Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Reviewed

WorselWorsel writes "The new edition of the seminal Dungeons & Dragons paper-RPG comes out this Friday and d20zines.com has this review. This is the first new edition of D&D since Hasbro acquired Wizards of the Coast. The last edition came out almost two years ago, and this time around the prices of three core books are up by $10 each. Since these are partially incompatible with older 3rd edition books, WotC is printing/making downloadable a short booklet explaining some changes." In addition to being a product review, it's a good overview of what's changed since 3rd edition, and really helps one decide if the changes are important enough to rebuy the core rulebooks.

MSRP vs real price. Free stuff from WoTC

[JosefWells]

True the MSRP of the books is now $29.95 but a quick look at almost all online retailers shows them going for about $20. Walmart.com and abebooks.com have em for around 18 each.

Granted this is the shortest core rules turnaround of all time, it would seem that WoTC is milking the public.. but if you check their website... htt://wizards.com/dnd you sill see that there is just an INSANE ammount of free stuff. Adventures, additional classes, monsters, maps.. just a bunch of stuff. As long as WoTC puts out free quality stuff like that, I'll bite on new rule books.

On the cheap

[SnowDog_2112]

If you're like me, and you know you're going to buy them anyway, pre-order the books from Amazon at a discount, instead of paying retail.

You can even do a little better if you buy all three books and then use the "share the love" feature to invite the rest of your gaming group to buy the books at 10% off the already reduced price.

(Not that I, er, still play D&D or anything.)

As much as I like to support the local game shops, some offers are too nice to pass up.

Re:whoa....this is evil...

[aridhol]

Er...where do you get that idea from? 3.5 is a replacement to 3.0. The shows the differences between the two; you don't need 3.0 in order to use 3.5.

Re:Now thats a term I havent heard in a long time.

[irix]

Real geeks know that this "thac0" thing was a 2E crap term and has no place in "real" (1st and 3rd) DnD. :PM

Real geeks played 1st Edition AD&D know that THAC0 was present then too. They changed the system for 3rd edition.

Re:Now thats a term I havent heard in a long time.

[SnowDog_2112]

You can get even geekier and point out that 3E D&D is not "Advanced" D&D any more (even though it's 3E which would seem to come after 1E and 2E in the AD&D chain of releases). So if the original poster was claiming that THAC0 wasn't part of 1E or 3E D&D, he was probably right -- THAC0 was a part of AD&D.

(Sorry to assume gender up there, but sometimes it's just a safe bet :P )

Re:I NEED to point this out

[Violet Null]

Interesting, but incorrect.

Dungeons and Dragons was published by TSR in 1974. This is the three volume set (Men and Magic, Monsters and Treasure, and the Underworld and Wilderness Adventures).

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons wasn't published until 1977 (Monster Manual), 1978 (Player's Handbook), and 1979 (Dungeon Master's Guide).

So, Dungeons and Dragons existed for at least three years before Advanced Dungeons and Dragons came out.

Sources: here [mistrealm.com], here [acaeum.com], and TSR's list of every product ever [yahoofs.com].

Re:Price Up? Hardly

[Ondo]

I highly doubt that WotC would be taking a loss if they had left the prices alone, anyways.

Nobody else sells a hardcover, full-color RPG book of that length for even $30. Why? Because the printing costs are too high to make a profit. The only reason Wizards can afford to sell them at $30 is because they order a higher volume than other RPG makers. There's no reason to think they wouldn't be taking a loss if they sold them at $20.

No, the price increase is because the bastards know that we'll buy it because we've been hooked on the damn game for many years now and we'll have to upgrade to keep pace.

Upgrade or download the free PDF explaining the changes from the bastards website.