*The tavern sighed again.
Flaeros frowned across the warm room. Jacks of burnished copper hung on a forest of stout pillars flashed fireflicker back at him. Long-whiskered men hefted pipes and tankards unconcernedly, as if none heard the mournful wail but a would-be bard visiting from oversea.*
–first four sentences of The Kingless Land
Versions 3 and 3.5 are just Rolemaster updated, anyway. Monte Cook was a major player in both the last major re-write of Rolemaster, and then D&D 3e.
There is a whole culture of FRP game players who loathe all that is d20/D&D, and almost as many alternate game systems. While there is definitely something to the idea of making D&D more “computer game friendly” (especially the move from day-based resources to encounter-based versions), there is also a fair bit of taking these criticisms to heart, as well. Personally, I’m in the “quitcha whining” camp, but a lot of people feel that 3.5 is too difficult and slow, especially at high levels. YMMV.
I’m not all that interested in what Wizards comes up with for D&D 4.0. Intellectually curious, but not passionately involved. I doubt I’ll want to drop another $100 on the three primary sourcebooks for yet another edition — I didn’t buy 3.0, either, though I did pick up three main books for 3.5.
I couldn’t care less what they do with Forgotten Realms, or any of their other proprietary worlds; I don’t use 'em.
I don’t really care for the Vancian magic and all of the associated bookkeeping, especially in that it causes the party to panic every 3 encounters and camp out to refresh spells, even though it’s been only 20 minutes in-game. I’d much rather play a game that I don’t have to make that kind of rigorous tabulation, or personally approve spells from a fourth-generation photocopy of a third-party sourcebook that the party wizard wishes to learn from.
Besides, I’ve been playing GURPS. I think I like it much better than D&D any day of the week.
So, you’re saying Rolemaster is now more like D&D that its famous roots as Chart Master? Rollmaster?
Now I remember why we play a custom system in a homebrewed world.
No corporate masters for my crew!
You know, I think we’ve found the one definite issue on which you and I agree wholeheartedly. I can only wish I had the money and the sources to collect all of the old late 1st/2nd ed. sourcebooks and boxed sets. I’d love to have everything from gray-box FR to Spelljammer to Al-Qadim to Ravenloft to Oriental Adventures to Birthright to etc.etc.etc…
I’m a bit of a sourcebook fiend, though. I just like to read them.
Yeah, a lot of the new changes coming suck a big fat bag of cocks. My one friend said that all the ridiculous simplification made it look like ‘D&D for retards’.
And nuking Faerun? That’s just fucking stupid, plain and simple. There really isn’t anything else I need to say about it.
I’d had it when I saw Ebberon. It was a D&D world made by fucking 10 year olds. ‘You know what would be kewl? Robots!’
Can’t disagree with the OP more regarding 3rd edition - I think it was a much-needed improvement to D&D, making things more consistent, and dare I say it, logical, while still preserving the overall flavor.
However, I agree completely on 4th Edition and the Faerun changes.
D&D4e is not Dungeons and Dragons, it’s World of Warcraft.
But I already did my rant on my LiveJournal yesterday - here’s a link.
I don’t think they’re killing ALL the high level NPCs… just most of them. They’ll probably keep Drizzt, since he’s the most popular and least interesting.
They lost me at 2nd edition.
AD&D rocks.
Wow, I’ve managed to work up some healthy geek rage in my day, but smiling bandit’s monster rants about D&D always show me what an amateur I am.
This is pure, unfiltered geek rage that is worthy of a “Get a Life!” Shatner-style.
I’m sort of pissed for a different reason – this just goes to show that no matter how long you have an idea you can look like a ripoff if you wait long enough.
I’ve been doing postapocalyptic-esque since the early 90s and now my stuff will seem like an imitation. Actually, it was a very early tech setting but the sparseness and struggle for bare existence is similar.
First it was my idea in the early 80s that lizardmen were the first race which GW then of course uses. Then it was my early 80s idea that kobolds were powerful sorcerors. They better not take my other ideas or I will be mad mad mad!
I can agree as far as the basic books (though I wasn’t a fan of the super-fast experience gain).
I always liked Artemis Entreri, although in the last two bok about him Salvatore basically jumped the shark. The entire plot was basically “Let’s all screw Entreri and mess with his head to complete his emotional wreckage.” Jeez, no wonder that guy’s a bloody-handed killer. If he’s only a murderer, I say he’s doing pretty well. In similar circumstances, I’d probably be wiping out whole civilizations and grinding their bones beneath my booted heels. The sole explanation for the hideous soul-numbing horror which is his life is that Beshaba decided on a whim to curse him so hard the curse won’t let him die - cause that would end the suffering.
Anyway, I did wnt to ntoe Candid Gamera’s remarks on his page there. He’s right. The classes seem to be moving pretty far toward a "Here is some freakish nonsensical ability and you get once per “encounter” system. It’s not getting rid of vancian Magic. It’s just making it sucky and pushing it on everybody.
I can say that I’m in the “against the shitting on FR” camp. Like 4th edition itself it just seems to be a way to wring a few extra bux out of players.
Want to play the "official" version of the game? Now your old books are completely useless, you have to buy all new ones. Even with 3rd edition, there is no doubt that people were using and adapting their old materials. No new sales there. Only the people at half price books and E-bay were making money off of that.
But hey, if you don't like 4th edition or the nuked Farum, wait a few years, they'll come out with 5th edition.
Me, I'm going to dig out my old Runequest stuff and dust off the notes I used to convert classic Forgotten Realms to that system. I wonder how that would work with Planescape?What really galls me is the specificity of it. You get all those per day and per encounter abilities, fine. Maybe you have some choice amongst them, too. But with fighters getting “self heals” and “enemy movement control” abilities - either you’ve carried D&D’s combat abstraction to absurdity, or you’re basically making every fighter a Jedi knight with quasi mystical combat maneuvers.
And while I like Jedi Knights, I like Boba Fetts, too. People who get by without reliance on magic. When I run my custom campaign world, I want Fighters to be the guys really good at fighting, not the “guys who has the special abilities relating to opponent position manipulation”. If I want “opponent position manipulation”, I can put in a prestige class that does it.
It just seems the core rules are making such heavy assumptions about the flavor of the game that it hampers the game’s ability to be generic fantasy.
And the World of Warcraft comparison looms ever-larger - ENWorld posted some new exceprts where the designers talk about ‘elite’ mobs… excuse me, monsters. Gee, I wonder where that terminology came from?
Don’t get me wrong - I like World of Warcraft. But if I want to play something like it, I’ll play it. Sometimes, I want to play D&D.
Don’t look at me, man. I been playing either Eberron, a custom world, or a really crazy game which was set in Upstate NY, in a USA hit by random portals dumping shit in. Mad fusion of D20 Modern and 3.5.
I have to say that A: clerics and shotguns go together like cheese and grilling, and B: really, not that bad. Very brutal till you pass 5th level, but after that, guns don’t make that much of a difference… except that you can hide 'em on you, keep reloads, and if you’ve got a good holster, fire 'em after being underwater or in the rain.
Plus, you know, Dark*Matter plus dragons.
I couldn’t disagree with you more, and I wish this thread was still in the Pit so that I could use profanity to insult you right now. :mad:
And you as well.
Anyway, I’m glad they’re changing the Forgotten Realms. I have the 3rd edition core book and I’ve DM’d a campaign in it. I may or may not pick up the 4th edition one, I’m undecided right now, but I’m more likely to pick it up the more they change. See, I don’t want a core book that’s the exact same fluff as the 3rd edition one, but with 4th edition stats. That’s not a campaign book, that’s a conversion document.
If I want to run or play in a 3rd Ed era FR game using 4th Ed rules, well, I can do that. It’d be a bit of work combining the rules with the fluff and doing the conversions, sure, but it’s entirely doable. So I don’t want WoTC to give me the same old stuff when it comes to FR. Shake it up and give me something new. Something that justifies a new campaign book.
A question from one who knows of Forgotten Realms mostly through rumor:
WotC just published “Grand History of the Realms” a couple months back. What was the point of producing this book in the first place, if the updated Forgotten Realms setting is just going to nuke it all?
Surely anyone who might be encouraged to pick up any future products based on this book is going to be kind of dismayed to learn that it’s all suddenly dust in the wind.
Well, the book is still accurate as far as it goes. The history of the Realm hasn’t changed, they just advanced the timeline and had a bunch of big events happen that changed things in the new “present”. And the history of the FR is full of world changing cataclysmic events, so in that sense, it fits in fine with the history.
Contain thy toothless geek rage, young padawan. There is argument for such. Primarily they’re almost completely doing away with the Vancian magic system, which has been an integral part of D&D up until now. They’re casting aside the old cosmology, which I thought was just about perfection. (Never did forgive WotC for letting Planescape fall by the wayside…) Instead of coming up with new settings, they’re reworking the old ones without apparent need. Damn stupid idea, you ask me (and you didn’t); most geeks don’t appreciate having their familiar, traditional settings turned upside down. It just doesn’t seem to have the feel of D&D, and said feel managed to make the transition from AD&D to 3E.
Or are you taking issue with the part about it being potentially interesting, balanced, and fun to play? 
(Seriously, dude, a difference of opinion isn’t cause for hurling insults. You can be more mature than that.)
That IS a good point, actually. Back when they put out the 3rd ed. Forgotten Realms sourcebook (which is sitting about 2 feet away on my shelf here at work right now) in 2001, they said they were going to advance time in the Realms by two years for every five years in real time. So, is this a massive time jump or did this cataclysm come only 2 1/2 years after the slice in time as described in that book?