Are people still mad about . . .

[Voadam]

Things I'm still annoyed at.

No NPC and pc wealth charts in the 3e srd.

Later monster books did not make it into the 3e srd.

3e WotC pdfs were ridiculously expensive.

4e pdfs were just expensive enough for me not to get them.

4e is GSL and not OGL.

4e does not have a rules srd you can use to play the game, just a reference list of things you can publish under the GSL. Quick start rule set only does half the job.

Can't buy any TSR/WotC pdfs.

Can't download the pdfs I legally bought if I get a crash.

d20 logo ending informally nonsense.

Stuff about modelling stats being better than playing a concept.

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

well

I remain disinterested in doing business with Hasbro, but since Paizo meets my needs these days, I'm not actively 'mad' about anything.

If anything, things turned out pretty well. Because 4E occupies the young gamers/casual gamers/MMRPG influenced gamer niche so fully, Paizo is incentivized to keep a more traditional, old school approach. So now we have two systems, and one of them works fine for me.

Ken

 

[Beginning of the End]

I wouldn't say I'm mad, but I remain bewildered and exasperated that WotC stopped selling the PDFs of the TSR-era material.

Taking the OD&D manuals off the market soured me and at least a dozen other people locally who were all playing in an open table OD&D game.

That is my impression of their online marketing. A typical piece would be:

1) Designer explains why 3e sucked, giving some example of play experience you never suffered from.
2) Designer makes unfounded claim about how some mechanical change in 4e will fix the problem, even when said problem to the extent it existed was attributable to encounter design, adventure design, or other DM choices.

Ditto. The fact that their "solutions" often turned out to make the problem worse was, of course, hilarious.

Mearls writing a blog post critiquing 2nd Edition for elevating a particular style of play above other styles of play -- after months of participating in a marketing campaign and writing core rulebooks which literally described ways that people had been playing the game for 30+ years as "no fun" and "wrong" -- was simply the surrealist cherry on the top of it all.

4th Edition appears to have been specifically designed to be a completely different roleplaying game from previous editions (which all largely played like each other). The 4th Edition marketing campaign seemed explicitly designed to create a massive schism in the marketplace. And the legal wranglings around 4th Edition appear to have been designed in an effort to make the pre-4th Edition version of D&D as unavailable as possible.

All of those things annoy me.

I also think 4th Edition is a net negative on the gaming industry: It's a narrowly-designed game which appeals to fewer people. The "everything is core" marketing approach raises the level of confusion and/or the perceived entry cost for newcomers. This, coupled with the continued lack of a non-preview version of the game packaged and sold like other games (a decision which dates back to TSR), has made D&D less accessible than ever before.

Since D&D remains the #1 entry product for the industry, this is really bad news.

This also annoys me.

 

[Jack99]

I remain disinterested in doing business with Hasbro, but since Paizo meets my needs these days, I'm not actively 'mad' about anything.

If anything, things turned out pretty well. Because 4E occupies the young gamers/casual gamers/MMRPG influenced gamer niche so fully, Paizo is incentivized to keep a more traditional, old school approach. So now we have two systems, and one of them works fine for me.

Ken

It's posts like this one that starts e-wars and end threads.

 

[gamerprinter]

How WotC affected third party publishers...

From a publisher's point of view (I wasn't one then, but am now...):

1. The whole GSL debacle - which is less monstrous in the newest version, but still not a good thing to 3pp's. And not just the GSL itself, but issuing the license, while not releasing the game for a whole year after that killed many small publishers, since by signing the first GSL, they couldn't produce previous edition material, yet had no new edition to support. I'm not saying this was intentional, but if it was, how deviously well designed to kill the small publisher as it did.

2. DDi - I constantly hear all the love of this. Yet, what about the 3pp's that did sign the GSL, and the newest one who want to support 4e, but can't get their monsters and other support material into the DDi.

Again, not saying any of this is intentional, but it "seems" that WotC's public voice stating we want 3pp support does not coincide with how they treat them, and still prevent them from being active supporters.

Since at the time, I was considering becoming a small 3pp - all of this forceably sent me to Pathfinder or other directions - far away from 4e.

I'm now happily a Pathfinder RPG 3pp with my first adventure out, second and third on the way, and possibly a new setting and adventures to follow, which is already in the works.

I'm glad I wasn't sucked into trying to be a 4e 3pp - it would probably have killed any possibility to ever being a publisher.

 

[Mistwell]

I am right that the motivating factor behind qualifiers like, "I don't mean to be rude..." or "With all due respect..." is to give yourself permission to be rude or disrespectful. We say thing likes, "I don't mean to be rude...", precisely because we know we are going to be rude. If we didn't mean to be rude, either we'd actually not say the thing we claim we don't want to say, or else we'd be oblivious to potential offense and not qualify our next statement.

Please do not speak for me or others.

When I say "with all due respect", I mean "with respect for your views and position as my peer, I hope you will give me the same courtesy when I say..."

You are not right, all of the time, about you knowing the private motives of all others who say that phrase.

I've seen no examples of that.

How could you possibly know?

You would have to know the private unspoken motives of every person who every said the phrase, to know there were no examples.

You're assuming you know, but stating that you are certain about it.

The most charitable interpretation I can give the phrase it it means, "Forgive me for being offensive/contridictory, but I feel I must", which is I suspect the original intent of the phrase probably from a time where there was more rigid class stratification and people could get in serious trouble for speaking above their station. In modern contexts and usage, it never IME the equivalent of "forgive me for what I'm about to say because I know it is wrong...", rather it is the equivalent of an aside to the audience which means, "Forgive me of the verbal hiding I'm about to give this jerk because he deserves it..."

You can give it a more charitable interpretation. I suggested one. So now, once you heard the alternative possibility, you CAN give it a more charitable interpretation. You're choosing to not do so.

In any event, I strongly encourage you not to use this phrase where respect due to social status is still required. If you say, "With all due respect..." to a judge, don't be surprised if he or she blows his or her top.

I probably have said it to a judge, and nobody ever blew their top. I've definitely said it to other attorneys, and nobody ever reacted the way you are reacting.

I encourage you to consider the possibility that some people do not mean that phrase in a negative manner at all, and in particularly it's unfair for you to assume a negative thing was meant by it in this thread.

If I ever say it to you, I assure you, it will not be intended in a negative manner.

 

[Wormwood]

4) The ludicrous statements of some 4e defenders concerning what 4e would be like - I remember alot of arguments about how great the Skill Challenge system was going to be - and the absolute faith that they had in a product they'd never seen.

Oh God that sounds like me.

In my own (meager) defense, I readily admit that I was misled by some developer posts which implied that 4e would embrace various 'indie RPG' elements that I love so much.

Since then, I have learned to take their words well-salted.

I cringe when I recall tilting at the lists with you and others, armed with nothing but wishful thinking and my soured memories of 3e.

A sadder and a wiser fanboy I woke the morrow morn.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Things I know I'm still 'fired up' about...

1) Killing the print editions of Dragon and Dungeon.

2) Completely dissing their own past products in their marketing of 4e. Related note, completely dissing the fans of their past products (anyone remember 'Cloudwatching'?)

3) Printing a 4e of a game which is utterly incompatible with the prior three editions of the game to the extent that is fundamentally a different game.

4) The ludicrous statements of some 4e defenders concerning what 4e would be like - I remember alot of arguments about how great the Skill Challenge system was going to be - and the absolute faith that they had in a product they'd never seen.

It was going to be out of the box a rules light, stream-lined, flexible, narrativist, minature optional system with very fast but still cinematic combat resolution but that also made resolving complex situations with skills as natural and as important as combat, and if you didn't believe that then you were a mental defective. And the skill challenge system was going to let you use any skill at any time, and it was going to make everyone in the party to contribute all the time to everything, and if you couldn't see the beauty of the coming system you shouldn't disagree with the people that did, because you hadn't seen the rules. If there was anything which you didn't understand from the previews, that was ok because it was going to be the best written edition of D&D ever with the most compelling fluff, the best DM advice, and in fact the DM advice would be impossible for anyone to read the rulebooks and be a bad DM or design a bad encounter. Because of course, there are no past issues that were the result of bad DMing, because everyone knows a good game system can't be run badly. And the rules would be such that it would prevent rules lawyers from being pricks. And the math would be fixed so that everything would just work with no need for DM input, because the designers said so. And the modules were going to be the best ever written for D&D ever, so that you'd totally forget about all that badwrongfun of earlier editions, which let's face it, sucked. And, it was also at the same time going to change nothing about how you played D&D because it was going to be the same game, and an even smaller change than between 3e and 2e, and heck, even if it didn't support playing D&D the same way then that was ok because D&D was always badwrongfun anyway.

5) The entirely pointless and contridictory new alignment non-system, and the other trashing of old fluff just for the sake of trashing it.

Celebrim has channeled some of my feelings as well. Preach on!

There are other things that bug me still, some of which bug me so much I don't talk about them here anymore because of what those discussions did to my blood pressure.

 

[haakon1]

I'm still kinda hacked off about 2 of Celebrim's 5 issues, but I don't think about them very often.

That is, #3 (lack of backwards compatibility) is still a thorn in my side and #1 (no more Dungeon & Dragon magazines) is something I miss sometimes, but am learning to live without. #1 does mean I don't go to FLGS nearly as often, which is sad . . .

As for one issue Celebrim doesn't mention -- WOTC pulling pre-4e PDF's, that issue makes me "not mad, just disappointed", since I've found a substitute source that makes me even more happy than a PDF would have done. That is, buying old stuff from Noble Knight. 99% of the time, they have what I'm wondering about, and I prefer real printed versions anyhow.

Things I know I'm still 'fired up' about...

1) Killing the print editions of Dragon and Dungeon.

2) Completely dissing their own past products in their marketing of 4e. Related note, completely dissing the fans of their past products (anyone remember 'Cloudwatching'?)

3) Printing a 4e of a game which is utterly incompatible with the prior three editions of the game to the extent that is fundamentally a different game.

4) The ludicrous statements of some 4e defenders concerning what 4e would be like - I remember alot of arguments about how great the Skill Challenge system was going to be - and the absolute faith that they had in a product they'd never seen.
. . .
5) The entirely pointless and contridictory new alignment non-system, and the other trashing of old fluff just for the sake of trashing it.

 

[Hussar]

About the only thing that still bugs me is the ludicrous assertion of how insulting the dev-blogs were. Looking back at those posts, particularly the "Cloud Watching" one, it takes some serious mental gymnastics to take offence at those.

Ever since the end of the print Dungeon and Dragon, people were going out of their way to take offence at anything and everything that WOTC had to say. It didn't matter if they were right, wrong, or indifferent. If they said something, the peanut gallery had to be up in arms yet again that they were "insulting the fan base".

The worst part is that years later, people STILL contend that these posts were so insulting.