MtG, D&D and Me TITLE NAME EDIT-The thread where Joe apparently offends everyone

[Ariosto]

As Bumbles observed, Joe, you have plenty of company these days -- especially here on the World Wide Web!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm offended that I wasn't offended.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

[sblock=I'm drunk]You see, Joe. May I call you Joe? Maybe "Mr. thelawyer" would be better.

There is a great feature on ENWorld called a "blog." It is the ideal place to put long-form rants and opinion pieces. Presenting such thoughts in main discussion groups is the equivalent of smacking someone across the face with your gloves to challenge them.

I saw my first collectible card game tournament today. A bit late to the scene, I know, but I’m an old bastard. What can I say.

CCGs have been around almost half your life, most of your adult life. It doesn't make you "old", it makes you disconnected from hobby gamer culture.

What drew me there was the hope that I had finally found a store in my state that sold RPG books other than 4e. Upon entering the place, I was taken back by the sheer number of pudgy teenage boys shuffling cards and eating junk food.

Please note your use of the phrase "sheer number". Why would such a thing be shocking? Oh right. Because it is likely that CCGs, being more accessible, attract a larger volume of people than RPGs? RPGs have always been a niche thing except for like 5 years from 1977 to 1982. CCGs have been staying quite strong for almost 14 years now.

You see, I never understood the attraction of the whole card game thing. ... I never would have predicted that a card game company would eventually, with the release of the OGL, save and preserve the hobby for all time.

WotC didn't save the hobby. White Wolf did. White Wolf is also the one who really killed TSR. Magic was a short-term addictive game that came out just as the AD&D 2e gamers started going to college, and destabilized the player network. Those that stayed with RPGs were likely to experiment with other RPGs and so we had a brief flourishing of actual choice in the hobby as D&D with it restrictive gameplay and absurd rules was a ridiculous thing to attempt. WotC managed to hoodwink everyone with the d20/OGL debacle, killing off dozens of game companies, only replace those willing to suckle on a d20 for sustenance.

Borders Southbury
100 Main St. North
Southbury, CT 06488
203.262.9419
There is a non-4e RPG Book at this borders reserved for you. Your "no place sells anything but 4e in my state" business is false. I found a non-D&D rpg in your state in 30 seconds. No, I didn't check how close to New Haven this is. I also grabbed the first non-4e Rpg I could think of.

(This counter-rant is becoming fun now)

I’ll be 39 next week, my birthday falling on the next D&D Gameday (thanks WOTC!). I’ll be a few years older ...
... I don’t look at D&D so much as a game, as I do a vehicle for the imagination. A means of escape to alternate realities which I only read about in fiction or non-fiction, where I could be whatever I wanted to be.

Gygax didn't create D&D. He created Chainmail, Arneson used Chainmail to create D&D, then Gygax and Arneson published D&D. Gary Gygax monetized and popularized D&D. Gygax = Jobs, Arneson = Wozniak. Pitchman, Genius, dig?

I think that’s why I never understood the collectible card game thing. ... I enjoy imagining......
So, after drinking this (now cold) overpriced Chai tea, and after having wandered over to the 2 ½ shelves of RPG books in my ever-increasingly futile attempt to find a non-4e RPG book on a store’s bookshelf, I guess I’ll wander over to the history section and read about Vikings and imagine how I can incorporate that into my game next week. Even if I buy a Viking book though, I won’t be reading it tonight. Tonight I start the “Prince of Nothing” series, which looks to be right up my alley.

Bored now. Okay. Dude, you are clueless if you can't find non-4e RPG books in Connecticut.

Anyway, here's the thing. CCGs saved RPG's.

1) CCG moneys let Peter Adkison buy TSR. TSR was not dying because of CCGs it was dying because of bad management.

2) CCGs prevented many nerds from developing lives after RPGs became hard to schedule. Many came back into D&D later on.

Japanification was happening to youth culture when you were a kid. GODZILLA FOR YOU WAS LIKE NARUTO FOR TODAYS PUNK KIDS!!!!!!!!!
[/sblock]
Rambling rnat over.

and I'm not actually drunk although I feel like I am.

 

[RefinedBean]

Could someone refine Joe's first post into a series of short, snappy sound-bites that my mind can gobble up and then forget about after a few minutes? It's the only way my brain can handle information.

 

[tomBitonti]

Hey man, thanks for the post.

I find telling that there doesn't seem to be much on the side that, perhaps, the game has changed in the last twenty or so years. Older farts do tend to wax nostalgic. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily wrong.

Now, there is some interesting background, as least to MTG. (I don't know much about other CCG's, so that "at least" is not real evidence that other CCG's don't have interesting backgrounds.) While I don't much care for the new MTG books, I very much liked the brother's war books. I especially like the part of the story that was about Xancha and Ratepe.

There is a very evolved background to WarCraft, too.

How much of those backgrounds translates into the respective games is not so clear. Perhaps moreso for WarCraft. You can definitely play either game while ignoring the stories. (As for my credentials on this: I've played some MTG, but fell out of it with the big rules change, the one that changed the ordering of interrupts. Anyways, while my deck construction has always been poor, as I try to stuff too much stuff in my decks, I do enjoy the game. Also, I have a level 80 Elemental Shaman that is heavily into raiding, and is one of the top 20 elemental shamans in his realm.)

My own personal draw into D&D has been that it provides a nice vehicle for the imagination, for inventing fantastic stories, and placing the player as both the author and as a participant in those stories. Where else can you imagine an illithid astral super-carrier crash landed on a negative energy dominant demi-plane after having fled a farm world that had fallen to the inevitable plague of undeath that arises on such worlds. That plague, which quickly spreads through the dense populations of the farm caverns, being the consequence of the gathering of the evil essence of so many bleak lives, and of the endless killing ...

 

[LostSoul]

With so many of us being older, having grown in knowledge, maturity, and depth, we realize we have less need of rules to get us where we want to go.

Here is what I think about good rules:

They provide results that no one would have picked without them. The results they do provide enhance the game.

I had a TPK recently; that wasn't something any of us would have decided upon without the rules. However, that TPK has changed the campaign in a number of interesting ways, and, I think, has added to the satisfaction of the game.

However, if the rules give you results you just don't want, you're better off running a free-form game.

 

[Hairfoot]

On the bright side, MtG and 4E are the reason RPG boards are now crawling with teenagers who care enough about a game to ferociously attack anyone with a dissenting opinion. That's a good sign for the future of a hobby which has previously been characterised by an online community of middle-aged grognards lamenting the death spiral of D&D.

When hormones subside and virginities are lost, the appeal of things like tieflings (conflicted, misunderstood outcasts) and dragonborn (bully this, you heartless jocks!) will fade, and many players will move toward the subtler style that experienced gamers keep eulogising.

Some people will never enjoy the classic style of gaming as much as the modern, and vice versa, but I think we're generating a lot of unnecessary flame because, respectively, some of us won't concede that perhaps some elements of classic gaming were genuinely excellent, and others won't accept that maybe some aspects of modern gaming provide a lot more fun.

 

[ppaladin123]

When hormones subside and virginities are lost, the appeal of things like tieflings (conflicted, misunderstood outcasts) and dragonborn (bully this, you heartless jocks!) will fade, and many players will move toward the subtler style that experienced gamers keep eulogising.

Ah, I see. So pretending to be a tiefling or dragon-man is for kids while pretending to be an elf is for adults.

(Wait, weren't there tieflings and dragon-men in previous editions too? Weren't teenagers in the old days drawn to the same sorts of archetypes? Didn't Stan Lee make a fortune exploiting this with X-men and the Incredible Hulk in the 1960s and 70s?)

There is no need to eulogize subtler rpg styles. My groups seem to be able to produce role-play intensive, rich fantasy worlds in 4e as well as we could in 3e (and better than when I played 2e because I am older and have a more nuanced world view these days).

My guess is that those people who started playing OD&D, 1e and 2e as teenagers and kids didn't initially produce subtle, incredibly nuanced worlds with moral ambiguity either. As gamers get older what they want and what they expect out of their rpg experience will change. The current rules (3e and 4e) are flexible enough to allow their games to evolve as their tastes change. I see no evidence this is any different than it ever was.

Note: you can produce subtle, nuanced role playing experiences that use dragon-men and tieflings too!

 

[Hairfoot]

Ah, I see. So pretending to be a tiefling or dragon-man is for kids while pretending to be an elf is for adults.

Good lord, no! In high school my group played hulking muscle-men and graceful elves, because they were reflections of what we wanted to be but were so far from, just as kids do with 4E races. I find no fault in that at all.

My point is the same as yours: "as gamers get older what they want and what they expect out of their rpg experience will change." I don't agree, though, that "The current rules (3e and 4e) are flexible enough to allow their games to evolve as their tastes change". On the contrary, my strongest objection to 3E and 4E is that they are overly prescriptive and inflexible. That however, is part of a debate we've all had and are all tired of.

 

[Bumbles]

Didn't Stan Lee make a fortune exploiting this with X-men and the Incredible Hulk in the 1960s and 70s?)

Not if the current legal wrangling he's been in was nothing more than a repeat of how they treated him previously.