What Does Tome change?

For those of you who've played the game before, you probably want a high level outline of what Tome really changes, so here goes.

The initial tomes focused on maintaining as much compatibility with the base game as possible. New options were introduced that could just replace old options, but without needing changes to the rules themselves. Eventually people came to realize that there's only so much you can fix a broken ruleset without ever changing a rule, and so some rules have been changed. Of course, once you change one thing it's easier to change a lot more, so by now there are a lot of people with various (mostly compatible) ideas on what it means to play a Tome game. This whole book is ultimately just one possible incarnation of things.

While a Tome game generally has a lot of small "quality of life" changes here and there, which you'll become familiar with as you read on, these are all the smaller types of things. If you forget about a change here or there it's not a big deal, and the game will still run. In addition to the race and class changes, that have been mentioned already, there are a few other big Tome changes that are worth mentioning at the start.

Feats

The biggest change that a player will notice when making a new 1st level character, after the class changes which already got a mention above, is that all the feats are way better. A character only gets 7 feats or so by the time they get to level 20. Most characters don't even get all 7 of those feats because they're lower level and never make it to 20th, they probably have like 3 or 4 feats during their lifetime. And every time someone wants to do some cool and unique thing it gets made into a feat you can take. That ends up with characters having way too many options to pick from and not many cool options that they can do when playing.

So instead of feats being a small power bump in a specialized area, where maybe you even need to take a requirement feat to get the feat you really want, Tome makes feats into bigger, more powerful effects. Many of them are scaling feats that grant more abilities as your BAB or skill ranks go up.

Magic Items

The next big change to mention is how magic items work, and it's in two parts.

Part one is that you can (and should) pay more money to get a bigger bonus on your magic armor or magic sword. This is bad, because then high level characters have to be spending all of their money on magic gear just to keep up, and they can't have the kinds of sweet stuff that isn't helpful in combat that high level folks should have, like a fleet of pirate ships, and a throne made of obsidian. In fact, when characters find cool art stuff they're actually supposed to sell it off for cash and then use the cash just to buy better magic items. The way to power involves stripping down as much of the world as you can and pouring it into your magic items, forever. Soon enough there would be no thousand-year-old castles in the sky, because some jerk would have sold it off brick by brick long ago. The Pyramids in real life used to be covered in polished limestone, no joke, but a lot of it got carted off for other projects after a while, and then the rest wore away. That's stupid not fantastical at all. What's just as stupid is that, at 50 coins to a pound, a +3 Sword is worth 360 lbs of gold. That is just a crazy amount of gold to carry around. Who would even do that?

Part two of the magic item problem is how all the magic item slots are arranged. People can wear them kinda based on their body type, with one cape or cloak, and one amulet or broach, and one hat or helmet or headband, and so on. It makes sense I guess that you can't wear two helmets at once, but surely you could just put on two amulets. "Oh, the magical resonance interferes!", they say. But you can wear magic rings under your magic gloves which are right next to your magic armbands, so what gives? And then what if a creature isn't humanoid? Does each weird type of thing get a different set of body slots? Maybe? Characters have pets, and it actually does matter to players if your faithful wolf animal companion can wear that old ring of deflection you've just swapped out.

Two related problems mean two related solutions: First, every magic item has a numeric effect (appropriate to the item) that scales to your own level and all but the weakest of items also have a non-scaling effect as well, because items that just give a bonus are pretty boring. For example, weapons get their attack and damage bonus and are also on fire, armor gets their AC bonus and also let you breathe underwater, fancy hats give an intelligence bonus and also disguise you, and so on. The numeric bonus always scales the level of the wearer; You can't pay for a higher bonus. Second, a person can only be affected by eight magic items at a time (this is sometimes called the "Eight Item Limit"). It doesn't matter where they go on your body though, as long as they all fit (you still can't wear two suits of plate armor at once). If you want five rings and three amulets, or a hat and a headband, just have fun, it's not a big deal.

Wish

Wish is a powerful 9th level spell that ultimately only has its power limited by the rule "the MC is allowed to mess your stuff up if you wish for too much". Except it does let you wish for some specific things without the MC slapping you, just at great cost. One of those things is that you can wish for magic items by just paying out the nose in experience points. Except the thing is that when a spell is cast as a spell-like ability, it doesn't have an experience cost, and a Noble Djinn can cast Wish as a spell-like ability. So then you wish for a ring of 50 wishes. And spells cast from an item also don't cost experience points when you use them (on the logic that the creator paid the XP cost long ago, but you had a Noble Djinn make that ring, right?), so suddenly there's all these free wishes floating around making all these magic items. And sure there's a limit of eight items per person, and sure they scale to your level, but some effects are still better than others and more expensive to create because of it. A sword that drains levels and sucks souls is much more valuable than a sword that's just on fire.

Instead of removing Wish entirely (because it's fun to get to just wish for stuff some of the time), the Tome version of with just has an important limit: You can't wish for magic items with a market value of more than 15,000 gp (which of course includes any item that can cast wish), and you can't wish for materials that can be used in crafting any such item. No amount of wishes will ever produce any goods useful for making Boots of Teleportation, for example. Items above 15,000 gp are "Wish Economy Items", because you can't wish for them, and you can't wish for the materials to build them, so they're in their own separate section of the economy for high level creatures, the "Wish Economy". High level creatures can buy, sell, and trade powerful magic items with currencies like Raw Chaos and soul gems, without needing to go around taking measly gold from lower level creatures; the same way a mid-level player character doesn't need to go around stealing turnips from peasants, they already have more food than they'll ever need. Which also means that high level players can throw all that gold they have into things like paying for an army to keep the peace in their kingdom, or a fleet of pirate ships. Stuff that's not magical, but is still cool to have.