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Mar 11, 2011 -- 8:40AM, frothsof wrote:

UNPIN THIS THREAD

I AGREE WITH FROTHSOF

Feb 14, 2011 -- 8:31PM, OckyFlam wrote:

Is it bad that I don't understand the uproar about essentials? I started D&D a month ago. Me and my players just use the online character builder, picked a class/race they liked, and started playing...

I later learned that some were from essentials, and some were from before.

It is not essentials exist it is that essentials is taking over.  Uptill Dark Sun 4e was getting better and better.  They were fixing the Wizards proble about only being a fire balls thower like class with new builds and powers. And ohter classes had there own way of getting spell like abilities.  Monster and Character themes added more customization to your character and monsters

Now that essentials is out its more like were DUMBING Down the Game to Get more People.  Characters from  the same class are now 90% the same. Wizars and other magic user are now the only ones with spells.  And Monster and Character themes are being tossed out to not confuse the 10 and under people.

If essentials were limetied to 2 or so books it would be fine.  But essentials are now becoming the design norm.  Which means that my wish list will never see the light of day.

Shadow as a full power source and not as and add on.  The Element power source will more than likely get the same treatment. More Character themes for stander settings, think of if  the vampire was a character theme instead of an essential basiced class, with the right monster themes werewolfs can be added to any monster.  But no things like customization are being thrown out to DUMB DOWN THE GAME!

Mar 16, 2011 -- 3:43AM, tuffn00gies wrote:

I've been away from D&D for about a year now so I missed the whole Essentials thing.  I'm having trouble finding out exactly what it is.  It seems to be a 4.5e that we were promised would never happen.  If that's not a fair assessment, why not?

It is not 4.5. The rules are the same (well, if you keep up with the errata, that is), and the options presented in the Essentials books are meant to supplement, not replace, what came before.

This post will be immediately followed by someone saying that it is 4.5.

If I already have  PHB1 & 2, DMG and MM1, do I gain any benefit from getting the Essentials books (other than errata, which I'm not that concerned about anyway)?

If you don't care about the errata, then, not really. The Essentials player's books contain new subclasses that share elements with their parent classes, but also have enough unique elements to be their own class. Page through the books, decide for yourself if the new subclasses are worth yout time and money. I dig them, others don't. The best opinion for you to listen to is your own.

There also seems to be some debate about whether Essentials is a short term line or the new norm.  Will all new material be Essentials or not?

With Essentials came a shift in design philosophy. They know what they consider to be the important balance points of the game, and have freed themselves from the AEDU power structure and the "Power Source grid." Expect future product to have more divergent classes and subclasses, options to support previous classes AND options to support classes which came out with and after Essentials.

That being said, I've heard that the Monster Vault versions may not be as hardy, but pack more of a punch than the MM versions.  That actually sounds like an improvement IMHO.

Over the last few years, we have discovered that monsters did not scale as well as planned against the capabilities of the PCs. Somewhere around early Paragon (at least, this is where I started throwing +4 level encounters at my party in order to challenge them), monster damage starts to become kind of trivial, which reduces most monsters down to a sack of hit points, rather than a challenge. One of the errata you don't care about updated the monster damage to scale better. Using these expressions, you can make Monster Manual 1 monsters a threat again. That being said, many of the monsters in the Monster Vault are nifty variations on the ones that came before.

And, unpin this thread.

Maybe someone more familiar with the Essentials classes can help me understand something a little better.  At the store where I play my Wednesday night game, there was another group running a campaign using nothing but Essentials classes.  When they found out that Wizards had pulled all of the publications they were planning to release that would expand on the E-classes, they decided to stop the game.  When I talked to the DM and asked him why they didn't just keep going with the material that had already been published,  he said that it wouldn't be possible without a whole bunch of houserulling, which he didn't want to put up with.  Specifically, what he kept citing as the biggest problem was the lack of "items" that he'd be able to give his players starting at the late heroic levels.  now, this kind of confused me, because I couldn't understand why he couldn't just use items that had already been released Pre-E. He and his players kept saying that it wouldn't work, and honestly, they  way they were saying it seemed to imply that they thought I was dumb or something for not understanding what they were talking about. 

The classes that they said would suffer the most would be the Hexblade (Warlock) and Sentinel (Druid).  I looked them up in my copy of Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, and the equipment that they had listed is readily available in Pre-E material.  Maybe it's because I'm still relatively new to D&D, and I've only played a single module that was at Paragon level (Demon Queen's Enclave), but I simply don't see why these classes have suddenly become un-playable now that Wizards isn't going to release any more expanded or supplemental material for them.  

Hey WotC:  Leaving this thread pinned is a total waste of space. Let it die.