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The Books

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Wizards of the Coast put out at least one Dungeons and Dragons 4E role-playing book per month.  And if you are playing a 4E game you are going to have to buy at least a few of those books.  (And if you get really into your game, you are likely going to purchase more than a few—simply because you will want to know more about the world in which your character now finds him/herself.)

The Audience

But at a minimum, unless you are one of those fortunate souls who breakfasts in the company of gnomes, dwarves, elves and the occasional dragon, you are going to need to know about your and your companions’ racial characteristics.  And you will need to know about your profession (your class)—unless you know more than a fair share about magic, are an excellent wood-scout, or perhaps have grown up in a typical Medieval town learning your “trade” as a pickpocket.  So the Wizards of the Coast have a captive audience.  Perhaps that is why they have been putting less care into the production of their books.

The Great Content

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the content of the D&D core and role-playing game supplement books.  What other books invite your imagination run wild by giving you so many choices?  If you opt to be a Bear Warrior, “you revere the bear as a symbol of the warrior’s strength and prowess.  Through long and ancient rites, you have bound that symbol to your heart with more than just words and totems….”  On the other hand, if you decide to be a Student of the Seven, the core book tells a legend about you and your kind: “Among the many legends told by bards, a few mythic figures appear with some regularity, including the mysterious Seven.  The Seven are sisters or sometimes brothers whose names vary from tale to tale.  They’re not gods, but they’re not mortals either…”  Maybe that is why the contrast between the content and the quality of the books is so apparent.

The Poor Quality

And this is what I mean by quality.  Many of the illustrations in the first core books are cartoonish and quite obviously done on a computer.  You sometimes get the feeling that the artist was just tossing stuff out as quickly as possible.  Likewise, the printing leaves much to be desired.  In more than a few books, every other page in the latter half of the book, is a bit faded—as though the printer didn’t have quite enough ink but kept going anyway.  And the binding is terrible.  I got a brand new, never opened Eberron book recently and before I got to the end, the binding had cracked and one of the pages was all but falling out.  The book had been glued in haste at that, rather than sewn together and this was the result.

The poor quality takes away from my enjoyment of these (literally) fantastical books. For while the descriptions of the races inhabiting the mysterious, intrigue-ridden, and monster-plagued world of Dungeons and Dragons is captivating, the thought that I shelled out $30 for a low-quality book is not.

Hope for the Future

However, given the recent (often quite striking) improvements I have seen in the D&D illustrations, it seems that I may not be the only one to feel this way.  The same, however, cannot (yet) be said of the binding and the printing quality.  So if you’re like me and wish that the D&D books were well made and well written, don’t despair.  Our complaints may be beginning to have an effect.

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