Locking and Unlocking Sourcebooks

[Chaosvii7]

A friend of mine once told me that he played in a game where his available resources were the core books and a single book of his choosing within Core/Eberron/Faerun. I kind of like that idea, but I was thinking of expanding on it a little.

Every member of the party who makes a character gets the ability to unlock a single book of their choice with their character. This would allow them to take a book that could give them and others a non-core class as long as they unlock them. For those worried about relative power level or floating/inconsistent players, you could limit the number of books unlocked and have them decide on it as a group, of course with your consideration. As the party levels, they unlock more and more resources in the form of books. This allows some breathing room as far as areas of the game is concerned(such as, traveling to your world's Orient before they get access to Oriental Adventures) and gives a bit of a boon to leveling that is on a more OOC level. The only forseeable consequence is that certain(read: most) builds(read: broken builds) will take a while to turn on, or may have to be approached differently.

Has anyone attempted something similar to this? Did it work? Did it not? I have no problems with simply saying "use any book", because I'm a nice guy and it allows us all to make mistakes(I don't DM often so I need to train my brain when I don't run, and things like these forums are good for that), but was it a helpful approach? If not, what books would you cut everything down to? Especially for a group of new players(wink wink)?

[eggynack]

I like the idea of people each getting access to a book of their choosing, because that limits the amount of books, and gets everyone what they want. However, the part where books are unlocked as you go seems annoying. It's a cool idea, but D&D is partially based around building your entire character from level one. For example, if a book is unlocked that has a prestige class you're interested in, it's unlikely that you'll qualify for it unless the prereqs are rock bottom. If books are unlocked in set ways, and at a set rate, as you level, that has a higher chance of working. However, that seems like it adds a crazy level of complexity to the build decisions in a game where you make tons of build decisions. There might be a fun challenge to coming up with ways to build a character to those specifications, but there also might not be, depending on the circumstances, and that kind of thing certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea.

edit: For book suggestions, I'd go with everything in the srd, PHB II, the completes, Tome of Battle, Magic Item Compendium and Spell Compendium. That seems like a good starting point, and is probably enough for just about everyone.

[sonofzeal]

All this would do is encourage more use of the relatively unbalanced PHB content, while harshly limiting access to the relatively balanced non-Core content. That seems like the wrong direction to go.

[Eslin]

Seconded. It's possible it could work, but you'd need to ban the core classes first.

[Fitz10019]

If you're keen on 'unlocking,' to make players feel they've 'earned' things, another option is you could do it to item-access and spell-access, instead of feat-access.

[Toy Killer]

I played in a gladitoral ring... "Game"... of sorts; Mostly just PVP, Role Playing optional kinda thing, but had a decent following.

One of the character creation rules was you could only pull from three sources, explaining that the kingdom that held the ring was in knee deep with a slave trade and pulled the best fighters from across the globe for it's events. This made for some thematic characters, but the Power Gamers stuck out like sore thumbs. Core was considered one source, but if a feat referenced a core feat, you could select that as you leveled up (IE, if you choose sandstorm but not core for whatever reason, you could take improved grapple, as it's a requirement for Scropion Grasp, or whatever). Core races weren't even allowed if you didn't take core.

It was interesting to say the least, but that's what immediately jumped to my mind when you said unlocking books. It was an interesting game and pretty fun, but the lack of consistant story eventually drove me away from the 'Game'.

[Talionis]

Many of the the books include ideas on how to introduce new Prestige Classes to the game. This is similar to what you are talking about.

I think you'd be wrong to think this a panacea. It won't fix all your problems, but I do think it would be a good way limit content and gradually add more. Such as it being good for new players.

Your idea will not help you with power level or broken combos.