Tired of all these damn books

[Lago_AM3P]

Used to be, around 3.0E edition, I could keep up with all of the books they had out. Why, I even had enough money to buy thoroughly stupid books like Enemies and Allies and Book of Challenges.

Not anymore, man.

The current trend of pumping material out faster than the Ministry of Truths makes me not want to buy anything. Not just because it's poorly edited/balanced, but just because I'm like 'why bother?' The huge deluge of material just frightens the collector aspect to me. The first book I've bought in a long time was, shit, Book of Nine Swords. Before that, it was Complete Psionics (at Oberoni's request). Before THAT, I think it was Complete Adventurer.

So from here on out, I will buy no more D&D books unless they come highly recommended to me, like Book of Nine Swords. I will instead turn my attentions on Exalted the 2nd and Shadowrun the 4th. At least I can keep up with that crap.

Anyone else feel this way?

[bitnine]

[Mention of practice deleted.] Meh, I'm clever enough to keep this in the abstract such that it certainly doesn't promote anything naughty:

I've got a gaming budget. It's fairly set. Now, I'll only buy good and worthwhile pieces of material with my budget. But I don't exceed that budget. So if WotC releases no good books, they get none of my money. If they release some good books, they get my gaming budget. They've got both a 0% chance of getting more than my gaming budget, and a 0% chance of getting my money for crappy books.

And that's my purchasing methodology. Note the complete lack of impact that the practices referenced in the first paragraph would have on my cash flow or the money that WotC receives.

[Lago_AM3P]

We're not allowed to talk about that activity, as I have found out.

I do, however, purchase books from drivethrurpg.com. In fact, that's how I got most of my Exalted and Shadowrun books as the only gaming store around is a crappy Waldenbooks.

[Imban]

The flood of sourcebooks has actually slowed down, if you check the 2007 calendar. Complete Scoundrel in January, Dungeonscape and Secrets of Sarlona in February, Magic Item Compendium in March, nothing in April, Drow of the Underdark in May, Complete Champion and The Forge of War in June, Monster Manual V in July, and nothing in August.

That's just 8 books in 8 months, 6 if you don't care about Eberron. Even though they say Shadowdale is a sourcebook, it's also an adventure - while Hyperconscious (Malhavoc) managed to do that and not fail, I'll wait and see if WotC can do that.

[fbmf]

My father got me MM IV as a birthday gift, and I usually buy the pre-packaged adventures, but I have not bought a WotC rulebook in more than a year.

Game On,
fbmf

[Catharz]

1166300124[/unixtime]]The flood of sourcebooks has actually slowed down, if you check the 2007 calendar. Complete Scoundrel in January, Dungeonscape and Secrets of Sarlona in February, Magic Item Compendium in March, nothing in April, Drow of the Underdark in May, Complete Champion and The Forge of War in June, Monster Manual V in July, and nothing in August.

That's just 8 books in 8 months, 6 if you don't care about Eberron. Even though they say Shadowdale is a sourcebook, it's also an adventure - while Hyperconscious (Malhavoc) managed to do that and not fail, I'll wait and see if WotC can do that.

Wow, and not one of those sounds in the least bit interesting. Oh well.

I guess Forge of War and Dungeonscape might have potential. I'm basing this purely on the titles, of course.


And I haven't bought a WotC book since...Wow. I can't even remember. Since the advent of 3.5e, I think. The thought of having to replace all my 'outdated' books was too much.

[PhoneLobster]

I haven't bought a rule book for ages.

Because the "rules" have annoyed me too much and the fluff just bores the god damn pants right off me, it bores even the under pants right off me.

I'm out here walking around with no more interested in their little stories pants left.

My god damned wardrobe of gaming tollerance is EMPTY. I have nothing to wear to the great big "lets enjoy using WOTC publications" Ball.

I don't even use d20 these days except for the odd game run straight out of a pretty heavily house ruled and well worn copy of the d20 cthulhu source book.

Well and that one hilarious game of Macho Women With Guns. GOOD GOD. I mean I can be satisfied with what is effictively a deliberately moronic third party rule book and setting based in the first place of the laughable d20 Modern and yet have found WOTC material so bad I won't pay for the stuff, or use or even accept it if its offered to me for free?

If I'm going to use dodgey stupid rules full of loop holes, innacuracies and assumptions I damn well will use my own home brew junk that better supports my far more interesting home brew campaigns and adventures. (which might I add are not all about fricking nine flavours of elf endlessly reinacting that same predictable and derivative D&D campaign everyone played when they were 15).

But if almost every ruling I have to make as a GM involves guess work and on the spot house ruling why the heck wouldn't anyone run home brew instead? What additional GMing authority do you get by using the same class, race, feat or ability NAMES from the d20 systems latest splat book attached to your newest set of on the fly rulings?

You hear that WOTC? Your stupid fluff and stupider rules have driven me back to the place 2nd ed drove me, PURE UNADULTERATED HOME BREW.

Think about that.

AAAAAAAH.

[SirWayne]

I have a similar practice when it comes to "obtaining" books that might not be any good. Which I hope is understandable, given that the last WOTC book I bought on "faith" was Magic of Incarnum. :|

I bought a couple of the 3.0 books, but never did get the 3.5 Core ones (no reason to; they didn't change enough for it to really be worthwhile). From 3.5 I've only gotten the Expanded Psionics Handbook, MoI, and Tome of Battle; my brother has the Complete books and a few others and one of my friends has basically all the Eberron books. I've gotten off pretty lucky-- I don't really regret any of those purchases (Incarnum might suck like Kirby, but I do like the system in theory). I'll probably pick up the Spell Compendium one of these days too, but that'll probably be it. No other book I've read lately has more than 10 pages of usable material or so (if that), and it doesn't hurt my conscience to Mod Edit: Text deleted.

So from here on out, I will buy no more D&D books unless they come highly recommended to me, like Book of Nine Swords.

Yep, this is basically where I'm at. WOTC has burned us enough times that they're not worth risking money on. They're getting better-- still not worth the inflated prices they're charging, but better-- and that might conceivably change unless 4E shows up on the pike sometime soon. But it will, so that's that. Only material that's so good it can be used in our games right now without having to be houseruled all over the place or those with such promise we don't mind doing it should really even be in consideration... and that's a very small list of books.

[Imban]

1166303612[/unixtime]]I guess Forge of War and Dungeonscape might have potential. I'm basing this purely on the titles, of course.

For me, it's Secrets of Sarlona (because I have an irrational boner for psionics, epic levels, and Eberron, and Secrets of Sarlona is two of these) and Forge of War (Eberron, again), leaving the other 6 books pretty much out in the cold.

Drow of the Underdark is funny for me, since even though I may be restarting a campaign featuring the Drow as the current antagonists very soon, Drow of the Underdark would probably be useless to me.

[Leress]

I have a number of "obtained" material from WOTC. The only other d20 book I have is The Slayers d20 from GOO. I also get the free d20 downloads form rpgnow.com and the wizards site.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I follow d20 Modern, though it really only puts stuff out about once every three months. But for the most part, yeah, I'm going back to pure homebrew.

-Desdan

[Imban]

Barring non-WotC sources, Desdan, d20 Modern is apparently officially cancelled.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Well, it's not as though there isn't a wealth of information for it already, even if it does need to be patched or overhauled.

My idea is that they should do the core (PHB/DMG/MM), the Near Core (A few settingless rule suppliments, my idea here is pretty much a Book of Fighting, a Book of Magic, A Book of Sneaking, maybe one or two ancillary MMs, and maybe even a few experimental books like ToM or Unearthed Arcana), and then focus entirely adventures and settings.

-Desdan

[Hey_I_Can_Chan]

My 3.5 purchases have included…
[*]The 3 core books,
[*]The Book of Nine Swords, and
[*]Cityscape.
This last I purchased thinking that maybe Wizards could actually pull together and crank out a decent text on city design that goes beyond, "There is a Brd16 in this city, and that means 2 Brd8's, 4 Brd4's, 8 Brd2's, and 16 totally dumbass Brd1's… isn't that useful information? Now say, 'Thank you.'"

But, largely, no. I stumbled into the weird-ass guild system that costs a feat to join some organization or other (or at least to join it well… WTF?), some prestige classes that make baby Jesus cry, a handful of worthless monsters, and a contact system that makes 2E Shadowrun look elegant.

I thought 3.5 was an Andy Collins/Ed Stark stealth-nerf power grab in the first place and resented it for that alone, but when it played often worse than 3.0, I resented it for real.

Almost every Wizards book for 3.0 sits on my shelves. You've seen my list of 3.5 stuff. There are too damn many books. There are too many inconsistencies. There are no playtesters; there is no one to smack these people upside the head and say, "Dude, that totally blows goat--go back to the drawing board and start anew." No. Instead, the 3.5 paradigm is, "Hey, is that an idea? Dude, write a book! The fans'll love it!" And that's just stupid. And mean. And disrespectful.

[erik]

My 3.5 purchases:
PHB, Spell Compendium, Heroes of Horror.

I only bought the PHB since there was a fair likelyhood that I was going to be DMing Living Greyhawk games and would need it on hand to beat over the heads of any fools who disagreed with me. The Spell Compendium was mostly bought so that I'd have a reference for all the wacky spells and not have to buy any "complete" books in order to run spellcasters in LG.

Heroes of Horror was a fluff purchase since it was fairly inexpensive.


I've started having a lot of fun playing Battlestations, and have briefly discussed with other rpg-mechanic-oriented friends about modifying their rule sets in order to run it as a pirate game, or for just about any other RPG setting. The biggest hurdle is incorporating magic stuff, but the high tech gadgets could be somewhat comparable.

[dbb]

I haven't played in an FTF game in years, and I don't even play in any online games any more. For a while after I stopped, I kept buying material anyway, because I'm a little bit of a packrat and I had the extra money and nothing else to spend it on.

I don't bother any more. I'm not planning to play in a game any time soon, and I doubt that anything much beyond Core would be allowed even if I did. Besides that, I feel like I have a good enough grasp on the perspective 3.X brings to the answers to most roleplaying questions; that perspective doesn't interest me enough in isolation to keep buying.

That's not to say I don't still buy gaming stuff (in fact, it's about time for another bookshelf). But I don't buy D&D material.

--d.

[MrWaeseL]

I am made of money and a such have every 3.5 book up to and including DMG2. I don't care for D&D anymore, however, so they languish on my shelf. I'm planning to bust them out in ten year's time to see how much the rules have changed then.

[Josh_Kablack]

Real life issues among my gaming circles have made 2006 a downright lousy year for face to face gaming of any sort in my usual group. My life has prevented the usual seeking out of an auxilliary group that I do in such times. And most of the games I were involved in were non-D&D anyways.

But for a year or two before that, I'd been running D&D with a policy of limited ruleset that went like this" We'll use the Core Three plus Josh's crazy houserules, and then each player can bring one book into the game and we'll use stuff from that too.

[Lago_AM3P]

Josh, I also thought that you were doing some serious work on Exalted the Second.

Surely that's affected your mentality, in terms of figuring out what to purchase?

[Draco_Argentum]

I'm in dbb's sort of position.

Also Frank and K's work makes it really hard to want to pay for anything from WotC.

[MrWaeseL]

1166604909[/unixtime]]I'm in dbb's sort of position.

Also Frank and K's work makes it really hard to want to pay for anything from WotC.

Unless maybe they publish Frank and K's work.

[dbb]

Since publishing Frank and K's work would be tantamount to admitting just how horribly they screwed up 3.x, I can't see it happening, certainly not until they're ready to incorporate it into 4.0.

--d.

[RandomCasualty]

I think the current WotC business model is more designed to making a game that doesn't work, which encourages people to buy more books in hopes that each book will fix the problems with the system. After all, if fighters didn't suck, we wouldn't need the book of nine swords.

And of course, wizards are always looking for more power grabs and new spells. The new marketing concept is to sell to players, and ironically that means producing a deliberately unbalanced game that rewards people for buying books and figuring out how to best collect all the bonuses.

[bitnine]

Bah. I think part of their trickery is to release part of a good idea and get people to buy it in the hopes they'll encourage them to write up the rest. Maybe the Book of Nine Swords doesn't fix things up, but if you don't buy it, maybe they'll figure that things for melee types won't sell! Boo!

Odd thing is... I sorta want books that I wouldn't necessarily buy to sell well just so they'll continue down that avenue of development. Damn catch 22.

[Josh_Kablack]

Josh, I also thought that you were doing some serious work on Exalted the Second.

Uh. No. My former roomate did a small amount of writing for it and I helped him with late night, under deadline pre-submission editing enough times that he gave me one of his author copies as a thanks. But that was the extent of my involvement in E-rev.

Unless maybe they publish Frank and K's work.

Will never happen.

Here's why:

Frank is both:

1. Unwilling to kowtow to an editor enough to get much published. Or if you prefer to look it at the other way: most editors are unwilling to put up with that sort of bluntness and stubborness.

2. Actively pusuing a career path which has a meaningful salary attached. The primary reason I wasn't more involved in Exalted was because flipping Rothlisburgers actually paid me more per hour at the time.