Ogrork the Mighty said:
I dunno, I'm just not feelin' D&D in general and 4E in particular. Feels like I've wasted a whole whack of money on a bunch of books that are going to be nothing more than general resource material. Added to the cancellation of Dragon and Dungeon and user fees for the website and maybe it's time to let D&D go.
It just feels like it's all about profit and how to squeeze every last penny out of gamers.
It's sort of like playing a video game when you reach a point and realize that you've made a mistake in your character development and that if you want to reach the end you need to start over with a new character, but instead you just say why bother and don't play the game anymore. That's kinda how I'm feeling with D&D right now. I don't feel the hype I felt with 3E and I don't feel I had enough time to get full usage out of the books I bought.
I'm not going to run around ranting and raving and saying I'll never buy another WotC product or that I'll boycott 4E. Rather, I kinda feel like just letting it go.
I dunno, maybe it's just time to move on.
I understand how you feel; the cancellation of
Dragon and
Dungeon really depressed me. For some time I'd been gleefully going on a nostalgic rampage through Greyhawk, setting of my youth, fueled by Erik Mona's dedication to keeping it alive in the mags. And while 3/3.5 still had
some of the baggage of
D&D, it was still such a huge improvement over previous incarnations of the game that with
E-Tools and
Dungeon I was good to go.
Naturally, I was upset about WotC killing
E-Tools ... that basically froze my buying new books at
DMG II because that was as far as the data sets got. But I figured that was probably enough ... anything that popped up in
Dungeon that wasn't in
E-Tools by that point, I could either use the
Dungeon stat block or kludge up something.
Then, the mags got the axe. Besides being bad for me as a current player, this also really hurt and shook me as a long-time gamer, for whom the presence of
Dragon magazine in bookstores and newsstands was as much a given as
Time or
The Washington Post. Even when I hated the rules for
AD&D, I could always find something of interest in
Dragon magazine.
I spent the month after the announcement of the magazines' impending death [1] sorta shell-shocked, as far as gaming was concerned. I continued running my Greyhawk game, but it was without any real joy or enthusiasm. There was anger all over my usual internet gaming haunts, and I was stoking the flames as much as anybody, which is completely not my normal behavior.
What finally pulled me out of my downward spiral was
Star Wars Saga Edition, actually. It was new, it was nifty, and it was good to see what had been pretty much been written off by many as a dead line given such a dramatic rebirth. It was also just the thing I'd been wanting for some time -- a streamlined, d20-based system where your character's abilities, not their gear, was what made them heroes. Just the thing for the sword-and-sorcery game I'd been wanting to run for years but didn't want to have to slog through teaching my players the even-more-complex
Conan system, or try to write up characters in
Grim Tales without the benefit of
E-Tools.
So now, ironically, on the day that my
Sword and Sorcery Saga conversion is ready to be unveiled, they come along and blindside us (not all of us, but a lot of us) with 4E -- which sounds like in many ways is exactly the direction I'd been wishing
D&D would go!
Am I happy? Not particularly.
Am I angry? Not particularly.
What am I? Really, more apathetic than anything else. A little annoyed at the whole Digital Initiative thing [2], and still very angry about the killing of the mags.
I
should be whooping for joy, as after 30 years
D&D is finally jettisoning a lot of the stuff that's driven me nuts about it for years. But I'm not. The most excitement I can generate is "meh" -- because those steps forward came at a price I was not willing to pay. I don't really care about
D&D now. Not in itself. I'm ready to chuck the dungeons, the beholders and kobolds, and all that other stuff associated specifically with the
D&D brand, and return to the sword and sorcery story games I used to run in
Fantasy HERO, even if I just happen to be doing it with a system derived from the "preview" version of
D&D 4E.
So yeah, I understand how you feel.
FWIW, I recommend hanging out over at Paizo for a while. I find it helps tremendously!
-The Gneech
[1] Yes, they are dead. "Moved to online distribution" is
not continuing a magazine. It's killing it and replacing it with something else of far lesser value.
[2] It is my firm belief that subscribing to online content, whether it be MMOs or magazines, is for suckers. I want my hard copy.
