Worst Purchase Ever?

[Mercurius]

Any number of 4E books. Player's Strategy Guide comes to mind, but to be honest I didn't actually buy it.

I agree with some of the 3E books - Hero Buiders Guidebook was so disappointing.

Any number of the 2E "Complete" books.

But the one I think disappointed me the most was the 1E "City System" box set. I just never used it. At all.

 

[MNblockhead]

Yes! Not sure they deserve to be on this list as they are not bad quality, but I just find them more work to use than they are worth. I even bought the new "reincarnated" tilesets and am reminded of this and wondering why I didn't learn my lesson the first time.

Their only saving grace is that I have young boys who enjoy playing with them. But that's for old fashioned play-pretend (the kind without dice). When my 7 and 11 year olds DM, they just use the old battlemap and wet erase markers--as do I.

When I want to get fancy, I print out a battlemap on a large-format printer.

My experience with tilesets is why I never bought Dwarven Forge stuff. Makes the mouth water--but, seems like a lot of work and I would (1) end up rail-roadingn players because damn if I'm going to let them skip a location I spent all night putting together and (2) everything would look the same as I reused them.

 

[MNblockhead]

Worst 5e purchase: The first official DM Screen. Not terribly useful other than as a simple privacy tool.

Worst RPG purchase: Something in the 3e era. I'd be hard pressed to pick just one. In terms of official product, maybe the Hero Builders Guidebook?

It was disappointing. The most recent one, the one with the red dragon flying while holding someone in a front claw, was the first licensend DM screen that was any good. The Curse of Strahd screen was disappointing, but it was at least helpful to have the overland map and key readily available.

 

[MNblockhead]

Man, this thread is really making me nostalgic for Walden Books.

 

[JonnyP71]

X3 isn't an awful module, but it was the weakest of the first in the X series and weaker than X10, which was the only X series I bought when it was a new release.

Oh but it is... X3 is truly dire.

Not as bad as Quagmire though...

So you bought the big 3, and just 4 more books in addition? Including the WSG and WG7 - that's really really unfortunate, all those ancient gems, brushed aside for - ahem - turd

 

[guachi]

I haven't actually tried to run X3. It's a good read in the sense that it gave you some background and a setting location, quite useful before the Gazetteers came out. The X series modules I actually owned were X1-5 and X10. I FINALLY got around to running X2 and that was deliriously fun. It's a great change of pace though it does require a lot of heavy lifting on the DM's part because of the paucity of information for each encounter.

The first D&D product I bought was the Red Box in 1984. I had checked out the PHB and DMG from my grade school library (Let that sink in. My grade school library had D&D books).

I probably got around to buying AD&D books in 1985 and switched to buying mostly D&D products, largely Gazetteers, in 1987. So my time for purchasing new 1e books that WEREN'T the big three basically lasted from 1986-88. And there really wasn't a lot of AD&D product that was any good from 1986-88.

Two Lankhmar modules, which I wasn't interested in.
A bunch of Dragonlance modules - and all my friends were more interested in the books.
Queen of the Spiders - Looked great as it was a compilation of modules I'd never seen in print. Didn't end up buying it.
H1-4 - Two required Battlesystem and my friend had that so he bought one or two of those.
Some I series modules I don't ever remember seeing on the shelf.
A few N series modules of which I bought N4 Treasure Hunt because it was a zero level module and I'd never seen that before.
Oriental Adventures modules - but my friend owned the book and I didn't so I didn't buy any.
WG7 - Castle Greyhawk - bought that

For main books there were:
Oriental Adventures, Unearthed Arcana, Dungeoneers Survival Guide, Wilderness Survival Guide. Each of the first three were bought by a different friend so I ended up getting the WSG. We weren't so rich that we could each buy all the books so we split them up.
Among General supplements was the Dungeon Master's Design Kit, which I bought because it was generic advice not specific to AD&D, which I wasn't really interested in as I was buying D&D stuff, and because it was written in part by Aaron Allston, whose Gazetteers I liked.

D&D was cranking out lots of modules to build up the X through I line (even if quality was variable) and then had the Gazetteers starting in 1987. The first D&D Gazetteer came out about the time the Forgotten Realms boxed set came out (the one with the Easley cover of the lone warrior on a horse). Since I couldn't buy *both* Forgotten Realms *and* D&D Gazetteers I stuck with D&D and I'm glad I did. Forgotten Realms of the FR sourcebooks looked REALLY interesting but it's become too bloated for me to get into anymore.

TL;DR: 1986-1988 was really a dead time for AD&D before 2e came out (aside from FR sourcebooks). Almost anything I bought would have been a candidate for worst.

 

[HawaiiSteveO]

1. WG7, Castle Greyhawk. Words, to this day, cannot express my rage at this product. TSR put out a lot of really terrible product among all the good stuff- but this may have been the worst, because it was truly spiteful toward the customers. To explain why, you had to understand the Castle Greyhawk (and its dungeons) were like the holy grail for 80s gaming. It was the ur-dungeon. Hinted at in modules and Dragon magazine articles, it was what every gamer wanted to see.

This was the one with Poppinfarsh the dough golem? Ahh fond memories he actually became party mascot for quite some time and even now I smile when I think of it

I'd have to say XGtE on DDB - I don't think it's great or necessary book (from DM perspective anyway), but would prefer to have hardcover book.

 

[cmad1977]

Pretty much my entire library of 4e stuff.

 

[JonnyP71]

I haven't actually tried to run X3. It's a good read in the sense that it gave you some background and a setting location, quite useful before the Gazetteers came out. The X series modules I actually owned were X1-5 and X10. I FINALLY got around to running X2 and that was deliriously fun. It's a great change of pace though it does require a lot of heavy lifting on the DM's part because of the paucity of information for each encounter.

X2 is one of the most entertaining adventures ever published, it's magnificent - though yes, you are right it needs some investment from the DM. I didn't mind that though, as I enjoyed reading and running it - and when I asked my players to vote on their 'favourite adventure thus far' last year, 3 out of 4 said X2 by a mile. That made me feel my effort was worth it.

And yes, you got into 1E at a bad time by the looks of things. I started with AD&D a year earlier, and over here in the UK, the games shops tended to stock the old modules as well as the new releases, with no real fanfare about the new ones - in fact the old ones tended to be £1-£2 cheaper - so I bought those. And I'm glad I did. My purchases between 1984-89 included X4/X5 for Expert D&D, most of the UK series, the U series, S4, WG4, I1, I6, N1, G1-3, D1-3 - so I wasn't in the slightest bit disappointed

 

[77IM]

I was super excited in the lead-up to 3e's Savage Species. I really love the concept of monstrous PCs (in fact, I am currently running a campaign called MonsterTown that is about this very thing). And 3e seemed like it had rich enough game mechanics to support monstrous PCs.

Nope! It had mechanics rich enough to support unplayable crap, like "level equipment" and "monster hit dice" and "your character is going to suck and die because we assume that the statistics in the Monster Manual are gospel truth and that the only way to build a monster PC is to make it exactly like a monster out of the MM." Well, , I didn't need a fancy book to tell me that! A one-page table of Monster --> ECL would have done the job, and crushed my dreams much more efficiently.

Not only were the mechanics poorly designed, the book was riddled with errors, typos, and rules problems. So it was also low quality.

It wasn't all bad; some of the art pieces were good, and they introduced the idea of "monster classes," which kind of worked, but only for certain monsters.

But overall, I was bitterly disappointed. It was the first 3E book where I had an actual negative reaction -- not just "eh, not for me" but more "WTF? WT gosh-darned rootin-tootin F is this?" It was also one of the last books released before the 3.5 switch, which also left a bad taste in my mouth. I guess you could say Savage Species was the beginning of the end of 3E for me.