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Hey everyone, I have just purchased a lot of 1200 D&D books and supplements on Ebay (God bless Ebay) though I don't have enough time to read all of them. They are all 3.5 edition products, and I will post a list of them at a later date. What I am wanting to know, is which books are the best for players, dungeon masters (myself) and which books aren't even worth bothering looking at. And as always, Thank You.

Core stuff + campaign setting and maybe the 'players guide' for said setting. Most of it is splat and gets over powered (ie a hexblade is better than a fighter all the time, you'd never pick a fighter..

The book of exalted deeds and also vile darkness are good (the latter a bit crass in places) but have good ideas and stuff.

The OA is interesting but I didn't bother with a lot splat books.

Twelve hundred.

I assume it was pick up only, or someone is paying a gak load of postage, either him or you? Of course could also be a PDF file, seen that before.

Sounds pretty awesome though, unless I am missing an actual series that was called '1200' and its just a handful of books.


Does it come with many settings?

Forgotten Realms was always one of my fave AD&D settings, along with Dark Sun.

The "splat" books (complete this and that) I think did more damage to the balance of the game than anything, but there are gems in there, too.
Setting books are my favourites- Eberron, Forgotten Realms and so on. Is it all Wizards material, or is some of it third party? I've seen some god awful third party stuff, and some amazing third party stuff.

1200?

How much was shipping?

shipping was going to be a gakking nightmare. $2 per book, so i ended up driving 5 hours out of my way to pick it up. and he also included pdf files of every single book at no extra charge. there are four 2nd ed books, adnd ravenloft- carnival, dnd gazetteer the shadow elves, the kingdom of lerendi and the golden khan of ethenga. then all the 3.5 updates and web enhancements, then every single adventure ever published for 3.5. all the dragon magazines from issue 1- the end of 3.5 edition, some athenaeum arcane, all the dragonlance, some stuff from the alderac entertainment group, every dungeon magazine ever published from 1- the end of 3.5, eberron, stuff from EN publishing, all the equipment books magical and mundane, on the flash drive was included all the e-tools, and they were burned onto separate cds, the forgotten realms, the green ronin series, grimtooth's books, kingdoms of kalamar, legends and lairs collection, maps and tokens out the wazzoo, midnight series, a few modern d20 books, some stuff by mongoose. then there were oathbound, and oriental adventures, stacks upon stacks of different sheets, the swords and sorcery, core books (of course, how could you play the game without them?) slayer's guides to collection, and violet dawn. also included on the flashdrive were various sourcebooks, and a dungeon generator. all the wotc sourcebooks were included as well. what do you think? did i get my money's worth at $300 plus $50 in gas?

All I can say is AWESOME.
What sword and sorcery did you get? I has envy, I does.

If you are new to the game or DM'ing games stay away from psionics, and incarnum, but to be completely honest some of the best games I have played in only allowed the 3 core books.

PM me and I can refer you to someone.

Congrats! Sounds like a great buy!

i've been playing since 2002 and i've been dming since 03, the only reason why i'm asking, is i've always done all of the campaigns from scratch, using nothing as refrences except the 3 core rule books. i honestly don't know anything about eberron,or any other source book.

Personally I like Forgotten Realms setting, because even with the core books you can still get a decent variety of character backgrounds if the players, use the background regions. That and I did personally enjoy the Mysteries of the Moonsea.

I'm a big eberron fan, but I mixed it up and made it all a bit 1920s rather than steampunk fantasy.

The Book of 9 Swords is a personal fave. It makes martial classes way more fun to play.

Da Boss wrote:I'm a big eberron fan, but I mixed it up and made it all a bit 1920s rather than steampunk fantasy.

Seeing as they setting was based on pulp fiction that was set between the wars... you we're doing it right all along.

Yeah I was much more interested in that end of things than the slightly more diluted base setting. I felt they made it a bit more generic than Baker possibly intended. It's still good stuff, but you put in a few speakeasys, some gangsters...good stuff!

Book of 9 swords was...interesting. I think, if you're going to use a splat book, you should allow ALL the splat books to be used. It's good in a way that you have access to all of them, but I will warn that at later levels if the players are good at min maxing, all game balance will go out the window and enemies will die ridiculously fast. That said, that can happen anyway with Core if someone builds a Wizard correctly, but it's something to be aware of.

3.5 is the best! I have been DMing my group since 1983 (yes I am old) and I always run my own campaign worlds. However, reading all of the other campaign worlds gives great ideas to add to your own and I would definitely suggest it.

Forgotten Realms is very well designed and gives some of the best ideas that are easily transferred to a personal campaign world (I think Dragonlance and Eberron are more difficult to transfer). For FR I would start with reading the intial campaign book then the Player's Guide to Faerun. These will open up a lot of options to you. I fully recommend all of their settings books though and I have a particular weakness for The Unaproachable East.

Although it sounds like other Dakkaites are not as fond of them as I am, the Complete series is a good set of rules to add variety to your campaign. (Also I disagree with what was said about hexblades, with a focused set of bonus fighter feats, a fighter holds up better to most encounters IMHO). Classes I would definitely support from the complete series include: Swashbuckler, warmage, favored soul, scout and beguiler (in my campaign this is the favored class of gnomes - who I don't see as bards).

Certain books are more fun for the players than the DM (Tome of Magic, Book of Swords) so I would think alot about these before allowing them to alter your personal campaign.

Have fun!

Scout is pretty good, and Swashbuckler is alright. Never liked Favoured Soul for flavour reasons, but it didn't look too unbalanced.

Favored soul is fun as it is basically a divine-caster sorcerer that sacrifices turning for spontaneous casting. It is a little more difficult to play than a cleric since it requires both high Wisdom and Charisma for casting.

Clerics only need a high Wisdom and I usually played them that way until my last cleric who had high Charisma and after a few very successful turnings, started playing clerics with high Charisma too.

I like multiple options, the more my group can choose the exact class they want, the more fun we have.

The classes i generally play depends on how the characters are bieng generated, but usually I end up playing Knight, Paladin, or sorcerer

Funting hell...

What are Splat books?

Books with lots of player content, for building new types of characters or spicing up old characters. Called splat books I believe because they generally focus on new and exciting ways to splat baddies.

In other words books like Player's Handbook Two which include variant class features and there are a few other books which add character flaws that reward you roleplaying them.

Only flaw that I can remember offhand that is actually fun to roleplay is called 'forlorn'.

Fifty wrote:Funting hell...

What are Splat books?

As has been said, books of character options.

The term seems to have cropped up when White Wolf was publishing tons of World of Darkness books. You'd get a series of books like Tribebook: Black Furies, Tribebook: Bone Gnawers, Tribebook: Shih Tzu, etc. They had a series for Vampire, a series for Mage, a series for Werewolf, etc. The name was probably because you'd see people talk about 'Tribebook: *' and the * is occasionally referred to as a splat...

In a lot of ways it was kind of like GW and Codices. The main rulebook had basic rules for most of the factions, but you'd get the Splatbook for a more detailed and more fun version. The splatbook version would have more options, more background, and quite possibly allow for more powerful characters.

White Wolf did over 20 of these for Werewolf (counting the books for other shape changing breeds) and probably more for Vampire, as that was their main game.

Even at $20/pop, this certainly added up.

Most RPG companies have reined this in a bit as customers started to feel it was a bit money-grubbing. I think in the current edition WW is doing 'fatsplats' or big collections of related books packaged together... Think how soem minis games do big books with multiple army lists in them.

White Wolf was by no means the only company to do this, but I think they got a lot of the negativity as they were very, very good about it. The Deadlands RPG has a book for every 'arcane background' and usually a couple books for various kinds of non-magical characters (I.E. a book for military types) for the various lines, and D&D has had similar books, probably even before White Wolf: D&D did a series called the 'Complete Book of..." for various races, classes, and concepts that was basically a version of the splatbook. (And had player 'kits' that were often a bit broken.)

Wow. Any 3rd/3.5 Ravenloft? If so, would you be looking to resell any of them?

I am willing to sell the e-books, but not the physical copies. (honestly I'm not sure if I'm allowed to do that, so I will stay away from that for now.) And thank you all for your input, sorry I have not been here in a while, someone compromised my computer, and I've been having some fun messing with him while he was in my computer. All in all, everyone was extremely helpful. Honestly, I think I'll look through each book, page by page, and see what is good, and can be used currently in my campaigns, interesting things that I may use later, and mark things that are unbalancing and would be detrimental to the campaign.

Balance wrote:

Fifty wrote:Funting hell...

What are Splat books?

As has been said, books of character options.

The term seems to have cropped up when White Wolf was publishing tons of World of Darkness books. You'd get a series of books like Tribebook: Black Furies, Tribebook: Bone Gnawers, Tribebook: Shih Tzu, etc. They had a series for Vampire, a series for Mage, a series for Werewolf, etc. The name was probably because you'd see people talk about 'Tribebook: *' and the * is occasionally referred to as a splat...

i always heard it referred to the sound a softcover book makes as opposed to the hardcover ones d&d was known for.

as for selling the "ebooks", i wouldn't. you never know which ones were legitimately purchased and which ones were pirated (which i suspect is a huge portion of the electronic collection).

Twelve hundred? Expect it to come in a refridgerator sized box that costs about the same to ship. Really? 12 hundred? I don't believe anywhere near that ammount have been created

Samus_aran115 wrote:Twelve hundred? Expect it to come in a refridgerator sized box that costs about the same to ship. Really? 12 hundred? I don't believe anywhere near that ammount have been created

The count seemed high to me as well, but it's possible some of the '1200' are the little pamphlet-adventures that were popular for a while in the d20 era...

I have just counted, and it is official, I have 486 adventure books.... the ones that are more or less "let me throw this in here, because I want to be lazy" books. i have about 150 hard cover books, all put out by WOTC and TSR and affiliates, I have tokens coming the wazoo, 50+ sheets for just about anything you can think of, 80+ maps, and the rest is a huge stack of 3rd party publications. I still have to read 99% of them

Good job. If the estimates above are correct, that's about 4 bucks a book.
My qualm with DnD is that it seems too much a miniatures game with a bit of roleplaying potential, as opposed to vice versa, for me to want to get into it.