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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seankreynolds" data-source="post: 1910599" data-attributes="member: 3029">One, as has already been discussed many times, you got the PH for $20 as a serious discount. The book was priced at $20 to bring old players into the new game without forcing them to eat more than the cost of a $20 bill. After WELL OVER A YEAR of selling the core books at $20, they set the prices to the more realistic $30. If you bought the core book in 2000 or 2001, it's really like you were paying $30 for it and getting an instant rebate of $10.Why am I not surprised that there are people out there who prefer kits and specialty priests (i.e., ways to make your character much more powerful within the rules compared to a core character) to the more balanced method of (well-designed) prestige classes? "I hate orcs, I'll never talk to them because I hate them so much, and I am strongly inclined to attack them on sight" is NEVER an appropriate balancing factor to "I get +4 to hit and damage against orcs because I hate them so much" (which was the case in at least one orc-hater kit ... I mean, come on, if you're really good at killing orcs, being forced to fight orcs more often isn't BAD, it's something you like, and thus not a penalty). You don't balance rules with flavor, and vice versa, and that's exactly what so many of those kits did.Because clearly so many FR campaigns had the Magister as a key figure, ready to swoop in and save the lowly PCs when they were overwhelmed by all the bad guys. Do you really need 32 pages (or 10 pages, or even just 5 pages) on the goals, duties, and spells of a unique, super-powerful spellcaster that the author doesn't think should be a PC? (Ed suggests that a PC who becomes a Magister should become an NPC in the DM's hands, or if you insist on running a Magister PC it's probably best to handle as a one-PC adventure rather than a member of a party, or only be Magister briefly before leaving office.)To put it another way, rather than focusing on what this really neat NPC can do, why not use those pages to give you more options for what your PCs can do? You know, the PCs, who are on-screen all the time, the people actually doing the heroic deeds you're running in your game, rather than some enigmatic NPC who if you're lucky only steals the spotlight at most once in any particular adventure?That's the difference between 2e and 3E, and a specific change we decided on for 3E FR: Focus on the PCs and what the PCs can do, don't dwell so much on the uber-characters and characters/events of the novels. Put the action in the hands of the PCs, write material so it's useful to the PCs (even if it's in an adversarial sort of way, like spells or items in the hands of enemies or enemy orgs plotting against the PCs). There's no sense wasting pages on stuff the PCs will never find out, and wasting pages wastes the buyer's money.Edit: Added some clarification.</blockquote>

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