Okay you get taint rules in Oriental Adventures. Then you get an update on taint rules in Unearthed Arcana. Now there are, updated yet again, taint rules in Heroes Of Horror.
I was reading the designer interview on the WotC about heroes of horror, and he was saying why he thought taint rules are better suited for dnd than the sanity rules. I agree with him on some points, but others not so much. He kind of implies that people are tempted to evil the same way Jedi could be tempted to go to the Dark Side. But the taint rules don't make you powerful by going evil, they make you hideous and suck at stuff. The new taint rules are like split into two catagories, Corruption (physical effects) and Depravity (mental effects). Unlike the Unearthed Arcana rules, these don't just make you pukish in theory, they do mechanically. Like for example, a minor corruption effect might be your feet shriveling up... but this also includes the game effect of reducing your speed by 10. Or a major corruption, your nose rots off and you permanently loose 2 points of Charisma, or your body rots and you take -1 on all physical scores.
Even worse, they aren't even balanced with each other. One of the severe depravity effects is always having to fight defensively and cast spells defensively (ie this can suck at times), another is permanent confusion (IE, your character is essentially unplayable). There is stuff like feats and prestige classes based on taint, but they don't really make taint all that tempting, nor does it account for how incosistant and unbalanced they seem to be.
Yeah so basically I think the new taint rules are a downgrade, not an upgrade. Oh yeah, and taint scores can now get into the hundreds, which means even more book-keeping. I don't know about the rest of the book, but my first impression of the taint rules is they suck.
