Essential books in D&D 3.5

[Blue Dragon]

After 21 years, I am finally adopting D&D 3.5 as a gaming system. Besides the three core books which first-party ones are quite indispensable to the game?

[Yora]

None. I actually think the game is better by not letting it grow out unrestrained until it becomes a huge bloat.

I would first decide on a type of campaign I want to run, and then consider which available books would be good expansions to have for that campaign specifically.

[Blue Dragon]

None. I actually think the game is better by not letting it grow out unrestrained until it becomes a huge bloat.

I would first decide on a type of campaign I want to run, and then consider which available books would be good expansions to have for that campaign specifically.

So it's better that I use the core books for as long as I can, only using extra material if the core doesn't provides what I need? That's good news, really!

Well, my group is mostly people new to RPG, so I think I will run the classics and any low-level adventure I can find.

Thanks for your time!!

[Silva Stormrage]

One thing to be concerned with is that core is one of the more broken rulebooks in 3.5. They got much better at designing balanced classes later on in the design period of 3.5.

Martials in core are dramatically weaker than casters and lack many of the class features one might be expecting from 5e. Having a party of monk, druid, paladin and wizard is going to be much more unbalanced than swordsage, wildshape ranger, crusader and warmage. That being said, if you have new players this probably won't be a major issue but it is something to be concerned.

Tome of Battle is the best tools for martials in 3.5 but has a very high optimization floor compared to the rest of 3.5's martials.

Spell Compendium has a lot of extra spells to add to spell lists for variety. I would also include the Magic Item compendium just for a lot of cool new items.

If you are planning to run your campaign in a specific environment stormwrack (Water), deserts (Sandstorm) or tundra (Frostburn) are also excellent books.

It's not necessarily important to pick specific books as "Important" but I wouldn't be confident in getting used to playing 3.5 only in core. Might be good for the first game or so but one of 3.5's strength is it's library of content.

[Paragon]

Spell Compendium
Magic Item Compendium
Tome of Battle
All the Complete books

[Yora]

So it's better that I use the core books for as long as I can, only using extra material if the core doesn't provides what I need? That's good news, really!

Well, my group is mostly people new to RPG, so I think I will run the classics and any low-level adventure I can find.

Thanks for your time!!

There are a number of quite interesting books that can add a lot to make a campaign more interesting.

But I very strongly advocate for being selective with which books you want to add to your game because there are just so damn many.

Particularly in a group with a new GM and fairly new players, just the material from the Player's Handbook alone can be very overwhelming. Doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the amount of moving parts that you have to keep track of will only make things more challenging.

The Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual are a complete game, and a pretty big one with a lot of content already. Once the group is used to that and has a good feel for how it works, then is a good time to start looking into the options to expand the game. Because then you will have a feeling for what directions you even want to expand the game into in the first place.

[Biggus]

Martials in core are dramatically weaker than casters and lack many of the class features one might be expecting from 5e. Having a party of monk, druid, paladin and wizard is going to be much more unbalanced than swordsage, wildshape ranger, crusader and warmage. That being said, if you have new players this probably won't be a major issue but it is something to be concerned.

I think this is only really true when players are both at least moderately optimization-focused and moderately expert. I've mostly played with people of lowish expertise and casters haven't dominated noticably in any of those games.

Exception: Monks suck, even with new players they'll typically struggle to contribute much.



Spell Compendium has a lot of extra spells to add to spell lists for variety. I would also include the Magic Item compendium just for a lot of cool new items.


Those are the two I was going to recommend, they're not essential but they makes the game far more well-rounded.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Agree with the majority. The true essentials are Player's Handbook‚ Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual 1‚ nothing else. Maybe Rules Compendium if you don't feel like excavating rules for every weird occurence.
Very good books to improve on player options are the Complete X (except Complete Psionics‚ which is only useful if you also have the Expanded Psionics Handbook)‚ and Tome of Battle if you find that your martial characters are getting bored of only hitting people.
Very good books to improve on things you'd like to give your players are the Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium.
And finally‚ very good books that heavily depend on the kind of campaign you want to run : the environmental series (Stormwrack‚ Frostburn‚ Sandstorm‚ Cityscape)‚ the monstrous series (Draconomicon‚ Libris Mortis‚ Lords of Madness) and the campaign settings (Eberron Campaign Setting‚ Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting).

I'd personally start with the first three‚ then Complete Warrior and Complete Scoundrel if you feel like your group is getting into it‚ and then add books depending on what appeals to you the most.

[H_H_F_F]

So, just to push back a bit on what you're getting here: 3.5's diversity and scope allow some of its greatest strength! You don't need to start with too many booksf obviously, but integrating more and more sources into your games overtime will be a joy!

Something I haven't seen mentioned here is PHB2, which honestly might be the first book I'd get after the core 3. It's sort of an "everything" book, it has some excellent ready-to-use base classes, it can be used to introduce plenty of mechanics that are used across the system (like Alternative Class Features), and has a lot of advice for beginner players / DMs. It's often thought of as a more "advanced" sort of book, but I think it's excellent to have from the get-go.

Once that's done, and you're ready to expand, I'd take complete scoundrel, especially if your martials are starting to lag behind, and move from there.

If you want to play in an established setting, buy one of the campaign-setting books ("one of"? who am I kidding, buy Eberron).

I actually think you'd find that to be a great start. Sure, sandstorm, frostburn, whatever are fun and more helpful than monster manual 4 or weapons of legacy, but PHB-II and complete scoundrel to me make for the best start.

[RNightstalker]

It depends who's at your table. You said you've been playing for years. How long have your players been playing for? If they're experienced players, you don't need to limit anything except for flavor and conviction. If you're playing 3.5, 3.5 books are essential to D&D 3.5. 3.0 books are essential too because not all of the content included was updated. I guess the best question is: are y'all/your group dipping your toe in the water or jumping in?

[threefivearchve]

The Spell Compendium would probably be my first pick. Easy load of content to add to your game. Probably the sourcebook we've used the most.

After that? Maybe the Arms and Equipment Guide and Player's Handbook II.

[pabelfly]

The three truly indispensible books are Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual. The players only need the Player's Handbook to create their character, and have the basic rules for playing the character, and you'll use the same rules too. Dungeon Master's Guide gives you rules and advice for designing and running a game, as well as more complex rules. Monster's Handbook gives you monsters to run against the players and rules on how to modify them.

From there, instead of recommending specific books, I'd suggest finding out what sort of characters the players want and work out what books can support that if the Player's Handbook doesn't cover it. If they want to be a martial character with lots of flashy moves and different options in combat, for example, you could add Tome of Battle and Swordsage. If they instead want to be a smart fighter that uses their knowledge of monsters to defeat enemies, you could add Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting for the Education feat and add it to something like a Ranger. If they want to play a monstrous character, you could look at Savage Species. There are plenty of other options and just as many books to support those options.

[Telonius]

For player options, as stated already.

For you as the DM? I tend to gravitate back to Fiend Folio as a monster source, even more than the later Monster Manuals. Loads of interesting, flavorful monsters to sic on your players.

[RandomPeasant]

TBH it depends a lot on what you are doing exactly. Are you joining an existing 3e group? Are you starting a new group with 3e as the system (I would recommend not doing this as a DM)? Are you transferring your existing group to 3e? Does anyone else involved have prior 3e experience? The answers to those questions effect how I would suggest approaching the problem a lot.


One thing to be concerned with is that core is one of the more broken rulebooks in 3.5. They got much better at designing balanced classes later on in the design period of 3.5.

This is mostly not true. Tome of Battle has martials that are significantly better than Core martials, but other than that there isn't much daylight between PHB and non-PHB classes. Are the Monk and the Fighter bad? Sure, but so are the Marshal and the Knight and the Moutebank and both versions of the Samurai. Are the Wizard and the Cleric good? Sure, but so are the Beguiler and the Archivist and the Death Master and the Artificer. I think you can reasonably say some of the later classes are better designed, but in terms of balance it's pretty much "casters are as good as casters, martials are as good as martial" with, as noted, ToB as the only real exception. I would even go so far as to say that the Rogue is significantly better than the various Rogue variants like Scout and Ninja.


Tome of Battle is the best tools for martials in 3.5 but has a very high optimization floor compared to the rest of 3.5's martials.

I would go so far as to say that your best bet from a balance perspective is to point people at ToB first and let them try the regular martials later when they understand the system better.


Spell Compendium has a lot of extra spells to add to spell lists for variety. I would also include the Magic Item compendium just for a lot of cool new items.

If you are starting out you should probably steer away from the Spell Compendium, just because there are already a lot of spells for people to choose from (particularly for Clerics and Druids, who know all their spells all the time), and it doesn't particularly contain anything vitally necessary.


Maybe Rules Compendium if you don't feel like excavating rules for every weird occurence.

Honestly I would anti-rec the Rules Compendium. It is not particularly good at being a unified reference (most of your problems are better solved with the searchable online versions of the rules), and it makes a bunch of weird declarations that, while technically the final word, are going to confuse anyone who is trying to learn the game by reading the rules and don't really produce better results than doing that.

[Remuko]

All of them. I've been a fan of 3rde since i first played over 20 years ago now. I still keep find out about books or articles featuring content i never heard of. even if i dont use it, knowing it exists and having access to the content contained, is to me invaluable. the sheer unassailable breadth of content and options is one of my favorite things about the edition.

[Ignimortis]

After 21 years, I am finally adopting D&D 3.5 as a gaming system. Besides the three core books which first-party ones are quite indispensable to the game?
I'll have to concur with Silva. Player's Handbook is by far the most broken and unfortunately-designed (I won't say "poorly", because the actual mechanical core is solid, but half the classes are plainly done wrong) book in 3.5, and supplements are actually one of its' biggest strengths.

Playing 3.5 core-only is doing the system a disservice (at least, once you're familiar with the basics), and I personally would advise anyone looking to dig into the system to at least keep in mind that Tome of Battle, Magic of Incarnum and the Binder section of Tome of Magic exist and provide decent variety and are never nearly as gamebreaking (in either direction) as some things that are found in the PHB. Furthermore, Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium are good additions for basically every game. Completes and Player's Handbook II are hit-and-miss, but can also help.

TL;DR: nothing is truly essential, but supplements is where 3.5 truly shines, so I'd advise taking at least a cursory look at most of them.

[Beni-Kujaku]

For player options, as stated already.

For you as the DM? I tend to gravitate back to Fiend Folio as a monster source, even more than the later Monster Manuals. Loads of interesting, flavorful monsters to sic on your players.

I don't know... FF has good high-level monsters, but its low-level ones are kinda bad and pretty boring. For a new group that will probably not play above level 10 for a while, I think MM3 is much better than FF.

[H_H_F_F]

I genuinely don't think "more monsters" are a high priority for beginners in the systems. They're more useful to freshen things up, once you've accumulated a lot of experience with monsters in core.

[Beni-Kujaku]

I genuinely don't think "more monsters" are a high priority for beginners in the systems. They're more useful to freshen things up, once you've accumulated a lot of experience with monsters in core.

I want an upvote button. In its absence‚ a simple +1 shall suffice.

[RandomPeasant]

I genuinely don't think "more monsters" are a high priority for beginners in the systems. They're more useful to freshen things up, once you've accumulated a lot of experience with monsters in core.

Your first set of games should be a pre-published adventure (probably Sunless Citadel), where all the monsters are pre-selected. After that I don't think it matters much either way. Whether 3rd level group encounters a CR 3 Ogre from the MM or a CR 3 Dracotaur from the MMIII is going to be largely the same amount of work for both them and you, and largely the same quality of experience. If you want to go through a couple of monster books to find something that sparks joy for you, do that. If you want to instead spend that prep time on something else, do that instead. It's not a big deal either way.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Tome of Battle and Magic of Incarnum. The two biggest and, IMHO, best subsystems. ToB gives an alternate take on melee combat, which is flashier, more varied, and easier to understand from an optimization standpoint than what the PHB provides (full-attacking with Power Attack/Sneak Attack, or tripping/grappling). MoI is a whole new magic system that can be used for combat, utility, or buffing yourself, but with a lot less bookkeeping than any of the magic classes in the PHB.

Another nice thing about these two systems is that they are very friendly to multiclassing. If your players start with, for instance, a Barbarian, but later get bored with the class, they can immediately start leveling in a ToB or MoI class and get some additional benefits*, so they don't have to retire their current character to try something new.


Tome of Battle has very straightforward benefits for multiclassing. Every level that isn't in your ToB class, let's call that Crusader for the sake of this discussion, still counts 50% for determining what new moves you can learn. So a level 4 Barbarian that picks a single level of Crusader can learn maneuvers and stances as if they were a level 3 Crusader. A Barbarian 8/ Crusader 1 would count as a Crusader 5 for learning maneuvers. And etc..

Magic of Incarnum classes don't get as many direct benefits (though their prior classes will count for their maximum essentia capacity). However, one or two levels in Incarnate or Totemist will often give you most of the abilities you want out of multiclassing, and will qualify you for sweet MoI prestige classes. Several of these prestige classes do play very nicely with PHB classes as well, like Totem Rager for Barbarians, Sapphire Hierarch for Clerics, Soulcaster for arcane casters, and Umbral Disciple for Rogues.



Also, if you think your players can handle some more options, point them towards Unearthed Arcana (which is available in the online SRD). Specifically, the variant races and classes, which are all reasonably well-balanced, and let you do things like a Fighter that gets Sneak Attack instead of feats, or a Druid that gets Rage instead of an animal companion and spontaneous summoning, or a Human that breathes water instead of air. ...Yeah, I'd probably save this particular resource for their second characters, or maybe even later.

[Troacctid]

Personally I don't see the point of using just the three core books. The main strength of 3.5e as a system is the depth and complexity of its character generation rules. If you don't want all the combinatorics of splatbooks, why are you here? Why not just play 5e instead, where you can get that "Back to Basics" D&D vibe as a more modern, streamlined experience?

No, if you're playing 3.5, you should play to its strengths, and that means adding in at least a few splats! Here's my top picks for player-facing books. Books marked with an asterisk are available for free in the SRD.

S-tier: The content in these books is fun, well-designed, and offers substantial improvements to gameplay.
Magic Item Compendium, Player's Handbook 2, Unearthed Arcana

A-tier: Great books with lots of great content that is broadly applicable and fun to play with.
Complete Arcane, Complete Divine, Complete Adventurer, Complete Mage, Complete Champion

B-tier: These books are great too, but mostly lack the broad applicability of A-tier, or have some editing or design issues that make them harder to work with.
Complete Warrior, Complete Scoundrel, Races of Destiny, Races of the Wild, Races of the Dragon, Races of Stone, Frostburn, Sandstorm, Book of Exalted Deeds, Dragon Magic, Tome of Battle, Expanded Psionics Handbook, Magic of Incarnum, Complete Psionic, Planar Handbook

C-tier: I like having these books, but there just isn't a lot in them, or the stuff that is there is less interesting. Low bang for your buck compared to higher tiers.
Spell Compendium, Rules Compendium, Tome of Magic, Dungeon Master's Guide II, Cityscape, Drow of the Underdark, Dungeonscape, Stormwrack, Draconomicon, Fiendish Codex II, Heroes of Horror, Libris Mortis, Lords of Madness, Miniatures Handbook, Exemplars of Evil, Oriental Adventures, Monster Manuals III–V
Most issues of Dragon Magazine from the 3.5 era also fall into C-tier.

D-tier: These books are mediocre, poorly executed, and/or obsolete, and can be skipped, although if you already have them, you might as well include them.
Heroes of Battle, Ghostwalk, Book of Vile Darkness, Savage Species, Arms and Equipment Guide, Deities and Demigods, Elder Evils, Fiendish Codex I, Epic Level Handbook, Monster Manual II, Fiend Folio, Tome and Blood, Song and Silence, Sword and Fist, Masters of the Wild, Defenders of the Faith, Stronghold Builder's Guidebook, Manual of the Planes

F-tier: These books are design failures that will contribute nothing of worth to your campaign.
Weapons of Legacy, Psionics Handbook (3.0), Enemies and Allies

[Metastachydium]

One thing to be concerned with is that core is one of the more broken rulebooks in 3.5. They got much better at designing balanced classes later on in the design period of 3.5.

Martials in core are dramatically weaker than casters and lack many of the class features one might be expecting from 5e. Having a party of monk, druid, paladin and wizard is going to be much more unbalanced than swordsage, wildshape ranger, crusader and warmage. That being said, if you have new players this probably won't be a major issue but it is something to be concerned.


I think this is only really true when players are both at least moderately optimization-focused and moderately expert. I've mostly played with people of lowish expertise and casters haven't dominated noticably in any of those games.

Exception: Monks suck, even with new players they'll typically struggle to contribute much.

While Biggus's spoint is certainly not without merit, I do believe non-Core classes are better balanced and very (if not outright most) often more interesting than Core classes. PHB minus the PHB classes (except perhaps Bard and Rogue) might be a good way to go.


I genuinely don't think "more monsters" are a high priority for beginners in the systems. They're more useful to freshen things up, once you've accumulated a lot of experience with monsters in core.

This is one of those weird instances where I vehemently disagree, but you are right.


Personally I don't see the point of using just the three core books. The main strength of 3.5e as a system is the depth and complexity of its character generation rules. If you don't want all the combinatorics of splatbooks, why are you here? Why not just play 5e instead, where you can get that "Back to Basics" D&D vibe as a more modern, streamlined experience?

No, if you're playing 3.5, you should play to its strengths, and that means adding in at least a few splats! Here's my top picks for player-facing books. Books marked with an asterisk are available for free in the SRD.

Amen to that!


S-tier:

What's with you and tiers?


Unearthed Arcana

Use with caution; contains much non-starter stuff (major rules variants, alternate systems, generic classes, even gestalt…).


B-tier: These books are great too, but mostly lack the broad applicability of A-tier, or have some editing or design issues that make them harder to work with.

Underdark? Or would you rate that C?


Book of Exalted Deeds

…
How so?



C-tier: I like having these books, but there just isn't a lot in them, or the stuff that is there is less interesting. Low bang for your buck compared to higher tiers.
Spell Compendium

Very good for a lot of non-full-casting casters, though.


Monster Manuals III

Easily one of the best dedicated non-thematic monster books. See H_H_F_F's contention, though.


D-tier: These books are mediocre, poorly executed, and/or obsolete, and can be skipped, although if you already have them, you might as well include them.

Savage Species
Very poorly executed, and not for beginners, but a valuable resource. Don't write it off!


Arms and Equipment Guide

This one simply doesn't belong here. A very good book with lots of stuff never updated to 3.5. Not an essential, no, but very good.


Fiend Folio

HEY! Once more, not an essential, but one of the better monster books.

[Troacctid]

Underdark? Or would you rate that C?
I stuck to generic setting books to save time. Underdark is Forgotten Realms. I would give it a D, though.


…
How so?
Book of Exalted Deeds has nice density of cool and interesting character options.


Very good for a lot of non-full-casting casters, though.
I know a lot of people have Spell Compendium really high on their lists, but it ranks lower for me because the vast majority of the good spells in there are just reprints from CAd, CAr, and CDiv. If you're using the Completes in your campaign, and you should, then Spell Compendium just doesn't add a lot of value, IMO. It's more akin to Rules Compendium—great as a quick reference, but you're absolutely fine without it.

If it were more comprehensive, I would give it a higher grade, probably. The fact that it leaves out so many great spells hurts. It means it's not really a one-stop shop like it wants to be.


This one simply doesn't belong here. A very good book with lots of stuff never updated to 3.5. Not an essential, no, but very good.
When half the stuff has been updated to 3.5, but you don't know which half, it really detracts from the book's usefulness. Too much of A&EG is obsolete. Also, it doesn't help that most of the unupdated material is, like, really marginal number-crunchy stuff, like, oh, this special material lets me reduce my shield's ACP by an extra point for 500 gp cheaper than mithral, and this alchemical item gives me a great deal on a situational +2 bonus to certain checks, hooray! That and, like, vehicles, which are a nice thing to have rules for, but also not so nice that they're deeply entrenched in the 3.0 space and facing rules.

MIC does the "here's a book full of cool gear" job much better.


HEY! Once more, not an essential, but one of the better monster books.
I mean, Fiend Folio does have a lot of cool monster concepts, but why should you bother dealing with 3.0 artifacts and iffy challenge ratings when there are plenty of post-update monster books you could be using instead?

[Blue Dragon]

One thing to be concerned with is that core is one of the more broken rulebooks in 3.5. They got much better at designing balanced classes later on in the design period of 3.5.

Martials in core are dramatically weaker than casters and lack many of the class features one might be expecting from 5e. Having a party of monk, druid, paladin and wizard is going to be much more unbalanced than swordsage, wildshape ranger, crusader and warmage. That being said, if you have new players this probably won't be a major issue but it is something to be concerned.

Tome of Battle is the best tools for martials in 3.5 but has a very high optimization floor compared to the rest of 3.5's martials.

Spell Compendium has a lot of extra spells to add to spell lists for variety. I would also include the Magic Item compendium just for a lot of cool new items.

If you are planning to run your campaign in a specific environment stormwrack (Water), deserts (Sandstorm) or tundra (Frostburn) are also excellent books.

It's not necessarily important to pick specific books as "Important" but I wouldn't be confident in getting used to playing 3.5 only in core. Might be good for the first game or so but one of 3.5's strength is it's library of content.

I completely agree with the library of content being the strenght of 3.5 and is a strong reason for me finally getting into it. Only the material from the (today offline) Wizards site alone is more than enough to take the game running! The thing with the thread is that I was in doubt about things like "Player Handbook II", "Monster Manual II", "Tome of This", "Guide of That" and how important they were from the beginning. Thanks for your time ansewring, you were very helpful.

[AvatarVecna]

idk about "indispensable" but in general I'd advise stuff with base classes. Dragon Compendium, Expanded Psionics Handbook, the Tomes, the Completes...even Dungeonscape and Eberron Campaign Setting (Factotum and Artificer respectively). Those books tend to have a lot of feats and spells in them as well, so that should give your players plenty of traps to choke on when you throw them in the deep end (affectionately).

[Blue Dragon]

Spell Compendium
Magic Item Compendium
Tome of Battle
All the Complete books

Added to the list, thanks!

[Prime32]

After 21 years, I am finally adopting D&D 3.5 as a gaming system. Besides the three core books which first-party ones are quite indispensable to the game?

There were "Premium Editions" of the Core Rulebooks (plus Magic Item Compendium and Spell Compendium) produced at the end of the system's lifespan, which incorporate all the later errata and rule revisions (including swift/immediate actions and heavy changes to how shapeshifting works). I'd strongly recommend those over the originals if you can get them.

[DeadlyUematsu]

I would caution in adding entire additional books. First, ban anything you are uncomfortable with in Core, then figure out what people want to do and whitelist material from there. My experience with carte blanche book allowances is that they don't work unless you manage it constantly and that gets tiresome with the side effect that people feel entitled to the material because you (sorta) allowed it.

[Kurald Galain]

I'd say you need More Classes, first because the classes in the PHB1 aren't particularly well-balanced, and second because there's popular archetypes or mechanics that just aren't represented there. So based on that,


PHB2 has the Beguiler, Duskblade, and Dragon Shaman!
Complete Arcane has the Warlock and Warmage!
I'd really skip the Tome of Battle unless I'm with more advanced players.
This website (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes) has twelve classes that fill in a lot of gaps. That's from Pathfinder, but you can easily add that to a 3E game without breaking anything. In particular, I recommend the bomb-throwing Alchemist, spontaneous divine casting Oracle, at-will debuff caster Witch, and my personal favorite, the sword-and-spell dual wielding Magus.


HTH!

[Blue Dragon]

There are a number of quite interesting books that can add a lot to make a campaign more interesting.

But I very strongly advocate for being selective with which books you want to add to your game because there are just so damn many.

Particularly in a group with a new GM and fairly new players, just the material from the Player's Handbook alone can be very overwhelming. Doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the amount of moving parts that you have to keep track of will only make things more challenging.

The Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual are a complete game, and a pretty big one with a lot of content already. Once the group is used to that and has a good feel for how it works, then is a good time to start looking into the options to expand the game. Because then you will have a feeling for what directions you even want to expand the game into in the first place.

I am a fair seasoned master (hum...season) but this will be my first full experience with D&D so I'll keep your advice in mind.

[Metastachydium]

I stuck to generic setting books to save time. Underdark is Forgotten Realms.

Ah, fair.


I would give it a D, though.

And unfair! Its races in particular are really nice.


Book of Exalted Deeds has nice density of cool and interesting character options.

I struggle to think of too many, though. Poorly conceived, cringe, useless or criminally bad stuff, on the other hand… Of that it has quite a high density.


I know a lot of people have Spell Compendium really high on their lists, but it ranks lower for me because the vast majority of the good spells in there are just reprints from CAd, CAr, and CDiv. If you're using the Completes in your campaign, and you should, then Spell Compendium just doesn't add a lot of value, IMO. It's more akin to Rules Compendium—great as a quick reference, but you're absolutely fine without it.

True. That makes it quite useful for a new player, nevertheless, which makes it a good pick in this context. While splatdelving is a skill to eventually acquire if one wants to get serious about 3.5, no need to frighten off new users early!


When half the stuff has been updated to 3.5, but you don't know which half, it really detracts from the book's usefulness. Too much of A&EG is obsolete. Also, it doesn't help that most of the unupdated material is, like, really marginal number-crunchy stuff, like, oh, this special material lets me reduce my shield's ACP by an extra point for 500 gp cheaper than mithral, and this alchemical item gives me a great deal on a situational +2 bonus to certain checks, hooray! That and, like, vehicles, which are a nice thing to have rules for, but also not so nice that they're deeply entrenched in the 3.0 space and facing rules.

MIC does the "here's a book full of cool gear" job much better.

For magic items, it does. AEG's weapons/armour section or alchemical items is not half-bad, and its mundane gear chapter is a truly unique resource. The section on mounts and detailed price list for hirelings is also a big highlight.


I mean, Fiend Folio does have a lot of cool monster concepts, but why should you bother dealing with 3.0 artifacts and iffy challenge ratings when there are plenty of post-update monster books you could be using instead?

Because it's basically 3.5 for all intents and purposes and the monster concepts are really cool? It's quite strictly not the MM2's "occasionally mildly interesting, but rendered next to useless by ruleset issues and piss poor editing" tier.

[H_H_F_F]

This is one of those weird instances where I vehemently disagree, but you are right. Either my understanding of English is to strict, you're using it to loosely, or we need to have a conversation about epistemology.


Use with caution; contains much non-starter stuff (major rules variants, alternate systems, generic classes, even gestalt…). Strong agree. Unearthed Arcana is great, but a lot of it is decidedly bot beginner friendly - and a lot of it is also accessible on the SRD.

Again, I think PHB-II is probably the first book I'd get after core.

[thorr-kan]

For thematic unity, I think you could build a good campaign using the PH, DMG, and MM1, with PH2, Races of the Dragon, Dragon Magic, Draconomicon, and Dungeonscape. You've go your Dungeons; you've got your Dragons.

Add Liber Mortis, Lords of Madness, and Fiendish Codex 1 & 2 for some variety.

Add Dragons of Faerun and Dragons of Eberron for even more draconic goodness.

[Rebel7284]

None. I actually think the game is better by not letting it grow out unrestrained until it becomes a huge bloat.

Disagree completely. Sure, a core-only Wizard or Druid will do just fine, however, if you want to build a competent bard, you definitely need to look in several other books since Bard support in core is nearly non-existent.

I think at the very least the completes and races of X books should be allowed along with Magic Item Compenium and Spell Compendium, otherwise you end up with very cookie cutter characters with very unbalanced abilities as the levels progress. Core-only fighter runs out of decent feats to take MUCH faster than a core wizard runs out of COMPLETELY GAME BREAKING spells. :smallsmile:

[RandomPeasant]

Tome of Battle and Magic of Incarnum.

I would be cautious about using Magic of Incarnum with new players. It's a very fiddly subsystem, and the interactions with magic items in particular are non-standard and mean the classes benefit a lot from having enough game knowledge to plan around it.


While Biggus's spoint is certainly not without merit, I do believe non-Core classes are better balanced and very (if not outright most) often more interesting than Core classes. PHB minus the PHB classes (except perhaps Bard and Rogue) might be a good way to go.

Non-Core classes are not particularly more balanced than Core ones (especially from the perspective of new players). Neither the Artificer (probably the most powerful PC class) nor the Marshal (probably the weakest PC class) is in the PHB. "Ban the stuff in the PHB, it's the most broken" is a fun contrarian take but it doesn't really hold water, especially for a new group that is likely to be playing at low levels where imbalance is less prevalent.


Use with caution; contains much non-starter stuff (major rules variants, alternate systems, generic classes, even gestalt…).

Yeah. Very strong anti-rec for Unearthed Arcana in this context. If you hand someone Complete Arcane, they can use all the stuff in it without further clarification from you. That's not how it works with Unearthed Arcana, which means allowing it will create unnecessary confusion for new players (especially since you can just point them at the web page listing the variant classes instead).


I know a lot of people have Spell Compendium really high on their lists, but it ranks lower for me because the vast majority of the good spells in there are just reprints from CAd, CAr, and CDiv.

Also there's a resource we're all not allowed to talk about that is hanging over the "spell reference resource" conversation.


I mean, Fiend Folio does have a lot of cool monster concepts, but why should you bother dealing with 3.0 artifacts and iffy challenge ratings when there are plenty of post-update monster books you could be using instead?

That's really a Monster Manual II problem, not a Fiend Folio problem. Fiend Folio has a number of really cool monsters you don't get anywhere else, like the Chronotyryns and the Ethergaunts. I would take it over the MMIV and MMV, though it's about even with MMIII.

IMO the overall ranking is MMI > MMIII > FF > themed books like Draconomicon > MMV > MMIV > MMII (though I'd rate MMII significantly higher if you are confident in your ability to fix its editing issues, there's a lot of cool stuff in there).


I would caution in adding entire additional books. First, ban anything you are uncomfortable with in Core, then figure out what people want to do and whitelist material from there. My experience with carte blanche book allowances is that they don't work unless you manage it constantly and that gets tiresome with the side effect that people feel entitled to the material because you (sorta) allowed it.

I think this probably the wrong approach. I would just say something like "3e is a system that has a variety of balance issues, which I will work with you to address if they come up in play". If you want a walled-garden game, play 5e. The reason to play 3e is to let people play with a bunch of options.


PHB2 has the Beguiler, Duskblade, and Dragon Shaman!

Have all the people praising the PHBII as a bastion of class design that beats the original just forgotten that the Knight exists? I mean, I don't blame you or anything, the class is garbage, but it is tiered lower than any class in the PHB suggest that this "non-core is better-balanced" thing is maybe not all it's cracked up to be.


I'd really skip the Tome of Battle unless I'm with more advanced players.

I'd be interested to hear your reasoning here, because the ToB classes don't strike me as particularly complicated (the Crusader can be, but if you give the player a physical aid to help with their weird resource management it's not too bad).

[AvatarVecna]

Have all the people praising the PHBII as a bastion of class design that beats the original just forgotten that the Knight exists? I mean, I don't blame you or anything, the class is garbage, but it is tiered lower than any class in the PHB suggest that this "non-core is better-balanced" thing is maybe not all it's cracked up to be.

Core isn't unbalanced because of monk, it's unbalanced because of wizard. Commoner is poorly balanced because it's got low numbers, but that's an extremely solvable problem (just use enemies with lower numbers). If your party has low damage, lower enemy HP. If your party has low HP, lower enemy damage. If your party has low saves, lower enemy save DCs. Weak PCs require adjustment, absolutely, but the edition is full of tools for doing exactly that.

But it's not the same kind of balance issues presented by characters who are too powerful. A high sense Motive skill can be a complicating factor in a murder investigation, but not nearly so much as a spell that lets you interrogate the victim. Once that's a tool in the toolbox, the players need to deal with murder investigations where they don't have time to prepare speak with dead, and dont have access to shops with ela scroll/wand of the spell. Any killer the PCs hear about needs to be one who rips off their jawbone as a matter of habit, so that Gather Information is useful. There's similar issues with many spells, like teleportation and resurrection. The difficulty of crafting a satisfyong narrative when travel time and death become non obstacles is why OotS uses them so sparingly.

When balance is a numbers game, it's a non-issue. PC vs NPC balance issues can be solved with an eraser and pencil. When balance is a tactics/strategy game, that's an issue cuz its not PC vs NPC, its players vs DM.

[RandomPeasant]

Core isn't unbalanced because of monk, it's unbalanced because of wizard.

Core absolutely is unbalanced because of Monk. "Just rewrite all the encounters to deal with the PCs being underpowered" is hard, and it's especially hard for new tables. If you can't pull a CR 3 monster out of the Monster Manual and have it fight your party of 3rd level players, you have a real problem.

And, of course, non-Core also has plenty of Wizard types. The Artificer, the Archivist, the StP Erudite, the Death Master, and the Wu Jen are all non-core classes. The PHBII even has one of its own in the Beguiler, who has the spells to be quite capable of running roughshod over a carefully constructed social scenario. It's even worse in some ways than the Wizard, because it comes with all those spells stapled to enough skills to be a top-tier skillmonkey without touching its spells. At least with the Wizard you can, hypothetically, carve out a niche for the Rogue by having a long sequence of low-risk challenges.


A high sense Motive skill can be a complicating factor in a murder investigation, but not nearly so much as a spell that lets you interrogate the victim. Once that's a tool in the toolbox, the players need to deal with murder investigations where they don't have time to prepare speak with dead, and dont have access to shops with ela scroll/wand of the spell.

"Interrogate the dead guy" is not a silver bullet for murder mysteries. It's useful for murder mysteries, but "a guy was poisoned" is a classic murder mystery (it's the basic plot of Knives Out, for instance), and in that situation the guy can't really tell you anything. In fact, Gather Information at the kind of giant check a truly dedicated skillmonkey can get is in some ways more of a problem, because it lets you lay bare all the motivations and secrets immediately.


The difficulty of crafting a satisfyong narrative when travel time and death become non obstacles is why OotS uses them so sparingly.

I strongly disagree about travel time. There are a lot of stories where all the action takes place in one location, or where there isn't a ticking clock, or where the clock only starts when you get to the final setpiece. It's true that you'll have trouble doing 24 if Jack Bauer can teleport wherever he's going rather than needing to get in a car, but it doesn't do much for Die Hard.

Death is more complicated, because it's true that death is a serious and important consequence, but it's also true that people really don't want to stop playing their characters. A campaign where you can bring back Greg's Fighter at the start of the next session after he gets run through by a Battlebriar is different from one where you can't, but if Greg doesn't want to roll up a Barbarian (and the rest of the table doesn't see any value in forcing him), that's fine. If anything, I would say that the level penalty generally makes death too punishing for the preferences of most tables.

I will say one final thing, which is that I think describing the problem as "the Wizard" is misleading. Because writing around particular plot spells is not that hard. teleport means that you can't do an adventure where the players spend a month slogging across a desert, but if you know in advance that the party has teleport you can just write a different adventure. Where you get a problem is when the players can just pull a new ability out of their asses and declare that now they have teleport or raise dead or commune or whatever it is that you didn't plan for. And the Wizard's ability to do that is something you can screen out pretty easily (just say "sorry, there's no scroll of teleport, maybe you can buy one on the other end of your road trip). But for the Cleric and the Druid, every option they could want is always on deck. That can be a real problem for new DMs (though even then, none of this becomes a problem until fairly high level).

[DammitVictor]

Going to say, out of the Complete books, I would consider Complete Arcane and Complete Divine to be essential because they present alternative paradigms for what "mage" and "priest" can be, and how their power works. Oriental Adventures and the Spell Compendium provide additional support for the new classes.

If you want psionics to be core, you need Expanded Psionics Handbook, but I would recommend Dreamscarred Press' 3.5 psionics catalog-- or even (carefully) their PF catalog-- over Complete Psionic for expanding it further. CP isn't bad, but most DSP material is just hands-down better.

Epic Level Handbook is really subjective-- you either really want it or you really don't.

[Kurald Galain]

Have all the people praising the PHBII as a bastion of class design that beats the original just forgotten that the Knight exists? I mean, I don't blame you or anything, the class is garbage, but it is tiered lower than any class in the PHB suggest that this "non-core is better-balanced" thing is maybe not all it's cracked up to be.

That's why I suggested to use more classes (e.g. core + PHB2 + CA), not to ban all core classes and replace them with PHB2 instead.

[thethird]

It really depends on your group. I would ask my players what do they want to play and then consider what books would be more useful to fill that niche.

For example your players might want a campaign revolving around heists, and thievery. And dungeonscape and complete scoundrel will scratch that itch.

They might want a pirate campaign in which case you would do well to have stormwrack, and probably complete adventurer arround.

Dragons? You can't go wrong with the books with dragons on the name. Like Races of the Dragon, or Dracononomicon, or Dragon Magazine Compendium (wait, no, you don't need that last one).

For books that help you rethink how classes work, and give you interesting ideas. I personally like PHB II, Dungeonscape, Complete Champion, Complete Mage, Complete Scoundrel.

[AvatarVecna]

I think slightly changing numbers is a harder thing to do than rewriting stories around major plot devices in a way that's still narratively satisfying

You're entitled to your wrong opinion.

[Blue Dragon]

I think this is only really true when players are both at least moderately optimization-focused and moderately expert. I've mostly played with people of lowish expertise and casters haven't dominated noticably in any of those games.

Exception: Monks suck, even with new players they'll typically struggle to contribute much.



Those are the two I was going to recommend, they're not essential but they makes the game far more well-rounded.

I can confirm it from other games. You need to have a building-focused player to actually reach something that breaks the game. So it will not be a concern for some time. And yes, Monks suck. Really not interested of having any in my games. Thanks for the recommendations!

[H_H_F_F]

You're entitled to your wrong opinion.

I don't know if it's "wrong", precisely. Different DMs have different skillsets, different groups have different expectations.

I agree with you, by the way - tweaking numbers is way easier for me than dealing with teleportation, divinations, etc. I'd be willing to bet good money that this is the case for a large majority of DMs, too.

I think we can all agree that if that isn't the case for RandomPeasent, that's valid, and good info on which books to pick fir DMs with the same tendencies.


---

All that being said, I think that the existence of bad classes is more harmful than you make it out to be, AV. An inexperienced group could easily have a party composition of Swordage, Warmage, Favored Soul, and Samurai. This will create a lot of hardship very quickly.

[Jay R]

Play with the basic three. That's enough for awhile.

Then you need to separate what the DM needs from what the players want.

For the DM's purposes, the additional Monster Manuals could be useful -- once you get bored with the 319 pages of material in the first one. But that will take awhile.

But many of the books are primarily player options. Eventually, your players might start asking if they can use X from book Y. Then it's time to look at book Y.

You can also look at those books to design new NPCs that are different. Again, you don't need beguilers, shadowcraft mages, etc., until you get bored with the core options. If you do, then Races of Stone will give more options for gnomes, dwarves and goliaths, Races of Destiny will provide more for humans, half-elves, half-orcs, and Illumians, etc.

The Spell Compendium has lots of new spells. The Magic Item Compendium greatly increases the number of magic items.

But there is no need to use any book but the core three until the game gets stale.

[Blue Dragon]

Agree with the majority. The true essentials are Player's Handbook‚ Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual 1‚ nothing else. Maybe Rules Compendium if you don't feel like excavating rules for every weird occurence.
Very good books to improve on player options are the Complete X (except Complete Psionics‚ which is only useful if you also have the Expanded Psionics Handbook)‚ and Tome of Battle if you find that your martial characters are getting bored of only hitting people.
Very good books to improve on things you'd like to give your players are the Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium.
And finally‚ very good books that heavily depend on the kind of campaign you want to run : the environmental series (Stormwrack‚ Frostburn‚ Sandstorm‚ Cityscape)‚ the monstrous series (Draconomicon‚ Libris Mortis‚ Lords of Madness) and the campaign settings (Eberron Campaign Setting‚ Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting).

I'd personally start with the first three‚ then Complete Warrior and Complete Scoundrel if you feel like your group is getting into it‚ and then add books depending on what appeals to you the most.

That's a good approach, thanks. Since the only other experienced player never played D&D at all and the more we play, the more the players will want to understand the game rules.

[Metastachydium]

Either my understanding of English is to strict, you're using it to loosely, or we need to have a conversation about epistemology.

There's no shame in talking epistemology! It quickstarted modernism! (Also, all I'm really saying is that you are absolutely right and I HATE that, because I love my superfluous bestiaries.)


I would be cautious about using Magic of Incarnum with new players. It's a very fiddly subsystem, and the interactions with magic items in particular are non-standard and mean the classes benefit a lot from having enough game knowledge to plan around it.

It's also a wild ride in terms of good-to-bad ratio (it's the book with Totemist and Soulborn, in terms of just classes!).


Non-Core classes are not particularly more balanced than Core ones (especially from the perspective of new players). Neither the Artificer (probably the most powerful PC class) nor the Marshal (probably the weakest PC class) is in the PHB.

But I like Marshal (even if it is bad)! (Also? I'm very meh on Artificer. It's a bit like Sha'ir in that it's theoretically really strong, but a pain to actually play, except probably even worse. Also, Warlock 11+ does its whole shtick better.)


"Ban the stuff in the PHB, it's the most broken" is a fun contrarian take but it doesn't really hold water, especially for a new group that is likely to be playing at low levels where imbalance is less prevalent.

Okay, maybe I've made a generalisation a little too generous, but let's face it: Core has the three big gun T1 full casters (two of which are of the "you don't have class features, you have spells; go break the game!" sort) as well as Fighter (the only two-levels-long class in the whole game!) and Monk.


That's really a Monster Manual II problem, not a Fiend Folio problem. Fiend Folio has a number of really cool monsters you don't get anywhere else, like the Chronotyryns and the Ethergaunts. I would take it over the MMIV and MMV, though it's about even with MMIII.

IMO the overall ranking is MMI > MMIII > FF > themed books like Draconomicon > MMV > MMIV > MMII (though I'd rate MMII significantly higher if you are confident in your ability to fix its editing issues, there's a lot of cool stuff in there).

Rock hard agree there!


Have all the people praising the PHBII as a bastion of class design that beats the original just forgotten that the Knight exists? I mean, I don't blame you or anything, the class is garbage, but it is tiered lower than any class in the PHB suggest that this "non-core is better-balanced" thing is maybe not all it's cracked up to be.

I love Knight. Yes, it's bad, but it is plainly obvious that it was designed with love and passion, has a coherent and sound concept and is trying to be an actual dedicated tank in a system where that's some hard feces to pull. Knight commands my respect!


I'd be interested to hear your reasoning here, because the ToB classes don't strike me as particularly complicated (the Crusader can be, but if you give the player a physical aid to help with their weird resource management it's not too bad).

Warblade in particular is very straightforward.

[Yora]

I think at the very least the completes and races of X books should be allowed along with Magic Item Compenium and Spell Compendium,

Now that's a completely different question.

All books can be used. I don't think there's any book so awful that nobody should use it if they want it.

But that's completely different from "you must use these books if you want to play D&D 3rd edition and can't really play it without them."

Because, realistically, how many books do we ask new GMs and players to read before they start making characters for a firat campaign? Three? Six? Twenty?
Just because there are twenty books that have something in them that some people might have use for doesn't mean these books are all mandatory to be able to play a simple campaign.

[Troacctid]

Clerics, wizards, and druids aren't reeeally overpowered in core until high levels, and they're actually really fun to play, so I have to agree with RandomPeasant that the monks of the world are the more concerning balance issue.

[RandomPeasant]

Going to say, out of the Complete books, I would consider Complete Arcane and Complete Divine to be essential because they present alternative paradigms for what "mage" and "priest" can be, and how their power works.

Also because the base classes in the other Completes are just unplayably awful. Where it is possible to do so, they're all worse than just playing the same concept using Core classes, and even where it isn't they're worse than comparable Core classes.


You're entitled to your wrong opinion.

I'm not, actually. If I'm wrong, I should be proven wrong. But you know that, and you know what petty sniping in place of substantive argument means for your position.


I agree with you, by the way - tweaking numbers is way easier for me than dealing with teleportation, divinations, etc. I'd be willing to bet good money that this is the case for a large majority of DMs, too.

How many games of 3e have you run? Because I bet the answer is more than "zero", which is the number of games of 3e OP has run. My point, at its most narrowly-constructed, is that "spells that break the plot" are not harder to deal with for a novice DM than "retuning all the numbers of everything on the fly" because A) those spells don't exist at the low levels a novice DM should start at and B) a novice DM does not know what the appropriate monster numbers for various player numbers are. The idea that it is obviously the other way around is a failure to understand the difference between what is true of you and what is true of the person asking the question.

That said, this is also wrong in general, because these spells are actually really trivial to deal with. Knives Out is immune to speak with dead by accident, because "write a murder mystery where asking the dead guy what happened doesn't solve it" is not actually very hard. Plenty of episodes of network cop shows start off by showing you the murder! In fact, Glass Onion is also not trivialized by speak with dead, because while you could figure out Miles did it pretty easily, the real challenge is getting the rest of his hangers-on to abandon him. A good murder mystery is not simply "what is the name of the guy who did this", it's "a person has been killed, how do you navigate the social situation around that to a satisfying result".

If you think "I can't possibly write a plot that teleport doesn't break", I am frankly suspicious that the plots you write would be very engaging for me, because the plots of most fiction I read don't shatter in the face of easily getting between two locations (I read, for instance, a great deal of fiction that is set in a modern world which contains airplanes). Conversely, it is in fact much easier to be able to design encounters by looking at two numbers (APL and ECL) than by looking at all the numbers that make up both monster stat blocks and character sheets, and I find it a bit absurd that anyone would think it isn't.


Also? I'm very meh on Artificer. It's a bit like Sha'ir in that it's theoretically really strong, but a pain to actually play, except probably even worse.

Oh absolutely, The Artificer is one of the worst-designed classes in the game, especially if you're willing to separate class tuning from class design. It's like someone looked at every problem people have with casters and said "what if we made a class that turned this up to eleven". You think casters are underpowered at low levels and broken at high levels? This class needs to make a DC 20+ UMD check to be useful at 1st level, but has every broken trick any caster has and more at 20th level. You think casters spend too much time dumpster-diving for spells? This class gets materially stronger every time you find an unplayable PrC that has a 5th level spell at 4th level. You think it's unfair that casters can make use of downtime more easily than on-casters? This class is designed around turning downtime directly into power.


Core has the three big gun T1 full casters (two of which are of the "you don't have class features, you have spells; go break the game!" sort) as well as Fighter (the only two-levels-long class in the whole game!) and Monk.

The big three are famous because they are in Core, not particularly because they are the most abusable casting classes. They all lose out to the Artificers, Erudites, and Archivists at high levels of optimization (though the Wizard maintains a niche for being the best class that casts arcane spells, which can be useful for PrC access). And the Fighter is actually a T4 class, putting it well ahead of a number of non-Core classes. Even the Monk manages to scrape into the top half of T5, beating out the PHBII's Dragon Shaman and Knight in the process.

You could maybe say something like "the PHB has the widest spread of class power levels of any single book", but I don't really think that's a very meaningful claim when you consider that the PHB has eleven classes and the books with the next-most have four each. Particularly because the gaps in those books are quite large too. The Expanded Psionics Handbook has the Psion (very nearly T1) and the Soulknife (ranked as the second-worst PC class). The PHBII has the Beguiler and the Knight. If you were to pick a random selection of eleven classes from 3e, it would very likely be as imbalanced as the PHB, and chances are good it would have a more extreme outlier in one direction or the other.


Warblade in particular is very straightforward.

Really Crusader is the only complicated one. Swordsage is kinda undertuned if you don't let them do the Adaptive Style thing (and arguably even then), but "you prepare ready spells maneuvers and when you use them they're gone" is exactly as complicated as how Wizards work.

I also think the high floor ToB has is really useful for new groups. One of the balance problems that's relatively easy to run into is a situation where someone plays a Fighter and someone else plays a Druid that is comparably effective to a bad Fighter. That doesn't really happen with Warblades until you're talking about levels of optimization new players won't hit. It removes one of the big footguns 3e has, and I think the complexity cost is worth it.


Clerics, wizards, and druids aren't reeeally overpowered in core until high levels, and they're actually really fun to play, so I have to agree with RandomPeasant that the monks of the world are the more concerning balance issue.

More than that, the "game breaking spells" AvatarVecna is complaining about don't exist at all until at least mid levels. If you start up a new group to play 3e with, you will have four whole levels of Monk (and Soulknife or Knight or Samurai or so on) being undertuned before you even have to think about speak with dead. You'll have eight levels of them sucking before you get to teleport. The idea that the pressing problem for a new DM is that Wizards get spells that effect the plot doesn't hold water, and as I said that's independent of the general debate about whether teleport "breaks the game" in a sense worth mentioning.

[Ozreth]

Your players are new to RPGs and you are new to 3.5. Ignore all the stuff about core being broken. By a pure numbers game yeah a handful of core classes are very overpowered. For groups like yours (and mine), this doesn't matter much.

Outside of the the three core I would say:

Players Handbook 2
Complete Adventurer
Complete Divine
Complete Warrior
Complete Mage
Complete Arcane
Magic Item Compendium
Spell Compendium

Really cool books for DMs: Stormwrack, Sandstorm, Cityscape, Dungeonscape.

I don't care about much else that isn't in those.

It can be difficult to talk about the game in a way that doesn't come down to crunch and optimization on these forums. But when thats what you want its a hard place to beat, just don't let it paint your picture of 3.5e before you get into it yourself.

Which edition or system are you coming from? "After 21 years" makes me assume 2e.

[H_H_F_F]

How many games of 3e have you run? Because I bet the answer is more than "zero", which is the number of games of 3e OP has run.

Right, but the point stands for my very earliest game. I was 10 years old, I messed up an encounter, threw in an NPC to help when I realized my friends were doing poorly, and readjusted CR for the next few encounters.


]My point, at its most narrowly-constructed, is that "spells that break the plot" are not harder to deal with for a novice DM than "retuning all the numbers of everything on the fly" because A) those spells don't exist at the low levels a novice DM should start at and

Zone of Truth can bust open whole plotlines in minutes at level 3. It won't always, since it allows a save, but it can. So can cure disease, at 5. So can create water, at 1.


B) a novice DM does not know what the appropriate monster numbers for various player numbers are. The idea that it is obviously the other way around is a failure to understand the difference between what is true of you and what is true of the person asking the question. Really don't think that's the case, especially when it comes to a DM that has DMd for 21 years. Getting used to new numbers is easier than getting used to new avenues of play, I think.


That said, this is also wrong in general, because these spells are actually really trivial to deal with. Knives Out is immune to speak with dead by accident, because "write a murder mystery where asking the dead guy what happened doesn't solve it" is not actually very hard. Plenty of episodes of network cop shows start off by showing you the murder! In fact, Glass Onion is also not trivialized by speak with dead, because while you could figure out Miles did it pretty easily, the real challenge is getting the rest of his hangers-on to abandon him. A good murder mystery is not simply "what is the name of the guy who did this", it's "a person has been killed, how do you navigate the social situation around that to a satisfying result".

This feels not thought out. Yes, correct: the innovative and excellent Knives Out (which I'd wager was, in fact, hard to write) would not be impacted by speak with dead. The absolute majority of the genre classics, however, would be.

I don't think you're thinking of it in the right terms. This isn't about "writing a murder mystery not solved by speak with dead is impossible". It's "best case scenario, I have to world-build a completely different culture around crime. Worst case scenario, I'd spend a week writing a murder mystery only for my cleric to solve it in a minute". Because - and this comes back to a point you made - novice DMs aren't us. They don't have nigh-encyclopedic knowledge of cleric spells. They might miss the fact that a form of magic interacts with an avenue of play they're not used to thinking of as related to character sheets.


If you think "I can't possibly write a plot that teleport doesn't break", I am frankly suspicious that the plots you write would be very engaging for me, because the plots of most fiction I read don't shatter in the face of easily getting between two locations (I read, for instance, a great deal of fiction that is set in a modern world which contains airplanes).

People who imagined a sword&sorcery world when they first approacehed D&D aren't bad writers, they just don't have the same level of familiarity with the system that you do. It's not hard to write plots that teleport doesn't solve (even though it's vastly superior to an airplane. I can't take an airplane into the Kremlin.) It does suck, however, to have to scrap a plot because your players got to level 9 and you haven't realized how much that changes things well enough in advance.


Conversely, it is in fact much easier to be able to design encounters by looking at two numbers (APL and ECL) than by looking at all the numbers that make up both monster stat blocks and character sheets, and I find it a bit absurd that anyone would think it isn't.


My experience with "level appropriate encounters" has resulted in less trust in the CR systems than I'm led to believe you have.



I think the repeating point is that while you rightly point out that we're more familiar with the numbers than novices, you fail to account for the fact that it is your vast experience with 3.5 that leads you to be weary of plots that wouldn't work within it. Salvaging an encounter (even by going as far as fudging HP) is doable even for novices. Having your meticulously planned desert survival adventure ruined because you didn't read all the 0 level spells sucks.

[Troacctid]

Oh. Yeah. I guess if you're a new DM, it would probably behoove you to get a nice adventure module, too. You don't want to have to design a whole adventure by yourself while you're still navigating the basics of the game system.

[Ozreth]

Oh. Yeah. I guess if you're a new DM, it would probably behoove you to get a nice adventure module, too. You don't want to have to design a whole adventure by yourself while you're still navigating the basics of the game system.

Sunless Citadel
Red Hand of Doom
Rise of the Runelords
Age of Worms

[RandomPeasant]

Right, but the point stands for my very earliest game. I was 10 years old, I messed up an encounter, threw in an NPC to help when I realized my friends were doing poorly, and readjusted CR for the next few encounters.

And you can do the exact same thing to deal with teleport. "Oh yeah that doesn't work the way that's a problem for me because asspull" works for spells too, it's just that fixing things with asspulls tends to annoy people if you do it constantly (I, for instance, would be way madder about finding out the DM was dynamically adjusting monster HP down for us than being told "sorry you can't teleport there").


Zone of Truth can bust open whole plotlines in minutes at level 3. It won't always, since it allows a save, but it can. So can cure disease, at 5. So can create water, at 1.

zone of truth doesn't break plots because it doesn't compel anyone to do anything. Plus, there's no guarantee that the person you choose to interrogate will be one of the ones that knows anything (you get three minutes per casting and maybe two castings per day, you're not getting everyone unless your DM takes a very liberal view of "speaking is a free action"). And you don't even know if it's working, or if the person is misleading you without lying.

I don't even know what plot you think would exist that cure disease breaks. Like the King has some horrible disease the players need to search out a cure for but you're not just going to say "sorry, curative magic doesn't work on it"? If a DM is going to miss that one, what makes you think he's going to realize that the players aren't equipped to deal with an encounter because they're three Monks and a Soulknife?


This feels not thought out. Yes, correct: the innovative and excellent Knives Out (which I'd wager was, in fact, hard to write) would not be impacted by speak with dead. The absolute majority of the genre classics, however, would be.

The point is that whatever difficulty in writing Knifes Out existed is orthogonal to the difficulty of dealing with speak with dead, because Rian Johnson was not thinking about speak with dead while writing it. And, sure, maybe there are examples of well-regarded plots speak with dead does break, but if you can't provide any of them I don't see that the hypothetical weighs terribly heavily on me.


It's "best case scenario, I have to world-build a completely different culture around crime. Worst case scenario, I'd spend a week writing a murder mystery only for my cleric to solve it in a minute".

That's the thing though. You don't have to world-build a completely different culture around crime, because most of the divinations that exist in D&Dland don't do much in our culture around crime. zone of truth is close to useless in a world with a right against self-incrimination. scrying or detect thoughts don't produce evidence at all. speak with dead would, admittedly, be quite useful for a murder trial, but it's also subject to post-death tampering, meaning you have to keep the corpse under guard until the trial's through. In fact, the tampering doesn't even need to be disruptive. If the murder has an accomplice come through once a week and ask the corpse about its favorite books, you can't interrogate it with speak with dead at all. The reason divinations are treated as "breaking the plot" of mysteries is because the tacit assumption is that the process of a "mystery" is "find out who did it" and then "go stab them in the face" rather than "find out who did it" and then "go present evidence to a court of law that they're guilty".


People who imagined a sword&sorcery world when they first approacehed D&D aren't bad writers, they just don't have the same level of familiarity with the system that you do.

Or they are simply playing at the fully a third of the levels where D&D is perfectly capable of doing Sword and Sorcery adventures. For some reason, everyone jumps on "what about teleport" as a reason high level play is broken, but it never occurs to them that "there is no number of 1st level warriors who can meaningfully threaten the party" is also a change in what adventures are supported. If you want to play a game where the players fight through a catacomb of ghouls to reach a tomb containing the precious prize of a +1 holy greatsword, teleport is far from the only reason that's a bad adventure for 10th level characters.


even though it's vastly superior to an airplane. I can't take an airplane into the Kremlin.

You can't teleport into the Wizard Kremlin either because the Wizard Kremlin has a bunch of forbiddances stacked up on it. Yes, that requires you to understand how different pieces of the rules interact, but it is also the plot of an adventure for characters that are at least 9th level. I think it's fine to expect DMs to understand rules interactions between two core spells when designing adventures at that level.


My experience with "level appropriate encounters" has resulted in less trust in the CR systems than I'm led to believe you have.

This is another one of those world-weary forumite things like "core is the most broken" that is just not backed up by data. CR is very reliable, that's why we can all look at things like the Adamantine Horror and say "wow that's way too dangerous for its CR" rather than "yep, that's another CR 9 monster that is a completely arbitrary level of dangerous". If you have four characters that perform roughly effectively against a CR benchmark like the SGT (and this is generally true of characters from high-floor classes like Warblade, Druid, or Beguiler even in the hands of beginners), they will perform roughly effectively against the overwhelming majority of creatures of that CR.


Having your meticulously planned desert survival adventure ruined because you didn't read all the 0 level spells sucks.

create water doesn't even do that. You also need food to survive, which doesn't get created until 5th level (no, goodberry doesn't work, you need "freshly picked berries" -- not exactly common in a desert!). Your hypothetical here is "what if the Cleric spends a significant percentage of their daily magical allotment at 1st level to make logistics modestly easier for the party" and you're characterizing that as "breaking a plotline wide open".


Sunless Citadel
Red Hand of Doom
Rise of the Runelords
Age of Worms

Again, I recommend starting with Sunless Citadel. It starts at 1st level (RoHD is bad for your first adventure for a variety of reasons, not least that it starts at a higher level), and it's a solid standalone adventure. When you get to the end you can decide whether you want to continue down its adventure path, jump ship to your own custom adventures (or stitch over to another adventure path), or even start over with new characters now that the players are more familiar with what they do or don't like.

[H_H_F_F]

And you can do the exact same thing to deal with teleport. "Oh yeah that doesn't work the way that's a problem for me because asspull" works for spells too, it's just that fixing things with asspulls tends to annoy people if you do it constantly (I, for instance, would be way madder about finding out the DM was dynamically adjusting monster HP down for us than being told "sorry you can't teleport there").

I'm not going to do a full point by point response, since I feel like we're not going to reach an agreement. I definitely would be more upset at "the spells you picked are useless because they ruin my game" rather than "DM planned the encounter wrong". It's fine that you wouldn't - but that's a preference, not some broader essential truth about class balance. My point is, again, that different DMs and different groups would respond differently.




I don't even know what plot you think would exist that cure disease breaks. Like the King has some horrible disease the players need to search out a cure for but you're not just going to say "sorry, curative magic doesn't work on it"?

Pointing this out again: "your spells are irrelevant when I want them to be" really sucks for me, and I don'y believe I'm alone in this. This sort of thing should be used extremely sparingly, or be established in session 0. Same for "anywhere that matters has forbiddance" that IS either incredibly ad-hoc and frustrating, or is by itself a serious impact on worldbuilding.


And, sure, maybe there are examples of well-regarded plots speak with dead does break, but if you can't provide any of them I don't see that the hypothetical weighs terribly heavily on me.

Oh come on. Fine.

Murder on the Orient Express, a Study in Scarlet, the Maltese Falcon, the Name of the Rose. That's off the top of my head, as someone who isn't an avid mystery reader.

We both know you could think of many more. You've made your case just fine about crafting mysteries - pretending that EXISTING murder mysteries would not be impacted by speak with dead (not to mention raise dead or reanimate) is just being bullheaded.



This is another one of those world-weary forumite things like "core is the most broken" that is just not backed up by data. CR is very reliable, that's why we can all look at things like the Adamantine Horror and say "wow that's way too dangerous for its CR" rather than "yep, that's another CR 9 monster that is a completely arbitrary level of dangerous". If you have four characters that perform roughly effectively against a CR benchmark like the SGT (and this is generally true of characters from high-floor classes like Warblade, Druid, or Beguiler even in the hands of beginners), they will perform roughly effectively against the overwhelming majority of creatures of that CR. Is the thought here what, that I'm lying to you about my gaming experience because I'm a forumite? There are plenty of low level encounters that can end parties if you don't know what you're doing and your group isn't experienced.




create water doesn't even do that. You also need food to survive, which doesn't get created until 5th level (no, goodberry doesn't work, you need "freshly picked berries" -- not exactly common in a desert!). Your hypothetical here is "what if the Cleric spends a significant percentage of their daily magical allotment at 1st level to make logistics modestly easier for the party" and you're characterizing that as "breaking a plotline wide open".

I don't know where you live, but if you've ever been to a desert, you'd know. Having your food disappear at night will suck. You might go hungry, and really worried if you have to exert a lot of effort and it's been a week. Losing your water? That's a straight up emergency. One of the scariest things that could happen to you.




Anyway, yeah. This feels like it's getting too petty for me. I respect your sentiments that cheesing an encounter is worse than cheesing plot, I disagree that most novice DMs and groups would find it easier to deal with clerics than with monks, and that has not at all been my experience when me and my friends were just starting out.

[Tzardok]

Excuse me, what? Murder on the Orient Express can't be solved by speak with dead, that's the whole point of it. The victim got stabbed in the dark while too drugged to properly wake up.
Edit: Not sure if this counts as a spoiler, but better be safe.

[H_H_F_F]

Excuse me, what? Murder on the Orient Express can't be solved by speak with dead, that's the whole point of it. The victim got stabbed in the dark while too drugged to properly wake up.

"I don't know, detective, I was trashed. There were multiple people talking. It was slow."

[Tzardok]

"I don't know, detective, I was trashed. There were multiple people talking. It was slow."

Nobody was talking. Sense of time was shot to hell because of the drugging, so unreliable.
So no. The spell may certainly help, but it won't solve the mystery.

[RandomPeasant]

My point is, again, that different DMs and different groups would respond differently.

I'm sure there are people out there who are absolute wizzes with numbers but can't write a plot that handles 3rd level spells. I just don't think 3rd level spells are the big problem for a new group starting at 1st level, because 1st level characters are famously incapable of casting 3rd level spells.


Pointing this out again: "your spells are irrelevant when I want them to be" really sucks for me, and I don'y believe I'm alone in this.

So the alternative is banning your entire class? If we're saying that Clerics are a problem because they get speak with dead, we have to do something about that, and if we're rejecting "don't let people use speak with dead" it seems like we have to embrace "don't let people use Cleric". And it doesn't have to be "spells turn off when the DM wants". It can just be an out-of-game conversation where the DM says "hey, I don't feel comfortable writing around teleport, can you either swap it for something else at no charge or be willing to okay your uses of it with me". That is, again, obviously easier than having to spot-check every encounter to make sure the Monk is useful.


Same for "anywhere that matters has forbiddance" that IS either incredibly ad-hoc and frustrating, or is by itself a serious impact on worldbuilding.

No it isn't. forbiddance isn't some obscure spell or some bizarre interaction. It is a spell that every 11th level Cleric in the world can cast every day which lasts forever. It would, frankly, be surprising if there were any places in the world that had ever been important to someone of substantial power that were not covered by it. It's like saying it's a "serious impact on worldbuilding" that there's a no-fly zone over the White House.


Oh come on.

Dude I came to the table with examples. I don't understand how I'm unreasonable for thinking you should have some too.


a Study in Scarlet

Isn't the first victim in that one poisoned? I don't think he necessarily knows exactly who did it. I suppose speak with dead would be helpful, as if I saw "REVENGE" written on the wall next to a dead guy and had the chance to speak with him, "who wants revenge on you" would probably be my first question. But that could just as easily end up with a red herring if the guy assumed an old business partner or something wanted him screwed over.


the Maltese Falcon

Again, speak with dead is useful here (probably the most so far), but the plot is more complicated than "who killed this specific guy".


the Name of the Rose

The first several murders here are done by poison. Do you really think someone is going to ask a corpse "read any interesting books right before you died" on the basis of exactly no other evidence?


pretending that EXISTING murder mysteries would not be impacted by speak with dead (not to mention raise dead or reanimate) is just being bullheaded.

Hold on now, you're moving the goalposts. Of course they'd be impacted. But the point is that speak with dead doesn't come anything close to "breaking open" mystery plotlines, because "a guy was murdered face-to-face by someone he recognized on sight for motivations he entirely understood" is simply not a good mystery.


There are plenty of low level encounters that can end parties if you don't know what you're doing and your group isn't experienced.

Tell you what. Let me name some broken CR 3 monsters, and let's see how many more you can name that aren't on my list: Allip, Shadow, the web enhancement giant crab, Runehound (I think that's what it's called, it's an MMIII critter that's pretty nasty for 3). Maybe there are a lot. But those are the ones that get memetic traction, and because people spend more time talking about "broken CR 3 monsters" than "totally fine CR 3 monsters", they spring to mind quite naturally. But most CR 3 monsters aren't like that. If a 3rd level party fights a Centaur or an Ogre or a Giant Owl or a Minor Xorn, that will be fine.


I don't know where you live, but if you've ever been to a desert, you'd know. Having your food disappear at night will suck. You might go hungry, and really worried if you have to exert a lot of effort and it's been a week. Losing your water? That's a straight up emergency. One of the scariest things that could happen to you.

So your plan here is that you will have an encounter where the player's waterskins get stolen, and you think that the players having an ability that allows them to solve that the next day is going to destroy your whole plotline? Why not just have an adventure in any environment where the theft is the Wizard's spellbook?


I respect your sentiments that cheesing an encounter is worse than cheesing plot

Then you've misunderstood my sentiment. The problem with character/encounter balance is underpowered characters, not overpowered ones (at least, at the levels of optimization new groups deal with -- we're not talking about Chain Binding here). If the PCs spend 20% or even 10% of their resources to deal with an encounter instead of 25%, that's fine because the encounter still felt like an engaging tactical exercise. The issue is when the Monk gets knocked over by a normal-strength encounter.

And, yes, this is a bigger problem for a new group running a low-level adventure than plot-breaking, because the spells that break an adventure like Sunless Citadel do not exist at low levels. It is by definition true that "the party is underpowered" is more of a concern for that scenario than "the party has a spell that bypasses the dungeon" because you cannot build characters that have the spells that bypass dungeons at 1st level. I am happy to debate more about how complicated plots need to be to deal with speak with dead or scrying or teleport or raise dead or fabricate or plane shift, but your position is simply factually wrong as it pertains to low-level adventures.


Excuse me, what? Murder on the Orient Express can't be solved by speak with dead, that's the whole point of it. The victim got stabbed in the dark while too drugged to properly wake up.

I honestly don't understand what people think murder mysteries are that they think speak with dead is a silver bullet for them. Have they not heard of simple plot devices like "it was dark when it happened" or "the guy was stabbed in the back" or "the assailant wore a mask" or "the murder was done by poison"? In the real world, police even have trouble solving attempted murders, where the potential victim is by definition alive and generally able to answer questions.

That said, it is true that magic impacts how plots work. I just wish people would address that by saying "here's the kinds of magic that exists and here's the things you can do to handle them while making adventures more interesting on their own terms" rather than "teleport is broken" or worse "Wizards are broken". Because it's almost always the case that adding some wrinkles to foil scrying or speak with dead or the like makes for a more interesting adventure in general. Knives Out would not be a better movie if Ransom had stabbed Harlan in the face while explaining his motivations to him.

[Troacctid]

Could you please redact the spoilers for the murder mysteries in question?

[Zonugal]

After 21 years, I am finally adopting D&D 3.5 as a gaming system. Besides the three core books which first-party ones are quite indispensable to the game?

Okay, I'm going to approach this by way of priority.

Mandatory
You've mentioned that you have all of these, which is good, cause you for sure 100% need them to run the game.
-- The Player's Handbook
-- The Dungeon Master's Guide
-- The Monster Manual

Supplementary #1 (game options)
These books provide such large-scale offerings to every player that they should be the first you pick up following the three core books
-- Magic Item Compendium
-- Player's Handbook II

Supplementary #2 (player options)
These books provide vast new options for players, in the form of classes, prestige classes, equipment, spells, ect...
-- Complete Adventurer
-- Complete Arcane
-- Complete Divine
-- Complete Warrior

Supplementary #3 (sub-systems)
These books expand on the game, through the introduction of new sub-systems which offer new options for everyone
-- Expanded Psionics Handbook
-- Tome of Battle
-- Unearthed Arcana

Supplementary #4 (DM options)
These books provide options for primarily dungeon masters, but some provide things for players, in addition to offering a super-adventure to help learn the system.
-- Eberron Campaign Setting
-- Eyes of the Lich Queen
-- Monster Manual II

There you go, 12 books that should set you up for success as you learn the system.

[RandomPeasant]

Worth noting that you don't need to explicitly acquire the Expanded Psionics Handbook because it, along with Unearthed Arcana and the Epic Level Handbook, was added to the SRD at some point, and you can access all those rules for free. Also I would put Tome of Magic over Unearthed Arcana if we are talking about books. Unearthed Arcana has a lot of optional rules, but unlike most books they are explicitly "optional rules" rather than game options for the standard game. Your players shouldn't just show up using Wound Points or Flaws the way they can Warmage or Frenzied Berserker.

[Prime32]

Going to say, out of the Complete books, I would consider Complete Arcane and Complete Divine to be essential because they present alternative paradigms for what "mage" and "priest" can be, and how their power works. Oriental Adventures and the Spell Compendium provide additional support for the new classes.

The warlock from Complete Arcane and dragonfire adept from Dragon Magic have a lot less bookkeeping than a Core caster, with a small number of abilities and no limit on how often they can be used. Though Dragon Magic, while it has a bunch of interesting material, makes heavy reference to content in Races of the Dragon (and to a lesser extent Complete Arcane + Draconomicon) so it's not really a starter thing.

Warmage, also from Complete Arcane, is like a sorcerer specialised in blasting. They have a set list of spells rather than picking them individually, including a ton of ways to fling energy at things but little else. So they won't be as powerful as a well-built sorcerer but they're very hard to screw up at the character build phase. Beguiler (Player's Handbook 2) and Dread Necromancer (Heroes of Horror) use the same casting mechanic but with different focuses.


Worth noting that you don't need to explicitly acquire the Expanded Psionics Handbook because it, along with Unearthed Arcana and the Epic Level Handbook, was added to the SRD at some point, and you can access all those rules for free.There's a bunch of content in both Core and those books which isn't part of the SRD. Mostly fluff and advice on using the material, but also mechanics - including some monsters and even two useful feats (Hidden Talent + Enhance Item).

[Efrate]

I actually like none of the big 3 classes (cleric, druid, wizard) and steering players towards a different option that easier to work with for newcomers. One day i want to run a no phb classes or no spells period and only use psionics, non-core classes etc. To see how it goes. Worked phenomenally for pf1e with path of war and akashic.

Talk to your players, get a feel for what they want, and then ask here to refine options. Use those options. If one wants to be a mind manipulating magic user, steer towards beguiler. They wanna blast? Warmage or dragonfire adept. Heavyweight champion of the world? Warblade.

Core 3 will get you what you need. There are mountains of options to make it more exact but you only need core 3 to run.

[Metastachydium]

-- Monster Manual II

You are a wicked man.

[Zonugal]

-- Monster Manual II

You are a wicked man.

You know, this is on me. I had recently read the Bestiaries for Pathfinder's first edition and had remembered how their 2nd monster manual had so many iconic fantasy TTRPG creatures in it. I, as a fool, figured the same for D&D 3.5!

A FOOL WAS I.

Yeah, upon inspection again, the Monster Manual II is rough.

I do enjoy the 3rd monster manual, but you don't need it if you also have the Eberron Campaign Setting book (which I think is a solid inclusion as it showcases what a great setting looks like for new DMs hoping to develop their own, in addition to providing a setting for those not ready/able to create their own quite yet).

Flipping through the other ones, I think the 4th monster manual is a pretty solid choice. It has NPCs for certain races/factions, it has sample lairs, it features sample encounters, strategies & tactics, typical treasure, ecology, lore checks for its creatures, and advice in how to integrate them into the Eberron setting? But most of all I think it presents a contrast to the first monster manual in terms of "This is an advanced/upgraded monster manual. You should be doing this sort of stuff with the other monsters you have seen in the other books."

So, yeah, bumps Monster Manual II and replace it with Monster Manual IV.

[Darg]

There's a bunch of content in both Core and those books which isn't part of the SRD. Mostly fluff and advice on using the material, but also mechanics - including some monsters and even two useful feats (Hidden Talent + Enhance Item).

Some rules and clarifications are cut due to some overzealous copyright editing. My favorite to point out is the soulknife's free draw ability. The SRD would have you believe that you can only use it once per round. However if you look in the XPH you realize that the text is actually referring to the limit imposed by the interaction of being in an APF when you fail your save. The SRD is good for quick referencing but the books have more contextual information. A really important example for the DM to know is the examples given in the PHB about the actions required for illusion interaction that are wholly left out of the SRD.

Edit: while this isn't a book suggestion per se, my groups have regretted not knowing about from the start is the Armor as Damage Reduction (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/armorAsDamageReduction.htm) alternative rule from Unearthed Arcana. It blunts the rocket tag at lower levels, allows the stacking of an otherwise underwhelming mechanic (adamantine becomes just as valuable as mithral), and makes for far more interesting higher level play where you hit more often even if it is for less damage.

[Metastachydium]

So, yeah, bumps Monster Manual II and replace it with Monster Manual IV.

Now with the special seal of approval of the Happy Little Blue Flower! (I'm quite fond of MM4. It's not a terribly important book, but it's competently done and has some critters that are dear to me.)

[gijoemike]

I'll have to concur with Silva. Player's Handbook is by far the most broken and unfortunately-designed (I won't say "poorly", because the actual mechanical core is solid, but half the classes are plainly done wrong) book in 3.5, and supplements are actually one of its' biggest strengths.

Playing 3.5 core-only is doing the system a disservice (at least, once you're familiar with the basics), and I personally would advise anyone looking to dig into the system to at least keep in mind that Tome of Battle, Magic of Incarnum and the Binder section of Tome of Magic exist and provide decent variety and are never nearly as gamebreaking (in either direction) as some things that are found in the PHB. Furthermore, Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium are good additions for basically every game. Completes and Player's Handbook II are hit-and-miss, but can also help.

TL;DR: nothing is truly essential, but supplements is where 3.5 truly shines, so I'd advise taking at least a cursory look at most of them.

I will second/third/forth this. The players handbook is the most unbalanced book. It has been years upon years ago but parties made up of classes from the supplement books are better balanced than parties made from core.


My favorite book is the Tome of Battle: Book of 9 Swords... But since you are just picking this up as a system, avoid it. It adds complexity and subsystems that would be a bit much at this time.

I fully expect this post to get flack for disrespecting the Tome of Battle and I DESERVE IT. But on the first trip into a 3rd ed I would avoid that.

[Efrate]

No flak for ToB, it is excellent and what martials needed since no one at wotc bothered to readjust martials.

I stand by work with players and I would steer them to concepts not in PHB personally but that's me.

[Eladrinblade]

After 21 years, I am finally adopting D&D 3.5 as a gaming system. Besides the three core books which first-party ones are quite indispensable to the game?

Whenever I bother with D&D, my book pile usually looks like this:
>my journal
>phb 3.5
>mm 3.5
>dmg 3.5
>mm3
>dungeonscape

It's been pretty consistent over the years. I've got like 20 other books but I hardly ever look at them.

[Pugwampy]

My faves usually due to OP classes and feats

PHB 2
Races of Faerun
Book of erotic fantasy
Miniatures Handbook
Complete prestige classes

[Darkholme]

After 21 years, I am finally adopting D&D 3.5 as a gaming system.
It's a fun system.


Besides the three core books which first-party ones are quite indispensable to the game?
After the main three, it very quickly becomes a matter of taste. For me, personally? Arms & Equipment; Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting; Player's Guide to Faerun; Magic of Faerun; Monsters of Faerun; Manual of the Planes; and *Maybe* Complete Mage; Then other FR Books as campaign-appropriate. Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium are okay too. Then 2e planar books like Guide to the Astral Plane; The AD&D FR deity books (Or Faiths and Pantheons if you want the 3e mechanics more than you want indepth religious cultural gameplay flavor);

A lot of the ones I add from Wizards, are because I find them interesting and flavorful as the GM. The picks of a player looking to optimize characters using Wizards sources will look different.

I will often allow other Wizards 3e books upon request (particularly the FR books, which should surprise nobody given the above), but those are my priority Wizards / TSR books. After the ones above, I start introducing third party and Pathfinder bits more than additional Wizards sources.

You only *need* the three main books, beyond that it comes down a lot to which books you find have stuff you like. It seems Magic Item Compendium and Spell Compendium are used by *most* groups though.

----------

I should also note, that which books are useful to you beyond the core three, will depend on your taste in gameplay, and how much you want different things to be the focus. If you really love combat, ToB will add variety to the martials. If combat is just one part of the game to you, or you want mechanics that make more sense from a simulationist standpoint, ToB strains that credulity more than the PHB because encounter powers are the main premise.

If you want rules for combat; negotiations; morale; warfare; base construction; legal trials; exploration; inventing; secret mystery research; nautical adventuring; or various other more niche topics - there are books for them, but often some of the better regarded picks are books put out by other publishers.