Quick review of Quintessential Wizard

[David Knott]

I finally picked up the 4E Quintessential Wizard. I really cannot recommend it - it seems to create far more problems than it solves. It introduxes some interesting ideas but implements them in ways that don"t work too well. The message board reviews and comments are generally unfavorable, with the problem mentioned most often being its unbalanced mechanic for metamagic feats, which involves burning up healing surges to emulate the effects of 3e metamagic feats.

In regard to other 3rd party products, is it safe to say from the fact that only I have ever mentioned any of them that the rest of you either cannot find copies of them or have no interest in them? If we disregard the 2 books that convert the missing classes, our immediate recourse is to use Andy Collins" monk conversion & wait for PHB2 for the druid & bard classes - we have more than enough other material to keep us busy converting other things in the meantime.

[John Hofmann]

Our group has elected to go with only WotC books for our 4e campaign.  This decision was due to the lack of quality in the average 3rd party products over the past 8 years.  The 3pp books just don't seem to have been thoroughly vetted and playtested enough to really be included in a game.

I expected the trend to continue in 4th edition and it seems to have done so.