WotC_Shoe: A tiny, tiny hint on new weapons post-PHB

[Desdichado]

I don't know if you mean that as sarcasm, but yeah, the ever growing list of splatbooks was one of my problems with later 3rd edition. Alot of dross with the pearls in that list.

And I don't know if you meant that as sarcasm, but your dross might well be my pearls and vice versa. It's no secret that they took a relatively broad scattershot approach.

From the very beginning, the motto of 3e was "tools, not rules" and I don't think anyone would claim that one tool does all jobs equally well. That broad approach meant that not everything was any good from everyone's perspective, but many more people were much more likely to find at least something useful in a given splatbook.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And I don't know if you meant that as sarcasm, but your dross might well be my pearls and vice versa. It's no secret that they took a relatively broad scattershot approach.

From the very beginning, the motto of 3e was "tools, not rules" and I don't think anyone would claim that one tool does all jobs equally well. That broad approach meant that not everything was any good from everyone's perspective, but many more people were much more likely to find at least something useful in a given splatbook.

To be honest, this whole "Let's put in a lot of stuff, only a tiny amount of which will be useful to any given person!" is what got me to stop buying 3E from from pre-3.5E until a year and a half ago. I'd just had enough of books which had literally 90% useless content, and which didn't cost any less for it.

If the same thing happens with 4E, I have no doubt that I'll stop buying books until they start releasing ones with much higher proportions of usable content (like Bo9S, which was maybe 40-50% usable). Of course, junk PrCs were a huge space-filler, and hopefully those will be gone (instead of simply replaced with junk/overprecise Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies).

 

[FadedC]

2E was probably just as bad when it came to releasing too much in the way of sourcebooks and rules bloat. The only "advantage" that 2e had was that 90% of the stuff they released was useless to almost everyone (ie the complete viking handbook) so you didn't have to worry about it as much. But overall they were known for their rules bloat just like 3e was and just like I'm sure 4e eventually will.

I remember when 3e was coming out the designers made fun of all of the sourcebooks and rules bloat that 2e had and said they were going to avoid doing that. They also promised that there would not be any kind of power creep causing a character made after sourcebooks were released more powerful then one created before. We all know how that worked out .

Still I think 3e did a better job with their million sourcebooks then 2e did, and my hope is that 4e will do better still.

 

[Desdichado]

To be honest, this whole "Let's put in a lot of stuff, only a tiny amount of which will be useful to any given person!" is what got me to stop buying 3E from from pre-3.5E until a year and a half ago. I'd just had enough of books which had literally 90% useless content, and which didn't cost any less for it.

Why would it cost any less?

It might be interesting if at some point in the future you could go through the table of contents of a book and have a menu that allowed you to buy mechanics by chunks (I'll take these three feats, those four magic items, and that prestige class and leave the rest of the book alone) but don't hold your breath.

Maybe DI could wrangle something like that up.

 

[WhimsyTheFae]

To be honest, this whole "Let's put in a lot of stuff, only a tiny amount of which will be useful to any given person!" is what got me to stop buying 3E from from pre-3.5E until a year and a half ago. I'd just had enough of books which had literally 90% useless content, and which didn't cost any less for it.

If the same thing happens with 4E, I have no doubt that I'll stop buying books until they start releasing ones with much higher proportions of usable content (like Bo9S, which was maybe 40-50% usable). Of course, junk PrCs were a huge space-filler, and hopefully those will be gone (instead of simply replaced with junk/overprecise Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies).

I liked Unearthed Arcana.

I would rather have standard stuff in the core books and extraneous stuff in splat books that I am under no obligation to purchase.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Im glad that people thought this was postworthy, but lets not jump to too many conclusions...putting "classic" weapons in the core, and then adding more out there weapons (either from history, fantasy, whatever) makes some sense. And it may not just be weapons, but various (fighter) manuevers tied to them...

as always, we will have to see.

Isn't this standard operating procedure? Practically every one of my 3.5 books has some kind of bizarro exotic weapons in the back.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I hope they keep the stupid weapons like spiked chains and double axes in splat books and away from the phb. That way I'll never have to look at them.

Spiked Chain had a rare combination of the wrong kind of flavour as well as a mechanical implementation that rubbed many people the wrong way. I did not mind the idea of the weapon as much as I did the idea of it being too good at too many different things (bonus to trip + only reach weapon to threaten near and far + 2 handed weapon bonus to damage output, it ended up being the only exotic weapon that was not a double weapon that someone may want to use).

Double Axe ended up simply having the wrong kind of flavour, I think. Not nearly as egregious as the Dire Flail for implausibility, but still very implausible. Mechanically, its just a double weapon doing slashing damage with a x3 crit multiplier.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[MaelStorm]

2E was probably just as bad when it came to releasing too much in the way of sourcebooks and rules bloat. The only "advantage" that 2e had was that 90% of the stuff they released was useless to almost everyone (ie the complete viking handbook) so you didn't have to worry about it as much. But overall they were known for their rules bloat just like 3e was and just like I'm sure 4e eventually will.

I remember when 3e was coming out the designers made fun of all of the sourcebooks and rules bloat that 2e had and said they were going to avoid doing that. They also promised that there would not be any kind of power creep causing a character made after sourcebooks were released more powerful then one created before. We all know how that worked out .

Still I think 3e did a better job with their million sourcebooks then 2e did, and my hope is that 4e will do better still.

Yeah I agree with you, I wasn't a big fan of AD&D 2E either. That's why I jumped to other games like GURPS, and then Shadowrun. With GURPS you took only the books you needed and that was it, but Shadowrun was bad too. It's not only the fault of WotC. All companies can be lured by this tactics.

 

[mhensley]

Spiked Chain had a rare combination of the wrong kind of flavour as well as a mechanical implementation that rubbed many people the wrong way. I did not mind the idea of the weapon as much as I did the idea of it being too good at too many different things (bonus to trip + only reach weapon to threaten near and far + 2 handed weapon bonus to damage output, it ended up being the only exotic weapon that was not a double weapon that someone may want to use).

Well plus they left out how you would need a round or two to wind up such a weapon before attacking with it and another round or two to recover after attacking with it. Also you would probably hit any allies near you (and possibly yourself) when using it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Why would it cost any less?

It might be interesting if at some point in the future you could go through the table of contents of a book and have a menu that allowed you to buy mechanics by chunks (I'll take these three feats, those four magic items, and that prestige class and leave the rest of the book alone) but don't hold your breath.

Maybe DI could wrangle something like that up.

I'm not saying it should cost less.

I'm saying I'm unwilling to pay the same price as an extremely useful book (or even an entire RPG) for that sort of thing.

See the difference? The price is justified in WotC's opinion, and I won't dispute that the material, if you used most of it, would be worth it - I'm sure the time/research investment for their writers justifies the price. However the low utility of that format doesn't justify my buying it.

And you're not even slightly wrong about that philosophy, either, it's very clear in virtually every 3E/3.5E book until later on. It doesn't even really irk me. It just makes me think "Probably shouldn't buy that as it'll be 90% junk". Sure, I spend the money on some RPG I'll probably never run instead, but I feel a hell of a lot better about my purchase than I did about, say, Sword & Fist, or The Complete Warrior (or whatever that thing was called). Or god forbid, PHB2.

I actually didn't mind Unearthed Arcana because it was clear from the get-go that it'd be mostly full of junk, and anyway, I got more use, or at least amusement out of it than many 3E books.

Still I think 3e did a better job with their million sourcebooks then 2e did, and my hope is that 4e will do better still.

I feel the exact opposite way, for the reason you kind of touched on. In 2E, unless you were interested in the precise subject the book was about, you could ignore it, and know that it had nothing for you. This saved me from many purchases. In 3E, every book was about many more things. Instead of The Complete Fighter's Handbook, we got Sword & Fist, which was full of junk for Fighters, Monks, and many other classes. Instead of The Complete Book of Dwarves, we get Races of Stone, with not only Dwarves, but multiple other races, and an entirely new an extraneous to requirements race (I actually kind of like the one in Races of Stone, but Illumians? OH COME ON).

For me, I ended up with more books that were "mostly useless" in 3E than in 2E, simply because to get the small core of useful material from any given book, I had to purchase one that was full of junk I didn't give two sods about AND which had LESS information on the things I did care about as a result.