First Splatbook – Day 11 D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop

This is day 11 of the of d20 Dark Ages’ D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge! Based off of the challenge’s prompts I will be sharing personal stories about my history with Dungeons & Dragons every day in February. You can hop to another participating blog by using the links at the end of the article or click here to see my previous answers.

Day 11: What was the first splatbook you begged your DM to approve?

This is an oddly specific question for a blog hop intended to cover 40 years of D&D. When I showed Hannah the list of prompts for this blog hop challenge before it started she asked me what a “splatbook” was. For those that aren’t familiar, anyone could publish material for the 3rd Edition of D&D using the Open Gaming License. This laissez faire game development lead to “splatbooks” filled with nothing but supercharged combat options for PCs, inviting players to trade $20 for a softcover book full of new feats and spells. Sometimes a player would purchase a book full of better-than-everyone-else powers and expect to use it within an established game, something that would need DM approval. (Sounds kind of like a microtransaction now that I’m thinking about it.)

I can credit the Open Gaming License with my favorite edition of D&D, 13th Age, so I can’t spew around too much bile about it. But in my opinion splatbooks were cumbersome and harmful unforeseen consequence for such a liberal policy.

To answer the question: I have never begged my DM to approve any gaming supplement. My longest experience in 3.5 and Pathfinder were within Eberron, a setting with plenty of supplements for those looking for something special. And as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, most of my D&D experience being in the form of 4E accompanied by the Character Builder in Dungeons & Dragons Insider. When a new article or a new book came out, the options for players and DMs alike were automatically added into the DDI database. We never had a discussion over what was “fair game”.

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