="post: 1629994" data-attributes="member: 4877">After reading through the torrent of glowing reviews, I trundled on out to the nearest B&N with an eye towards picking it up.  I grabbed the copy, sat down in a comfy chair, read for an hour, then put it back.  It had utterly failed to spark any excitement.Thing is, I don't understand why.  On the surface, it had a lot going for it.  Who wouldn't want to play a golem?  How long have people been wanting artificers?  It had the ingredients that it should've taken to spark any Final Fantasy fan's evil little heart, but I didn't even feel a twitter.  Mostly I just felt a vague sense of disappointment, that the solid-gold ingredients lacked a proper execution.  The Shifters could shift, and the Warforged were golem-y, and everything was pretty much by the numbers, but nothing ever leapt out at me in a 'Whoa, cool!' moment.Take the Warforged.  Golem people, check.  Metal and tough and stuff, check.  And... that's about it.  Instant improvement for them, right off the top of my head, make 'em battery powered.  Have a store of 'charge points' or what have you, burning one point a day, recharging by absorbing beneficial spells at one point per spell level.  Have a list of short-term special abilities that can be activated by using charge points.  Have a level of a prestige class (or a feat high up a feat ladder) give them SR, with spells that fail the SR being converted into charge points.  Bam, instant new dimension for a character, a host of interesting toys for players to mess around with, life is fun.Psionics.  Boy did they miss that boat.  Hearing that Eberron was going to fully support psionics raised my interest considerably, until I read the extent of that support that can be summed up as, 'If you have the Psionics book, you can use it.'  The Realms have more complete support than that in the Player's Guide, at least they actually went to the trouble of making up psychic organizations and a prestige class.  Nary a new class nor power nor feat that I could find even whispered a word about psionics, making me suspect that the one-paragraph mention of it was stuffed in post-production when they decided they wanted to sell the Expanded Psionics Handbook.  Dark Sun is a poster child of integrating psionics into a campaign setting, a feat that was sadly not even seriously attempted with Eberron.  The freaky two-souled people have a lovely ring to them, but no interesting rule mechanics to back up their description.I think, after some introspection, that my disenchantment with Eberron came from just that, a lack of rule mechanic meat under the lovely shiny ideas.  Keith Baker strikes me as the opposite of Monte Cook; Monte's a master at making enthralling rules but pretty lackluster at detailing a campaign world, while Keith made up a great world but fell flat at coming up with fun mechanics to make it run.  If only science had some way of combining them...</blockquote>

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