Sharrow
Legendary Pubber
- Joined
- Jun 11, 2021
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They were great, though Clerics made with the priest book are generally a lot weaker than the base Cleric - the book should probably have explained that it was intended as a complete replacement for the core Clerics and Druids. It was a good book, but felt almost out of place, like it was a Runequest 3 book.Also several of the completes are actually pretty good: the complete fighter, thief and priest in particular are full of imaginative kits and good advice for running games.
The mage book was uninspired - the kits weren't terribly interesting, so it was mostly about the spells, and really Magic-Users had too few slots to be using niche spells and the core rules' spells covered all the general use spells you'd need.
The Bard book was interesting, but some of the kits were a bit excessive - one gave the Bard as good a spell progression as a Magic-Uuser until 10+ level (and who cares about that in most games?), and as a Bard used the 'rogue' XP progression, that was way too good (and the downside wasn't much, as I recall - worse 'Thief' skill progression I think).
After that we get into the splats that went a bit crazy, like the Elf one.
You could build some seriously unreasonable characters using 2e psionics. Their clairvoyance and travel powers allowed them to short-circuit adventures several levels earlier than the equivalent MU spells (though the spells usually had more raw power). With a GM who had a good grasp of all the powers, and players that weren't power-gamey, it was fine, Otherwise not so much - in particular, if the GM didn't know it well a non-power gamer player could, quite by accident make a cool-sounding character that would turn out to blow up the game down the track. Hardly a problem unique to this book - plenty of games have things that do this (early WW games, I'm looking at you).Complete psionics is a classic. I also recall really enjoying the complete dwarves and halfing books. The elf book is often criticized for being unbalanced, which may be true but there's a lot of cool ideas in there as well.