My Life As A Gamer: Some Arcana Should Remain Unearthed

To borrow a phrase from Tex of the Black Pants Legion, the following is the opinion of an asshole.

Not All Things Are Equal

There is a reason that the Bros, when speaking of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, talk about the three core rulebooks more than anything else: that is where the game is.

The supplements? Some are fine, but--especially after Gary went to Hollywood--that fell off hard as the 1980s rolled on. Aside from the Dragonlance module series, one book is a clear demarcation of where the rot set in.

"Really?"

Yes, really.

What Went Wrong

The core rulebooks present a complete product, a full and feature-complete game. It scaled from Man To Man combat all the way up to mass battles without changing the rules at all. Economics, politics, multi-scale (and interacting-scale) campaign play all going on simultaneously in a Grand Campaign where someone inevitably wins or everyone loses.

If there is anything we can fault Gary for, it is in failing to communicate this to the rest of TSR (including his own children), because it is at the publication of Unearthed Arcana that missteps originally found in the modules--which were originally for Tournament Play only--began to take hold as folkways and thus began the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play.

As I said yesterday: they don't read, they can't parse technical manuals, and they rely on Just So stories and folkways to pass on the Cargo Cult practices.

Get those people into position to publish stuff, and it gets into the product pipeline; this supplement is the first result of their uncorrected errors being put down in print.

The expanded Racial options are there due to first Greyhawk and later the Forgotten Realms, as are the expanded Class options; it is at this point that "D&D Fantasy" took hold and the hobby began to go into an Oroborus cycle by being its own source materials. They are unnecessary, even if some are logical extensions, and they usurp the agency of the players and the authority of the Referee.

However, it is not entirely useless either. Many of the new spells and items are good additions to a campaign, and a lot of them are the sort of spells or items that skilled players would invent.

That mixing of iron and clay would continue with Oriental Adventures, but more and more of the Big Picture part of the game faded away through neglect until by the time of the late 1980s it was presumed to be gone as it was never addressed and the new things presented were ill fits with that part of the game.

The reality is that most of those supplements are superfluous. You won't miss them in a proper campaign, not with ambitious and skilled players adding to the campaign with spells, magic items, monsters, Classes, etc. of their own creation.

So, Asshole, What's Good?

The only one I recommend without reservations is the Fiend Folio. Far too many good monsters, including some now sufficiently iconic to be part of the brand's identity, to leave out for long.

Deities & Demigods is good to have, especially if you have the Cthulhu and Melibonean Mythos chapters, but not necessary. The additional Monster Manuals are luxuries, but not at all necessary; you won't miss not having them.

UA is a buffet; take what (little) works and leave the rest. OA should be re-examined with a critical eye as a lot of what it claims to cover can be done with the core rulebooks.

The Exploration Guides and Manual of the Planes are unfit for purpose and surplus to requirements. Skip them.

I have made my position on Official Settings clear previously. Don't.

TLDR: The rules are the game. The supplements are not the rules. Some are good to have; most are not- this is due to the publisher losing sight of what the game is, to the ever-falling detriment of the game, the brand, the product, and the hobby. The Cargo Cult killed D&D and RPGs, and the current management of Magic-Users knows it. RETVRN!

The videogame versions always do Conventional Play better than anything in tabletop. If that's what you want, go to vidya and don't look back.