Palladium games are the only RPGs I own where I feel the splats significantly enhance my gaming experience, especially Rifts.

I am huge fan of L5R 1e, but I found the splats got in the way of my vision of Rokugan and sadly, the same happened with 7th Sea.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;448585Battletech, if we can consider core as the blue-covered Rules of Warfare and a 3025 Tech Readout

If you want to go even lower-tech and say just the original BT boxed set, that's OK too.

But...but I like the clans!

'Course that could be because I came into Mechwarrior via Mech2.

Quote from: Peregrin;448588But...but I like the clans!

I'm going to start hitting you now.

Quote'Course that could be because I came into Mechwarrior via Mech2.

Ah, Repomancer will be glad to have another fan - he coded most of Mech2.

I think that most RPGs are better served without supplements. There are few games I would say "You need this extra book to enjoy it 100%" Actually, if you need more than the core to enjoy the game, the game may not be very good.

When I write supliments I go for "hey this is fun but it's completly optional" which might explain the poor sales.

Rolemaster. I've got nothing good to say about the Companions, the character classes are seriously imbalanced, to the point that if you choose a character class from the corebooks you're a sucker, the table of related skills is a nightmare, etc. If I played Rolemaster again, I would use the three corebooks (Character Law, Arms Law and Spell Law), and maybe Creatures & Treasures 1, C&T2 is only good to have a good laugh, we used to mock the monsters that appeared there.

Vampire the Masquerade. Some of the first supplements, like Chicago by Night, were very good and inspiring, but I hated how the more information they revealed about the setting and the metaplot, the more the sense of mystery was ruined. I miss the times when there was only the Camarilla, the Sabbath was a mystery, and there were no independent clans.

Quote from: Imperator;448605I think that most RPGs are better served without supplements. There are few games I would say "You need this extra book to enjoy it 100%" Actually, if you need more than the core to enjoy the game, the game may not be very good.

Not that I disagree with you, but that's not what is being discussed in this thread. It's not about supplements that are not necessary, but about supplements that make the game worse. For example, RQ Vikings is not necessary to play RuneQuest, but it's an excellent supplement. On the other hand, the RM Companions are crap.

Quote from: Simlasa;448582I kind of felt that a lot of the White Wolf stuff was best as a raw idea in one book... no splats. I've got a shedload of the things but all inherited, I never bought anything but the corebooks.

I mentioned explicitly Vampire the Masquerade, but it's true the same could be said about the other WW lines.

Quote from: Claudius;448616Not that I disagree with you, but that's not what is being discussed in this thread. It's not about supplements that are not necessary, but about supplements that make the game worse. For example, RQ Vikings is not necessary to play RuneQuest, but it's an excellent supplement. On the other hand, the RM Companions are crap.

Oh, I see

Well, I guess that I have been quite lucky with my supplement acquisitions, as I cannot remember having any book worsening the game for our group. We've bought several poor adventures, but in the supplement area the results have only gone from average (the supplement adds something useful, but nothing game-changing) to excellent (the supplement becomes core to us).

I managed to avoid the horrible stuff in Vampire, it seems

Quote from: Benoist;448580If you want to keep arguing about CharOp "balance" in 3rd ed, power creep etc, create your own thread to do it, please. This thread here is about games that you prefer to play without supplements, and why.

Thanks.

But I prefer to play 3e core only.  The power creep is part of the why.

Quote from: Melan;448516AD&D 2nd edition. In hindsight, you can pick out the rare gems from the torrent of crap and run a great game with them. Back then, you would just be wading around in crap a whole lot. Which is what we did.

Agreed on this. Some of the setting books are good, but ignore all of the rules supplements.

7th Sea is another big one. In this case it's more the setting which gets worse the more books you read. Actually - it's been a while since I read them, but I think 7th Sea may even be best if you use only the PHB and ignore the GMG.

Quote from: Claudius;448616For example, RQ Vikings is not necessary to play RuneQuest, but it's an excellent supplement.

This is the sort of supplement that I like, taking the game in new directions, instead of just piling on more rules.

Quote from: Imperator;448605There are few games I would say "You need this extra book to enjoy it 100%" Actually, if you need more than the core to enjoy the game, the game may not be very good.

I'd say Vampire is one such game, though you can totally enjoy the game from just the core book. If however you start with the core book (say, second edition), and then add in Player's Guide and Player's Guide to the Sabbat, the game becomes different, yes, but by my own account, actually superior (and to be clear, it's not a matter of just adding clans to the mix. It's a matter of reading such supplements, especially PG to the Sabbat. So just getting Vampire 3rd edition -which gathers all thirteen clans with far less limited information- just doesn't cut it). When the game needs some shake up and you know the game well, add in Elysium rules and allow the players to play Elders. The game changes again, and when done right, for the better.

EDIT - maybe there's a case to be made that enjoying Vampire to the fullest actually requires the GM to purchase a good "by Night" book, like Chicago or Constantinople or Montreal or Dark Colony. The tiny example included in the original core book, Gary, just doesn't cut it IMO.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;448573"Core only" is a terrible idea in 3.x and is sign #1 that the DM doesn't know the rules very well.

I take issue with this part of your comment.

As Benoist posted in the "3.5 is broken at level seven thread", some of us can't be arsed enough to learn all of those rules. It isn't that we don't know the core rules well enough to play Level one to ten, it is that we don't want to take the time to learn all of the higher level stuff or have any desire to add ALL of the supplement bloat to the game.

There is a difference between "doesn't know the rules very well" and doesn't give a crap about high level play or have a desire to be adding supplemental bloat to the equation.

Some of the supplements were ridiculous. The Book of Exalted Cheese for example. Some of them have some good content. A lot of the third party stuff doesn't play well with the WotC stuff though. It can be a headache. Some GM's don't have the time or the desire to use all of that crap. It has nothing to do with how well they know the core rules or not.

Quote from: PaladinCA;448671I take issue with this part of your comment.

As Benoist posted in the "3.5 is broken at level seven thread", some of us can't be arsed enough to learn all of those rules. It isn't that we don't know the core rules well enough to play Level one to ten, it is that we don't want to take the time to learn all of the higher level stuff or have any desire to add ALL of the supplement bloat to the game.

There is a difference between "doesn't know the rules very well" and doesn't give a crap about high level play or have a desire to be adding supplemental bloat to the equation.

Some of the supplements were ridiculous. The Book of Exalted Cheese for example. Some of them have some good content. A lot of the third party stuff doesn't play well with the WotC stuff though. It can be a headache. Some GM's don't have the time or the desire to use all of that crap. It has nothing to do with how well they know the core rules or not.

I would suggest that if you don't want to learn how to play the entire game, you should play a different game. There are plenty of games that recreate the low-level D&D 3.x experience without the complexity of high level play.