A few thoughts.
First, about rec.games.frp.dnd. Quite honestly, the biggest problem that new visitors to the group has is that too often, they break one of the fundamental rules of not only Usenet but any online discussion group: lurk before posting. Get a sense of the general tone and focus of the population before contributing; it's only polite, I think, to see how things are done before making assumptions. Usenet groups don't really have the same resources as webfora like ENWorld - rec.games.frp.dnd has a FAQ, but it relies upon one guy to get it posted; there are no moderators (and personally, I'm thankful for it); there's no "framework" to the discussion which could contain advice on how to moderate your behaviour to the "community standard", like there is with any message board attached to a website.
It's obvious to anyone who's been there that the community standards of rec.games.frp.dnd are very different from those of ENWorld or most other popular D&D discussion groups. Without moderation, guys like Michael Scott Brown are free to abuse posters who display ignorance of the rules from the questions they ask; some people might consider it unhelpful, of course, but MSB has a particular notion of what's good teaching behaviour, and it has to be said that he's not often wrong about the rules. It's a rough environment, but I imagine that for completely new players it could be a bit like boot camp: rough, and not something everyone can tolerate, but a really efficient way to get rid of bad habits and train up (in this case) your thought processes and critical skills, as well as your knowledge of the rules.
It's certainly not friendly to Eric's grandmother, but frankly I prefer it that way. I'm pretty firm in my support of nigh-absolute free speech, though I suppose we have it a little easier in that most young kids don't know how to access Usenet, and would turn up their noses at the unattractive look of Google Groups compared to a site like this or even RPG.Net.
As for the denizens of the group being "rules Nazis", I really have no idea how that opinion could arise. More than half the on-topic threads are about changing the rules, by my estimate; by a stretch of the imagination, I can vaguely see how the constant admonitions to read and understand the rules from MSB and others might come off as strict by-the-bookism, but it's mostly born out of a concern for having a firm foundation in the rules as written before making drastic changes, and inducing a habit of drawing one's intepretations from the general structure of the game as a whole.
This brings me to the second topic I'd like to cover: why I prefer Third Edition to the earlier versions of the game. Basically, it boils down to this: creative inspiration - in the sense of flavour, fluff, setting, colour, whatever one wishes to call it - is something I don't need the rules of the game to try and describe or mandate for me. Frankly, most game designers are not ranked among the best writers in the world; Gygax's version of Tolkienesque fantasy isn't really much of a patch on Tolkien himself, and I don't even like Tolkien!
Now, the divide is narrower than I'm probably seeming to paint it, and I get a lot of good ideas from the setting material that Wizards of the Coast and other publishers (like Malhavoc or Green Ronin) put out, but as far as I'm concerned the core rules of a system should be as bare-bones as possible in terms of flavour, simply because anyone else's idea of what makes for a good fantasy setting is never going to be precisely the same as mine, and rules are not my forte. Thus, not only do I appreciate a good rule system much more than setting information, I want that system to be as divorced as possible from any setting, because stripping setting-dependence out of rule systems which don't divide the two is almost always a necessity.
It's not always necessary to be this hardline about it, of course. I really like Malhavoc's Arcana Unearthed, which Monte Cook designed specifically to have a greater relationship with its implied setting that core D&D! On the other hand, there's a line somewhere, and Third Edition D&D and Arcana Unearthed are on the "good" side of that line, while Second Edition AD&D is on the "bad" side of that line for me.
I think what it comes down to is pretty simple, at least for me: genre emulation should be light. I think the genre the core D&D rules give you in Third Edition is pretty light; it feels more like a toolkit presented in a continuous example of application than Second or First Edition did; the later just felt like "this is the game you will play".
For me, that's much worse than a lack of flavour in the ruleset.
)
