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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Grumpy Celt" data-source="post: 261208" data-attributes="member: 1019">Who pushed my "diatribe" button?Ah. Sinistar. My old enemy.For those of you who do not know, Sinister and myself are arch enemies.  Except we are both the bad guy.  We keep breaking into each other secret lairs, blowing up each other doomsday weapons, ratting each other out to the likes of James Bond and Austin Powers, and stealing the elasmobranches from each other’s shark tanks and that sort of thing.  We spend so much time doing that, that Dr. Evil and Mojo Jojo keep showing us up.That said, I’m taking my gloves off and using real names in the rest of my diatribe.As a frequent DM, I often “wing-it” when it comes to the rules in favor of the story.  These games are about it being so groovy that people can finally get together for connecting and having fun (without taking their clothes off).  Telling a story – and ideally a game is a group effort at telling a story – is just one way this can be done.  “Crunchy” game mechanics are just a tool to help facilitate the telling of the story, so keep it on track and to be a means of arbitration.The “creamy” aspects of the books – Forgotten Realms included – help greatly when it comes to the story aspects of the game.  They help move things along every bit as much as does the mechanics.I agree.In fact, it can probably be said that with the forth coming Monster Man II, Book of Vile Darkness (sheesh, Imnop), Savage Species (and maybe d20 Modern), the “crunch” aspect will have been stretched as far as it can be stretched.  Or rather it will have been stretched as far as it can without belaboring the point, becoming repetitive and its usefulness becoming thin.  All the conceivable bases will have been covered.  What else will there be but some essentially pointless repetition?As for why they are doing it…pardon me while I digress for a story for the purposes of illumination.In the movie “The Game,” the Michael Douglass character is an evil businessman*.  He goes to one his employees to fire the old man.  This old man had been running a factory that showed something like a 4% profit margin.  Douglass tells the old man he is still fired and still a failure because company board of directors had counted on a 5% profit margin. So despite the profit, the old man was still a failure.  That is close to home because to Wall Street a 4% profit is an inexcusable failure because board of directors had been counting on that 5% margin so much that they went ahead and spent the 1% they did not and would not have.  And if you want to refute this and to deny that it happens, then how can one explain WorldCom, Xerox, and Enron?So, if the DMG and the PG and the MM made – hypothetically speaking – a 5% profit, but FRCS only made a 4% profit, then the FRCS is a failure.  If further Realms books only make 2.5% profit or 2% profit then that is even worse. If Magic the Gathering and Pokiemon and Harry Potter trading card game made a 10% profit, then the failure of the Forgotten Realms books becomes past being inexcusable and its time to schedule a trip to the slaughterhouse.Because that is the way the world works.*Interestingly enough, the “evil businessman” copyright is owned by Michael Douglass.</blockquote>

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