D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023

[darjr]

Also that review was in 1999!

Deep dive there.

Imagine being held to the fire for something you wrote in 1999!

 

[The Myopic Sniper]

I don't think Mike Mearl's Keep of the Borderlands review is particularly wrong in any sense. It is written in an "edgy" way that a lot of late 1990s online outlets like Pitchfork or alternative weeklies rendered their reviews in. I agree with him that outside of nostalgia that The Keep on the Borderlands was possibly not the best on-ramp to TTRPGs for the new audience that D&D was looking for when they released it.

 

[pemerton]

Also that review was in 1999!

Which I said in my post. And which can be seen, very prominently, on the rpg.net page.

Imagine being held to the fire for something you wrote in 1999!

Who is holding anyone to the fire? I mean, you don't even know whether or not I agree with Mearls's review!

 

[darjr]

Which I said in my post. And which can be seen, very prominently, on the rpg.net page.

Who is holding anyone to the fire? I mean, you don't even know whether or not I agree with Mearls's review!

You called it slander?

 

[pemerton]

You called it slander?

I described it as slander in the context of being uttered by an employee of WotC - it is incredibly harsh, and I can't imagine any commercial publishing house permitting an employee to say such things about its own publications.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I described it as slander in the context of being uttered by an employee of WotC - it is incredibly harsh, and I can't imagine any commercial publishing house permitting an employee to say such things about its own publications.

WotC OWNS KotB, but they didn't publish it.

 

[pemerton]

WotC OWNS KotB, but they didn't publish it.

They are a publisher of it: B2 The Keep on the Borderlands (Basic) - Wizards of the Coast | D&D Basic | Adventure Modules | D&D Basic | DriveThruRPG.com

 

[cavalier973]

On Mike Mearls:

Here you can read Mearls's famous (notorious?) 1999 review of B2 Keep on the Borderlands: Review of B2: The Keep on the Borderlands - RPGnet RPG Game Index

Some choice quotes:

*If you paid for it, you got ripped off​

​

*The Keep on the Borderlands (KotB) literally serves as exhibit A in the great case against Dungeons and Dragons.​

​

*The Keep on the Borderlands was written after the Village of Hommlett, after the D series. Those modules weren't masterpieces, but they sure as heck had far more depth and coherence than this disaster of a gaming product.​

​

*How many people picked up the D&D basic set, fiddled with it for a bit, and then dropped it altogether because they didn't know anything better then the Keep was out there?​

Had he changed his mind by 2012, when the Caves of Chaos was used as a 5e playtest adventure? Or was he just doing his job, which would include not slandering the products made by the company he works for?

I don't know. And I'm not really sure that it matters.

He complains that none of the NPCs is named. I would guess that the DM is expected to provide names, to make the module the DM’s own, but Mearls attributes the lack of names to fascism.

I think he was trying to be funny.

It isn’t a real review; he doesn’t talk about anything substantive about either running it or playing it.

 

[cavalier973]

I tried to run it, and had issues. For example, it isn’t clear whether or not the road is supposed to be usable by the PCs to get directly to the caves of chaos, or if they have to search “somewhere to the east”, hex-crawling, as it were, but in a grid, in order to find the caves.

It spends an inordinate amount of space to describing the treasure of the keep’s inhabitants, for some reason.

On the other hand, it is the only early publication that gives info on what the PCs can expect to get when they sell gear and weapons that they recovered from slain monsters (half price).

It does introduce the concept of wilderness exploration, and has advice on running it (“keep the players near the bottom of the ravine until they gain levels”, etc.).

 

[pemerton]

He complains that none of the NPCs is named. I would guess that the DM is expected to provide names, to make the module the DM’s own, but Mearls attributes the lack of names to fascism.

I think he was trying to be funny.

It isn’t a real review; he doesn’t talk about anything substantive about either running it or playing it.

I agree he's trying to be funny.

I also agree that the GM was probably expected to provide names (though I just did a quick skim-read of the GM advice and this isn't mentioned); on the other hand, the recent blog I linked to just upthread asserts that the lack of names is a part of the setting!

But I do think it's a real review, in that Mearls has genuine points to make about the nature and the quality of the product.