I can live with 4e’s PHB2, PHB3, PHB4 (and the other associated CORE 2 cooks) as bieng sort of “updates” or the like. As example, the DMG2 is going to expand on the concept of skill challenges, which is okay. In all these I can look at them and decide if they are worth my $$ or not.

What I am more disappointed about is the fact that they are publishing campaign books which has a new class/feat/race/power/etc.. that will “encourage” people to purchase them as well to get them. I think it would be perfectly sutiable to use the CORE # books following to reprint some in a more compliled format. There was nothing more frustrating for me in 3.5 than having to uncover where someone’s (published NPC or visiting PC) feat came from after a while with a ton of books sometimes having just 1 small entry on a new feat, ala Book of Horror.

I always found that letting my players homebrew these unique touches (with DM approval, of course) helped them cherish their characters more. They roleplayed better, took threats and challenges more seriously, and were less interested in rolling new character every session because they simply didn’t get bored as easily. They weren’t simply playing a sheet of statistics.

Essentially, we were creating our own “feats” to apply to our 2e characters, making them into “More Than Core.” When they added Feats to 3e as an actual game mechanic, they robbed the system of that creativity and personal involvement. Feats suck.

1) The accelerated release of options probably has more to do with World of Warcraft than it does with 3.5e. WoW gamers can basically be anything and do anything, and that fits well with a free-form MMORPG. It doesn’t fit with a refereed (DMed) tabletop game, so this is just Wizards’ way of enticing the gaming market back to traditional systems. I hate all the options, but I hate MMORPGs more, so I support the initiative.

2) The article at the very top referred to the PHB2 as a “core” book. It’s not. The core consists of the PHB, the DMG and the MM, which is why these three have been released in the aptly-named “Core Rules Boxed Set,” and that’s all you really NEED to play. PHB2, DMG2, MM2, Draconomicon, Open Grave, all the campaign settings and everything else are OPTIONS.

If you don’t want to deal with options, you can tell your players you’re running a CORE game, and if they’re not satisfied, help them work out a house rule that fits the campaign … kind of like in the days of 2e, when you had Fighters, Clerics, Mages, Thieves, and a bunch of poorly-syntaxed optional classes that took too long to roll, and you TWEAKED your vanilla fighter to make him a barbarian or a swashbuckler or a knight in shining armor.

3) I forget 3.

Part of the book count is the split between “player books” and “GM books”, too. That’s new to 4e. If you only play, I suspect you actually need fewer books now to get all the options you can use.

The rate at which they’re publishing does seem pretty fast. I’m not sure it’s a bad idea, though.

Instead we are getting lots of choice, questioning if it’s too much and people are still making up their own classes and races.
WOTC are dammed if they do and dammed if they don’t

Personally, I’d rather have PHB2 come out early when I’m likely to buy it and find it useful, then later on in 4e’s life when I’m going to be wondering if it is worth it with a 5th edition possibly round the corner.

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Seriously, do we need all of these new classes? And will they make the PHB1 classes obsolete due to power creep?

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If people want it, I’m not blaming Wizards for releasing them. I’m really surprised more than anything else.

For reference, Draconomicon is only a DM book and contains no player content. I expect Open Grave to be the same.

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Compare that to 3.5, released in July 2003, which had around 30 books released between then and July 2008, when 4E shelved.

Like I said, they are milking the hell out of 4E.

The real question is if we’ll see Martial Power II in 2010 (or even 2009). Then we’ll be in serious overload with no end in sight.

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Right now, I see what you’re getting at. Options for specific classes in as few books is great. But that’s right now. What about the future? They’ve released a plethora of options in a very short period of time, especially compared to 3.5, and I don’t see it ending any time soon.

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Reveal: First, you can’t confuse streamlining of the rules and streamlining of options. One was claimed, the other I hadn’t heard claimed.

Secondly, the reason it’s better for me as a player is that there are fewer books I have to look at overall. If I’m playing a Cleric, I can limit to PHB, Divine Power, and maybe the setting book of whatever campaign world we’re playing in.

In 3e, I felt like I needed the PHB, PHB2, Spell Compendium, Complete Divine, Complete Warrior (for feats to change Turn Undead into something useful), and so on and so on. It’s much more siloed. Yes, there’s lots of options if I’m starting from scratch with no character class in mind, but that’s never been an issue for me.

However, rituals are still a big issue being all over the place. And the one that hasn’t changed a bit are magic items being in way too many places.

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What I’ve done for the 4E games I’ve run is limit the players’ options: In my latest game I let the group choose 4 core races to include in our world and then everything else got dumped, either completely or relegated to monster status.

Plus, more options grant more freedom to have the fighting style you want mechanically represented – which takes nothing away from imaginative character portrayal.

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@Scott – Yeah, I was gonna say that 3.5 at least spread it out, but you beat me to it.

How many classes and races did 3.5 have? More than 18, and WAY more than 17. Even if we don’t count templates. And a lot of them came out within a relatively short time span. (Consider third-party supplements, and the number jumps still higher.)

There’s an argument to be made that that material was spread out more. But in 4e, a limited number of options is one of the most visible weaknesses of the system. It makes sense to expand the breadth (races, classes) and depth (powers) of the system early on by providing those options. New core classes came later to 3.5 because they weren’t needed in the same way — but prestige classes were, and 3.5 offered those by the shovelful, even early on.

As for magic items and powers/spells, those have always been offered in expansions. I can remember scouring modules and such back in the 1e days for those (and new monsters).