Link.
The first question on last night’s University Challenge gave the above quote, mentioning Cecil Adams and the Straight Dope in the process, and asked for the name of the game Adams was describing in his column.
My guess of Rubik’s Cube was clearly incorrect but kudos to Cecil for attracting the attention of question compilers for the UK’s longest running and possibly most difficult TV quiz.
Is that the same University Challenge that Rik, Vyvian, Neal and Mike were on, representing Scumbag College?
Sorry, I’m a child of the 80’s. And an American.
That’s it. Link
More or less the same one. The original went off the air, then was revived years later with a new host, and flashier graphics in the picture questions.
As for you being American, don’t you have your own version of the quiz College Bowl? I’ve seen brief clips of it, and it looks like the same format.
One interesting thing: I recently had a look at the newest edition of the D&D rulebooks in a bookstore. I’d estimate it’s approximately 5000 times more complicated that it was in 1980, when I was playing and Cecil described it as having the “excitement of double-entry bookkeeping.”
Since Cecil talks about Gygax leaving TSR in the mid-1980s, and about a CD-ROM due out in 1996 – he didn’t write that in 1980. Date at the top of the column notwithstanding.
In certain ways, yes, Maroci, in that in order to even generate a character you need to figure out and write down about 3 times (off the top of my head,) as much data.
On the other hand, everything works relatively the same way, so skill checks work in much the same way as to hits work as much the same way as saving throws. So once you mastered the relatively hard basics you can do pretty much anything.
Unlike 1.0 where you had different rules for attacking a monster versus someone with an armor class type, or attacking someone with a weapon using a to hit table and a D20 versus a percentage roll with dozens of modifiers for the 3 basic grappling types, not to mention the two different effect tables psionicists had to look up depending on whether the defender was a psionicist or not (with entirely different rules for each.)
Which is not even to get into the differences DMs had between each other, whereas the rules are now more streamlined for XP and magic item generation. Before, most DMs made it nearly impssible to make all but the most basic magic items (with the rare exception of those that made the game look like a steampunk city on crack,) while now it’s easier to do by default but takes experience points so it’s not like you can equip the entire party with +3 weapons right off the bat by making them.
Unfortunately it looks like the last part might be going away with the new 4.0. But maybe not.
Well, the columns have been updated occasionally, but the “double-entry bookkeeping” crack is old – it was in the first Straight Dope book back in the Eighties.