Your favorite 3.5 supplements

[AquilaRift]

As far as I can tell, there are no universally acknowledged "bests" (although there are a number of definite "worsts"). The answers differ widely depending on individual preferences and which side of the DM screen you're on.
So I'm turning the question over to Playground opinion. Which D&D books (outside of core) are consistently most useful at your table?

[Dayaz]

spell compenduim

complete adventurer and complete warrior see a lot of time at my table

[eggs]

Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium. Both for adding a huge amount of sheer content. The prior for giving most of the classes in the game more actions to choose from; the latter for giving characters cool stuff to do, even when their classes aren't delivering.

[Alienist]

I think this is a really deep question.

The short, executive summary is that with 3.5 we hardly ever used any rulebooks. The primary uses in game were looking up spells. There were loads of post-game arguments though, generally between the players, because the DMs lacked the system mastery to serve as a proper moderator.

The 'interesting' thing with 3.5 is that everything is designed as an exception to the rule. And this means that the rules for something can be very spread out over a large number of sourcebooks, each slightly incompatible with the others. And when you do that it gets to be a mess.

Examples of difficult things:
Mixing touch spells and touch abilities in hand to hand combat.
Figuring out which feats (outside of a very small number that are specifically given the thumbs-up) work with Eldritch Blast.

Just to spread the love around (as an example of how breaking rules up and spreading them around can cause confusion), here's a perfect example from 4th edition: a fighter's mark goes away after one round... what about other people's marks? Do they go away after one round? (See p91 and p76) I believe that if you were (for instance) reading through the PHB from cover to cover for the first time, that it would be really easy to get marks for other classes wrong, because you read the section for fighters in depth, and then when you get to it in other sections you think "I know this" and keep moving.
Or maybe you skip over the sentences buried deep inside other paragraphs were it mentions the Fighter's and Paladin's marks expiring if not kept up, and your first encounter with the marked condition is on p277, and you don't realise that the Fighter and Pally both have special caveats attached to their marking...

Funnily enough, in 4th edition you don't seem to get people arguing that because of p277 their mark should be permanent. Whereas that is the sort of rules-jujitsu I see all the time in 3.5

With that as a clear exception that proves the rule, apart from marking with most of 4th edition, I think they tried to go in a different direction. There are very few 'edge cases', and as a general rule, rules are never repeated (essentials breaks that of course, so YMMV).

Now, surprisingly, this doesn't actually make it any easier to play with the 'correct' rules, because if you read the rule for charging or opportunity attacks or double move or marking (or anything really) wrong the first time, you might always play it wrong because you're never going to encounter it ever again.

So when I see the 5th edition play test stuff, where rules are spread out all over the place, I get nervous. But there doesn't seem to be any (or not much) duplication, which I take as a (somewhat) encouraging sign.

The discouraging sign though is that Wizards are once again the top dog. A perfect example of this is that in 5th edition nobody ever learns anything outside of the abstract mechanism of levelling up (and it looks like there are some 'dead levels' for some classes, no prizes for guessing which ones). However, not only does the Wizard never have any dead levels, he can also increase his class features (i.e. spell list) by learning outside of the levelling up mechanism.

So lets say that your fighter runs into a cool NPC with a different 'school' of tricks. Can you learn anything from him? Nope. What about when you level up? Nope. You're on a one track roller coaster from level 1.

[molten_dragon]

I have just about every official 3.5 book ever written (minus a few of the campaign-setting specific ones). I've been playing roughly once a week since 3.5 came out. During that time some books get used a lot, some hardly ever. It would be nearly impossible to rank them in order of usefulness, so I'm putting them into rough groupings of how often they get used.

Books that get used (almost) every game
Player's Handbook
Monster Manual
Dungeon Master's Guide
Spell Compendium
Magic Item Compendium
Tome of Battle
Unearthed Arcana

Books that get used frequently
Complete Adventurer
Complete Arcane
Complete Champion
Complete Divine
Complete Mage
Complete Scoundrel
Complete Warrior
Heroes of Horror
Libris Mortis
Monster manual 3
Player's Handbook 2
Races of Stone
Races of the Dragon

Books that get used infrequently
Book of Exalted Deeds
Book of Vile Darkness
Complete Psionic
Draconomicon
Dungeon Master's Guide 2
Dungeonscape
Expanded Psionics Handbook
Frostburn
Heroes of Battle
Monster Manual 4
Monster Manual 5
Races of the Wild
Races of Destiny
Sandstorm
Stormwrack

Books that (almost) never get used
Cityscape
Dragon magic
Fiendish Codex 2
Lords of Madness
Magic of Incarnum
Planar Handbook
Rules Compendium
Tome of Magic
Weapons of Legacy

Books that we have literally never used for a single thing ever
Drow of the underdark
Exemplars of Evil
Fiendish Codex 1

[Hiro Protagonest]

Spell Compendium, Magic Item Compendium, the online System Reference Document (or just Expanded Psionics Handbook, Epic Level Handbook, Deities and Demigods, and Unearthed Arcana, if you prefer, the psionics and UA seeing the most use), Tome of Battle. Less good stuff, but still some gems in each: Complete Champion, Complete Mage, Dragon Magazine Compendium, Tome of Magic, Magic of Incarnum, Dungeonscape, the Champions of Valor web enhancement (it's free to download). One I don't have, but if I liked 3.5 more, would probably get: Dragon Magic.

[SaintRidley]

I'd say the first Fiendish Codex and Lords of Madness are my absolute favorites. So much packed into those. Very fun just to flip through.

[rexreg]

The Spell Compendium is great
we have found the Rules Compendium can speed up gameplay (i break from most other here in this)
I love both Fiendish Codices; I am also a huge Planescape fan
it is not WoTC, but Feats by AEG games

[Mithril Leaf]

Planar Handbook and Fiend Folio are favorites of mine, although not the most commonly used. As far as third party stuff, I love Hyperconcious.

[eggs]

it is not WoTC, but Feats by AEG games
Good call! That's a really fun book. It has just enough wonky stuff in it that I don't like letting it in without oversight, but it definitely falls into the SpC/MIC category of "books with a ton of character options for basically everyone."

[Roguenewb]

I use the completes all the time, particularly Mage, Arcane and Champion. I often send people to the other 5 completes when I'm tasked with helping build their characters.

Tome of Battle is key. There are a lot of melee types that I don't use with this book, if it doesn't match the flavor of the three base classes, but if the character has even a vague relationship with the flavor of Disciplined Divine Tank, Diligent Studier of Martial Arts Esoterica, or Lover of Complex Fighting, then I go right to ToB, so that my martial character can play too!

Dungeonscape, the ACFs are almost all good, and it has my favorite class in 3.5, the Factotum.

Elder Evils when I'm DMing, I like that kind of story, and Elder Evils has some great material for it.

Lords of Madness/Drow of the Underdark/Libris Mortis/The rest of this series of books on creature types. It allows me to build far more realistic bad guys and plots and schemes for those character types.

[Aegis013]

Tome of Battle.

[Tvtyrant]

Monstrology/Ecology: Dungeonscape, Lords of Madness, Fiendish Codex

Subsystems: Magic of Incarnum, Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic.

Settings: Eberron Campaign Setting, Magic of Eberron, Lost Empires of Faerun.

[Kazyan]

Magic of Incarnum. Its crunch is both interesting and well-designed, and though the fluff is kind of a mess, it's at least engaging.

[Pyromancer999]

*snip*

With the Core Books, Tome of Battle, and Races of the Dragon being the only exceptions, this list is completely inaccurate for almost every 3.5e game I've ever played.

[Techsmart]

Other than the base 3 (PHB, DMG, MM1), the next most commonly used is probably complete adventurer. I has my favorite class in it (Scout), and about half of the prestige classes in it were at least a final goal of many builds around my table. We use it all the time.

Next would probably be Unearthed Arcana. Usually, it's more of a quick reference than something used consistently, but its influence is noticeable in many builds.

Most other books are situational.

[killianh]

Spell, Magic Item, and Rules compendiums are the most used at my table.

Player-wise my group loves the two Tomes.

As a DM I always reach for the enemy focus books any time I introduce a type of enemy into the game (FF 1&2, LM LoM and the like) I love the background info.

As for choosing an overall "best" I would say MiC.

[Bloodgruve]

Spell Compendium first and foremost
PHB II
I really like the other systems in ToB, ToM(Binder) and Incarnum.
All the Eberron books if they are considered supplements ;).

Blood~

[Daftendirekt]

The Spell and Magic Item Compendiums for their sheer usefulness.

Races of the Wild because I loves me some elves, halflings, and raptorans and all their accompanying fluff and gear.

Lost Empires of Faerûn, also for lovely fluff and crunch.

Sandstorm because I'd love to play in a desert game one day... one where Create Water and Endure Elements were not allowed, so as to not trivialize all the dangers of a desert with an orison and a 1st level spell. :smallmad:

Dungeonscape for the Factotum, the dungeoncrasher, wand chambers, and the finder's chalk/finder's glass.

Races of Stone for the Whisper Gnome, the most badass race around.

[Igneel]

If it has anything to do with dragons, even if it just has spells used by/against/etc dragons, I typically use it. So of course that means at minimum Draconomicon, Races of the Dragon, Dragon Magic, Dragons of Faerun, Dragons of Eberron, Dragons of Kyrnn, whatever other books with additional dragon races (MM's, Sandstorm, etc) are key in my mania as a dragon-lover. Then of course there's Core, Completes, Races, and I started taking peeks at the Tomes.

[Uhtred]

Flavor-wise I have fallen in love with Eberron. Magic robots, elemental airships, the artificer class, all of it gets my DM gears turning. Feature-wise the Completes, Races, and Tome of Battle. And when my players get cocky, a trip through MMIII tends to remind them they're only level 10. A Shadesteel Golem and a couple of Wights in their room at the inn almost wiped them. Ah, memories.

[willpell]

I love top ten lists, personally. But actually let's make it a top eleven since D&D likes that often-unloved number.

11. Complete Adventurer. Not a sexy supplement at all, and originally I just called it an honorable mention, but it's a solid addition to games which offers much-needed extra options.

10. Complete Divine. As one who loves the idea of a wide range of gods (though I'm less fond of the way they're portrayed as "just really powerful monsters"), I liked getting a whole chapter which talks in greater depth about nearly the whole Greyhawk pantheon. Plus the Favored Soul is an extremely solid addition to the class roster, and the Spirit Shaman looks like it'll offer interesting possibilities when I get around to introducing it. I haven't looked at the spells at all, and that may affect my opinion of it for better or worse.

9. Heroes of Horror. A fairly interesting analysis of how to turn the assumptions of the game on their heads. The Archivist is a great class. Would be much higher on this list if not for its terrible sprawling dis-organization.

8. Magic of Incarnum. There's a lot of missteps, but I like that they tried to blaze totally new ground, and even if it's not usable as-is I find it extremely inspiring. I hope to see a future edition pick up the concept of incarnum and show it a whole lot of love, as has happened with psionics already.

7. Tome of Magic. Only the first third is usable out of the box, and even that suffers from lousy organization, but the emphasis on the story behind every one of your powersets is top-notch, and the art is quite enjoyable.

6. Manual of the Planes. The D&D cosmology is a little heavy on cliche for my taste, but it's such a rich diversity that I can take an axe to all the things I dislike and still have more than enough to build a great campaign around. Paraelementals and Yugoloths are superb additions to the monster catalogue (I really wish the former had ever been updated to 3.5), and a ton of extra templates are very useful for assembling custom creations. I also actively like the fact that it contains very few prestige classes, as IMO there are far more of these than are needed.

5. Races of Destiny. Many players may not share this fondness, but I for one love having humanity play a central role in the game, on account of being human myself. The Illumians are a fascinatingly strange custom race, which I like in concept even if not always in mechanics (you may notice this is becoming a theme), and the Half-Ogre and Skulk are also neat. Plus it introduces the god Zarus, whose status as a smirkingly hypocritical Lawful Evil bigot-god can just lead to all sorts of uncomfortable fun for your players, as well as giving more detail about campaigns set in an urban environment, which I greatly prefer (I admittedly haven't compared it with Cityscape in this regard).

4. Draconomicon. This one is just flat-out beautiful; the game utility is pretty narrow and a lot of the information strikes me as extraneous, but the art alone would make it worth the purchase price to someone who can afford a vanity supplement.

3. Expanded Psionics Handbook. Probably the closest thing D&D will ever give us to a complete game in one book, presenting one of the overall best game systems in a very compact way and with a lot of monsters, races, and so forth to round it out (though it could have used more items) which make it immensely useful.

2. Lords of Madness. Of all the various "comprehensive guide to X" type supplements published by Wotco itself, this one concerns the type that most needed to be expanded upon; it offers tons of utility for structuring interesting campaigns and providing antagonists that have a lot more flexibility than the Fiendish Codices.

1. Unearthed Arcana. I would characterize this as the fourth corebook; most of its contents aren't useful, but there are just so MANY of them, and they really help with finding new directions to take your campaign. I find it very hard to imagine running a game which doesn't at least offer the "buying off level adjustments" option and probably some of the variant classes (Domain Wizard is thoroughly unnecessary, but Thug as an alterntive to Fighter is something I wouldn't want to do without). Flaws and Traits are more of a plugin, you can get along without them fine, but they make it possible to customize your character a lot more and that's always a good thing. And there's still half the book I haven't read. Just a spectacular smorgasbord of content, at least some of which is extremely good to have.

(The Core 3 are excluded from this list, as are campaign settings of any sort; there's really no reasonable way to evaluate those.

[molten_dragon]

With the Core Books, Tome of Battle, and Races of the Dragon being the only exceptions, this list is completely inaccurate for almost every 3.5e game I've ever played.

Eh, it's all subjective anyway.

[Amphetryon]

Heroes of Horror + Libris Mortis: For the Dread Necromancer and its support.

Tome of Battle: Melee CAN have nice things.

Expanded Psionics Handbook: For PsyWars and Wilders.

[navar100]

Tome of Battle
Expanded Psionics
Complete Warrior
Complete Divine

[Kelb_Panthera]

i'm a big fan of "It's hot/cold/wet outside," city/dungeonscape, and heroes of battle.

All five let you take campaigns in directions that just aren't sufficiently covered by core alone.

The Books of Exalted Deeds and Vile Darkness get an honorable mention because I'm one of these nut-jobs that actually likes the 3.5 alignment system.

[Arcanist]

Exemplars of Evil

Your table doesn't use Uncanny Forethought? Does you Wizard even Cast!? :smallconfused:

With Core and Exemplars of Evil a Wizard becomes a nigh unbeatable (short of running out of spell slots) :smallamused:

Little reason for me to not make that one of my favorites.

Exemplars of Evil
Complete Mage
Spell Compendium
Complete Arcane
and I know this isn't a supplement but I wanna put Player's Guide to Faerun on this list of mines :smalltongue:

[molten_dragon]

Your table doesn't use Uncanny Forethought? Does you Wizard even Cast!? :smallconfused:

With Core and Exemplars of Evil a Wizard becomes a nigh unbeatable (short of running out of spell slots) :smallamused:

Never saw that in there. That is pretty good, though slightly feat intensive. I might have to bump that book up to almost never use.

[Psyren]

XPH, for finally making psionics into something to be loved rather than feared.

ToM + MoI = my favorite alt-systems.

[Krazzman]

If I would choose I would say:
Completes (-champion, psion unsure) ToB and EPH.

My liking for EPH stems from the fact that I never could play a bloody psion. In my old group I tried and for my sanity let go of the idea of playing that and in our new group I can try ToB :D

[Dsurion]

I used to like Frostburn and Complete Scoundrel. Complete Scoundrel was the only 3.5 book that was entertaining or even remotely interesting to read front to back (except for the spells and magic items parts, I always skip those). Frostburn is a book I thought would be a lot more interesting than it was. It covered maybe twenty pages of environment and then went on to all of the rest of the usual 3.5 bloat I don't really care about.

I guess the only books I like now are the Races of ... supplements and Tome of Magic for the flavor. I don't really use any of the 3.5 material for rules any more, I'd rather just find or create homebrew and use the core books.

[lsfreak]

In terms of the amount they get used, I'd have to go with MIC and SpC. PHB2 and the second round of Completes are well-written and better balanced than much of the earlier stuff and see a decent amount of use. I love ToB, ToM, and Incarnum (the first for balance, the other two for mechanics and fluff), but since they're pretty much stand-alone things they see less use than the others, especially ToM/MoI

[Anderlith]

Do the ebberon books count? cause I love the artificer <3

[Novawurmson]

3.P player, here. I'll avoid PF material for now. ToB is probably my most frequently used 3.5 book because throwing a level of an initiator class on an npc spices up battles so nicely.

[Laughingcarp]

Heroes of Horror is my favourite book hands down, for the best fluff ever and some great crunch.
Magic of Incarnum for an excellently fun alt system.
Expanded Psionics Handbook for making psionics playable and excellent.