[3.X] What is Official/1st Party 3E D&D Material

[Fizban]

Same as usual: "Official" doesn't mean anything other than what the person saying it wants it to be.

The only thing that makes something "official" is someone with "the authority to decide what's official" making the decision.

Dragon Magazine touts itself as all being "official" DnD content. Anything that managed to get published with such a phrase would be similarly official content. I would bet plenty of things on that list don't use the word "official" anywhere in them, and yet are considered by some to "obviously" be official content.

You mention the Ravenloft 3E material- is that Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, or some other material? 'Cause people mention the non-magical "devices" in there all the time- maybe not as a "practical" expectation that a table will allow them, but certainly as an "official" way of getting non-magical magic items.


The criteria used by corporations and licensing to determine what logos go on what and who gets the sales money have nothing to do with the authors or coherency of whatever the "official" body of work might be. They are completely meaningless for gaming purposes, even claims that 1st party content has better quality control quickly fall flat in either direction with a little analysis- better copy editors maybe, but just as much busted. I have not seen a single time someone has ever given a good reason for wanting "official only" or "1st party only" answers, aside from the tautological "my group only allows/uses all official 1st party."

The entire idea is that there is a specific body of sources which everyone has, and anything outside of which is not valid. That's not how reality or DnD works. But it sure as heck does let people argue that X busted thing is totally official and thus they deserve to break the game, or Y busted thing isn't even official so it doesn't matter.

As I've said before, trying to run a game where "all official/1st party is allowed" is an exercise in gambling, retcons, and walkbacks, since instead of doing the DM's job of checking content beforehand, you're either A: allowing things in without looking and possibly having to fix the problems later, or B: checking things before they're used and potentially having to walk back your "all allowed" standpoint over and over. Both make it obvious that the initial statement was a failure, and it's either blind luck or a set of unwritten rules the group is actually following which holds it together. Stating a preference that the players not inundate you with requests for far flung 3rd party or wiki homebrew requests is entirely reasonable of course, but that's not what the sentence says.



There is a general set of books that are widely known and relevant to most forum discussion, but the criteria it's based on has more to do with availability, recognizability, and whether or not something is perceived as its own setting. This set of books is much smaller than even the somewhat more defined "1st party" list, because there are plenty of 1st party books plenty of people don't use or which have little reason to expect reference to- the entire pile of pre-made adventures, any setting book that isn't so thick with mechanics people are constantly mentioning it, bad-guy books, and also just several books which came out so late in the run that the forum scene has already coalesced its body of memetic knowledge without them. Generic non-setting content found abundantly in major bookstores during the height of the game's popularity seen and used both by early and late adopters beats small 3rd party publisher and monthly magazine subscription content that most people never saw. It's that simple.