UniversalMonster
Explorer
I hadn't realized that RPGnet was habitable again. Thanks for the link. I guess I'll have to register.
I'm getting Edition War fatigue
- Thread starter Majoru Oakheart
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I hadn't realized that RPGnet was habitable again. Thanks for the link. I guess I'll have to register.
tyrlaan
Explorer
This is a great point. I can't remember the last time I bothered to look at the News page.
I get what you're saying, but the problem here is what's "blatantly obvious" to one person might not be so crystal clear to another. To that end, I try my best to take questions at face value. It doesn't take long into a thread to see if things are going to go sour.
Dragonhelm
Knight of Solamnia
Seconded. Just ban edition wars outright. You would be amazed at how well that works, especially if the mods are proactive in enforcing it.
We have banned edition wars at DragonlanceForums.com, and even though our fans are split between 3e, 4e, Pathfinder, AD&D, and SAGA (amongst others), we all get along remarkably well. That's because the mods put the anti-edition war rule in place and set the tone.
Edition wars seem kind of silly to me anyway. It's like having a big, hurtful battle on whether a Chevy, a Ford, or a Dodge can get you to work the best. They all have their ups and downs, and a lot of it boils down to preference. In the end all 3 vehicles get you to the same place.
Same thing with games. You could play any edition, each with its ups and downs. In the end, though, it all boils down to preference. Each edition/game system gets you to the same place - the gaming table, the adventure, and the fun.
Mark
CreativeMountainGames.com
Discussing any game on its own terms and not resorting to cross-edition comparisons is not impossible (and preferrable in my opinion). More often than not, I see discussions of a rule set moving along quite well and becoming derailed when another edition or rule set gets propped up for comparison, which often is perceived as suggesting that one is better than the other as a whole rather than in one particular instance.
Any time we get proactive, people get cheesed off at us.
Banning the topic sounds good to most people, until we implement it, and we decide you are the one who's guilty. If we try to "head something off at the pass" we typically then get a nasty e-mail or PM, calling us hypocritical, biased tyrants with personal agendas against the poster, and so on, because whoever it is, they weren't the ones edition warring, it was always the other guy who was about to do it.
It causes mod burnout. Each of us in turn has had to take extended periods away from duties to recharge from dealing with it.
While we can nab the occasional offender, as a practical matter we cannot (nor do we really wish to) force the community at large to really behave itself. Ultimately, you folks have to decide you don't want part of the nonsense any more.
Thornir Alekeg
Albatross!
Edition war: A strange game. The only way to win is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad
For a while, banning editions wars was done here. It worked. The notice was at the top of the forum, and for the most part people followed it. The board was MUCH more pleasant.
So I don't understand why you are saying it cannot be done. It's not even being tried right now. It worked in the past here. It's working right now at other boards. It can work here again as well, we just have to try it.
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Regarding "unfair comparisons": part of the problem for me is that even if you give 4e the benefit of the doubt, and assume that all it's trying to be is an "exciting fantasy-themed combat engine", it completely fails at the "exciting" part... It's obviously well-put-together and coherent (due in no small part to bringing over the 3e combat system mostly unchanged), but none of the playtesters or designers seemed to have put the game to a "WoW stopwatch test". One- to three-hour combats, that fail to threaten the PCs in any meaningful/dramatic way (i.e. what the DMG calls a level-appropriate encounter), aren't enjoyable. You can point to other design priorities that led to this state of affairs (e.g. making everyone a "spellcaster" to give everyone at the table "cool" stuff to do, inflating monster HP and nerfing monster damage to remove any chance of one-shot/round kills and to allow more time for "tactical opportunities" to develop), but regardless of how it came about, the result is suspect.
(In fact, I tend to do the "unfavorable comparing" in the other direction: I think 4e partially turned out this way because 3e was an "evil seed"; it also had time issues and 4e didn't do anything to fix them. My leading theory is that individual initiative/"I-go-everyone-else-goes" is a bad way of doing things unless you can guarantee that each unit's turn time is minimal.)
I'm not really an edition warrior, but my own vote is in favor of keeping the "vigorous debate" going in some fashion (ideally without people taking it personally, getting bummed out by the negative vibes etc., although "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" generally). Beyond the abstract/impractical goal of getting WOTC to stop selling this product, my immediate interest in the discussion is to a) figure out how to "fix" 4e (so I can run a better game without having to tell my players to go buy another set of rulebooks), and to b) get some understanding of "what they were smoking" in the design process (e.g. to what extent this was the product of pure "ganz falsch" design ideology, or whether it was really the result of large numbers of potential customers clamoring for grindfest combats).
Admin here. Writing a post designed to start an edition war in a thread about the meta-topic seems full of folly, don't you think? Not appropriate and not wanted; please avoid this in the future. PM me if this is unclear. ~ Piratecat
(In fact, I tend to do the "unfavorable comparing" in the other direction: I think 4e partially turned out this way because 3e was an "evil seed"; it also had time issues and 4e didn't do anything to fix them. My leading theory is that individual initiative/"I-go-everyone-else-goes" is a bad way of doing things unless you can guarantee that each unit's turn time is minimal.)
I'm not really an edition warrior, but my own vote is in favor of keeping the "vigorous debate" going in some fashion (ideally without people taking it personally, getting bummed out by the negative vibes etc., although "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" generally). Beyond the abstract/impractical goal of getting WOTC to stop selling this product, my immediate interest in the discussion is to a) figure out how to "fix" 4e (so I can run a better game without having to tell my players to go buy another set of rulebooks), and to b) get some understanding of "what they were smoking" in the design process (e.g. to what extent this was the product of pure "ganz falsch" design ideology, or whether it was really the result of large numbers of potential customers clamoring for grindfest combats).
Admin here. Writing a post designed to start an edition war in a thread about the meta-topic seems full of folly, don't you think? Not appropriate and not wanted; please avoid this in the future. PM me if this is unclear. ~ Piratecat
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Maldin
First Post
Infiniti2000
First Post
Well, eventually you'll need to implement the /. system then!
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