Wormwood said:
Before you abandon tabletop play *entirely*, you way want to consider a couple of factors:
1. Don;t switch to 4e. Keep on doing what you are doing now!
2. There are still groups that play older versions of D&D---and there always will be. Find them or start such a group yourself.
3. The hobby is teeming with roleplaying games of every stripe---there is bound to be one suited to your tastes! I'm sure there are people on this very board who could help you find the perfect game for you. Hell, I'd love to help!
4. Finally, you could wait and see what 4e is actually like before you chuck your dice in the bin. 4e could rock on toast or stink on ice, but nobody will know that until it's released. And if it's the digital initiative that bothers you, my suggestion would be to ignore it.
I have considered many options over the years, going through changes from 1st ed. Yet it seems that everything we (the DMs and Players) want is largely ignored until WotC find a way to charge us double or sell us 2 books instead of one.
No I understand that business is business and you need to make a profit (I run my own), so this is not my gripe. I am sick of the double dealing and giving us a smaller product in pieces instead of just buying the Core books so we can play the game.
In my personal experience, Neverwinter Nights was the best thing to happen to the game when it was made and released by Bioware. Yet this is where my joy ended, once Atari became publisher and then the fate of the game sealed into Oblivion (the location not the rival product
) by Obsidian and their pathetic attempt of a sequal. I used to have a group of 300 people in Australia playing 24/7 across 3 timezones, yet these players and builders have also stuck with nwn1 due the "sold out" feeling they were left with by these two companies.
So all in all I feel that WotC have got into a room with these two companies for their money without regard to us the fans and people who keep them in business. Digital is the way to go, yet you need to keep in mind that people still like to play PnP. They have closed the door on that hapening by stealing the good ideas from the people who have tried to push this game into this new realm. ie., there is a lot of good ideas out there and many products to help keep the game going, yet when we try to make our own Campaign in the digital field, we are shut out by inferer products or restricted to how we can use the system.
They HAVE forgotten how or why we play.
I'm just saying there may yet be hope yet, and I'd hate for the RPG hobby to lose a member as passionate as you obviously are over something as trivial as a new edition of D&D.
Hope is something that has come and gone many times for me in the role playing genre. My first encounter with something that looked like we could move to computer based gaming was way back inthe days of Dungeon Master and The Bard's Tale, seeing these I thought hmmm., maybe we could see this game grow into something that could be enhanced by computers, yet years later I still see that the digital reality is a thing that D&D fears.
So unless we see a come back of Moddable gaming in the hand of the people who play them, pen and paper gaming being enhanced by the digital realm and a hibred of PnP experiences without restriction (ie. we need to see more open source in my honest opinion, Linux, Mac, Console alongside the PC).
Looking at how they are setting up the 4e system, you need to be plugged into the internet 24/7 just to play. Well at work I have a daily grind of trying to get our willing customers money to pay for their product because of a fight between the phone lines and the banks' inadequate database servers. The irony here is that I see the same problem occuring for the 4e model. Without a reliable source and internet connection how can one play the game.
Sure, it looks good on the surface, but too much of the information stems towards us being dictated to on how and what we use under their digital system. All I have seen so far is a very basic system that has more going against it than for it.
WotC need to put the game back into the hands of the players and DM's who build worlds and keep this game moving forward, so unless we see a boom in Open Source options, there is only a very limited scope for enhancing their 4e tool.
To put it even more bluntly, I see their system going back to the days before miniatures, before the rules where refined and many many books to get all the relavent material to play, and all due to the reliance of a Windows based PC (and yes I have a very expensive PC with all the latest stuff, minus VISTA BS OS) yet all of this is beaten by going back to the 3e model, armed with a Pen and piece if paper.
And they say this is progress, sheesh, grow up WotC, smell the roses, and GET WITH IT.
WE THE PEOPLE , yeah right, that'll be the day.......
