Each supplement reads like a "Best of Dragon Magazine". Take a year's worth of articles, compile the best, put out a supplement. The supplements resemble Unearthed Arcana, which largely was a compilation of Dragon Magazine articles.
The thing is, this kind of catch-all supplement works great if there's one of them. The more supplements like this you have the messier it gets trying to figure out where to look for something.
The net result is that with the supplements the whole is less than the sum of the parts. There are individual bits that are fantastic. And if the price were low enough I'd probably spring for them.
I've actually taken to (digitally) compiling the various parts of the supplements into coherent groups and it's much more useful. I've gotten as far as putting all the classes and races each into their own section. Either a cut-and-paste job from one of those online versions or just type it by hand. It all gets recompiled in Word. Some extraneous stuff gets stripped out and there are no pictures but it's otherwise all there. The formatting and fonts WotC uses aren't hard to imitate so it still looks similar. The net result is that I feel that WotC could compile their supplements into coherent sections and end up with a really useful product.
The thing is, this kind of catch-all supplement works great if there's one of them. The more supplements like this you have the messier it gets trying to figure out where to look for something.
The net result is that with the supplements the whole is less than the sum of the parts. There are individual bits that are fantastic. And if the price were low enough I'd probably spring for them.
I've actually taken to (digitally) compiling the various parts of the supplements into coherent groups and it's much more useful. I've gotten as far as putting all the classes and races each into their own section. Either a cut-and-paste job from one of those online versions or just type it by hand. It all gets recompiled in Word. Some extraneous stuff gets stripped out and there are no pictures but it's otherwise all there. The formatting and fonts WotC uses aren't hard to imitate so it still looks similar. The net result is that I feel that WotC could compile their supplements into coherent sections and end up with a really useful product.