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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Loonook" data-source="post: 4568526" data-attributes="member: 1861">When characters have magic items to sell, a travelling merchant is in town - or will be soon - to take it off their hands.Yep... nothing about merchants traveling about collecting magic items.I also enjoy the fact that 'the boring parts' now consist of any interaction which isn't about the combat or the immediate thread in front of you.  And here's the issue with it that no one seems to cover:Those of us 'stuck' in our 'inferior' editions learned the tropes and traits from the knee of those editions or earlier editions.  We fell in love with THAC0, the Will and the Way, Van Richten's Guides, Necromancer's Handbook, old Cthulu-inspired Deities and Demigods, etc. etc. etc. Through these developments, and the outside interactions of years (or decades) of our varying chosen cultures we develop games . . . and then have to shatter the player's specific concepts of 'how things must be done'.  Because, just like us, the players will develop their own styles.  A lot of player enjoyment comes from the DM side, and as new individuals take up the mantle they get to add their own touches.  Bad Shaw Bros. movies, Shakespeare, webcomics, farmer's almanacs, histories... all sorts of things begin to build that DM's style.  And the player's style gets around it to.The boring parts... well, they've never been boring to me.  I had DMs who brought about that feeling of those things mattering to their setting, their concept, etc. because the old editions were the Wild West of gaming.  Hamsters in Space!  Not my bag, but it was someone's.  Lots of dangerous traps and derring-do?  Yeah, depends on the game.  A good game is out your window or deep in the Abyss, dealing with dwarven taboos or fighting your way out of some castle which has become infested with the Red Death.  Rules are a necessity for the style of game that most of us D&D (no matter the edition) weaned suckling pigs grew into . . . and when we became the big boars with all the slings and arrows of crap games, great ideas, and experience came about we become focused on our styles.  Nothing wrong with it, and I encourage it because we make games...The best games, in my opinion, come from flavor.  An Orc shouldn't always be an Orc, and the levels of fun, fear, and fantasy in games should be giant knobs yanked about by DMs to create the balance they want in their games.  Flavor is primary to a narrative device; too much and you bog your players down, too little and we may as well all play an MMO and get it over with... but MMOs have flavor too.  EVE is as different from UO as can be, but they have specific things close to each other than define the genre.We cannot allow the rules to overrun the flavor of the game, because then 4e is less than even the lowest MMORPG or wargame... hell, even they have stories behind them.  3e's concept of half price sales is close to console RPGs like Final Fantasy, but we accepted that as 'the baseline', and it can be adjusted from.  4e tilts on a lot of points I really like; it is the flavor of things which seem to be suggested heavier than they were in 3e that irritate me more than anything, and the lack of a strong 3rd party element which allows the average gamer who doesn't want to have to homebrew to 'opt out' of settings as presented which irritate me the most of it.I've been granted the 'gift' of the 4e books from the SO.  I like a lot that I see but I hate the presentation.  However, looking at the way that people talk on the forums about even these little bits, how vehemently they protect the new sacred calves of 4e, that worries me.  The thinness of skin when it comes to this, the lashing out against older edition groggies who are trying to at least learn opinions and find out whether they will adopt the system is worrisome.  There are plenty of ideas I like about 4e, but having to retrofit all of the materials I have without really solid analogues, the posts by WotC staff early on that suggested you just wrap up and retire your games before launch... that really poisoned the well for me.  Yeah, I may bring in some of the concepts which I wasn't already using into my 3.X and Modern gaming (consolidated skills with skill ranks seems great to allow access to mystic skills using Psychic's Handbook and Mythic Earth, foe example).  However, with this pressing forward on both sides I just feel more and more compelled to just dig a hole and start running WW and other materials.  I attempt to help where I can on 4e threads when someone posts a concept; a basic understanding of the system should be a given for anyone who is interested in D&D because, well, how else will you modify something you like from it? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Ars Magica... I'm coming to join you honey.  Slainte,-Loonook.</blockquote>

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