World of Warcraft RPG

[eBarbarossa]

To those who know it - what do you think of Sword&Sorcery's World of Warcraft?
So they renamed all of the attributes and some of the skills and reworked the base classes. But they did bring out a lot of interesting concepts: a useful banner-bearing PrC, another PrC that finally does something useful with ley lines, the whole rune magic system.

[StSword]

Yeah, lots of stuff one can cannibalize for their own games is how I think about it.

[eBarbarossa]

Yeah, thought the same thing. Rune Master/Ley Walker will be a nice add-on to my high level buffer.

[Tzardok]

I liked it, but I think there was a bit of power creep over the course of the sourcebooks. I mean, 3.x did have some of that, but the WoW RPG was the first time I noticed it just by reading books one after the other.

Still, I like referencing it because it did some interesting stuff.

[Fizban]

Since I care about DnD 3.x/d20 (and to an extent the fluff around Warcraft 3), and don't care about zomg WoW, naturally I have a bit of a dim view of the conversion to WoW-isms from the original d20 Warcraft setting (there were several books with normal stat names before they did a new edition renaming things and jamming in the basic rules for the "WoW RPG"). On the other hand, with the WoW template to follow they could make more extensive changes to their spellcasting lists rather than just saying X spells can only be used if you take Y PrC, which seems like a good thing.

There are some decent PrC ideas and some are decently made, the body-runecaster is more fleshed out than most examples through the ages but still limited to just its one book. Cool and broken and lame and useless spells and feats and magic items. The tech device system is bogus and full of holes with probably at least half their example tech items not replicable by their own rules, but they are fairly simple for just assigning arbitrary numbers- meanwhile the newer steam armor system is just about the best version of power armor I've found, shame it didn't get more modules. The 2nd edition manages to have an even worse generic-non-ranger (because true Rangers are a PrC) base class than the original, IIRC. I don't think there's a single thing I would actually use as written, even though I love being able to go "hey, Naga and Padaren and a non-casting Ranger PrC and look at that busted item, oh my!"

Basically, it sure is a 3rd party setting setting.

. . .Actually, unlike how a lot of 3rd party books get so much flak for being unbalanced and unedited, a lot more of those accusations in the Warcraft books actually hold true. 3rd party books are usually smaller, have their own ideas about balance, and will either spend a huge amount of time building a detailed new system or reskin things- they might look rough, and they might read rough, but they're usually internally consistent and can be forgiven when they need to wrap things up in a single book that will get only modest sales. The Warcraft books treat a bunch of clearly half-baked shortcuts as if they're actual pillars of their worldbuilding and playable main class features. As I said, the only tech items I've tried to reverse engineer failed to meet their tech item creation guidelines, which still have significant holes even after the update. Their original base classes aren't any better than most highly questionable 3rd party entries, while their races are universally a notch higher than PHB. There's a spell that will let you cast infinite spells and an item you can consume to recover all your spells, though I think those were both left in the first edition- but the outside of turn counterspell and magic absorption feats remained.

It's like a microcosm of 3.x itself, with less page count: entire new systems which ought to have their own books just kinda shoved in somewhere or never mentioned again, huge lists of PrCs for everything ranging from 3.x reskins to yet more new micro systems to just generic boring stuff. Spellcasters generally most supported and handed OP stuff because spellcasters. Plenty of words spilled on setting stuff which I'm pretty sure boil down to "yup, they sure did undo all the progress from WC3 because horde vs alliance lol everyone pick a side," comparable to much DnD fluff which boils down to "yup, demons bad, angels annoying, undead and mutants cool, zomg dragons and drow."

I'm sounding very negative but it's not like I hate it or anything- having Warcraft setting books for DnD is cool. But they lack a serious mechanical direction, starting with "reskin 3.x into Warcraft" then pivoting to "put everything you can from WoW into DnD," while the pivot from the Warcraft setting at the end of WC3 to the MMORPG stasis of WoW just bleeds any sense of gravitas out of everything as far as I'm concerned. Actually trying to run the game as-is will inevitably end up needing rewrites to fix it, because their tech system isn't a tech system. But the actual standalone systems are again often shorter and less supported than even something you'd find in another 3rd party book, while many of the PrCs are so WoW-ified they'll just be out of place in a normal DnD setting, and the base classes are only significant for replicating. . . WoW classes.

So in the end, the only things that really appeal to me for potential use are a couple of races (that need to be adjusted), a power armor system (that needs to be converted and expanded), and a handful of spells. Much like any other 3rd party book or gimmick setting, but with a bigger budget and no central gimmick.

Or I could have just linked this old post (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?525805-World-of-warcraft-D-amp-D-D20&p=22041809&viewfull=1#post22041809) where I did a more direct comparison between the editions which hit all the same point less negatively.