Also Florida. But only if you count the votes from the bugged machines they put in democrat-heavy districts that failed to stamp a proper vote most of the time, but made it look very much like they had done by folding the near-cut piece under. Republican judges and Republican vote counters under the brother of the Republican candidate said it wouldn't be fair to count them, and now here we are with no privacy, massive spy complexes, the end of habeas corpus, and endless wars on abstract concepts.
The red colour may represent hindsight, or just my inane ramblings. Whichever.
Wizards of the Coast, freshly sold out (Sep '99) to Hasbro LLC, having bought the properties back from the brink of bankruptcy from the failed TSR, after a year-long genius of a marketing campaign powered by leaks from the playtesters to a mild-mannered Eric Noah (and a bunch of free press in Dragon and other places), built on a three year engineering project, enormous surveys of interest and desires, working with hundreds of playtest groups, release to you, in August 2000 CE, the
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
Player's Handbook.
CORE RULEBOOK I.
With that CD-ROM in the back, for Windows(R) 95/98, on IBM(R) compatible PCs of 133 MHz. It's a demonstration of a free character generator, pretty simple stuff, which obviously shouldn't take them long to finish.
It took them nine years and another edition to finish it, whereapon they charged you $10 a month to be able to create characters for D&D at all. In 2000, no one could figure out how to make real money from the internet. By 2009, no one could figure out how to make real money anywhere but the internet. In between there was World of Warcraft and the subscribe to play model.
Newsfroup rec.games.frp.dnd is the place to talk about the new rules. Thousands of totally unmoderated trolls SCREAMING at each other about how the new rules make no sense, or that people are idiots for failing to understand them, or how that must be quite confusing because there's already three different answers for how it works and there's only two posts. Seriously, mounted combat: what the fuck?
rgfd is dead, barely 100 posts a month, usenet is dead, all the ISPs dropped it. It's also gotten really polite and supportive on the few remaining indy servers. It's like traffic is some sort of curse, people in a crowd becoming some sort of crazed mob at the drop of a hat. Over the next few years there was people posting thousands of messages a month, and it was all ugly as fuck. Fond memories of that are why I'm here.
The cheeky sods didn't even put an edition number on the cover. Fortunately, all the preview material has “3e” stamped all over it, so we can just use that until something better comes along.
Nothing better came along. The 3.5 books just plain gave up and put 3.5 on the cover, retroactively making this edition 3.0 (and the previous revision 2.5, etc).
The credits page shows original design work by Cook, Tweet, and Williams.
Skip Williams later claimed to have fought his best to keep some of the restrictions on spellcasters, but got constantly outvoted by Monte and Jonathan in their rush to unburden the game of all it's restrictions, making this the “say yes” edition. To some extent it's really just Monte Cook's and Jonathan Tweet's edition in terms of player empowerment primacy over challenge and structure.
Player's Handbook design: Jonathan Tweet. Wrote this book. Famous for Over the Edge, then full time at Wizards before the TSR purchase designing a new Ars Magica and Everway.
Direction: Peter Adkinson, the boss at WotC, famous for letting some dude try making collectable baseball cards out of RPG characters, like TSR did, but then making a fancy card game out of it, with special rules on each card, which turned out to be a huge thing.
Additional Design: Richard Baker. He's to blame for Alternity and Birthright in the dying days of TSR. By blame I mean the dodgy game mechanics, the dodgy finincials were not his doing.
Four editors: Kim Mohan with David Noonan, Jeff Quick, and Penny Williams.
Core Creative Director: Ed Stark. A couple Children of the Night books in his manifesto.
Director of RPG R&D: Bill Slavicsek. Ordering polls, surveys, finding out what people want. Got that well sorted.
Brand Manager: Ryan Dancey. Give that man a cigar. Genius. Branding? BEST EVAR. Not to mention the OGL. It was a cool idea by the time of release, but the market support for it turned out to be gigantic, even though Hasbro lawyers did their best to kill it over the following years, and 3.5 was a huge kick in the pants to brick and mortar places holding stock in any of it. But it saved RPGs in 2009 when the death of D&D spawned a professional and legal D&D clone by the name of Pathfinder.
Also, there's a whole bunch of managers and tech people, Todd Lockwood and Sam Wood are the main artists, and some bastard decided to write everything in this book on top of fucking background art (no one's ever taken credit). The lines under the text are supposed to mess up the OCR and induce jpeg artefacts on scanners to stop piracy.
It did not stop piracy, at all. Not even a little bit. It did annoy a lot of paying customers though. See also every anti-piracy measure ever, or anti-terrorist measure, or that big angry dog your neighbour has to keep burglars away. But I digress.
About two years later a very long argument on rgfd ended when someone pointed out there was rules on page 87. Half of everyone playing the game had never seen them. Millions of people could not or simply did not read the text over faded line-art. That was improved for later products.
They also wrap a huge amount of text very tightly around complex-edged images. Like it was a new tool and they couldn't help themselves from over-indulging. Which it was, and they did.
Them were the days.PHB p2 wrote:Printed in the U.S.A.
There's a 1-page table of contents, which is mostly a listing of tables. Then they take you to a 2-page spread of Character Creation Basics. Before Chapter 1, or even the Introduction. Which is weird, but here we are.
Rule 0: Check with your Dungeon Master. They might change stuff.
This is, was, in hindsight, somewhat overused in conversation about how the rules have problems. Compared to 2nd edition, where something like that was written on nearly every page, it's a miracle of player empowerment. But it is there. As Rule Zero. I recall at one point no one I knew could find rule zero, like we'd all imagined it as a terrible shared hallucination. If only.
Next roll stats (3 of 4d6, must net +1 with at least one 14+), choose class and race at the same time, assign adjusted stats, see if you like the default class options, record race and class features, select skills, select a feat, review descriptions (maybe select some, as you will), roll gold and buy gear, calculate and record combat and skill numbers.
I don't understand the random shuffle they ask you do. At all. It seems like you should only be rolling stats after you have your race (which adjusts them), and then you should immediately place them and do all the associated sums. Which means pick class, pick race, roll-place-adjust stats, pick-adjust skills, pick feat, buy gear.
Then go nuts and add name and alignment and weight and height and bla de bla bla bla.
There's no need to develop the character completely. With your DM's permission, you can always add, or even change details as you play and as you get a better feel for your character.
The Introduction explains how Wizards can do woderous things and Fighters can stab something and then die a lot of different horrible deaths. What you need to play that sort of game is
Starter sets clearly do not have enough dice to this day. You also need at least four d20's, and N+1 d6's, where N is the current number of d6's you have.PHB p6 wrote:[*]The Player's Handbook, which tells you how to create and play your character.
[*]A copy of the character sheet.
[*]A pencil and scratch paper (graph paper is nice to have, too).
[*]One or two four-sided dice (d4), four or more six-sided dice (d6), an eight-sided die (d8), two ten-sided dice (d10), a twelve-sided die (d12), and a twenty-sided die (d20).
[*]A miniature figure, or at least something to represent your character in the game (even if it's just a mark on paper).
Note the pencil and paper: it's like people didn't own iPads or iPhones yet, like apple is a failing company, like google hangouts weren't even in popular science-fantasy yet … oh, right, August 2000.
See also (to be linked as completed) ...
- Abilities: Chapter 1.
- Races: Chapter 2.
- Classes: Chapter 3.
- Skills: Chapter 4.
- Feats: Chapter 5.
- Description: Chapter 6.
- Equipment: Chapter 7.
- Combat: Chapter 8.
- Adventuring: Chapter 9.
- Magic: Chapter 10.
- Spells: Chapter 11.
