Supplements and other books

Wanted to start another vote regarding supplements, as of now and for the next couple months there isnt a TON coming out but by feb. of 09 it looks like there might be several. I wanted to see what people thought about using them. I want it to be uniform so we don't have a couple PCs with access to stuff and the other don't have the same access etc. So with that said the question is should be vote on each book as it comes out or just make a uniform choice (we can use anything that comes out).

The 3.5 supplements were notorious in my mind for coming out with stuff that was useless or overpowered, which is why I wasn't a huge fan. I am hoping they learned their lesson and made stuff more well rounded in these supplements.

So just respond with your thoughts on how you feel is best to handle it and we will go from there.

If by supplements you mean all the 3.5 books that had all sorts of different options of ways to play, like races, prestige classes, monsters, etc, then I'm all for it.

Right like 4E has a bunch of those that are coming out. Obviously I don't mean use 3.5 for 4.0, just like a precaution for when 4e stuff DOES arrive.

I know in Eberron campaign Jon and I had taken stuff from other random obscure books (granted 3.5 had like 500 books floating around) and it was kind of weird just because if everyone doesn't have access it can make it less fun for them not getting the same cool stuff (since the supplement stuff is usually more powerful/inspired)

Only other thing that kinda makes me worried is that these days you don't have to go buy the book if you don't want to. I dunno it kinda of degrades it to me that a player could just grab a book from online, or even just find a power listed somewhere and just have it versus back in the day if you wanted to use some of those things you had to get the books and fork over $$. At least then there was some other consideration you had to make before you got another book trying to make your guy really good. Now it's just so open access....personally I buy the books if I am going to use it because I like to support a good product also I still like referencing the book since that has always been part of the D&D experiance to me.

Anyways just wanted to start this discussion before things rolled off the presses and we ran into an issue later.

Only other thing I might request as DM is if you are using a supplement power just note it on the forum or let me know so I know what you have access for and am not caught off guard by something super duper powerful. Maybe Wizards will do a better job this time but like I said I felt like in 3.5 they just made new stuff TO good or unusably awful.

Personally, I think it might be fun to check out the supplements but I'm not really that excited to check them out or anything. Again, this is just me being biased from 3rd edition but in 3rd edition the new stuff was either too ridiculous or the normal PHB stuff was better. Just for easiness sake also I don't really plan on trying to use them. This is an early decision since I haven't looked at the new books, but last time they just seemed like more hassle then it is worth. Especially because in 3rd edition they introduced books that had completely separate rules than the core 3e game, which I really didn't like at all.

Yeah they did do some rule changing but I feel like they did that because they were NEVER happy/tried to please everyone in 3.5 but it seems like 4e they have been more happy with and could easily add powers into the game without changing rules. I think 3.5 was kinda inflexible versus this system is very flexible.