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