Questions on FFC Printings & Blackmoor

[Havard]

Personally, I put less faith in the DA series modules, even less in the 3E products, much less in the 4E book.

I thought I should explain this a little. The upside of the later products is that they expand the setting a lot. I mean, the total amound of new background material in the DA modules, the 3E books, and so on, is amazing.

It's also a lot for me to remember. I like to think about Blackmoor as a campaign from a simpler era, not one where I have to keep track of a zillion details.

Thing is, back in the days people were also keeping track of a zillion details. It was just that in many cases they saw no need to write them down as they assumed they would be obvious to anyone reading them. Unfortunately, to those arriving to the hobby a decade later, lacking for instance the war gaming background, material written in the 70s was sometimes confusing.

That's one thing that bothered me about later editions of D&D, and I have this same problem with monster stat blocks and so on. Keep 'em simple and I'm happy.

Here is a place where we don't disagree. When it comes to rules bits I also don't see much need for too much of it.

However, I do like the setting material to be fleshed out. I do like timelines (alot), general overview of kingdoms, racial descriptions and such. The FFC says the Peshwah have X number of horsemen and Y number of Dragons. I am glad that I have another book which actually tells me who the Peshwah are.

Also, I find some of the new material disturbing. For example, I know that there weren't prestige classes in 1971. This stuff was added later to fit the 3E rules system. They didn't have "at will" powers, etc, until 4th edition. I should be able to look past that part and focus on the background material, but I just can't.

Prestige classes may not have been part of the system, but what prestige classes really are is a formalization of character tropes. While the formalization may be new and perhaps not even neccessary, certain tropes have always existed. Whether all the actual PrCs in the D20 Blackmoor line did exist as tropes previously is another matter.

As Havard put it, apparently I'm "allergic to 3E material".

If you have an allergy it is much milder than the people I normally talk to. For some reason, I am never bothered by reading books where I need to ignore part of the contents. It is possible that this has to do with the fact that I have played so many different systems/settings, and have often used the setting from game A with the rules from game B. This is a pretty interesting exercise, because it forces you to really think through which parts are rules and which are setting.


-Havard