Eberron & Races of Eberron books

[User3]

2. Unlike Races of Eberron (a craptastic book I refuse to review), ...

This quote above is from K in the Lords of Madness thread. But it was noteworthy enough to quote since I am not hearing good things about this book - and it is about 2 days away from being in my grubby little hands (mail-order).

But in general, I'm curious what all of you think about the Eberron main book as well as the new "RoE" book.

....

Has the Artificer (and its associated cheese and imbalances), Warforged (and its improvements for tank characters), Luck Dice, and other Eberronic game mechanics been an improvement for D&D?

[User3]

Eberron is an almost setting. Its almost good.

Basically, its where good ideas go to die.

I mean, some things could be good.

Machines run by magic? Sure, you could totally have all kinds of crazy machines like pain engines and darkness batteries and soul currents powering necro-mechanic cities. No, instead you get dragonshards that have no flavor at all and they run standard magic items and some lame real world stuff.

Construct PCs? Sure, you could have Transformers(tm) or technomagic cyborgs or clockwork killers or steampunk mecha, but instead you get a race that blows as anything but a fighter adn its the bad parts of being live and the bad parts of being a construct.

Magic tattoos that show up in bloodlines? Sure, you could have bloodline culture books a la Vampire that expand character concepts or a setting reason for fighters to get level appropriate Fireballs if they take their 1st level of Wizard as a 10th character or blood magic thats more than just stealing power(as it is in every RPG ever). No, you get throw-away powers at high cost with a few broken things on top.

Artificers? No gnomish inventors or dwarven smiths or vodoo doll makers or watery tarts tossing magic swords around; we instead get a few broken loops and characters who must XP dance as their class features stop if they don't get enough levels fast enough.

Eberron fails simply because none of the ideas in the setting can be tranferred to another game and the ideas that you might consider aren't done well enough to try.

[Thoth_Amon]

I think the setting is cool.

I have not reviewed Races yet, but I thought Sharn was a good book as well.

I liked the ideas and felt it was the best setting since Planescape (which I also liked).

TA

[Ramnza]

I agree. I like a lot of the ideas that Sharn has. If anything, it get's my creative juices going.

[PhoneLobster]

I can't stand idle while people compliment this setting.

I agree with K. It was an almost setting.

Its different from the standard D&D setting, which is nice, but not different enough to be of any real interest (it needs to be at least as different from standard as Dark Sun if not a lot more to impress me).

It contains some interesting ideas that could have been exported to other settings (or made it worth using Eberron instead of one of the other clone ForrgottenHawk/GreyRealms settings, which this still pretty much is). But they tended to be complete and utter stuff ups like the dragon marks. Or just plain uninteresting like the artificer.

In particular one of its major flag ship concepts, the Warforged are unforgivably mediocre.

K is wrong about one thing, they can be more than just fighters, they can probably make mediocre psions as well.

Though their being an overall stat penalty race with other drawbacks that apply REGARDLESS of class (like their stupid armour) means they are the half orcs of the eberron setting, regardless of the fact that there are still half orcs in Eberron, who now look relatively good in comparison.

Warforged as a concept? Not overly creative but good enough to use.

Will I EVER use so much as a single line of the lengthy write up of the warforged mechanics EVEN ONE? Not in a million years its so craptastic.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I actually like the "alignment-lite" version of the setting. No race has any alignment tendencies except certain outsiders, you can find yourself allied with evil people against the forces of good on occasion, and so forth.

[Julia_of_Hillsdown]

Same goes for clerics. Gods don't care about their followers, so you can experience a total alignment-shift and still get your powers from your god.

[Username17]

Eberron is a good example of a settin whose rules don't match their flavor text, and since it was supposed to be created from whole cloth to explain 3e rules, there is no god damned excuse for that.

Let's take the example of the D&D fact that high level characters and monsters are completely over-the-top insane. A good setting would answer that in some way, either by adding addiitonal rules that limit the impact or just running with it and making that a comprehensible fact of the game world. In that vein:

Planescape: The setting takes the insanity of monsters as a given, and creates a world that is based on the constant clashing of actually limitless reserves of power. There are rooms full of demons who are chain summoning, there are rooms full of angels doing the same thing. This is a fact of life and people are pretty chill with it.

Spelljammer: The setting takes the insanity of the upper level spellcasters as a given. High level characters gaining immortality and making magic items is seen as an accumulatory process that has been going on for some time. There are now planets run by these guys and they have literal space navies that are left over from those fools getting bored at some time between now and the millenia ago that they were young adventurers themselves.

Darksun: The setting attempts to limit the impact of crazy high level shit by bringing the low level crap up to speed with the high powered shit. That is, all the low level characters are also crazy over-powered too. This means that the world is naturally going to be a constantly burbling apoccalipse... and wouldn't you know it? They seem to have actually taken that into account.

But then there's shit like Eberron. Where it responds by saying "Oh, noone's bothered to do that yet." They haven't actually closed the loops, they haven't brought the power level down, there's just mysteriously noone already out there using any of the shit that makes you a serious threat for world conquest. So Eberron is a campaign setting that lasts like one week. After that, people say "What the hell were we thinking?" and then whip out the simulacrum armies and the game world turns into Spelljammer.

Game worlds should take into account the fact that people are probably going to actually use the really obvious uses of the powers that they have. If the game world doesn't address the powers that people have, it's going to immediately explode into a renaissance and/or nuclear war which will leave a completely different world in its wake - making all that work completely wasted.

When you write a world, you should either make it be "at equilibrium" where it could plausibly stay recognizably as presented under the forces at work upon it described within; or it should be "on the cusp of a great change" in which you actually go through the directions that the forces upon the world are pushing it. Under no circumstances should you present something as if it was at equilibrium when it is clearly not.

And that's what Eberron does. It includes a bunch of crap that completely undermine the society and power relations that supposedly govern it. It's like if you wrote up a feudal economy, yet mysteriously had fully functional factories which were privately owned and operated by people working for a wage. In fact...

Yeah, Eberron is a piece of crap that was written by a no-nothing hack without the slightest grasp of even basic historical relationships or game mechanics. Everthing in the setting is there because the author thought it would look cool, there's no way to actually explain how it all fits together into a world.

-Username17

[User3]

Our group and a few others in the Chicago area have taken all the Eberron-specific game mechanics and ported them over to our home-grown Forgotten Realms campaigns.

In essence, we like the Eberron book only for "plundering goodies". Kinda like what we do with most D20 books of value. Beyond that, Frank's assessment is pretty spot on. The flavor and storyline of Eberron is just plain ass stupid, incohesive, and improbable.

For you Forgotten Realms fans, incorporating Eberron-specific stuff is quite easy and worth the effort in flavor, game balance, and compatible mechanics.

[Thoth_Amon]

OK.

But I still like it. I can't help it. I like the art, I like sharn existing at a nexus with the plane of air, I like the fact that monster's run cities there and are powerful enough that other cities go "we aren't go to go there and clean that nest out becasue we might get our asses kicked."

I think the races are meh, but the flavor and concept of the warforged, shifters, and changelings is cool. (Admittedly they are underpowered compared to practically anything and pegged for certain classes, but I have never been in a setting where a few houserules were not in order.)



TA

[PhoneLobster]

but I have never been in a setting where a few houserules were not in order

A few?

In a setting that introduces several poorly executed new races, all of which need to be house ruled in at least one case all the way from the ground up.

Dragon marks, which need to be house ruled from the ground up.

A major new character class that is screaming to be house ruled all over the place, or out of the place.

And ACTION POINTS, a whole new annoying mechanic that muddles with the game all over the place and fuels a few of the games character options in various annoying ways, all of which needs house ruling, preferably out of existance so that the rules are you know fractionally more consistent with every other 3.5 edition book EVER.

With Eberron its like the house rules never stop.

It was billed as the blow your mind hip new kid on the block, it was written by a guy who supposedly dusted what? tens of thousands? of competing writers entries with his all mighty setting creation powers... and yet it isn't even half what say, Dark Sun, was (and I ain't no second edition apologist so that says a lot).

[Username17]

Eberron was supposed to explain all 3rd edition mechanics and creatures. It was also supposed to have some new awesome and innovative stuff in it.

It fails on both counts.

Hell, it doesn't even explain its own new stuff, which is in turn tired and recycled from other settings. The artificer, for example, is the flagship new class. He's not only the same tired "gnome technician" archetype from Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, or Warcraft 2, he comes with a god damned infinite loop using only his own bonus abilities by level 12. Sure, you can use selectable features and crap to get that tasty infinite power at a lower level, but every Artificer automatically has access to infinite power by level 12 whether they like it or not!

So how the hell is the world supposed to function with artificers as the hang-back-make-steam-engines guys the game tries to pass them off as? They can destroy the planet at 12th level. The game mechanics do not match the supposed flavor, which is honestly itself inconsistent and trite.

Terrible. It's like they just chose the setting with the coolest looking accompanying sketches without even reading them. Wouldn't it explain a lot if WotC editorial staff didn't ever read things and was just attracted to shiny objects?

-Username17

[User3]

Eberron has been a resounding failure here in the U.K. Relatively few people play it, and its lack of popularity is evident by all the masses of Eberron books and modules sitting on the shelves gathering dust.

How is the game's popularity there in the States? Is it eclipsing the FRCS, Greyhawk, or Dragonlance over there?

[fbmf]

Are any of the modules worth a damn?

Game On,
fbmf

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I remember thinking that the adventure at the end of the Eberron Capagin setting was terrible. Of course, I find most of the sample adventures to be terrible.

[User3]

one of the more reputable critique writers at EnWorld wrote this review on RoE.

http://www.enworld.org/reviews.php?do=r ... id=2197278

[User3]

one of the more reputable critique writers at EnWorld...

Although that's kind of like saying "The nicest rabid dog I know".

The review itself starts in on a discussion of the art (like I give a damn about the art in a sourcebook), and refers to how taking Alertness on a Warforged character represents "good advice". Argh.

Mostly the author harps on the fact that the book "Races of Eberron" is almost completely written as an Eberron book, something which I would actually be offended if it weren't the case. The actual problems with the book - the mechanics are poorly written and the character generation discussion is on a Junior Highschool Level - are not addressed at all.

-Username17

[User3]

I warned you .. he *is* one of the more reputable and credible reviewers on the market. Although net-published reviewers use vastly different criteria for D&D products than people here at the Gaming Den use. In fact, I challenge any of the regulars here to post links to a so-called reputable reviewer that actually has interesting and/or informative things to say. Please keep it to reviewers who actually post or publish to high-traffic web sites with regularity and consistency. You know, so-called "named people with good reps".

Net reviews for D&D books tend to focus on a number of niche things - art, layout issues, paper & cover quality, etc. Hardly any reviewers I know of actually have the knowledge or wherewithal to talk about the minutae of game balance, mechanics, or game structure.

Ultimately, I tend to get better book reviews and critiques from the Gaming Den regulars as well as a few (dwindling few, that is) select forums at WotC.

[Wrenfield]

1114892696[/unixtime]]Are any of the modules worth a damn?

Game On,
fbmf

The modules are incredibly boring. I read through the first two and they paled in comparison to the 3.0 D&D first 2 modules. And that ain't saying much.

As someone stated earlier, Eberron is great for borrowing game mechanics (spells, races, feats, etc.) and tossing them in your game world. The Artificer, besides its broken UMD craziness, is a fabulous core class addition once you make a few relatively minor tweaks to some of its infusions. The Blastificer version is not broken at all (contrary to popular belief) due to the heavy resource investment.

Otherwise, I think the game world itself is unneccesary. For those in a heavy immersion FRCS campaign, you can throw all that Eberron stuff in it with little trouble.