Hero Builder's Guidebook, Part 1

Welcome to December! This is the last month of the year, obviously, so once I'm done with these products, that will be everything that WotC did for 3rd edition D&D in the year 2000. Not a bad collection of stuff, I'd say. There aren't a lot of products this month, either; there's a Dragon magazine, a Polyhedron, and the Hero Builder's Guidebook. There were two other things that I don't have physical copies of: Caves of Shadow, which looks like something that goes along with the D&D Adventure Game Box Set, and The Fright at Tristor, an RPGA module for Living Greyhawk. I couldn't afford to get them just yet, so they'll have to wait until after Christmas for me to get physical copies.

In the meantime, though, we have this lovely tome. Now, I've seen mixed reviews of it. Veteran players considered it pretty worthless for the most part, while beginners thought it was great. Let's take a look and see which side is right, or if it falls somewhere in between.

The book isn't broken down into chapters; there are six sections to the book plus an appendix. So, I'll cover the first couple of sections today. We begin with, as always, an Introduction. This sells the appeal of the book, which is to assist in character design and add additional stuff to each step of the process to flesh out the character from the start. This is practically anathema to old-school gamers, who believed that all of that stuff should be done through gameplay. However, in the more modern story-telling type of game where the character is an extension of the player themselves, characters tend to be less fragile and subject to horrible deaths. I'll leave it to others to decide if that's the better way or not.

The first section is on ability scores; next is choosing your race and class. This is the longest section of the book, being about 30 pages long in a 64-page book. Then there's a section on creating your personal history, as well as determining your alignment. Finally, there's 'planning your future career', which involves deciding ahead of time what feats, skills and prestige classes your character will be earning as they advance in levels. This, I think, radically changes play styles from the old-school way. Back then, you just advanced in levels to get better at what you were doing, gained new spells if you were a caster, found whatever magic items your DM happened to place in your path, and that was about it. There was no planning beyond 'survive this adventure'. Now, characters have their lives planned out from the very beginning like they're planning out their own children's career path at the age of two.

Lastly, there's an appendix full of names. This, according to some people, is the most valuable part of the entire book. If you struggle with names, this will be a big help. Then we get the obligatory 'How to Use This Book' section, which really just says 'this book is cool, so use it when creating your character'. Not very helpful, but there wasn't much else they could say.

Alright, let's get to the Ability Scores. We get a lesson on how the Bell curve works; if you're rolling 3d6 for each ability score, you're going to average 10.5 with your rolls. The book suggests that 3d6 in order was the standard for previous editions of the game, and people decided to do it differently to make their characters better. This edition will now standardize the most common method, which is 4d6 and drop the lowest, arrange as desired. Here's the thing, though: That method goes all the way back to the original Dungeon Master's Guide in 1979; it was Method I of 'rolling ability scores'. And it was pretty much the standard for 2nd edition, too. So they're being a bit dishonest here.

Anyway, 4d6 is the standard dice-rolling method for 3rd edition. And they have a 'hopeless' rule for characters with really low scores (nothing over 13) or total modifiers of 0 or less. In that case, you're allowed to start again if you want. But you don't have to, of course. There's a sidebar that suggests that if you roll a 3 for one of your stats, play a half-orc and assign that 3 to Intelligence, since that's the lowest score allowable for any character, and the half-orc's -2 penalty is nullified. Sure, that works.

There's some encouragement on playing characters with one or more low scores, using Raistlin from Dragonlance as the primary example of this. The tests he underwent as an apprentice shattered his body and made him weak and sickly. However, if you actually look at his character sheet from the earliest Dragonlance adventures, you'll find that his Constitution score was...10. Not 6, like they are hinting at, but an average 10. That's only two points lower than Tanis and Goldmoon, by the way. So it's really not that great of an example. Of course, I don't know too many of TSR's novel characters who actually did have low ability scores, so I guess Raistlin is as close as they're going to get.

There's a section on making sure you don't mingle your own personality too much with the character; you're supposed to be playing someone else, not an avatar of yourself (unless your DM is actually doing that kind of game, which would be pretty awesome). So, think of how the character would react in a situation based on their race, class, and even sex. It might be different from how you would act yourself, but that's totally fine. Encouraged, even. Dare to be different.

So, that's the opening part of the book. The next section is the huge one on races and classes, so I'll do that tomorrow, then finish the rest of the book after that. In the meantime, get ready for winter. It's going to be a nasty one, or so I've heard. Stay warm, my friends.