The Mongoose Pocket Player’s Handbook

Game: The Mongoose Pocket Player’s Handbook
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Series: d20
Reviewer: migo
Review Dated: 2nd, March 2005
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10   [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00

This review originally appeared on RPG.net

The Mongoose Pocket Player’s Handbook is as the name suggests a pocket-sized Player’s Handbook. While the product uses the OGL symbol on it, it is quite clearly d20, with the exception that it doesn’t require the D&D Player’s Handbook to use, and can in fact substitute it. It is essentially a pocket-sized version of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook v3.5 except in name. It is missing a few things like info on specific deities, but I consider this to be a plus as I’m not interested in the Greyhawk-centric view of the D&D Player’s Handbook.

As far as style goes the MPPHB is rather bland. It is 400 pages of pure black and white text with the occasional table thrown in. There’s very little white space. The border is a marbled grey which gives the appearance of it being written on colourless parchment or stone. A nice little touch for an otherwise bland book. The fonts used are simple, and the book is quite readable and should be fine for people with below-average eye-sight as well. It doesn’t do too well in terms of layout, art or coolness, but it does very well in the readability department, and as this is intended to be a serious RPG product (unlike Pokethulhu) I consider readability to be the most important. It gets a 4 for style for this reason. It has a simple, clear and easy to read design.

The first page covers, the table of contents, copyright and credits. Quite a lot for a pocket-sized page. Well, the table of contents isn’t much of a table of contents. It’s more of a table of chapters, which considering the fact that there are otherwise no chapters is a good thing. However, I think it’s taking simplicity to the extreme. A book like the MPPHB should have at least 2 pages of ToC. As far as I’m concerned. This, along with a few other qualms is what keeps me from giving the MPPHB a 5 for substance.

Right off the bat, the MPPHB starts with a quote from Mark Twain. “Use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; do not let fluff and flowers of verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it.” They don’t follow this to the letter as a lot of it appears to be word-for-word from the D&D3.5 SRD. They, however, did follow the principle in terms of design. It begins with an introduction to the d20 system suggesting that it is portable to any type of game and this book is the only one needed to play any type of game. This, while strictly speaking is true, is misleading, to say the least. I criticised the GURPS Basic Set for making the same claim when I felt that it was only useful for historical and modern-day campaigns with optional magic and psionics are thrown in. The main content of the MPPHB is D&D 3.5, so this book is really only useful for Fantasy gaming on its own. However, for people who want to use d20 but don’t want to spend a lot on a core supplement, they won’t use it is useful. At $20 USD it’s quite a bargain by any standard but is especially so compared to over $30 for the D&D 3.5 PHB. My recommendation is to ignore the blurb on the d20 system. It really has very little relevance to the rest of the book, especially since it doesn’t use the d20 logo and uses the OGL logo instead. (Well, the d20 part is cleverly integrated into the cover, as there is an embossed (not actually embossed, only appearing to be) representation of a d20 on the centre of the cover, with the 20 facing up. A nice trick for getting around the licensing.

Next, it goes into the basics of roleplaying, most of us are already familiar with this and have read it dozens if not hundreds of times already. It also doesn’t seem to be much use as I don’t see anyone without RPG experience picking this up and buying it. It seems much more likely that existing D&D players would pick up. On the bright side, it was rather funny. The only other funny “What is Role-Playing?” blurb that I’ve read was in Pokethulhu – and it was Dork Tower and loaded with in-jokes. So, I’ve finally found a “What is Role-Playing?” blurb that is useful for everyone. On the odd chance that someone new to RPGs picks this up, they’ll actually be able to understand what it’s about, and the rest of us (all 99%) can at least get a bit of a chuckle out of reading it if we don’t skip over it all together. It seamlessly moves into the basic d20 mechanics. Up until the end of this chapter, someone who didn’t know what they were buying might still believe that the MPPHB would be useful for any game setting.

Upon reading the D20 Characters section, any such notions should be dispelled. It’s basically the D&D 3.5 SRD word for word. On the bright side it is in a compact format and quite a bit easier to use than the SRD. It also costs about the same as it would to print the SRD at home, and looks better. One thing to note is it does include rules for Epic characters, although the XP progression table isn’t included. It’s easy to extrapolate the level 1-20 XP table to figure out the epic levels, however. The XP required for the next level is always current level times 1000 + whatever the previous XP requirement would be. It would have been nice if they’d at least presented this formula in there. Mathematically challenged players might be rather dumbfounded trying to figure it out on their own.

The Skills and Feats sections are also essentially verbatim of the D&D 3.5 SRD. However, Epic feats are also covered, to complement the Epic classes covered in the earlier sections. I have one big gripe about both these sections. There isn’t a table listing all the skills and feats – anywhere in the book. As far as I’m concerned that’s a bit of a must. It works fine as is if it’s just used as a reference, but it almost seems like this was the compromise they made with WotC for allowing them to include the character creation rules. Aside from this problem, the sections are done very well. Each of the individual skills and feats is covered clearly. (Note, the Skills and Feats sections are separate, I just referred to them together as I had the same thoughts regarding both of them).

The Equipment section is again SRD material. It’s done quite well and thankfully includes equipment tables. It doesn’t appear to have changed from the 3.0 PHB. Then again, if it ain’t broke…

The Combat section, I am happy to report, is much easier to understand than the 3.0 PHB. The only downside is that in 3.5 fashion, it covers area and movement in squares instead of feet, which is an unfortunate by-product of WotC’s attempt to sell more products and earn more money by packaging miniature gaming with D&D 3.5 and making them necessary to play D&D. Fortunately, miniatures are not needed to play, tokens are fine, and converting squares to feet (or meters for metric fans) shouldn’t be a problem.

That concludes the first half of the book. The second half is Magic and Spells. Spell lists for the spell casting classes, and then descriptions for each and every spell. This can also be found in the SRD. The index starts on 390 (the ToC mistakenly indicates it as 389) and takes up a good 8 pages. I guess it’s making up for the lack of detail in the ToC. The index is more useful for players who want to check the rules however, as the ToC (as it is normally done) is counter-intuitive for such things. Page 399 conveniently gives a list of all the tables, which fills the page exactly (maybe they dropped the Skill and Feat lists for this reason as well, who knows).

Page 400 is legal information. This usually comes at the beginning of a book, but I don’t mind it being at the end. The MPPHB is released under the OGL 1.0a. I’ve never bothered to read the whole thing through, but as I understand it, everything in the book is public domain within the restrictions of the license. Speaking of the license, I mentioned that a lot of the information in the book is the SRD repeated verbatim. This isn’t a bad thing, I just did it as a reference point. The D&D PHB, DMG and MM are also for a large part, the SRD repeated verbatim.

The overall content of the MPPHB is good, and there is a lot of it. However, the weak Table of Contents and lack of tables listing the Skills and Feats anywhere in the book keep the MPPHB at a rating of 4 for substance.

Do I recommend it? Oh yeah. Definitely a better deal than the D&D PHB, especially for those of us who have the original 3e books. For people who haven’t yet played D&D 3rd Edition and would like to try it out, I also recommend it, it’s a lot cheaper than the D&D PHB. For people who already have the D&D 3.5 PHB, it’s harder to recommend, as the information is essentially the same, and the D&D 3.5 PHB has more information. I guess it would depend on whether players and/or GMs want a slightly more portable version of the PHB.