The manual for this game is almost identical to the core section on the 3.5 edition of the D&D player's handbook that was available in bookstores. I was thinking of purchasing the other one's that are available for purchase but I went with ToEE simply because I prefer turn based games. The closeness to "real D&D" mechanics are almost a perfect conversion, aside from the bugs (crashing, rare graphic errors, not being able to see your party in the dungeons at certain corners and walls) the only major difference is that you have to use codes and back-doors to manually import your characters from other campaigns. There is also no way to change skin-tone, so although there are Drow NPCs, they don't look traditional. One other major difference that comes to mind is that you can only go up to level 20, which is ok for how the campaign is set up if you start from level 1. Personally I imported some characters I used in other campaigns by "hand" to avoid all the side quests and low level monster mashing. I'd recommend this game to fans of the older SSI games and tactical gamers. Although "power-gaming" is slightly possible in this game, players want to just hack and slash should seek elsewhere.
