Post originally by jason at 2004-07-27 16:49:27
Converted from Phorums BB System

<i><b>Buzz</b>: Why not? How else do you convey feel? There's lot of d20 adventures out there that use the same rules but have vastly different feels. It's all about attitude, isn't it?</i>

No, he's criticizing the book from the same position taken by creative writing instructors the world over: show don't tell. Talking about how the game should be noir without actually showing what a 'noir-flavored Eberron game' is is a valid criticism of this book.

However, I'd point out a mitigating factor: Every developer ever whines that they don't have enough pages to lay the world out properly. This $40 book is huge, and it has the dual job of presenting a massive amount of rules and setting detail on a brand-new world. There's barely any space for the drawn art, never mind arty writing. I think I prefer to have 320 pages of solid information than White Wolf's iffy game fiction interrupting each chapter.

<i>D20 is a system designed for Dungeons and Dragons, and the attempts to make it a universal system and map the package of classes, levels, and StrDexConIntWisCha onto other settings and genres have all been failures to one degree or another.

<b>Buzz</b>: I almost stopped reading your review at this point.</i>

Maybe this was a joke about nate's whining about the flowery introduction. He's wrong, of course, AEG's Spycraft pretty much justifies the existence of the d20 open license all by itself.

"A thousand shades of gray" is a phrase pretty much every lib arts major with a copy of Sartre's <i>Nausea</i> comes up with on their own at some point in their early twenties, think it's original, then realize quickly it isn't and drop it. Somehow it ends up in a book written by 40 year olds. Immaturity or just bad editing?