Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9669206" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Not personally. I'm quite well aware that it is a way to fleece people of their money. Far more people desperate to win than will ever actually win. I see no point or value to it.Nnnnnnnope! Again: Risk. Not the oldest strategy game in the world, but certainly the grandad of board game strategy games. It contains dice. That doesn't make playing it in any way comparable to spinning the roulette wheel. It contains probability. It's not "a gamble"."A gamble" implies long-shot victory, unlikely scenarios, barely surviving the odds, etc., etc. That isn't what you have in Risk. Yes, it contains a probability mechanic, which can, extraordinarily rarely, lead to otherwise sound strategies failing to succeed. That doesn't make it suddenly "a gamble" and in no way a game of skill and strategy. The skill and strategy remain by far the most important part of the experience--the probability only there to tousle things artfully now and then. D&D is much the same, especially since you can manipulate the odds in your favor.Yes, I'm quite well aware of your hostility to contemporary preferences.It's not bland to me or the folks who like these things. Xenofiction would be bland--I'd have nothing to relate to or think about because it would be incomprehensibly alien. Getting to play something that is like a human, but not a human, is interesting to me. Getting to play a being who shares something of what it means to be "a dragon", but isn't actually a dragon, is very interesting to me. Ideally, it comes with something at least vaguely analogous to Arkhosia (the ancient, long-fallen dragonborn kingdom from the 4e "Points of Light" setting), e.g., a kingdom that wasn't perfect but was generally pretty good, but which fell to internal corruption and external violence, so its descendants carry on its legacy and culture even if the original is little more than dust--because books are the memory that does not die.Sure, dinosaur stuff has been in D&D forever. Again I don't see how this undermines my point: original D&D was not persnickety about what was allowed in and what was excluded. It was open to a wide variety of things, time travel and space aliens and psionic squid-men and all sorts of other things besides. To assert "tradition" as the reason why X thing should or shouldn't be included is itself the most untraditional thing one could do!But once a certain period of time had passed...for some reason, the gates were locked tight. Nothing more could be allowed in. Even though "do whatever seems cool" was very clearly the watchword before that, after that point, zealously, jealously guarding that gate to make sure nothing somehow "wrong" leaked in was the norm.I just don't understand how people square that spirit of openness--one of D&D's truly great qualities!--with the harshly closed nature of their current behavior. Everything up to some nebulous time is good; everything after it is forbidden forever. Had someone suggested dragonborn to Gygax and been included, no doubt you'd be defending them just as vociferously as any other traditional part, solely because it is traditional, when those traditions only came into existence because of people openly and intentionally defying tradition!</blockquote>

Verification