Camelon75 said:
Personally, I read that blurb as saying "this book only contains the genre material, and no setting to fit that genre. The GM will have the tools to (and will need to) create a setting (world, NPCs, scenarios, a few world-specific skills, the odd piece of technology, etc) themselves."
Sorry mthomason But I just cannot agree with your reading.
Page 221 of OGL has a paragraph entitled Detrermine individual challenge ratings which has a phrase
"creatures have their CR listed in their discriptions..."
Ah, well, now you're giving me more to work with. Before I was only referencing the blurb you quoted, and not anything else from the book.
Camelon75 said:
Now where in this book do I get the discriptions, I would argue that all is not contained in this one book and all the tools required are alos not contained within this book If I had only purchased this book as my first OGL product I would be missing an importnat element to my creation of scenarios.
in fact the previous chapter contians many specail abilities but does not tell me how they affect a CR or even how a CR is calculated for a creature
only how an ordinary is level -1
Okay, thats certainly an omission. A small one, but pretty important if you're not familiar with the concept from other D20 games (and I believe this is supposed to be self-contained and not require you to own any other rulebooks).
The author should have stated that CRs aren't calculated, but are set by the GM based on finding something similar (in other words, an educated guess.)
Now, if the book doesn't at least contain some example creatures to do that "CR modelling" against, then it's certainly missing some pretty important content, and I would then agree it doesn't give you everything you need to create your game setting. Of course, you could go raid the SRD online, but the book promises more and you shouldn't need to do that.