The Gaming Den

This seemed to deserve it's own thread. I'll lead off.

I like the martial classes. Especially the weird PrCs.

Things like Dungeon Veteran, Progenitor of the Gith, Death Knight, and Bone Rider all rock my socks.

The guidelines for playing monsters as PCs are interesting. Everything else I'm lukewarm on.

Scaling feats are one of the simple, yet incredibly time-consuming fixes that I really appreciate someone doing the work on. Hands down, my favorite.

The interesting approach to cultures and race relations is a close second.

And my all time favorite line:

"Hey, we're fucking Cloud Giants! We conquered you, okay?"

Necromancy in general. It helped that I had tripped over it when I was running an undead heavy campaign.

Monk pretty much takes the cake. It's simple, elegant, relevant, balanced, and tactically interesting every round.

Monk also gets a vote here for:
[*]Fixing the problems
[*]Being interesting (and offering real choices)
[*]Yet somehow being something that people accept in their games even when they don't like most Tome stuff.

That said, weird Prestige Classes - Pumpkin King, BEEEEEEEEEEEES and who can forget, Elothar, Half Elf Warrior of Bladereach.

Planar adventure hooks.

Nature flavoured necromantic PrCs like Pumpkin King and Lurker in the Swarm, mostly for pumpkin bombs and jack o lantern headed skeletons and undead bees with obsidian hives implanted in their chests (no reason you can't do this)
Scaling Feats (more options and powers are always good)
All the flavour stuff, especially the "Lazy Hyena men made of awesome" and pointing out the generation discrepancy of dwarves and goblins.
Necromantic feats, awesome for making it possible for my first level character to have zombies and skeletons following him around.

DP

1) All the fluff and adventure hooks.

2) The classes that are about doing differnt cool stuff every round, but not based on uses a day, Monk/Conduits with expert Access/lots of Community classes that wouldn't exist in that form without the inspiration of balancing to Tome level, and at will being okay.

2 doesn't apply to the martial classes, because they don't do different things, they just do one thing too fucking well, just like they did in non Tome.

3) Immediate action counters built into classes. This should be mandatory, every class should have an ability to use immediate actions for something. Fighter 5fts and foil action are really good, and would be great not attached to a giant feat engine.

I like the fluff and world building things.

The discussion of necromancy and negative energy is a great one, as is the various discussions of races like the Sahaugin and the Kua-Toa. The tomes really made most of those races come alive for me, where as before I honestly just thought the Sahaugin were another monster.

Actually I also agree on the bit where so much community stuff happened as a result of the Tomes.

And the stuff on Sahuagin is also cool. There should be a campaign setting that is largely ocean and small (tropical) islands, with it stated that Sahuagin are the rulers of the sea and the campaign world divided into surface and aquatic. That would rule.

Scaling feats, and skill feats. Yes, I _can_ see around corners and send prehensile death ropes to murderchoke you around those corners. No, I _don't_ have a prestige class, why do you ask?

Pretty much all the blocks of text that don't really have mechanics attached to them.

This also includes (even if it has some mechanics to it) the race writeups, the culture writeups, the economicon, thhe dngeonomicon, socialonomicon.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:I like the fluff and world building things.

The discussion of necromancy and negative energy is a great one, as is the various discussions of races like the Sahaugin and the Kua-Toa. The tomes really made most of those races come alive for me, where as before I honestly just thought the Sahaugin were another monster.

+1

+2 on the discussion on Negative energy. Really helped me put final touches on an Undead Heavy Campaign I was running and the subsequent undead took over the world campaign.

Giant Frog!

The sense of having versatility with almost every class.

The tone of writing.

The fluff.

The Book of Gears.

The simple, out of the box playability.

Your mom.

Yes, yours.

And the new classes of blue.

The feats and the Race discussions.

Planar adventure hooks.
Tone of writing.
Classes of Blue.
Simple and effective feats.

NineInchNall wrote:Your mom.

Good point. I thought "your mum" jokes were old*. But the Tomes totally brought them back into fashion**. Or maybe that's just Frank's regular insults more than the Tomes.

*Old like your mum
**They also brought your mum back into fashion

I'm pretty sure that the Tomes talk exclusively about your mom.

I really like the Assassin.

Fluff-wise, I really like the Thermodynamicon, etc. They all just really helped the D&D world come to life for me.

Sadly, I haven't really had any experience with the prestige classes.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:I'm pretty sure that the Tomes talk exclusively about your mom.

Swashbuckler Class Skills. Only instance though.

And I made the Swashbuckler, so it's not original Tome stuff. It's part of the new wave of stuff.