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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 3715936" data-attributes="member: 6779">I understand how you feel; the cancellation of Dragon and Dungeon really depressed me. For some time I'd been gleefully going on a nostalgic rampage through Greyhawk, setting of my youth, fueled by Erik Mona's dedication to keeping it alive in the mags. And while 3/3.5 still had some of the baggage of D&D, it was still such a huge improvement over previous incarnations of the game that with E-Tools and Dungeon I was good to go.Naturally, I was upset about WotC killing E-Tools ... that basically froze my buying new books at DMG II because that was as far as the data sets got. But I figured that was probably enough ... anything that popped up in Dungeon that wasn't in E-Tools by that point, I could either use the Dungeon stat block or kludge up something.Then, the mags got the axe. Besides being bad for me as a current player, this also really hurt and shook me as a long-time gamer, for whom the presence of Dragon magazine in bookstores and newsstands was as much a given as Time or The Washington Post. Even when I hated the rules for AD&D, I could always find something of interest in Dragon magazine.I spent the month after the announcement of the magazines' impending death [1] sorta shell-shocked, as far as gaming was concerned. I continued running my Greyhawk game, but it was without any real joy or enthusiasm. There was anger all over my usual internet gaming haunts, and I was stoking the flames as much as anybody, which is completely not my normal behavior.What finally pulled me out of my downward spiral was Star Wars Saga Edition, actually. It was new, it was nifty, and it was good to see what had been pretty much been written off by many as a dead line given such a dramatic rebirth. It was also just the thing I'd been wanting for some time -- a streamlined, d20-based system where your character's abilities, not their gear, was what made them heroes. Just the thing for the sword-and-sorcery game I'd been wanting to run for years but didn't want to have to slog through teaching my players the even-more-complex Conan system, or try to write up characters in Grim Tales without the benefit of E-Tools.So now, ironically, on the day that my Sword and Sorcery Saga conversion is ready to be unveiled, they come along and blindside us (not all of us, but a lot of us) with 4E -- which sounds like in many ways is exactly the direction I'd been wishing D&D would go!Am I happy? Not particularly.Am I angry? Not particularly.What am I? Really, more apathetic than anything else. A little annoyed at the whole Digital Initiative thing [2], and still very angry about the killing of the mags.I should be whooping for joy, as after 30 years D&D is finally jettisoning a lot of the stuff that's driven me nuts about it for years. But I'm not. The most excitement I can generate is "meh" -- because those steps forward came at a price I was not willing to pay. I don't really care about D&D now. Not in itself. I'm ready to chuck the dungeons, the beholders and kobolds, and all that other stuff associated specifically with the D&D brand, and return to the sword and sorcery story games I used to run in Fantasy HERO, even if I just happen to be doing it with a system derived from the "preview" version of D&D 4E.So yeah, I understand how you feel.FWIW, I recommend hanging out over at Paizo for a while. I find it helps tremendously!-The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> [1] Yes, they are dead. "Moved to online distribution" is not continuing a magazine. It's killing it and replacing it with something else of far lesser value.[2] It is my firm belief that subscribing to online content, whether it be MMOs or magazines, is for suckers. I want my hard copy.</blockquote>

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