Tome Must-Haves

[DeadlyReed]

I'm thinking about starting up a 3E campaign again but I'd like to keep the house rules to a minimum this time around, no more than 5. What are the really necessary additions introduced by the Tomes that I should definitely include?

[Maxus]

Depends on how you define houserules.

I'd put it as:

1) Tome classes replacing the SRDs with the same name

2) Scaling feats

3) BAB fix

4) Book of Gears items

5) Races of War combat

[Judging__Eagle]

The bulk of the other stuff in Tomes is fluff. Only the actual crunch; and speficically, the martial crunch, and the BoG method for magic items really helps to keep the characters evened out.

Stuff that describes how the lower planes are run, why dungeons exist, etc. is seriously, fluff, and doesn't give anything except for fodder for the DM for how to run an adventure, or some interesting places to run an adventure.

I'll be honest though, use stuff from the Tomes as you need it. Don't read up the Caster PrCs, unless you have a caster in the group. Just say that you're going to do things differently, and keep a copy of the PDF printed out and in a binder. Printing 4 pages per sheet in your PDF viewer will keep the amount of pages under control; and you can easily read the small print, since you're usually only referring to the pdf for short periods of time, not reading it from start to finish.

Like myself, I don't really talk about the teleport and "greater than long range" restriction, until I discuss "Dungeons, by the gods, why?"

After that, people suddenly think that "yeah" dungeons are weird, but a minor and acceptable nerf to the Teleport line of spells helps explain why you can't just teleport to the boss's place. He's got 40 feet of continuous material around his location.

If that's merely 40' down, and then goes into an other direction, or is a fairly shallow operation only 10' down, with an pair of 'elevators' to go down, then up again; then that still qualifies as being teleport interdiction zones. Plus, of course, if you can't Scry into an area, you can't possibly teleport into that area without risking showing up inside of a wall, or through a table.

[Windjammer]

Depends on how you define houserules.

I'd put it as:

1) Tome classes replacing the SRDs with the same name

2) Scaling feats

That's my top 2 as well, and I'm easily the person on the Den with the (so far) smallest exposure of RoW at my game table. I'm running a core only campaign, so I figured the one thing that needs to go is the fighter class and, concomitantly, the feats as they really belong together.

Here's a handy little PDF I created last year which excerpts from RoW what I personally needed most.

I sent it to Frank's layouter and wonder if he ever passed it on. In any case, enjoy!

And thanks for your work, Frank.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I'd put Races of War advanced combat as the number 1 thing to use, as it's about 10,000 times easier to learn and use than the standard.

Following that are all the classes, because they're fun and you only need to learn them if you use them.

All of the fluff stuff (ecology, dungeon building, wish economy) is very useful for crafting adventures, and only needs to be learned when you actually want to use it.

The mass combat rules are pretty much a must-have if you ever want to do mass combat, but if you don't then it's a moot point.

[God_of_Awesome]

Excuse my ignorance, but where was the BAB fix described?

[Blicero]

Races of War.

Unless they're thinking of something else, it's not really a "fix" per se, more like the addition of the Edge system that rewards people for choosing the high-BAB classes, even when that high BAB does not significantly affect your attack rolls in ways that a medium BAB would be unable to.

[Cynic]

well there's also the BAB levelling off business.

[Blicero]

You're right: the minimized penalty to additional attacks and the extra AoO's. My bad, those had slipped my mind.

[God_of_Awesome]

I remember someone linked me a full downloadable collection of the Tome. Tome 0.7rev95, IIRC. I know we got a link up on the top but it's nowhere near as complete as what I got now. Does anyone have that link again, I wanna pass it around to try to run a game.

Edit: Nevermind, found it.

[God_of_Awesome]

I'm trying to run a Tome game with those unfamiliar with Tome.

I give them the whole Tome PDF but what should I specifically point out for them to see?

Here's what I wrote so far:

You will need to download the above to get the somewhat new system. It's mostly still 3.5 with lots and lots of fixes. PHBI magic users are mostly unchanged but martial classes are reworked and other classes besides abound. A new feat system is in place, except for [Metamagic] feats. [Combat] and [Skill] feats scale with BAB and ranks respectively. Everyone should check the skill feats and martial classes combat feats.

Anyone wanting to play magic classes should read the section on Magic and everyone should read the Combat and Advanced Combat section, especially martial classes. If you want special gear, read The Book of Gears.

[Lokathor]

``BAB changes
``Only 8 magic items can be used at once (15 minutes to swap)
``Magic items auto scale to your level
``There are now Feats that scale to your BAB or Skill Rank, use them.
``There are now Classes that are better, use them.
``The "Wish Economy" starts around level 9 or 10.
``The "Turnip Economy" will not accept gold or gems as payment because they actually don't want high value things near them that anyone ever might want to stab them in the face to get.

[Red_Rob]

I give them the whole Tome PDF but what should I specifically point out for them to see?

Firstly, in my opinion if they are already familiar with 3.5, don't give them the full 0.7 version. Seriously, its over 500 pages long, if someone said to me "I'm going to run a game, here's a 500 page document you have to read before we start!" I'd run a mile.

Also, a lot of the 0.7 version is just the 3.5 rules reprinted from the SRD. In some places because of the changes made by Frank and K it is actually contradictory about how things work. If you give this someone to read as a complete rules system it may just confuse them.

What I would do is go through and seperate out the actual new/changed rules and make a "primer" just consisting of these sections. If you download just the 0.61 version this will be easier to do as it doesn't have the SRD in there.

What you will actually find you will need are:

[*] New race writeups (if you want these in your world)
[*] New Character classes and Prestige Classes
[*] New Feats
[*] New Armour rules
[*] Changes to Combat Maneuvers and the Edge
[*] Book of Gears Item Rules (8 items, minor, medium, greater)

If you don't particularly want to focus on the Lower Planes or Necromancy you can leave out whole sections of the Tome designed to tackle these subjects.

Once you break it down to this level it will be a lot easier for a new player to pick up the things they need without it seeming like you've given them War and Peace to slog through. To be honest, most of the rest of it is world building stuff and exploration of how some common D&D concepts work and why. You can let the players read this if they show an interest but its not vital to getting into a game.

One thing that is important to work out ahead of time is how you are handling Magic Items. This section of the Book of Gears is unfinished, and as such the Magic Item rules don't really interact with the DMG very well. There are no guidelines for how much a minor item should cost, how many minor or medium items a character should have at a given level or how much planar currency should be able to buy an artifact. You will probably want to work out how you are going to handle this before you start the game, either with a home made "items by level" table or by assigning static costs to the various levels of magic items. There is some discussion on this subject Here which also includes Frank's expanded list of item powers.

[angelfromanotherpin]

For my Tome games, I did up a couple of word docs, one with 'rules changes that most people will interact with,' one with 'new races/classes/feats/etc. that you could ignore if you really wanted.'