The tighter WOTC close their fists around a system that is perfect, the more players will slip through their fingers. I hope everyone is paying attention because all that’s happening is we’re getting away from the basic game system and back into something resembling 1st edition from the late 70's: Charts, tables and answers to every question we could possibly have during game play. We can stop the game cold, cause no one can know all the rules, and ruin flow to look up something on a chart somewhere. Sooner or later we won't have to think of anything and we can role on a table to figure out how drunk our characters are, oh wait we did that in 1st edition. Just role-play how drunk you are, it’s more fun and the bottom line is we are supposed to have fun. It's all there to help those who need crutches feel more mobile.
Every system has its’ faults, hell first edition D&D was the worst system ever, now I am talking about the BASIC system, the one with the red book. I am so far removed from this system I can barely remember, but I think in order to be a mage you had to be an elf at the same time. Now that system was a pile of garbage.
For experienced role players such as our entire group, we only need a skeletal system to help us tell our story. We don't need all the bells and whistles telling us how to fix the problems in 2nd edition. We already know those fixes and have been playing with them for 10 years or more. We don't need a new set of books coming along to fuck with what we have created amongst ourselves. It's a volatile debate to say the least. I know I have a strong opinion on the whole matter. As you might very well tell.
I don't want to have to relearn a system I have been playing for nearly half my life, just cause someone else, namely WOTC thinks THACO from 2nd edition doesn't work right. Well mister Wizard boy, it works just fine for me, and until someone came forward and thought we could make some more money off these guys by making a new edition, everyone else thought so too. I never heard anyone say, "wouldn't this be nice if we reversed THACO and changed things up?" I have played in hundreds of games over the years and not once did I hear that complaint. When I did hear a complaint we "fixed" it ourselves and moved on. This whole pile of garbage trying to get everyone to buy new books and move away from something that has been working for over15 years is just a ploy to get more money out of our pockets. I’m not going to let them tell me when something I’m playing is broken. I think it's working just fine for all of us.
I wouldn't buy those books if I had Bill Gates money and spare time like Ghandi. I HATE wizards of the coast lately, they’re like the Nazis except with role-playing games. If you're not a d20 system (Blond hair blue eyes) then you’re singled out and not like them so you’re outdated. Imagine what WOTC is going to do once they get a hold of the Marvel universe, you know it's coming, they’re going to dismantle our precious green, yellow and red chart and put in some THACO and d20 crap to make it more mind-numbingly taxing to play.
I like the diversity that different systems can bring to role-playing. A lot of them work better for their genres and styles. Star Wars was MUCH better as the old d6 system. I learned the new system and honestly it was better at points, but the old one was much smoother and more liberating to the player and the GM. I was able to tell the story without having to remember a huge pile of complex, albeit, very neat rules. K.I.S.S.
Wizards of the coast should have stuck with Magic: The Gathering, their ruining the landscape of gaming today. Didn’t they make enough money on that card game system that was like crack to me? WOTC have some really nice looking books though, but honestly do we really care how nice a book looks when it's just going to get Cheetos and Mountain Dew on the pages? I know for one thing I don't want to spend $40 on a book that I feel I have to carry around like it's the dead-sea scrolls. I have my 2nd edition book and it's been through friends splattering ink all over it and my constant tossing it around for many years. It might look like crap and the binding barely holds it together, but it's like an old pair of shoes, it fits and it’s comfortable. A lot of my friends have their old Marvel set bound together with duct tape and love. Will they throw that out when the d20 version hits the rack early in 2009? Not a chance in hell. I know a friend of mine who might be buried with that player’s guide. I’ll keep playing the old percentile system and I think it's going to get harder to force people to learn a new system each time we play a game.
Enough said on my part, I think I have proven to everyone I am a total crazy fucker with a head full of loose wires. I won't be giving WOTC any of my money unless I see something worth it, then I'll buy it used from some kid on Ebay who bought the newer version and is trying desperately to give WOTC more of his hard earned money. WOTC and d20 can suck my white ass...
When are they going to change Shadowrun, Chthulu and White Wolf to d20 systems? When that day comes we can all bow our heads in silence of a youth full of gaming swept into the past. WOTC looses all their Karma on this session.
Michael
Friday, February 29, 2008
Part Deux : Save Vs. WOTC
I’m not saying that 2nd is the bomb, it's just not broken and it never was. It had its faults and so does 3.0 or 3.5, every system does. But the money making machine that is WOTC is trying desperately to revive a gaming institution in the wrong way. You should see the hate mail they get for these revamps. Look up some forums on this stuff, I am a preacher boy compared to most views out there.
They are insulting my intelligence by releasing something like this. Thinking that after nearly 20 years of playing 2nd edition I need another revamp cause what I have been doing is wrong, well according to their bottom line it is.
It's no longer ROLE-playing to WOTC, it's ROLL playing and they’re getting away from storytelling and making themselves more viable to those 13-15 year olds who can't put down their xbox controllers for one second and want to fight a big boss man at the end of the next level.
Here's how brainwashed a guy was who wrote a review of 4th edition.
Just 2 weeks into playing 4E, I boxed up every non-fluff heavy book I owned, drove down to Half Price Books and sold them for as much cash as I could get. I knew I would never, ever, touch them again. Yes. 4E really is that good. It is the XBOX 360 to your XBOX. And it is time to upgrade my friends.
Wow, I see why WOTC changed the rules again. So they can get these fucking poster child idiots to start over with a new set of books and spend another $1000 with them. He's even using a video game analogy to tell me how much better the edition is. He's a video gamer, which translates to ROLL player, rather than a ROLE player like we are.
4E rewards the inventive DM by giving him a wide range creatures with a large range of abilities and combat roles, then turns him loose to try and find the nastiest, most dastardly ways to harass his players.
AND....
Rangers SUCK. Not in the 3.x way in which they're silly and underpowered. As a DM, you will learn to hate them because with a well-placed shot they can drop your backfield controller before he gets a chance to really harass your players.
This shit makes me want to puke. This guy is a total nut job and is expressing my exact reason for NOT needing a system like 2nd edition to be revamped at all, unless you want to play a video game or board game with pieces of paper and dice, if so just buy a board game or a copy of Morrowind and have at it. I love those games, but they are NOT role-playing, and these editions are geared towards taking the ROLE out of the term and ejecting it with the term ROLL instead.
I made my save vs. WOTC and I won't buy into their regime bullshit. D20 is a good idea, but lets face it we don't need it. If we want to play Marvel, we play Marvel, if we want to play AD&D we play 2nd edition mostly, however a "fixed" version of it, and if we want to play Werewolf/Vampire we play White Wolf. No need to spend money we shouldn't for systems that are made for weakling DM’s/Players. It’s all about ROLL playing to them. Who cares about the storyline, inject as much combat rules and numbers matching level crap to make encounters more realistic, well so they say. NOT!
Lets not get defensive here, the d20 system is a good idea, it's a copy of GURPS trying to make everything uniform, so we could have a core system that is the same, but there are still tons of modifications for each genre you play in, so it's almost like learning a whole new system anyways having to deal with modern armor vs. medieval armor vs. futurist armor. Same with weapons and skill sets and all that jazz, I know cause I tried to use GURPS for all that along time ago and realized it was still pretty much like learning an entire new system each time you tried to switch genres.
If d20 is so great why do we need new core books for each new system; we should just need ONE core book (like GURPS did) and then use supplements for the rest, instead of a whole new $40 book for each new genre.
I should have better things to do than prattle on about this, but of course I am a 35, about to be 36 year old geek who is holding on to the past and won't let go of his dirty washed out 2nd edition rulebook. Those Kobolds are going to have to pry that book out of my cold dead hands. I would never think to ask my friends and players for many years to switch with me to another system and start the learning curve over when I would rather tell some good stories instead. If I ever want to fight the big boss man at the end of the next level, I’ll know what system to get.
I want ROLE-playing. It's fun. The system should be invisible and understood from the start. With 2nd edition we ALL know it and we don't have to stop and think about it and ruin the flow of a game. Learning a new system would just wheelchair the games we already have limited time to play. This isn't the early 90s, we don't play three to five times a week anymore. It’s more like three to five times a month, or even a year sometimes. I am not going to waste those precise hours we have together learning some new system that won't really benefit us THAT much.
Enough said. Unless someone else prattles on about this, I think I have said WAY MORE THAN ENOUGH....
Michael
They are insulting my intelligence by releasing something like this. Thinking that after nearly 20 years of playing 2nd edition I need another revamp cause what I have been doing is wrong, well according to their bottom line it is.
It's no longer ROLE-playing to WOTC, it's ROLL playing and they’re getting away from storytelling and making themselves more viable to those 13-15 year olds who can't put down their xbox controllers for one second and want to fight a big boss man at the end of the next level.
Here's how brainwashed a guy was who wrote a review of 4th edition.
Just 2 weeks into playing 4E, I boxed up every non-fluff heavy book I owned, drove down to Half Price Books and sold them for as much cash as I could get. I knew I would never, ever, touch them again. Yes. 4E really is that good. It is the XBOX 360 to your XBOX. And it is time to upgrade my friends.
Wow, I see why WOTC changed the rules again. So they can get these fucking poster child idiots to start over with a new set of books and spend another $1000 with them. He's even using a video game analogy to tell me how much better the edition is. He's a video gamer, which translates to ROLL player, rather than a ROLE player like we are.
4E rewards the inventive DM by giving him a wide range creatures with a large range of abilities and combat roles, then turns him loose to try and find the nastiest, most dastardly ways to harass his players.
AND....
Rangers SUCK. Not in the 3.x way in which they're silly and underpowered. As a DM, you will learn to hate them because with a well-placed shot they can drop your backfield controller before he gets a chance to really harass your players.
This shit makes me want to puke. This guy is a total nut job and is expressing my exact reason for NOT needing a system like 2nd edition to be revamped at all, unless you want to play a video game or board game with pieces of paper and dice, if so just buy a board game or a copy of Morrowind and have at it. I love those games, but they are NOT role-playing, and these editions are geared towards taking the ROLE out of the term and ejecting it with the term ROLL instead.
I made my save vs. WOTC and I won't buy into their regime bullshit. D20 is a good idea, but lets face it we don't need it. If we want to play Marvel, we play Marvel, if we want to play AD&D we play 2nd edition mostly, however a "fixed" version of it, and if we want to play Werewolf/Vampire we play White Wolf. No need to spend money we shouldn't for systems that are made for weakling DM’s/Players. It’s all about ROLL playing to them. Who cares about the storyline, inject as much combat rules and numbers matching level crap to make encounters more realistic, well so they say. NOT!
Lets not get defensive here, the d20 system is a good idea, it's a copy of GURPS trying to make everything uniform, so we could have a core system that is the same, but there are still tons of modifications for each genre you play in, so it's almost like learning a whole new system anyways having to deal with modern armor vs. medieval armor vs. futurist armor. Same with weapons and skill sets and all that jazz, I know cause I tried to use GURPS for all that along time ago and realized it was still pretty much like learning an entire new system each time you tried to switch genres.
If d20 is so great why do we need new core books for each new system; we should just need ONE core book (like GURPS did) and then use supplements for the rest, instead of a whole new $40 book for each new genre.
I should have better things to do than prattle on about this, but of course I am a 35, about to be 36 year old geek who is holding on to the past and won't let go of his dirty washed out 2nd edition rulebook. Those Kobolds are going to have to pry that book out of my cold dead hands. I would never think to ask my friends and players for many years to switch with me to another system and start the learning curve over when I would rather tell some good stories instead. If I ever want to fight the big boss man at the end of the next level, I’ll know what system to get.
I want ROLE-playing. It's fun. The system should be invisible and understood from the start. With 2nd edition we ALL know it and we don't have to stop and think about it and ruin the flow of a game. Learning a new system would just wheelchair the games we already have limited time to play. This isn't the early 90s, we don't play three to five times a week anymore. It’s more like three to five times a month, or even a year sometimes. I am not going to waste those precise hours we have together learning some new system that won't really benefit us THAT much.
Enough said. Unless someone else prattles on about this, I think I have said WAY MORE THAN ENOUGH....
Michael
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)