Recent content by Dire Bare

Necessity? Depends on your needs. There are very good, even necessary reasons, for some folks within the US to learn a second language even if they never leave home. Depending on your career and where you live, Spanish is very useful and possibly even necessary. If you are traveling . . . what...

Not quite. Certainly, the shift from the white box to AD&D, then 2E to 3E, then to 4E, then to 5E created almost entirely different games. But there was an incremental series of revisions between the white box and the Rules Cyclopedia. All mostly compatible. The transition from AD&D 1E to 2E...

Yeah. A lot of digital ink spilled over small stuff.

Well, with that resume, I'm certainly not hiring Dancey for my RPG start-up! But I'm not going to hold all of that against him as a person. He was in charge for a lot of that, but not exclusively so, and no doubt holds a reasonable amount of responsibility for the various failed projects (the...

I respect your own recall of events, but . . . I'm taking all of that with a grain of salt without more solid links. Not that you need to worry about solving my curiosity, it's just that I don't recall any of that . . . of course, it's been a long while. D&D 3.5 came only 3 years after 3.0 . ...

What were Dancey's shenanigans during the TSR acquisition? How did Dancey crash and burn with D&D 3.5? What happened with Eve Online and Pathfinder Online? Not that I'm doubting your list of negative Dancey events . . . I'm honestly not familiar with most things on the list!

I agree that learning and playing multiple RPG games is a way to improve your enjoyment of the hobby! I also think the hobby supporting multiple games is healthy for the hobby and industry. Not that there is anything wrong with sticking with your favorite game to the exclusion of other games...

That's a take I have a hard time agreeing with. WotC promoting D&D and working to keep it at the center of the industry by making it an open game . . . certainly incentivized publishers to create d20 products, but didn't prevent them in any real way from publishing non-D&D games. WotC didn't...

Buddy, we'll have to agree to disagree.

If your goal is to reduce the number of game systems out there in favor of D&D . . . I think the "how" you go about it is important. I don't think the goal itself is "offensive". Staff at WotC seemed to honestly believe that "system proliferation" was harmful to the RPG industry as a whole . . ...

I miss the days you were creating content for WotC. Although I enjoy your work with MCG! Was one of Dancey's goals to eliminate all non-D&D games? Or virtually so, at least? Or was one of his goals to further cement D&D in the center of the industry, and lower the number of other, non-D&D...

Good questions. Maybe declaring art that incorporates AI generated elements "not art" isn't helpful. But to me, it is problematic. It certainly isn't black-and-white, your image shared above actually doesn't bother me overmuch, and I understand (I think) why you created it. But the use of AI...

A work of art doesn't need a primary author. Art can be collaborative without an individual needing to be on top. Setting aside the use of AI . . . when you brought all of these artistic elements together, did you create a new piece of art? I think we could argue that, although I'd argue, "no"...

Yes. Obviously, there was a lot of human-generated slop before the rise of our AI overlords. Since the dawn of time actually, before even the rise of social media. But you could follow trusted sources and feel reasonably certain the news you were reading was written by a journalist. I don't...

That's one way to parse what he said. Dancey worked for a game company that wanted to sell more games. He came up with a way to do that, which also preserved D&D 3E (and eventually 5E) as an open game. How terrible. The OGL put D&D 3E into the community as a game anyone could design content...