What is it with all these random fantasy role-playing games being pushed on Facebook and YouTube? I have seen three new ones in the last week. It is like everyone is rushing to get their games out as quickly as possible. YouTubers are rushing to cover "the next big thing in fantasy gaming!"
Excuse me.
What?
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/
All right, let's create some Palladium character sheets by hand, for free. While this tutorial is for Palladium Games, specifically Ninjas and Superspies, nothing is stopping you from doing this for D&D 5E, Pathfinder 2, GURPS, or any other game you can imagine. All we need are some free tools, like LibreOffice; grab it from the link above, or if you are on Linux, you probably already have it installed.
Why LibreOffice? Why Linux?
Because we are not supporting the AI ecosystem and are staying away from paid character hosting sites, software packages, and learning to be self-sufficient without spending money or having Microsoft feed our documents into AI models. My characters are my IP and thus mine. Also, I am not feeding into this RAM crisis. I choose not to use AI.
Also, my hand-crafted character sheets come out far better than these pretentious ones you get in the OSR and other games with dungeon maps and far too much clip art tossed all over them. They are simple, to the point, save paper and toner, and I can create custom sections to my liking if a game needs special information.
Download LibreOffice and install it. Then, go to Format->Page Style...
Set your margins to a half-inch, and give yourself a half-inch gutter. This way, we can three-hole punch our character sheets to store them in a binder with dividers. You may not want to know it now, but if you plan to run many characters or track one as they level, you will thank me later.
If you run an adventure, three-hole punch that too, and put the old character sheet in with it when you print a new one. This way, you will have a record of the adventure and the characters who went on it, and how they were at the time. Since you have hard drive space and these are small files, save a new file every time you level, just to watch the progression.
Next, go to Format->Columns and set this to two, and leave all the default values, including autowidth. This will use our paper better. Three columns are sometimes too hard to manage, and I end up with a lot of overflow onto the following line.
Part of me wonders if people need a tutorial like this, but another part of me knows that many just don't know. This is how we used to hack together character sheets in the 1990s, using word processors and dot-matrix printers, doing our own layouts and working magic with the features of the programs we had.
If you want an actual throwback, 1990s experience, doing your character sheets this way (or by hand) is the way to go. This is how we did them, and they always came out so clean, with plenty of room for notes and other scribbles. Did a value change? Cross it out, pencil in the new number, fix it later, and print a new sheet when you level up.
Remember to shred and recycle! But, seriously, doing my character sheets this way wastes a lot less paper than printing out a 16-page monstrosity with Hero Lab. One double-sided sheet can hold a lot of information when done this way. Of course, one sheet done by hand is the most waste-reducing way to make a character sheet, since you can use it until the holes wear through the paper. These sheets can do the same, as long as you pencil in new SDC and other changing values. I could do empty tables for "fill in by hand" parts, like for gear and open skill slots, and that is probably a smart improvement I can make to enhance reusability.
But it is my choice to make them! In many sheets and programs, you get no choice. This way, I get exactly what I want, and I can engineer re-use into the sheets if I feel I am wasting paper. I could go the whole way and make the entire sheet rigged for re-use, with a fill-in-the-blank box for everything.
For Ninjas and Superspies, I laid my first page out like above. The stats have tab stops, so I can create "columns" for the value and then the modifier. If a character has more than one martial art, copy and paste the Primary Form section for a new one. I made one since that is enough for now.
Skills and secondary skills will expand! Leave a lot of room at the bottom of a column for these expanding lists. In general, open lists will appear at the bottom of your page. Also, use the Insert -> More Breaks -> Insert Column Break command to stick a section at the top of a column, as I did for the weapon proficiencies. This way, they won't keep backing up into the skill lists.
Palladium has a lot of weapon modifiers that can add up for different weapons, so I split out the "to strike" modifiers for different weapon categories and include any bonuses from PP.
My second sheet has gear and, on the right, a list of the characteristics of different attacks. I have equipment back here, cyber implants, and a section for the training programs I selected during character generation, including the colleges the character attended and the time spent there. Cover is not on the official character sheet, but it improves as you level, so it needs its own section. Background is another fun section that covers family and other personal details. Remember to total your equipment weight!
If you need to set tab stops, you can do that by putting the cursor at the first spot in the document, choosing Format->Paragraph, and choosing the Tabs tab. Type in 0.5, press New, and then add them like that. I did mine every half inch.
If you want to get fancy, you can insert tables, too, and be very organized! I do everything with tab stops, but to each their own. If you like tables, go for it, and your sheets will begin to look very fancy. For games like Pathfinder 2, this may be a lifesaver feature. I will need to adjust column widths, and that is just a matter of dragging them over. Doing it this way gives me higher reusability, as previously discussed.
I like these hand-made character sheets a lot. They are more work, but this is a small trade-off for a sheet that grows as you fill it in, and you can create custom sections for whatever you want on the character. I can also copy & paste out of my PDFs into these, saving me a little work typing. If I need an entire spell description, I can create a sheet for it and paste that right onto the character's grimoire. If a character has an animal companion, I can make a place for their stats on the sheet.
If I want an adventure log, I can create a spot on the next sheet and list the adventure, the location, people involved, a summary of what happened, the XP gained, and other information.
Also, given the way you create characters in Palladium Games, you are copying and pasting a list of skills and modifiers into the sheet, making a few choices, and moving on to the next training package. For my character, I just added all the skills first with their modifiers, sorted the list, and removed the lowest-modified duplicates. Select a bunch of rows of text, and use Tools->Sort to sort that list so you can keep your skill and ability lists alphabetized for easier reference during play.
Would I love a Palladium software package and character designer? Yes, I would, and I know about the spreadsheet designers and have those for fantasy. But even those can't be as fine-tuned as this style of sheet, which is very personalized, and I can optimize the numbers I need and put them all in easy-to-read sections. The availability and quality of the character sheets I can find for the game do not limit the amount of fun I can have with it.
And my DIY sheets, while taking a little longer to set up, are fully customizable and quick to use during play. Are they fancy? No. Are they retro, and look like something we would do back in the 1990s with a 486 and a dot-matrix tractor-feed printer? Oh, yes! We did this for Spacemaster (with WordPerfect), and those sheets worked very well. All the same skills were used, including columns, bolded titles, and tab stops.
Now I don't need character creation software; I can do this myself on Linux. I am not feeding into the AI nightmare, and as a gamer, I can make the conscious choice not to feed into the AI bubble madness. I have the freedom to make that choice as a consumer.
Also, this throwback, 1990s-style word-processor sheet makes me happy.
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| Palladium Fantasy Gamemaster's Pack, page 50 |
So I was looking through the pregenerated characters in the Palladium Fantasy Gamemaster's Pack, and I saw a 4th-level ranger with ...five melee attacks? And a rate of fire of five with his longbow?
Then a sense of panic hit me. Five? Five! Where are they getting five?!
Am I getting all the attacks I should be getting?
This is critical in any Palladium game, and this is one thing D&D 3.0 stole from the system: the notion of your attacks per turn going up, and your damage naturally increasing as you level. Granted, in Palladium, attacks can be traded for defense, so there is a balance to the mechanic, where in D&D 3.x, they are just attacks. Wizards did a lousy job at implementing the concept they borrowed, again.
So, where do these attacks come from? Let's look at Palladium Fantasy.
The first two are easy: Hand-to-Hand Combat Expert starts with two attacks per round.
The next one is also easy. Since this character is 4th level, we look up the chart, record the bonuses, and see that at 4th level we get "one additional attack per melee round."
That is three of the five accounted for. Where do these two other attacks come from? We have an explanation on the forums:
https://palladiumbooks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=170392
Later revisions of the rules and game introduced the rule "2 attacks for living," which means that without any melee combat skills, you get two attacks, and these will stack on top of the HTH combat styles in the game. This was present even in some of the older books in the Palladium fantasy line, especially in NPCs and pregenerated characters.
The Palladium Fantasy RPG book needs updating, as do many of the other books in the line.
So this is our five melee attacks, and where they come from:
For ranged, this is where they come from:
That HTH Expert extra attack at level 4 DOES apply to missile weapon fire! This may seem surprising, but multiple sources confirm it, and it aligns with the pregens.
And I have sources on the Palladium forums:
This is a question that Google's AI gave me both answers for; it insisted the wrong answer was correct, said I was dead wrong, and after I found the official clarifications, it went back on its original answer and admitted I was right. AI can be dead wrong and insist it is 100% right, trying to provide facts and proof, when it is clearly NOT.
AI is a very persuasive liar when it is dead wrong.
This is why we need a human soul in any decision-making process.
And why we need skeptics and those who challenge us.
Be very, very, very careful and never trust AI! It is a known liar in some cases, will lie to prove itself correct, and bases its claims on incorrect sources, trying to use this as justification for the truth. Good luck playing with an AI DM, everybody over there in D&D land. Your character will die because the AI DM goes stupid on you and tries to use someone's incorrect rule interpretation on some forum somewhere as the official rule.
Also, they put a lot of work into making these AI systems sound super confident, which also helps sell the lie and justifies the billions of dollars they are pouring into it all.
In Rifts Ultimate Edition, which is the master rules update for all Palladium games from 2017 onward, the HTH tables were updated to the correct "4 attacks per melee round" value, and the unwritten "2 attacks for living" rule was done away with.
Also, the language for the level 4 bonus in HTH Combat Expert was changed in Rifts Ultimate. In Palladium Fantasy, it is:
In Rifts Ultimate, it is:
This makes it clear that it is an "attack/action" per melee round, which DOES include missile weapon fire. Missile weapons fire as many times as the character has melee attacks, but some skills do have their own rate of fire rules that these HTH attack bonuses do modify.
So, by Rifts Ultimate, our melee attacks are:
And for our ranged attacks, by Rifts Ultimate, this is unchanged:
As far as I am concerned, Rifts Ultimate is the master Palladium rules update, and it should be used with all Palladium games, including Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas & Superspies, Palladium Fantasy, and every other game.
I created a character for my throwback 1980s Palladium Ninjas and Superspies game last night, and there it is. That incredible feeling came right back to me. This is a character I want to play. Wow, what a fantastic experience, and this is a character with depth, real meat, and substance. When I am done, the character feels substantive, authentic, and seriously cool.
You must be able to follow instructions! Most modern players do not have the patience for this process and will never be able to figure it out, but that 'speed bump' is not gatekeeping; it is a skill test to see if you are worthy of putting in the time and attention the game demands. If you can't get past character creation, other games are going to be better for you.
This was true of games like Advanced Squad Leader in the 1980s; the rules were a certain way, creating a natural barrier, so more casual players would play other games, while players who appreciated the level of detail the game delivers would stay. This creates a filtering system so people who want to put in the time will stay, and those better suited for casual games will go elsewhere.
And this is not bad design; it is a feature. Those people on gaming YouTube saying "it is common wisdom this is a bad design" have no idea what they are talking about. They just want to sound smart and push everyone into casual games so they can get on the monetization gravy train. This is also why the First and Second Editions of AD&D (OSRIC or For Gold & Glory) are better for me than BX or BECMI.
I will take devoted, attentive, and patient players over the casual crowd any day. It is the difference between home cooking and fast food. While fast food is great every once in a while, it never satisfies me, nor is it worth going out of my way to eat. Meals made with care and time are always better, and the people who share that love are the ones I can relate to and speak to about food. The same goes for gaming; simple, casual, easy games feel pointless to me.
That is not to say the system could be more organized. Keep listing the skills and their modifiers that your training packages provide. In the end, sort both the primary and secondary lists, go skill by skill in the book, and write down your base percentage (plus the education bonus for primaries) and the per-level bonus. Some skills also have a negative modifier when chosen as a secondary, so secondary skills are better for no-percentage physical skills.
I create my characters in a LibreOffice document in double-column format, with fixed tabs, and type all the values by hand. Who needs a silly character sheet? Real players use LibreOffice and Linux for their character sheets. If you know how to create columns and tab stops every half inch, you have everything you need. You will never be taken advantage of by a paid online character storage site or Windows and its AI reading your documents ever again.
I even prefer this method to many "crafted" character sheets that are too fancy or take up too much space. At least here I can set a half-inch gutter margin and three-hole punch the character sheet for binder storage. LibreOffice character sheets are the way to go these days, and you will get a greater sense of DIY attachment and accomplishment once you create a sheet that is better for you than what others can provide.
Once you create one character, strip it down and use it as a blank template for others. There is your blank character sheet, and you can do a better job of organizing things yourself. Make sure to use LibreOffice's "sort" feature (Tools->Sort) when you select a list of skills so you can alphabetize them quickly.
This works very well for me, and I can fit an entire character on a single double-sided page. Also, note that I listed the skills as a base percentage plus X%/level, so if the character levels up past level one, I will not need to go back to the book and find all these "per level" modifiers again.
This also works for any Palladium game, and you can even export to PDF or text to import into a VTT. It sounds primitive and like a lot of work, and while it is more work, I feel an in-line two-column character sheet that I design is superior to most anything I could find online. For one, I have infinite space, plenty of room, and I can create custom sections for things that I want the campaign to focus on.
You will get double skills in character creation, and only the highest level applies. Also note that the character's education bonus (if they have one) is added to all primary skills, and not the secondaries! Some skills will modify other skills, so take note of that.
And do those physical skills early, so they modify your stats and SDC.
Also note, this is an old-school game. If your character is missing a skill, you can either wait until the OCC says you get a new one or you can figure out a way to get it in-game. Let's say I want my agent to get a "combat motorcycle driving skill" and they don't have it, or I forgot to give it to them.
Your first option is to swap an unused skill for that one, but be careful with physical skills, since they modify stats! Another option is to wait for the OCC to grant you a skill pick.
The third option is to figure out how long it would take to get that skill through a training course, if they can take it, who they would take it from, and how much in-game time it would take to attend classes. Three months for a secondary and six months for a primary sounds right, and you are trading time for advancement. If the skill is more in-depth, this time may be 2 to 4 years in fields like medicine, and it will take place over a more extended period.
You are trading time away from adventuring and adding time to the character's age in exchange for that advancement, so it works out. If you wanted to start with this skill, add the time to the character's age and give it to them. You are trading lifespan for a skill that is more than fair.
Also, I added a few sections to this character sheet that the "official" one lacks. I created a background section for the character's background and family, including the university they attended and when they graduated. I made a training programs section to list the packages I took during character creation. I added a date of birth. I made a section for their cover that can also expand if contacts or other special notes are needed. I listed all their martial arts moves and abilities. I made a section that lists the strike modifiers for different weapons and attacks.
The combination of the time it took to create the character, craft the sheet, and go through the selections and picks made me excited to play. I don't get this feeling with other games, and games that are much simpler than this. This character means something, and I get that "excited to play" feeling that I do not with other games.
Fantasy characters done this way are likely just as good, and clearly a step above anything 5E gives me.
We have MDC in this world today. Once you are talking 120mm APFSDSDU rounds fired from M-1 tanks, you are in the realm of 2025 MDC weapons, and the effects blow turrets straight off enemy tanks, sending them hundreds of feet into the air. We see these things every day in videos from the war.
Getting rid of MDC is running back into the safety of the game designer's arms, begging for them to balance the game for you, and protect your character from one-shot kills for "fairness."
We are talking highly speculative science fiction here in a world gone mad. Parts of this world are already here, especially when you are talking about modern weaponry that can vaporize an entire ship or building in one hit. We see this almost every day on the news, and yet, we still pray for peace.
You can't remove the MDC in Rifts without also causing another problem. You will break the fundamental conflict in the game. MDC is not just a game mechanic; it is a part of the core conflict in the setting. Remove MDC, and you are removing the best part of the game.
Take the Coalition, the mostly bad guy, but also possibly good guy, favorite punching bags of the setting. In my campaign, the coalition's cities are strictly SDC settings, and even the police are rolling around in SDC armor, carrying SDC guns, with an "inside the megolpolis" vibe that's more like the pre-ruin world and how it used to be.
MDC quick reaction forces are always on the ready and can be called in at any time; all the Coalition Police need to do is make a call, and the flying suits and skelebots start rushing in. The Coalition is one of the largest users of MDC arms and armor, but there is a deeper philosophical issue at play here.
If the goal of the Coalition is to retake Earth and make things "like they were," then the citizenry should be able to live in a world "like it all was." The police use regular SDC guns and armor because, well, they could be stolen, but the reality they wish to create is one of normalcy, not of the MDC overlords coming in, acting like gods, and demanding fealty and servitude.
This is especially true when superheroes, fantasy monsters, and aliens can walk into this world and be instantly converted to MDC overlords, get drunk with power, and fall to madness. The MDC of the rifts is like booze, and you could imagine a group of "good guy" superheroes coming into the world of Rifts, getting drunk with power, and all of them turning into MDC demons.
Just because they were good guys in their world does not mean they will remain so in Rifts.
The alignment system and the ability to make alignment changes are core to the experience of playing any Palladium game. This is how the "good knight" falls to evil and dons the black plate mail.
Imagine the X-Men beginning to go mad with power, growing demonic horns, wings, and hooves, their skin slowly turning red, and the wickedness they begin to embrace as the raw power of MDC, magic, and super psionics corrupts their souls, and actual demons show up to smile and offer them more. Some of them realize what is happening and try to turn the tide and warn others, but it is already too late. They are sacrificed so the demons can further corrupt the rest.
Remove MDC, and you are taking the forbidden fruit away.
This is a story that can only be told in Rifts. It is an old-school game; if I want to instantly drop a character modification on a character, like a pair of demon wings, I can. In 5E? Forget it, you are centrally planned all the way to level 20, and that would break the game. People would want it to take a feat slot and limit the wings' flight. Don't laugh, I have seen this in so many race supplements for 5E, it is not funny. Flight breaks 5E in most cases. In Rifts, I can go there and do that without worrying about what game designers will think of me.
The story of the corrupted superheroes is a great tale to tell.
This is the core conflict in Rifts.
Power corrupts.
The MDC conversion puts a massive strain on the human soul, and it is still alien and abnormal to the world. MDC technology lacks a soul; it is merely a tool. But a Coalition that recognizes that "MDC everywhere" is a danger to what it needs to keep existing, families, a semblance of everyday life, children being born and growing up in safe environments, and soldiers fighting for their precious SDC enclave where they can feel normal, that is what "saving humanity" is all about.
How can an ex-soldier raise a family if they have to worry about punks with MDC laser pistols shooting up neighborhoods, or MDC police forces fighting back, and those stray shots flying through the walls of dozens of houses? If the world they fight for is supposed to be normal, then the interiors of these cities will be kept as normal as possible. It highlights the "fake nature" of reality, since everyone knows better. Still, this group depends on millions of people going about a typical day in schools, factories, service jobs, healthcare, and other professions.
Again, if an MDC user of magic teleports in, the MDC quick reaction forces are on a hair trigger, but the life this group needs to create is one of normalcy. And yes, being in the Coalition Police and only having SDC armor and weapons is a terrible job when an MDC something shows up, but that is life. It isn't always a perfect job in this world, and you need to duck and call for reinforcements since your partner was just vaporized.
Remove MDC, and there is little reason to play Rifts other than as "just another science fiction IP," which it is not.
The MDC versus SDC mechanic is a core conflict in the game, highlighting the struggle between outsiders finding a home here and those who want to preserve the way things were. And that, my friends, is a very topical and current conflict to explore.
Y&T was a great 80s metal band. Then, their label forced them to make cheesy pop-rock music. Then, the band died. Longtime fans felt they sold out. The new fans never showed up after the original MTV video went into high rotation, and then everyone dumped them. They could never return to their deeper cuts, and they were stuck in limbo until grunge killed the genre.
So what do they have to do with Traveller 5E?
https://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/threads/traveller-5e.126195/
I see people saying, "If Traveller wants to survive, it needs to attract a younger audience." Yes, the Traveller players are getting older, but this new audience is not interested in the current Traveller. The universe is not engaging with them, and a new set of rules won't make it any more appealing. If it were, they would be playing it.
So next year we are getting Traveller 5E, which is a terrible name since we already have Traveller 5.
But repackaging the current Traveller universe is not as compelling to the players they are trying to attract. They will want dragonborn, tieflings, animorph races, fae creatures, talking plants, robot people, dark elves, puppets, space elves, and all sorts of cute and cool things running around in space.
Frankly, Starfinder 2E is the better game for them, and it is not even close. What the younger players want from science fiction is not what Traveller will give them. Starfinder is the better game, with better player options, and it plays perfectly to its audience and knows what it is.
Starfinder also feels more relevant to today's mood and feeling, and it feels more like a game for young players than Traveller in a 5E wrapper will ever be. Starfinder is an exciting, engaging universe that feels fresh and is begging to be explored and used for adventures. Traveller has the best-established universe in science fiction, but if it hasn't already attracted these players, a change in rules won't do much good.
The above is an excellent video on the Y&T band and a recounting of the events around this label-forced mistake that ended a great run and wonderful music. Please like and subscribe, and watch it all the way through. Great music commentary is very cool to see, and I support thoughtful, engaging commentary.
But it is an example of trying to be what you are not.
And trying to appeal to new fans who won't be there for you in the long run.
5E is not a universal solution to every problem with marketing and aging audiences. Companies that feel 5E is the answer to every issue will alienate their core fans, and the new fans they thought would be there will go right back to their Baldur's Gate 3 adventures and cartoony player options they are comfortable with. But if younger players like these things and it lets them express themselves fully, that is cool, too. Having fun is what gaming is about.
We are clearly in late-stage 5E, where every company is rushing to get its game on the platform. I fear the announcements of Runequest 5E, Rolemaster 5E, Tunnels & Trolls 5E, Call of Cthulhu 5E, Twilight: 2000 5E, Savage Worlds 5E, Paranoia 5E, Lamentations of the Flame Princess 5E, OSE 5E, and who knows what else. The modern audience will save us all, right?
Tell that to the band.
I get it, Traveller's audience is getting older. Tell that to every '80s band when grunge came out, and the kids walked away. There are times when there is not much you can do but try to please your core audience. The answer is not in rebranding; the answer is always in creating something new that speaks to the next generation.
You don't need to wrap Traveller with 5E.
You need to do what Starfinder did, and build a new universe that appeals to younger players. The best they can do is fork the Traveller universe and fill it full of neon-colored fantasy races. I know, it sounds like heresy, but you need to play to what your audience wants.
Starfinder 2E wins this fight before it even begins.
During the life of AD&D 2E, they released these books in the "Complete" line, which introduced "kits" for the various classes, allowing you to flavor your class along a particular theme, such as a pirate, swashbuckler, barbarian, or gladiator. This was the birth of the subclass, and also a lot of the "spin-off" classes, such as the barbarian in later editions.
The kits were a small collection of proficiencies, suggested gear, and minor bonuses for a particular character type, and they were cool and fun. They were not that complex or in-depth, and they did not have leveled bonuses or ability progression. All they were was a set of modifiers, kit abilities, limitations, and other modifications.
Subclasses that become treed progression paths and that load new abilities on you every few levels are far too much overkill for a fantasy game. In the end, a barbarian should be a "fighter kit" and not its own class, and the barbarian with subclasses feels like going into far too much depth for a game that is supposed to be simple and straightforward.
Subclasses these days feel too overdone, and classes that should be subclasses (barbarian) end up being their own class. There is something to be said for "keeping all fighters under fighter," using simple kits to flavor the fighter, and keeping the core class identity strong. We end up with a bloated game that is not easy anymore, and classes that go too in-depth with subclass progression, and the complexity shoots out of the roof.
I could say even Old School Essentials suffers from the "too many specific classes" problem, too, along with many OSR games that just keep adding and adding without putting a foot down to keep the game's design clean, streamlined, simple, and uncluttered.
Kits are "class flavors," and they work well that way, and help us differentiate one fight from another. Yes, there can be more generic fighters, but gladiators are a special flavor of fighter; they are still fighters at heart and should not stray too far from the core fighter concepts and core abilities.
And they are optional. Can you be a "gladiator" without them, just using the core book? Yes, pick a fighter and say you are. Do these add flavor? Yes.
These books work perfectly with For Gold & Glory, the 2E retro-clone that stands out as a perfect, community-supported, throwback 2E set of rules with one of the most generous redistribution policies I have seen in the OSR. One of the things I love about AD&D 2E is that TSR positioned the game as a competitor to GURPS 3E in the late 1990s, and they made an honest attempt to be "everything generic fantasy" by splitting out the D&D, setting-specific, and generic fantasy parts in distinct lines of books. This wasn't TSR "dividing the market" more than it was "making sure the core line of books could be used with any specific setting." The "Complete" line of books could be used with the Forgotten Realms just as well as they could with Dark Sun.
Contrast that with today, we get new 5.5E Forgotten Realms books with subclass options that everyone will backport into every setting anyway, and all of a sudden, everything is a mixed-up mess in a stewpot. Today's organization of books and setting guides is one long run-on mess of content.
I love the organization of the product lines in AD&D 2E. It makes sense to me: I can focus on a specific setting, have the rules-sourcebooks that support it, and a core of the 2E rules forming the foundation. The idea that TSR published too many campaign settings is a simplification; they should have just focused on the Realms and Dark Sun, possibly combining Birthright and Greyhawk, and the Realms and Spelljammer.
Then again, Dark Sun never really had a great direction in 2E, and the setting feels like the lore ran dry, and nothing interesting was happening after the dragon kings were deposed.
Ravenloft should have been expanded to a whole world to take on Vampire: The Masquerade, along with a LARP option. This is where they lost a lot of ground in fantasy role-playing in the 1990s. Vampire and Magic: The Gathering were the death of D&D.
The Complete books work perfectly with FG&G, and if you want a source of "subclass-lite" kits for your game, check these out. I like this design theory; they aren't writing hundreds of pages of new classes, and the kits aren't all that complicated. They serve as "flavoring" for a class that can seem a bit dry and dull, turning it into something unique, special, and fitting its purpose in the world.
And you are not supposed to use everything in every Complete book. If you have a gladiator-themed game, just use that with the core rules, and don't try to use everything in every book. Again, the design theory feels like GURPS: you don't use it all at once; just stick with the core rules and drop in the bits you need. Again, this is unlike 5E these days, where our character creation tools bloat and die with too many options. I have had new players get scared off by those bloated tools in my 5E game, and I dislike them.
If you play a lot of 2E and are looking for optional expansions for FG&G, check this line out. These are worthy.
