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Let's chat about 3rd Party Publishers and D&D, specifically what you bought and what you used in actual play!

D&D 0e-1e had Judges Guild, Mayfair and some crazy DIY guys making stuff. I don't remember any 3PP from the 2e days. Of course, there was the D20 license and the OGL for 3e and the OSR, and the half-assed GSL for 4e. So far Mearls made a non-announcement about how 5e may have something sometime next year for fans to produce stuff so we will see how that plays out.

What was the most useful 3PP product you bought as a Player?

What was the most useful 3PP product you bought as a DM?

What 3PP stuff showed up most at your game table?

Just a handful of stuff.  It was all drek that saw no table action.

This is 3x only but I bought and used Sword and Sorcery and Arcana Evolved stuff mostly. The bulk of my money went to White Wolf  games when 3.5 rolled out and 5e has me back.

So which one do I pick if I never bought any 3PP stuff until after I'd stopped playing D&D and then I bought a variety of things, mostly 2nd hand, to milk for ideas for other games... like Runequest?... and then later collected a bunch of old stuff to inspire ideas for S&W/DCC/LotFP?

Wayback I used various D&D scenarios in White Dwarf with WFRP and Stormbringer.
I liked running and playing Death Frost Doom... and its aftermath with S&W.
My DCC games are kindasorta centered on City State of the Invincible Overlord and Wilderlands... but with DCC modules placed thereabouts. It seems like the right sort of crazy.

AD&D - mostly TSR stuff plus White Dwarf magazine.
With 3e D&D I think I bought more third-party than WotC - Necromancer, Mongoose, Goodman et al.
With 4e D&D, I got the Goodman DCC adventures & bestiary, but not much 4e stuff around, so great bulk was WoTC.
I have several retro-clones in hardcopy, bunch of C&C stuff.
I have been buying tons of Pathfinder stuff recently, guess that's a 3rd party!

Quote from: Spinachcat;755240What was the most useful 3PP product you bought as a Player?

What was the most useful 3PP product you bought as a DM?

What 3PP stuff showed up most at your game table?

I don't put a high value on 3rd party player side stuff.

TSR era - the amazing Irillian adventure in White Dwarf, reprint in Best of White Dwarf scenarios III. Recntly got Judges Guild City State of the Invincible Overlord, still great.

3e: Discounting Pathfinder (Core Rules, Inner Sea World Guide, Rise of the Runelords hardback is amazing) most useful 3e-era purchase would probably have been Necromancer Games Lost City of Barakus, got a 32-session campaign from one book. The prettiest/most inspiring would be Necromancer's 3e Players Guide to the Wilderlands and Wilderlands of High Fantasy Boxed Set, I've run several short campaigns with those - probably similar play total to the Barakus campaign in aggregate.

4e was slim pickings, but the Sellswords of Punjar DCC adventure was fun to play and GM.

Retro-clones - Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC are the two I use a lot.

In the old day, I never knew Judges Guild even existed. I never saw any of their products in stores.

I did buy a few Mayfair products though in the 2e era. Most notably Demons, which kinda sucked. Witches was okay.

OTOH, in the 3.x era, almost all my purchases were third party. Most of the WOTC stuff was such crap that even the worst third party stuff looked good (well, not the Mongoose stuff. That was almost entirely crap). Some exceptions, and they improved quality as they hit the 3.5 era, but by then I was burned out on 3.x.

Complete Guide to Gnolls was my first and last of that. Was not impressed at all.

I guess technically the d20 Gamma World counts, as that was done by White Wolf. But it was done for WOTC and under their mandates for certain things in and out. Guess that is a hybrid.

The 5e campaign I just started will be mostly done with converted Necromancer Games modules - Crucible of Freya, Tomb of Abysthor, Bards Gate, and Rappan Atthuk.

During the 1e and 2e eras, there simply wasn't enough available on the local market to even close to match TSR's output. I did buy the occasional JG item, but 3pp played a bigger role in my Traveller experience in the day. If I wanted sketchy material for D&D, Dragon magazine was the usual source. And even then, my vetting of Dragon material would become a prototype for what would become abuse-goalkeeping in the d20 era.

In the d20 era, I picked up lots of 3pp material. I did quickly learn to avoid the junk peddlers of the era. The better 3pp eventually surpassed WotC in imagination and play quality. I still mine the better d20 supplements for material.

I don't buy much 3pp for Pathfinder except for Dreamscarred Press and a few kickstarters.

Even though I review OSR stuff I'm not opposed to buying "real" product. But I've found that the real stuff just doesn't have much use for me. The rules are embedded very deeply in much newer product and the fluff is virtually non-existent. This means you can't really use it unless you are playing the version it's written for.

I bought a fair amount of Judges Guild and Role Aids material back in the day.
In the 3E era, I bought mostly Necromancer Games products.
With 4E, I've used only WotC material.

The problem I've found with 3PP material these days is the gap between their editing, organization, and layout, and the standards of Paizo and WotC, have become too big for me to ignore. Most 3PP books look like they were thrown together by someone's brother-in-law using Microsoft Publisher over a few spare evenings, using a template and styles from 1998. The tiny fonts, ugly layout, and walls of text compare poorly with the professionally designed and organized books put out these days by the big boys. I'm too old to be squinting walls of tiny text and flipping pages try to find what I'm looking for.

I never bought any 3PP for D&D until the 3.x era. The 3.0 and 3.5 era had better material coming out of 3PP (and I'll include the Paizo versions of Dungeon and Dragon magazines) then was coming out of WotC.

Similar thing is happening with Mongoose Traveller right now. Better offerings from 3PP are out than what Mongoose is doing.

I rarely buy anything for D&D, these days; I either roll my own stuff, or I draw on my existing "RPG library."  My most recent 3rd party purchases that have seen use are modules from Expeditious Retreat Press (their "Advanced Adventures" line).  I've used a couple of those, although I heavily modified them, both times.  

I bought a lot of TSR products during 1e AD&D's glory days.  A few JG products, back then, but not many, and I didn't really use them, at the time.  (Although I've used them, since then.)

I stopped buying D&D stuff during the 2e AD&D era (because I found the products to be crap).

In the 3e D&D era, I bought third party products almost exclusively.  I think I have two WotC modules (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and Red Hand of Doom).  Everything else was Necromancer Games and a few things from Green Ronin.  I'd say I bought the most D&D-related products during the 3.0 era.  That changed shortly after 3.5 was released (I'd grown dissatisfied with 3E, and 3.5 gave me the nudge to abandon the system).  Most used third party product was probably a battlemat.  

Didn't buy 4e, so that's N/A.

Don't plan on buying 5e, although I'll check out the Basic PDF.  From what I've seen/heard, so far, I'm not expecting it to make me want to play 5e as "my D&D," but I'll give it an open-minded look.  

As a player, rather than a DM, I can't really think of any third party purchases.  Dice, I guess.  Or Zebra mechanical pencils.  Or Mountain Dew.  (Man, I haven't had a Mountain Dew in years.)

Back in the 1/2 E days I bought a bit of Judges Guild stuff. Got a good mix of stuff from 3/3.5 days. Bailed out at 4 e and buy a lot of OSR stuff.

Do the Flying Buffalo Citybook series count? Those are generic "use in anything" books. Though I got the impression those and the Grimtooth series were aimed at Tunnels & Trolls in some manner.

There was little of it in 2e, the 1e stuff is in the higher heavens of collector circles, IME, and 3e stuff is like shifting through a pile of shit to find the corn kernel tidbits. Is there 4e 3PP stuff even worth writing home about, and that's adaptable out of 4e mechanics?

Overall, never had much interest in 3PP stuff until the OSR came around, if that even counts. I hope it does, because it has been the most interesting new batch of material I've seen in the past 15+ years.

I get the sense that lots of the 1e Era 3PP stuff outside of Judges Guild was very regional.

Does anyone remember All the World's Monsters Volume 1-3 from "The Chaosium"???

My friends back east never heard of it, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, the books were pretty common sight since Chaosium is in the East Bay.

Here is a review from Kickassistan...
http://www.kickassistan.net/2013/09/monster-book-monday-all-worlds-monsters.html

Ocassionally. I was, and am, much more likely to pick up a moderately-priced, focused 3PP product in pdf than anything.

In 3e, probably the 3PP book I used most was Silk Road by XRP (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/12185/A-Magical-Society-Silk-Road?it=1). Fantastic book for trade, as well as a nice primer for the historical Silk Road, and making a fantasy equivalent.

I get everything as review copies these days.

From scavenging through bargain bins long after the d20 glut collapsed:

- Scarred Lands
- Dungeon Crawl Classics modules
- Necromancer modules

Didn't really use much of this stuff.  Though I briefly used the Pathfinder Golarion setting for my 4E games, when the other players weren't interested in the generic Nentir Vale and 4E Forgotten Realms settings.