Why does the general opinion of Oriental Adventures seem to be bad? I've enjoyed the book alot. I never really try to fully use the setting, but I've used alot of other things by embeding them in my own worlds. So why was it such a let down?
Second question: Is the +1 LA worth it for Hengeyokai (the animal shapechanging people) worth it? It seems like if you get a form that can fly or breath water the +1 LA is ok, but if not you are basiclly a Tibbit. I guess for spying/hiding some of the forms are great.
Fizz
My biggest problem with OA is the attempt to merge in the Legend of the Five Rings stuff. As much as I like Lo5R, it didn't mesh well with the overall generic Oriental setting they were trying to portray. Other than that, I like it. Hengeyokai are more flavor-based, along with the spirit folk. I don't think the +1 LA is warranted, IMHO.
In the 3.5 update in an issue of Dragon, James Wyatt got rid of the +1LA for Hengeyokai, as well as other things.
All the reviews I've read were very positive. I think it's a great book; I don't mind the L5R stuff being in there so much as there are fun new monsters and prestige classes, but Kara-Tur rocks.
Im not so sure... I kinda like Ravenloft... But them bird guys sound so cool... What is OA? I used to think it was like Unearthed Arcana, which is a book of varients. Great book. Then I learned it was a campaign setting.. An' I thought it only had humans... Ack! Gah!
I like oriental adventures but thought they wove their campaign world alittle to tight into the whole of the book. They needed to have it more segregated.
I agree with ArchLich. I love the material but I think they should have separated out the Legend of the the Five Rings stuff.
All the reviews I've read were very positive. I think it's a great book; I don't mind the L5R stuff being in there so much as there are fun new monsters and prestige classes, but Kara-Tur rocks.
I did like the L5R stuff (mmmm...maho), but again, they should have either done a setting outright, or kept it generic. No Kara Tur in there! *sniffles*
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Is the +1 LA worth it for Hengeyokai (the animal shapechanging people) worth it? It seems like if you get a form that can fly or breath water the +1 LA is ok, but if not you are basiclly a Tibbit. I guess for spying/hiding some of the forms are great.
There's also the fact that, notwithstanding the 3.5e update in Dragon, hengeyokai aren't humanoids, which makes them immune to certain common spell effects. (While the 3.5e update makes them humanoids, I prefer to make them magical beasts, since they're animals that take humanoid shape, not vice versa.)
Is the +1 LA worth it for Hengeyokai (the animal shapechanging people) worth it? It seems like if you get a form that can fly or breath water the +1 LA is ok, but if not you are basiclly a Tibbit. I guess for spying/hiding some of the forms are great.There's also the fact that, notwithstanding the 3.5e update in Dragon, hengeyokai aren't humanoids, which makes them immune to certain common spell effects. (While the 3.5e update makes them humanoids, I prefer to make them magical beasts, since they're animals that take humanoid shape, not vice versa.)
I think I see their logic. see, mostly the players will be playing the henge-thingy in humanoid form. Otherwise there are too many complications, unless it's a weird special animal campaign in which all the guys are henge-thingies. When the henge--Oh for Garl's sake, lets just call them birdmen. When the birdmen are in bird for, they are most likely magical beasts.
The most popular campaign I ever ran was Oriental Adventures. At the time, I was playing with slightly jaded players who had so much experience with 3.0 that there were very few surprises left (most of the people I played with at that time period had DM'ed many times in 3.0, and so were very familiar with the monsters and spells and such...). Along comes Oriental Adventures with new races, classes, items, magic, LOADS of new monsters and mythology, and a completely different societal hierarchy. It breathed much-needed new life into our gaming group, so I don't feel it was a disappointment at all!
I truly love L5R and I enjoyed their brief stint of putting out books in both 3.5 and R&K format- it was like reading something in two different languages that put accents on different parts of speech! It was fascinating and taught me that different rule systems were just that- different with neither being inferior or superior, just focusing on different aspects of combat or roleplaying. However, I agree in that it should not have been the base setting for OA. It should have been either a completely generic world, or Kara Tur, which would have made a wonderful addition to the Forgotten Realms book.
I felt very let down by the book. Much of the coolest stuff had already been updated in the complete books.
What remained often did not really work unless you actually had a place where this taint like mechanic was coming from. They mixed both Legend of the Five Rings Stuff with other more generic stuff but it was all so confusing. I don't know jack about Legend of the Five rings and after reading this book I still don't feel like I learned anything.
I wanted the book to give me the tools to run in a fantasy Asia but I don't feel that it did. It gave me classes that have been mostly already upgraded, it gave me strange mechanics I'm not sure how to incorporate into my homebrew and which are not very well explained. It gave me lots of monsters which are apparently all nature spirits. Races that are really odd and seem to exist out of context.
I think it needed to be written with a more coherent background. Same sort of style as say as the original Faerun or Ebberon Source books. Oddly enough I think I would have had an easier time stealing bits and pieces from it if I understood how the authours envisioned all this to work together as opposed to the kind of smoraborg of I actually got which just left me scratching my head. I mean without some kind of unifying theme it might as well have been the big book of D&D stat blocks and mechanics.
In the end I gave up and made my own oriental material for my home brew while this book gathered dust.
I think the 3.0 Oriental Adventures book tried to fit too much into one publication and, as a consequence, didn't cover anything well. IMO, they should have either gone with a generic Asian setting (i.e., Kara Tur) OR Lot5R instead of trying to cover both.
Yup, I'll chime in and agree as well. There were actually a lot of great ideas in this one, but they were so hot to tie it all to Legend of the Five Rings that it was hard in some points to extract the "general" information from the campaign specific.
On top of that, when it did present non-L5R material, it almost felt like "well, this is the best setting to use, but if you want something else, here some stuff that might kind of sort of work." Its not that the material was bad, but it wasn't really presented with much enthusiasm.
As others have said, tehre wasn't quite enough to "get" the L5R setting from the book, but yet a lot of the text of the classes, from the clans to the taint mechanic to the Shadowlands monsters, really depended on having some knowledge of the setting.
I enjoyed the OA stuff both Lo5R and the general stuff. Hengeyokai, nezumi and vanara are all interesting races. The samurai is actually better than the CW one, the shaman is totally different from CD's spirit shaman (and I prefer the former over the latter, personally) the sohei is a light barbarian with a monkish flavour. Shugenja was word for word duplicated in CD and u jen don't know, but the monks can multiclass freely rule is quite frankly excellent imo. Some neat PrCs cool gear and feats, nifty monsters (most notably the lung dragons, imo) and a whole slew of ideas for tweaking campaigns. Not disappointing to me, although some sections could use more meat.
Though I tend to like Oriental Adventures there are two things about it that have always bugged me (strangely enough, not the absorbed L5R stuff--I kind of liked that, and loved seeing the D&D artists I love doing L5R art).
First what I love about D&D is that it has this great fantasy feel without trying too hard to emulate any particular real-world society. D&D isn't feudal France. It isn't feudal England. It's a nice blend of cultures that blur together into something that feels original, seamless and whole. It has it's own feel.
Not so with Oriental Adventures. They pretty much made it Japan. Here and there they threw in a chinese reference or maybe a southeast asian one, but mostly it was straight Japan and that's less fun. It doesn't feel like D&D anymore. It feels like a port of historical stuff in our world but with some names fudged around a little--but not enough to protect the innocent.
Second, I love how the races in D&D play back to ancient myths (largely norse) but without a lot of the strange mythy baggage. They kept the look, added some flavor to make the culture fit the ideas, but they didn't try to take everything lock, stock, and barrel because they realized some of that stuff is just a little silly.
In oriental adventures though, things are kept too close to the myths I think. Some of the stuff for flavor would have been fine, but as it is there's too much mystic weirdness about the races to make them really fit.
My answer usually is to generally just make my own races when I run oriental adventures, and to mix in a generous helping of other asian lore blended in nicely to help finesse the huge chunks of Japan.
I think a certain amount of making a cool fantasy setting is to do like they do in Pathfinder. Let the cultural roots show--let there be a hint of Romany culture, a hint of african, a hint of asian. Let the influences give some flavor to the ideas, but then step back a bit and breathe fresh ideas in there too. Let things mix and mingle so while people can appreciate a familiar and recognizable feel. But at the same time don't just cut and paste a bunch of real-world history that doesn't belong until it doesn't feel so much like D&D anymore.