FrankTrollman wrote:So let's break that down: you're an Avenger of Erathis. Divine Power is a book that is nominally about your character, and your character is pretty much not playable without it. You probably use about 3 of the powers in this book, two of the feats, and a total of 3 paragraphs of world building text. And... that's it. Using a space saving layout, you could get literally everything that book has to offer you down onto a 3x5 card. And that's for a character for whom this book is "extremely mandatory."
That was my exact impression while I was still solely DM'ing and not playing 4e regularly. By the time I was, and my PCs were regularly clerics, my opinion of Divine Power changed. I thought the book was spectacular, esp. if you didn't chance across it at mid-campaign stage, at which point the things you could swap out were indeed limited, as were the things you could still opt in (like paragon paths).
But contrast that to starting a new character. I especially loved building characters from scratch for paragon level campaigns, and loved building those PCs without DDI. I'd restrict myself to three books always - 1. the book in which the PC class was published, 2. Adventurer's Vault, and 3. the Power splat (first generation) for that class. So, two examples:
Cleric: PH 1, AV, Divine Power
Bard: PH 2, AV, Arcane Power
Eye-balling for synergy effects between crunch elements from just these (respectively) three books was, and remains, a highly enjoyable exercise. Because the builds really shine once you complement your feat, gear, and power choices, and the three books are filled to the brim with them, you can (in theory, and in my experience) spend hours with the books to browse through them. Because they are filled with just that - feats, gear, powers. Now, admittedly you end up choosing only a small portion of that - Frank got that absolutely right - but on the way there you explore quite a bit.
Same for building bards, except that they are even more versatile if you played half-elves and their race based paragon path which let you pick powers from ANY class. Then you'd obviously need to reach beyond the main 3 books. But that was rather a special build, and most bard builds - e.g. the archer bard - wouldn't require going really beyond it. Of course, multi-classing and hybrid classing changed that too, but I'll ignore that for now.
So why was this experience, and my enjoyment with the Power books, so unusual, even among my rather narrow circle of acquaintances of active 4e gamers? (Nevermind the online community.) Because our group ignored the mess of the DDI errata stream. We played with de facto errata, as published at the end of PH 2. We hand picked errata for the worst loopholes on powers and (especially) AV items. (AV remains the single most errated book throughout 4e's run.) But by ignoring DDI, we did not just ignore the errata bloat - we also happily ignored the class-related crunch bloat coming out of half baked articles in Dragon. (Yay, 20 more powers for the fighter class. Every two months.)
So I guess Frank's argument stands, if for a reason he did not even care to mention. 4e's books didn't simply have small return of investment because, to existing PCs mid-career with their builds set in stone, you could at best get 3 feats and 2 items out of a new Power book.
Much, much worse, you knew that 2 months in, WotC would errata the hell out of each new book, AND errata the hell out of any nice synergy effect you'd discovered beyond the new material and the old. Esp. AV, which kept getting updates until I know not. Or take the cleric class in PH 1 - my favourite - which Essentials shat on, and rewrote in large parts, for no other reason than to say 'this class is too well designed compared to the shit we are shivelling out now'. They literally rewrote a 2008 class two years into the game because later material made it 'mandatory'.
So nobody bothered with books because their half life was literally 1-2 months, and up to 2 years into their life cycle a single class (or sometimes power) could get errated 3 to 4 times. Sometimes the errata was redacted. Sometimes they were overwritten. Whatever. All of this was nothing like D&D previously where, once an errata appeared for Player's Guide to Faerun, you knew they were done with errating and you could henceforth consult
the book in peace.
Rather, errata were an ongoing thing. And the 4e crowd caught wind of that right out of the gate. That's why the books didn't sell. DDI was basically like the DM who told you 'you may have bought this book, but whether, how, when, and what part of it applies will change at my game table every other month'. That delegated the campaign relevance, from a player perspective, of those books to 'reading material' - a level at which they failed abysmally.
Sorry for the long post, but Divine Power remains next to PH 2 one of my absolute favourite books across 4e's run, and I wanted to write why. As I hope to have made clear, I don't think my reasons generate very widely beyond the group I played in.
Edit. The other point of my post was to say how long and much it took our group to come up with a way to relate to 4e the game and book series in a way that didn't suck out all joy of them. We basically had to ignore the advise the WotC crowd was giving them in instructing its readership. In retrospect, the books were not simply bad themselves (more often than not). I feel WotC failed to develop a business model where selective use of the books was rewarded or even made possible.
