Tomorrow, blog. Tomorrow.

Amazon told me today that they shipped my copy of the PHB. That means I’ll have it tomorrow afternoon, blog.

While I almost always buy from my FLGS, the (really nice!) guy who runs my FLGS wasn’t sure he’d be getting them in the day of (e.g. Friday, or possibly Saturday). So I decided to hedge my bets. I’m still going to buy the whole set from my FLGS. I also bought a PHB from Amazon, in case I don’t have the books by Friday or so. It was insurance! And now I am getting the books a day earlier than I thought.

But this isn’t why I’m blogging now, blog. I’m blogging because although I’m excited, I’m also remembering that I don’t like core books.

All right, sure, I do actually like core books. They are nice to read after I’ve read ‘em once. It’s the first read-through that gets me. I think Justin Achilli pointed this out in some forum or another, and it clicked for me: core books are often boring because they are huge information dumps. The authors have only so many pages to introduce the whole game, and they have to do it as efficiently as possible. It’s dense reading and, when it comes to reading mechanics, very tedious.

You can see where this is going, blog: D&D core books typically don’t have anything but rules and mechanics! The new World of Darkness books avoided some of the drugery by putting the core rules in another book, so the amount of redundancy was minimized. Actually, when I bought 3.5, I’d been away from D&D for a while, and so it was honestly something of a revelation to me that nearly of those books were rules.

I’m excited about the games I’ll be playing with it. I am less than excited about trying to digest everything and figure it out. I like the excitement of the lead-up. I am less excited about absorbing some 320-odd pages of information. I’ll be doing a lot of skipping around, I think.

Also, blog, I’d like to warn you: I am not going to review the books. I hate trying to write reviews because I suck at it. As with 3.5, it won’t be until after I’ve read the books, played the game, and digested the whole experience that I’ll form any kind of solid opinion. Even then, my opinion will change as time goes on. Hopefully, blog, you’ll get a sense about how I feel about it as I post about DM prep, actual play, bits I like, bits I don’t like, monsters and scenes I’ve designed, and all of that stuff.

That’s enough rambling from me, at least for now. Look for more posts this weekend. If I get all of the books, I will more than likely run something. If I only have the PHB, all bets are off.