[Review] DnD3e Hero Builders Guide

Anyone who picks up the Hero Builder's Guide has to understand what the purpose is. It's for newbies. It's for RANK newbies, people who have never played a roleplaying game in their life. Mostly. It gives a 'head start' past the pitfalls that first-timers often fall into.

First, the vital statistics: 64 pages, MSRP $14.95, b&w print on decent paper. Published by WotC, for Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition. D20 imprint.

The book gets off to a quick start. It assumes that the reader already knows what roleplaying is. When you think about it, that's not a bad assumption; someone who's joining the hobby probably has had it at least explained to them, or they would not be interested; in any case a book explanation wouldn't be as useful as actually playing in that regard. The introduction is short, just an outline of the contents and the character creation process.

The book then goes through a methodical, step by step approach to character generation. After a few pages about rolling attributes, there's a section on race and class, with a few paragraphs on each race/class combination, and what they give you. Each combo has a "variant" with a little extra flavor in it. This section has a few interesting ideas in it, but many of them are solid cliches.

Next is "Creating Your Personal History". This is essentially a rehash of all the other backstory generation tables we've seen so many times before. The tables are useful in one respect, in that they're integrated with the rules, somewhat; when you roll, for example, for the size of the community you come from, the results mesh with the community generation tables in the DMG. Someone will probably automate this stuff before long, I'll wager.

Following that, there's a section on alignment. With all the debates that go on about alignment, it would be useful to find something to clarify what they're supposed to mean, but you don't really get that. Instead, you'd have to pick through the 'alignment test' to get the implications. That's probably the veteran gamer in me talking, though... for a newbie, this kind of test would be more useful than a general test.

Next is a section on 'planning your career'. This puts a good emphasis on the fact that in 3e, you really need to plan out your advancement in a way that you don't need to do in most other games (including 2e). If you're going to pick feats and skills based on what seems coolest at the moment, you may very well miss out on some interesting stuff by the time you get to 20th level...for some people, that won't matter much, but I think that some frustration can be avoided here, especially for newbies, who are trying for a certain kind of character, and find at 8th level that they would have been better served by putting their skill points a point or two different when they took their 4th level advancement.

Lastly is a section on names. This is the right place for it; I find it rare that I know a character's name right from the beginning. Only after I've made some decisions about who he is, can I choose the right name. There are some guidelines on choosing a name, followed by some lists of names that fit with the 'official' flavor of the various races.

In summary: Probably not a good choice for any of you folks, but not completely useless either. Might make a good 'add on' to the PHB if you're giving the game to someone who has decided to join your game, but has never played before. It's well-written and serves its purpose well, but its purpose is fairly narrow.