Haffrung, you just nicely summarised my nr. 1 reason for moving here. Every other well visited forum seems to have been taken over by this kind of useless discussion.

So, I finally got my hands on the book (hooray for having an actual FLGS in town). On first skimming, I love it. Great art, nice layout, and most importantly, cool rules.

I can even stomach and work with most of the halfling artwork. So that is one concern down.

However, I can not stand the entire chapter on races. It's even worse than I thought. Drow as iconic elves and way to many hardcoded setting elements in the stats. I'll propably write a new one of my own entirely.

So much for my homebrew players guide fitting on one double page.

Quote from: Gold Roger;782848Drow as iconic elves and way to many hardcoded setting elements in the stats. I'll propably write a new one of my own entirely.

Same here. Luckily, they're written as Dark Elves (Drow), so they could, in theory, just be a stand-in for dark elves in general.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;782810Tell it to Gary Gygax.

  Wasn't AD&D conceived in part as a way to do tournaments and organized play, and as a replacement for OD&D? This is not exactly a new issue.

Yes, AD&D was " conceived in part as a way to do tournaments" (organized play came much later) but it was not a replacement for OD&D. OD&D continued to be published long after all three AD&D books were out and only stopped onced the "revised version" of OD&D (B/X) was out. (O)D&D was intended by Gygax remain the game for people who wanted to do it their way.

Quote from: RandallS;782853Yes, AD&D was " conceived in part as a way to do tournaments" (organized play came much later) but it was not a replacement for OD&D. OD&D continued to be published long after all three AD&D books were out and only stopped onced the "revised version" of OD&D (B/X) was out. (O)D&D was intended by Gygax remain the game for people who wanted to do it their way.

   Do we have a citation for that? My formative introduction to the hobby's history was Lawrence Schick's essay in Heroic Worlds, which gives the strong impression that TSR only kept OD&D in print as long as it did because of demand, and only maintained the Basic/Advanced split under legal pressure from Dave Arneson. I am open to correction; after all, that's one source that's twenty years old at this point, even if it was from someone involved in the early days of TSR.

Quote from: Haffrung;782675Char op and char comparison threads are like peeking into another dimension. This is how they read to me:

Poster 1: "Anyone else think the Gank Dweomer Slash is underpowered? It can only jazz its caps on a daily matrix. Why would someone ever take it over a Thrush Blade Topper, who has every bit of jazz max as the Gank, but can also bottle like a Shell Captain?

Poster 2: "I know, right? While your Gank Dweomer Slash (or any Dweomer ganking build, really) is capped on fungibles, a Thrush Blade Topper, or even a basic all-strike Thrush Blade, will be kill-shotting mobs every two rounds without even bottling a daily. And it only gets worse past 14th level, when bottling ramps up area soakage even better than any of the blanket flat-block classes. Why the fuck didn't the devs catch this in playtesting?"

   Because, of course, arguments about the hirsuteness of female dwarves and the proper calculations for the dimensions and impact of a fireball are so much more high-minded and accessible to the average player.

Quote from: RandallS;782853Yes, AD&D was " conceived in part as a way to do tournaments" (organized play came much later) but it was not a replacement for OD&D. OD&D continued to be published long after all three AD&D books were out and only stopped onced the "revised version" of OD&D (B/X) was out. (O)D&D was intended by Gygax remain the game for people who wanted to do it their way.

I started with Holmes Basic in '79, and other than the odd copy of Eldritch Wizardry or Gods, Demigods, and Heroes at the hobby store, I never came across OD&D. I certainly never saw the original boxed set with the three brown books. The AD&D PHB came out shortly after Holmes, and from that point forward OD&D may as well have not existed. I didn't see any OD&D books or anyone playing OD&D. And my community had a lot of well-stocked hobby stores and a thriving player-base.

Whatever Gygax originally intended, he had pretty clearly changed his mind by 1980.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;782862Do we have a citation for that? My formative introduction to the hobby's history was Lawrence Schick's essay in Heroic Worlds, which gives the strong impression that TSR only kept OD&D in print as long as it did because of demand, and only maintained the Basic/Advanced split under legal pressure from Dave Arneson. I am open to correction; after all, that's one source that's twenty years old at this point, even if it was from someone involved in the early days of TSR.

There's quite a bit of scource material on this. I don't have time this afternoon to hunt up a lot of it, but two of Gary's columns in The Dragon magazine are the earliest public discussion of this that I remember:

Dungeons & Dragons: Where is it Going? (Gygax, The Dragon #22 Feb 1979, pp 28-29)

From the Sorcerer's Scroll: D&D, AD&D, and Gaming (Gygax, The Dragon #26 June 1979, pp 28-30)

Quote from: Haffrung;782869I started with Holmes Basic in '79, and other than the odd copy of Eldritch Wizardry or Gods, Demigods, and Heroes at the hobby store, I never came across OD&D. I certainly never saw the original boxed set with the three brown books. The AD&D PHB came out shortly after Holmes, and from that point forward OD&D may as well have not existed. I didn't see any OD&D books or anyone playing OD&D. And my community had a lot of well-stocked hobby stores and a thriving player-base.

OD&D books were easily available into the early 1980s in San Antonio -- at Waldens and B. Daltons yet. They sold right along side the AD&D books.

Quote from: Bill;782815Now how do I learn to 'Bottle like a Shell Captain'?  That sounds cool.

Everyone who's anyone is bottling like a Shell Captain, Bill.

Well, got my PHB last week and heres a few observations...

The book has one, possibly two minor binding flaws, the backing on the back has a prominent wrinkle in it and I am not sure, but it feels like it was bound a little offset. Someone over on RPGG reported a different sort of misbinding and pages are actually coming loose.

On a positive note the book feels sturdy and survived UPS's best efforts to destroy it. The book was shipped in an open package... WTF??? and on opening it had sufferred severe warping of the pages from moisture or humidity. But a week later and the pages are about 99% flat again.

Art looks good. But these are some of the most gawd awful looking halflings I've seen rendered in a while. And two elf pics just look off one way or another. I note ALOT of poor cropping of art throughout. Nothing serious really. But ugh thats alot of pics clipped off at the sides or bottoms.

Minor gripe. I kinda wish they had at least sectioned the cantrips off from the morass of spells for every class all together in one go. Alphabetical at least.

So aside from the minor binding and minor art quirks, not bad really.

The Halflings...

I have a player who described his halfling as essentially a fey-looking mini-elf kind of like the art in 3e. When we got the PHB... holy shit the laughter.

The kicker is that *all* of the halfling art is that old Hobbit-pastiche with a jolly face and HUGE head, all looking decidedly unadventurous. We're still laughing about it. My player insists that his character doesn't look like that. I let it slide - but everytime a halfling NPC shows up in the game, everyone starts giggling as I describe them pretty much how they are in the book.

I have a feeling the Kender will look more like what he imagined halflings should look like.

Halflings in my game world all look like Jeff Dee's halflings.

Quote from: tenbones;783080The kicker is that *all* of the halfling art is that old Hobbit-pastiche with a jolly face and HUGE head, all looking decidedly unadventurous. We're still laughing about it. My player insists that his character doesn't look like that. I let it slide - but everytime a halfling NPC shows up in the game, everyone starts giggling as I describe them pretty much how they are in the book.

My opinion is that they don't look "hobbity" enough. They need better proportionality, though they can be plump. They also need oversized, bare feet with hair on them.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;783091Halflings in my game world all look like Jeff Dee's halflings.

Those guys are much closer to what I'm talking about. This guy from an Easley sketch is more my style though:

Yeah, the halflings are drawn really strangely, for whatever reason.

I'm week 6 into my 5e Campaign. And I have nothing I'm complaining about that isn't simply because the DMG and the assumed support content hasn't arrived. Ruleswise... I'm pretty solid.

When we're complaining about how big the halfling melons are in the art as a criticism (and granted to the halfling lovers out there it might be a downer) - I think it's a pretty fine start to 5e.