D&D 5E (2014) Xanathar's Poll

[gyor]

Honestly it's like three different books. I'm happy with the players option, feel the DM stuff is fine, but should have been in a different book, and am dusguisted by the filler like pages and pages of names.

 

[pogre]

I think one of the reasons it is a big seller is that this is really a players' book. Nothing wrong with that, but the dungeon master sections are particularly weak. The random names section is pure filler.

 

[ccs]

Neutral I guess.

Some of the stuff will eventually prove useful.
Some of it'll never see play & is just a waste of space as far as I'm concerned.
At $50 MSRP I think it's over priced for the page count - but then I didn't pay anywhere near that so....

Conclusion: It could've been better, but it wasn't bad.

 

[schnee]

I like it, with a few reservations, but not many.

I'm glad so many sources are pulled in to it, so now at my table - where we use PHB+1 book, like Adventurer's League - most of us now use it and it covers all the things we need.

I think the fact that we've seen everything in UA is the best part. How they did it, what they put in, what they kept out, etc. shows the process from beginning to end, and it's transparent and sensible. It's really well balanced for the most part - I know I've been looking over most of the classes and as much as I want to try them, I see what I'm giving up to get them, and it feels like a really tough decision. The only ones that stand out as definite 'must use' are the ones specifically put in as alternatives to known weak classes in the PHB.

I'm really happy with all the charts. This fills in big gaps that had a bunch of us at our table running to 3rd party websites constantly. They're well-done, and really buff out our hex crawl / West Marches style game.

I also like the extended character creation. These have been things that have been lacking or iffy in earlier editions to my taste, and these are good for what they give to new players - a framework for how to think about the flavor behind a character, and inspiration that will bolster their own creativity.

 

[GM Lent]

The book is WAY too expensive for its content, especially since so much of it is reprinted. If they see having too much information spread across too many sources as being a problem for Adventurer's League, they can change the PH+1 rule.

Seriously, what happens next time there's a book high in player content? Do we get reprints of the reprints? Having $30 of content in a $50 book is bad enough. Having a third of that $30 worth of content be reprints is just insulting.

Unfortunately, it is selling very well, so when they regurgitate half of it in two years for a $50 book that has 120 pages, we can all only blame ourselves.

All of that said, overpriced =/= worthless. There's a lot of good to great stuff in here, much of which I've already adapted into my game and publications. It's nice to have additional guidelines for character classes and options as well as for various specific things like knots and falling.

 

[guachi]

I won't be purchasing it.

One of my players switched to Gloom Stalker and we borrowed someone else's copy. The minor magic items are nice but I'd already cribbed a list from Giant in the Playground as I needed some about two weeks before Guide was released.

 

[Iry]

Things reprinted from UA are perfectly fine and fair. That's the point of UA. Being upset at seeing revised UA material in Xanathar is like being upset at seeing 5E playtest material show up in the core book. Though, I can understand losing some of the "Wow" factor. But that's just a normal consequence of any kind of public playtesting.

Mostly I really liked Xanathar. The only thing that stands out to me as genuinely a waste is 20 pages of names.

 

[Zilong]

I'm weird. I liked the names

As has been pointed out, it is a tad slim for its price and there are things I rather wanted to see make it in like the weapon specific feats. Overall, however, I feel I got what I needed and expected.

 

[Iry]

I'm weird. I liked the names

I don't think there is anything wrong with a list of interesting racial names, specifically. But interesting names are readily available from countless sources, and name generators of all flavors are at your fingertips with a 2 second Google search.

Because of the mind-boggling ease which names can be found in other places, those 20 pages should have been used on more valuable content.

 

[gyor]

I don't think there is anything wrong with a list of interesting racial names, specifically. But interesting names are readily available from countless sources, and name generators of all flavors are at your fingertips with a 2 second Google search.

Because of the mind-boggling ease which names can be found in other places, those 20 pages should have been used on more valuable content.

It's also the shear size of the space that it takes up, a much shorter list would have been fine. And human names we're a complete waste of space.