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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Choice" data-source="post: 6011242" data-attributes="member: 90669">I don't get the whole "tone" argument.  I simply looked at this game from an adult standpoint.  Back in 2007, I had no bias for or against 4E, I loved 3.5, played it pretty consistently, but I also recognized its flaws.  I was 26 then, and didn't see them making jokes about gnomes or grappling trolls as dismissive of me or my friends.  Maybe it's because I don't tie in most of my personality to a hobby.  Maybe, back when I was 14, I would've been angry.I get that people invest in this thing, I do, but we should all recognize that it is just that: "a thing that we do". Some of us can make a living doing it, most of us don't.  We talk about it, argue about it, but I feel it should remain just that.  Not some thing we tie alot of ourselves into.  When we do that, we're no better than the soccer (oh pardon, "football") hooligans or crazy hockey dads who get into fights over some referee's decision in a pee-wee game.  The point I'm trying to make is this: maybe it's unhealthy to get so attached to such a game, any game.I'm going to talk from the heart and make a confession here: back when I was 15, my mom passed away from cancer.  I didn't know how to cope, it was hard.  So I retreated into my own little world, because it seemed like the only people who didn't treat me like some broken thing were the guys I gamed with, the only place where I didn't hurt all the time was when I was telling stories and rolling dice.  It's only when I got to college that I realized too much of my life had hung on this game; it had become my coping mechanism, and it was unhealthy.  Whenever people criticized what I was doing as a gamer, I reacted as if it was targetting me as an individual.  My identity as a person was tied too closely to a game.  So, when I see people reacting violently to a short cartoon, I flash back to that broken kid.I still write oodles of text for my games, way too much according to some.  I still invest time and thought into making characters and worlds that sing and come alive.  But, if I'm allowed to torture an analogy, I see it as baking a cake.  See, I'm a pretty decent cook, and I love baking.  But whenever I bake a cake (be it chocolate or other flavour), I realize those are just empty calories, a nice dessert, but not a substitute to a whole meal.  I'll invest time in making it, baking it, etc., but it'll remain just that: a part, fun though it may be, of a whole with much healthier parts.I've never been bullied or victimized because of my hobbies.  It's been done to me for other reasons, though.  Still, it does not excuse clannish and exclusionary practices.  We are adults (most of us, I assume), let's talk and act like it.  I react the same way when some nerd cries about Megatron not turning into a gun in the Transformers movie; there are legitimate criticisms to make about those movies (the racism, the objectification of women, the non-sensical plots, the nausea-inducing cinematography, Shia Leboeuf), why focus on THAT? Similarly, there are legitimate complaints to make with 4E and its marketing, saying it's "baby's first WoW simulator" or saying they "fired you as a customer" because of a cartoon is not a valid one and it's not adult behaviour.  And having been bullied is no excuse.  We don't know, maybe James Wyatt was taunted as kid, maybe Bill Slaviscek was pushed down a flight of stairs on a couple of occasions, maybe Chris Perkins got teased about his big, bald dome.  Maybe they all faced prejudice at some point.  The only difference between them and others was that they didn't let that define them as individuals, and they made a game and marketed it as such.But I don't get where they told us we were playing the game wrong.  They implied they thought they had designed a better way to play.  Agree or disagree with the results of the design process, that's what they did.As a comparison, here's an excerpt from Races and Classes, one of the two 4th edition preview books, that deals specifically with gnomes:They weren't dismissive, or disrespectful, they simply didn't know what to do with the little fellows as a PC race.  So they shelved them for a while, so that folk that really wanted to play them would have a workable, playable race that connected to the world of D&D when they were ready.Note also how the author refers to the "world of D&D".  Gnomes may have a niche within your world (they did in Eberron, for exemple), but it is true that they lacked a hook in the core, bare-bones, version of the game.In the end, when you have all the facts laid in front of you, there were no valid reasons to get upset over the cartoons portrayal of gnomes.  You can say the humour failed, it certainly didn't make me laugh out loud, but as a gnome player, I didn't feel betrayed, talked down to or insulted.</blockquote>

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