So, with all the stuff that WotC has put out so far, I am less than impressed. However, I like to look at the genuine pieces of quality made in the past. Do any of you have any d20-system related books that you like, third-party or otherwise?
I liked the Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition book, at compared to other d20 books, it was very well play-tested and seems for the most part balanced.
I liked the Book of Unremitting Horror and Call of Cthulhu d20; although the PCs in d20 Modern and CoC d20 were weak for the most part, it reflected the horror them of being ordinary people faced against overwhelming horror.
I liked the 3.0 Core Rulebooks; they're what introduced me to D&D. Although I never looked over the rules with a fine-toothed comb (that's what you guys are for! ), I enjoyed the game for the most part in more ways than one.
I liked the Midnight and Ravenloft series of books. Although the game mechanics have much to be desired, I absolutely loved the fluff. And I could always use low-level Core D&D or Frank's Tome series for the mechanics.
P.S. I am biased against high-level D&D, as the power discrepancies are most obvious between full casters and non-casters.
IMO, most of the Green Ronin books are quite good...there's a few weird things, but overall they're of high quality.
Beyond Countless Doorways, by Malhavoc Press, is frikkin' awesome. You can even ignore the stats provided and just use the dozen or so settings. most of which are really cool. Graveyard of angels. Plane dominated by fey and divided into four seasons - literally. Dying world orbiting a dead star. You get the picture.
Lords of Madness is a surprisingly good WotC book, if you like aberrations and other squiggly things.
MartinHarper wrote:Babies are difficult to acquire in comparison to other sources of nutrition.
I like Green Ronin books, too, especially the M&M and True20 books, but I guess that's because spell casters for the most part in True20 were given a nerf bat (e.x. no save or dies, no infinite power loops that I have yet to find, etcetera).
I also enjoyed the 3rd edition Ravenloft Gazetteer books, as their attention to detail and being full of useful information for the relevant domains was very fun to read.
Last edited by Jerry on Tue Jun 10, 2008 11:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The Tome of Battle wasn't terrible. If you have a casual group it actually works out pretty well and makes fighter types a lot more interesting to play.
RandomCasualty2 wrote:The Tome of Battle wasn't terrible. If you have a casual group it actually works out pretty well and makes fighter types a lot more interesting to play.
What do you mean by "casual?" D&D for me is a hobby, and I tend to be "casual" about my hobbies.
Last edited by Jerry on Wed Jun 11, 2008 3:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
The example here is that Tome of Battle abilities aren't super balanced or particularly powerful, but many of them are interesting. So if you're in a campaign where you're drinking from Gygaxian fountains and finding artifact swords and shit and aren't worried about balance anyhow, then Tome of Battle is a good solution to Warrior stagnation. They are like 4e characters except with actual abilities.
On a similar note: about half of AEG's Evil is quite a good read. That's pretty decent.
FrankTrollman wrote:The example here is that Tome of Battle abilities aren't super balanced or particularly powerful, but many of them are interesting. So if you're in a campaign where you're drinking from Gygaxian fountains and finding artifact swords and shit and aren't worried about balance anyhow, then Tome of Battle is a good solution to Warrior stagnation. They are like 4e characters except with actual abilities.
I'm still confused; does a "casual" player not care about game balance? Is that what you meant?
Last edited by Jerry on Wed Jun 11, 2008 2:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
RandomCasualty2 wrote:The Tome of Battle wasn't terrible. If you have a casual group it actually works out pretty well and makes fighter types a lot more interesting to play.
What do you mean by "casual?" D&D for me is a hobby, and I tend to be "casual" about my hobbies.
Or do you mean players where D&D is more than a hobby?
Probably the way that you describe casual.
I would recommend
Book of Iron Might aka Tome of Battle lite. It is easier to intergrate than ToB and everyone can use it.
With my penchant for getting free pdf from RPGnow there are a couple of nice ones that have some good stuff in them...
Combat Options: Improvised Weapons - an okay book Coupons and Artifacts, Coupons and Feats, and Coupons and Feats 2 - These are nice even though most of the feats do mostly suck Lava Rules! Fire and Brimstone - okay, needs work Swords Into Plowshares - Really can't go wrong with a book of magic items. The Book of Oafish Might - It's funny and much of it can be used in a serious game The Practical Enchanter - I haven't full gone through this books but it look promising The New Argonauts - Most of this book is pure shit, but there are some feats that are worth getting out of it. Also the Web Enhancement is complete ass. A Buck a Batch: Bonus Potion - Might as well have more potions Paths of Power - A good idea, shitty execution. Ink and Quill - If you can find this e-book it is very nice for low magic campaigns. The book creation is a little too long and some information is missing but fully usable.
Now back to ones you pay for... The Slayers d20 - Overall very good, with some adjusting it is a good setting to run around. Advanced Magic d20 - It takes the Spell casting of Slayers d20 (a drain system) and makes it compatible with DnD with varying results (mostly good) Traps and Treachery 1 and 2 - Traps traps and more traps, much fun. The power gamer's 3.5 warrior/wizard strategy guide - Power game this SRD way. Not the highest in the list to get, and it's usefulness wanes with more splatbooks.
Jerry wrote:
I'm still confused; does a "casual" player not care about game balance? Is that what you meant?
Casual is pretty much a game where the characters aren't particularly optimized. Probably if your group doesn't understand how the polymorph mechanics work and have never used them, you're playing in a casual game.
RandomCasualty2 wrote:Probably if your group doesn't understand how the polymorph mechanics work and have never used them, you're playing in a casual game.
What if you understand them, but the GM hates them and has banned them, and you agree with him?
MartinHarper wrote:Babies are difficult to acquire in comparison to other sources of nutrition.
I liked: Evil (AEG) - special kudos to "How to play LG as CE and still be LG" Undead (AEG) Lords of Madness (WotC) Draconomicon (WotC - so sue me, they hadn't over-egged the dragon pudding at this stage)
Both Fiendish Codices (WotC), for the fluff and artwork Iron Kingdoms world setting guide (Privateer Press), although discovering glaring inconsistencies and the fact that PP are a bunch of cockbags lessened that after the fact. BESM d20 (Green Ronin, I think?) - totally unbalanced, but really cool anyway, and let's face it: you're not playing this in any way other than casual Encyclopedia Arcane - Crossbreeding, for saying "A wizard did it" is much better than anything involving a dire rhinoceros, a pixie and a lot of lubricant. No really, I salute them for suggesting that we replace such horrific images with "Two creatures were unwillingly fused together in an arcane ritual. They were lucky. Some just turned into abominations that died in a few minutes of agony." d20 Modern - Urban Arcana (WotC I assume), for the pictures of Maddie in a high-rise pink G-string. That is the only drow (aside from the drow queen in Hordes of the Underdark) I find attractive.
Also, I enjoyed Mutants and Masterminds a reasonable amount (limited interest in the superhero genre at the time is probably the cause of not really getting into it), and found WWE d20 - Know Your Role to do a great job of emulating the genre. I've played matches where one person beats down on the other for most of it, only for a sudden upset to completely change things around. It also makes skills fairly useful (for giving synergy to combat abilities, not for making skill checks, aside from convincing the referee you really didn't mean to choke your opponent or you really didn't hit them with that chair).
RandomCasualty2 wrote:Probably if your group doesn't understand how the polymorph mechanics work and have never used them, you're playing in a casual game.
What if you understand them, but the GM hates them and has banned them, and you agree with him?
That doesn't meet the criteria for "casual." In this case "casual" is being used to mean the same thing as "unexamined." If power levels and ability interactions are left unexamined by the players, the relative strength of any character is generally pretty random. For one thing, when rules are not well examined and understood groups often end up having undeclared house rules that stem simply from assumptions and group think. How many people allow Monks to use their ki strike crap to hurt incorpeals just because they never read the text finely enough to realize that as written they can't do that?
When players and DMs have a tangential relationship with the rules, they often end up unintentionally nerfing or boosting characters. A power that is never used because the player doesn't realize that he has it is just like a power that the character doesn't have. An ability that players simply assume that a character has is a power in truth whether the rules say that the character has it or not. And the latter category certainly includes such "Easter Egg Class Features" as artifact swords and power gloves.
When you talk to people on line about how incredibly shitty Fighters are, many times people will pipe in with rants about how Fighters are awesome because they can lead troops or become kings or whatever. And despite the fact that there is in fact no rule in the rulebook that allows them to do any of that, those people aren't exactly wrong. In the unexamined game their group has unintentionally house ruled in vaguely defined abilities to do those things to the Fighter class because it never occurred to them that a powerful warrior character wouldn't have such. That kind of thing is really common. The Elothar Warrior of Bladereach is a joke, but it's seriously how a lot of people play the game. If the Fighter's "fistful of rubies" class feature that a specific game assumes that he has is as good or better than whatever the wizard player happens to be able to figure out how to do with the spells he happened to choose - there's no guaranty that any particular character will present as more or less powerful than any other.
Monte's Books of Experimental Might I and II are surprisingly useful. I picked 'em up after after I read over the 4e shit and realized what abject failure looked like.
Its kind of wacky. A couple minor changes (add con score to hit points at first level) and then some heavy stuff- feats every level, spell levels are changed so they match character level (so most spells are split- lightning bolt is 5th level, fireball is 6th, which is weird). DC goes to a simple 10+half level+ stat mod. Metamagic is quirky- the feats just grant 3 uses/day. And quicken gets slapped with a level minimum.
The main thing is that class features are replaced by disciplines- basically at will powers that you can enhance. They seem functional, but the healing is pretty crap.
Book II is better, and is the fighter book. It came about because he was confused that people thought that warrior types were getting left even farther behind. So he reworked the fighter feats. (And keep in mind that this is with a feat every level instead of every three).
First, fighters get fighting domains- intellect fighting, sword and board fighting, agility, dirty fighting, bestial, etc. Theres a bunch. There is a bonus based off a key feat for each domain. Gain an additional bonus when you have 8 feats in the domain. (Which is about 6th level is you can get the prereqs). Only fighters can get domains innately (3 over time, starting with one). barbarians and rogues can swap out imp. uncanny dodge for a domain, rangers can ditch their animal companion, paladins can ditch remove disease (which seems fucking obvious), monks can give up imp. evasion, other classes can take one instead of a feat at 10th level or later.
Fighters also gain an extra bonus to certain feats (at certain levels) if they took the feat as a fighter bonus feat. Iron Will gives +3 rather than +2, and shit like that. Fighters also get feat boosts: +1/day at every odd level. These are extra feat bonuses- rerolls come up pretty often. Rogues and barbarians get a boost use 4, 8, 14 and 20.
There are also double feats and uberfeats. Double require spending two feats at once (and you can't save up), so pretty much fighter only and some prestige classes. Some cool stuff here that actually adds legitimate options. Example: Reflective shield- automatically bounce a single target or ranged touch spell back at the caster (3/day), using the caster's DC or ranged touch attack modifier. (Boost: use it additional time that doesn't count against the 3/day).
Uberfeats sound really silly, but there pretty much mastery options. You retire 3-5 feats (ie, still count as prereqs, but you can't use them), and get a slew of bonuses:
Honored Master (Intellect fighting domain uberfeat), retire 4 feats. Benefits: take a -2 to attack rolls and you inflict max damage on all attacks, always confirm crits. If you take an additional -2, gain +4 dodge bonus to AC. Alternately, take a full attack to auto-crit on a single strike. You are immune to disarm, trip and feint attempts. Can't use power attack or beserk attack with this feat.
Basically, it adds a bunch of options to fightin' characters, without changing the flavor. Some of the numbers need to be crunched, because there is some serious cheesing available and you can do... excessive things with fighter/rogues. (Or even just plain rogues). And some of the numbers become big, fast. Several feats give you bonus pools equal to your level that you can just add, to things like AC and attack rolls. The sword and board uberfeat is a specifically bad example of this, despite being awesome, because by the time you get it you can just add 8 to your AC and 8 to your attack rolls. Which, you know, is just wandering right off the scale.
And sometimes Monte's brain just doesn't work right. Take this feat:
Punishing Blow [General]
You really know how to make it hurt.
Prerequisite: Base attack bonus +6
Benefit: You use a full attack action to deliver a single melee blow
that inflicts +1d6 additional points of damage for every one of your iterative
attacks. Do not multiply this damage in the case of a critical hit.
Fighter Bonus Feat: Starting at 15th level, if you took this as a
fighter bonus feat,make an opposed Strength check with your foe
when using this feat’s benefit. If you succeed, your target is also
stunned for 1 round.
Boosted: You may reroll one melee damage roll.
Design Note: This feat is useful to high-level fighters who do not
inflict much damage (perhaps because they are size Small).
OK, take the bonus damage, and observe the design note. Yeah. Hurrah. At 6th level, you do an extra d6 rather than get a second attack. Whatever. What really makes this feat awesome is that, at 15th level, you can smack people with a stun effect. You can stun lock an enemy wizard forever, with likely an 8-10 point difference on the strength check. So seriously, ignore this feat until 14th or 16th level, take it as a bonus feat and get the real use out of it.
Last edited by Voss on Wed Jun 11, 2008 5:34 am, edited 2 times in total.
I've liked the flavor text behind the Freeport series. A lot of the flavor behind Sword and Sorcery line by White Wolf is almost passable.
From a design standpoint, there really aren't that many good third party sourcebooks. I like almost half of the stuff done by Monte Cook and his Arcana Unearthed series (it's a bandaid on many of 3.x DnD's flaws, but it succeeds by departing from DnD rather than straight replacing the nonfunctional stuff).
Also, as Frank noted, Evil is pretty decent. If someone said he wanted something from that I might not lose respect from them.
Talisman wrote:
What if you understand them, but the GM hates them and has banned them, and you agree with him?
Anything where you're nerfing stuff, and the DM knows enough to nerf stuff, is not casual at all. Chances are if your DM felt the need to nerf stuff, it's anything but casual. Casual games tend to have very few house rules that are balance derived. The majority of house rules tend to be entirely flavor based.
Generally when people find overpowered stuff in casual games it's by falling ass backwards into them. Like someone might make a druid that turns into a bear because he thinks its cool, and then later figure out that wild shape is crazy awesome, but he's not going to go out of his way to use wild shape because he knew that before hand.
You rarely in fact have to nerf stuff in casual games because most players just don't read the majority of the material. They read planar binding or polymorph and all they actually see is a huge block of text that seems too complicated to bother with. So after spending a few minutes trying to comprehend it, they realize they then have to look at the monster manual, and instead they go back to looking at fireball, and say "oh cool, 1d6 fire damage per level."
Casual players also rarely play tactically. Like the reason most people don't seem to have problems with the 5 minute workday is that the majority of parties just don't think of playing that way for whatever reason. Similarly, stuff like scry/teleport just isn't used much.
Generally the introduction of even a single powergamer can be like an atom bomb going off in casual games.
I liked the Ravenloft stuff too. Horrible mechanics but well written and interesting as a setting. Unfortunately its not a good idea as a D&D setting in the first place.
Armageddon 2089. Very nice near future giant robots setting. The walking tank style, not the flying anime ones. The setting premise is essentially taking the 'Bush Doctrine' of preemptive strikes to its logical conclusion then adding mechs.
I never got to play it but by the look of it the mechanics are vastly too complex for an rpg, pretty certain to be too much for a tactical wargame too.
Draco_Argentum wrote:I liked the Ravenloft stuff too. Horrible mechanics but well written and interesting as a setting. Unfortunately its not a good idea as a D&D setting in the first place.
I think that something like True20 or a game system without high-powered Wish loopholes and stuff would fit Ravenloft very well. That, or a horror game system that doesn't have Wizards using Fly, Scry, and other things to break the mood.
I also regard Arcana Unearthed/Evolved as pretty decent, and Iron Heroes, to my knowledge, always sounded usable and interesting as a warrior character game, even though I know it's full of holes.
I highly recommend anything DSP, but except for one book (Tome of Channeling, which I actually do find didn't go far enough, even though I playtested it, so I regard some of its flaws as my flaws as well ...), you'd have to use psionics - the Tome's standalone.
I'd also recommend Radiance Press' third-party pact magic (still to get at least one more 3.5 book): all of it's interesting at least, the classes have internal balance quite a lot better than, say, PHB II (I know that's not high praise, of course) - but there indeed are some crazinesses, and, unlike most books, there actually are typos rampant, and some visible bad wording going on; unsurprising if you know there were playtesters but no proofreading or edition (aside the author's itself, of course).
Hans Freyer, s.b.u.h. wrote:A manly, a bold tone prevails in history. He who has the grip has the booty.
Huston Smith wrote:Life gives us no view of the whole. We see only snatches here and there, (...)
brotherfrancis75 wrote:Perhaps you imagine that Ayn Rand is our friend? And the Mont Pelerin Society? No, those are but the more subtle versions of the Bolshevik Communist Revolution you imagine you reject. (...) FOX NEWS IS ALSO COMMUNIST!
LDSChristian wrote:True. I do wonder which is worse: killing so many people like Hitler did or denying Christ 3 times like Peter did.
I'd chime in for Arcana Evolved (the next version of Unearthed) - it's really not that terrible and comes with some nice flavor.
If I had a group, we would have used it by now...
Also for Evil and most of Green Ronin's stuff, and for AEG in semi-general. (AEG has some stuff that is crazy broken and other stuff that is crazy lame.)
Oriental Adventures was a favorite of mine, and so was the Rokugan Campaign setting. Then I realized that they basically suck balls.
Oh, and inComplete Warrior for the discussion of DnD Warfare (even if it was utterly inane.)
I don't think so. There isn't really a "wish" spell persay. Also not as much conjuring and summoning and other planes - a lot of that has been replaced with "nature spirits" or somesuch.
I liked the dragonmech book. admittedly, fantasy mechs make no sense, but the rules seem solid, and were playtested at least some before release, and i do like the story. have yet to test the rules, i've been playing games for which it would make no sense to use them.
AE doesn't have wish as a spell, but it does have Call Outsider as an 8th level spell and what you can summon is pretty much explicitly subject to DM fiat. (Demons and genies are 'rare', but mentioned as existing, so...) And there are ways of compelling almost any action short of suicide.
), I enjoyed the game for the most part in more ways than one.
