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

[Saintheart]

Well, this is where we could get philosophical about it: what significance applies to 'officially endorsed' anyway?

I'm only all postmodernist about it simply because of repeated interactions with holes in WOTC's QA, editing, and in some cases, base concepts. WOTC turned out several if not many products themselves which sure are 'officially endorsed' but which you'd need a hole in the head to use or apply as written. Legacy Weapons. Truenamers. Challenge Rating. Vow of Poverty. Fighters (haha). If some of this stuff turned up from third party publishers unaffiliated with WOTC you'd never hear about it unless some crusty old forum poster with too much time on his hands and a strange affection for secondhand books started doing miniature reviews at random of twenty year old splats.

I doubt there was that much serious playtesting past, say, the first year of 3.5. There just wouldn't have been the money in it, not with fourth edition on the horizon promising to correct all of third edition's ills. Tome of Battle was their last hurrah, and that sucker they couldn't even be bothered issuing proper errata (let alone that it was a testbed for some of fourth's central concepts).

Sure, it might help to know what WOTC's in-house teams actually wrote and what some random freelancer slapped together in his garage. Doesn't automatically tell you what's quality and what's not.