The Inverse Trek Law?

[kennew142]

1e -"Hey! This things sells!"

2e - "Hey! Let's crank out a new edition and sell some more! whoa. This isn't going the way we thought."

3e - "Hey! This thing sells!"

4e - "Hey! Let's crank out a new edition and sell some more! . . . "

Its all in the wrist, as they say. 1e had the right intention and idea - cool idea begets game and public responds with great sales. 3e essentially did the same thing by way of a reinvention. 2e was bandwagoneering in search of a buck. 4e appears to be similarly motivated. IMO, you are always better off aiming for cool ideas in a game and letting the sales take care of themselves. 2e did not and suffered somewhat for that. 4e again appears to be motivated more by the need to sell games than the opportunity to make a really cool game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, "they are a business," but they are a GAMING business and in a GAMING business there is no substitute IMO for being motivated by cool ideas first and sales only thereafter. We shall see if the inverse works with 4e.

From what we've seen, 4e is all about new ideas and mechanics. Isn't that what so many posters are complaining about?

 

[Steely Dan]

And Gary's prose sucks.

Yeah, I just read the original Vault of the Drow the other night (been about 20 years since I last read), and wow, is it the worst piece of run-on sentence crap I have ever read (how a few years gives you perspective) – it was painful to read (my eyes bled several times).

It was basically an endless list of drow elves and how many copper pieces they are carrying with the odd bit of atrocious prose.

 

[Voss]

It doesn't really work. First, 2e was just 1e, condensed into a smaller number of books with a handful of tweaks. Literally a handful. Toss caps on fireball and lightning bolt, move NWP from Dungeoneers and Wilderness Survival Guilds to the PH, take out the assassin and monk and call it a day. (yeah, yeah, I'm sure there are a couple other 'changes' that matter to someone, but swallow the hyperbole and accept that there really aren't a lot of mechanical changes). 2e sucked, in my view, as an edition, because it was essentially 1.21223e, and after skills and powers and that garbage it was 1.64321e, and imploded in on itself. On the upside, whatever else is said about 4e, and its successes and failures, it isn't consolidating the books *just* to make more money. There are actually significant changes to the ruleset that help establish it as its own edition. (which, I would say makes it very different from 2e, or 3.5).

Second, and more importantly. 1e wasn't 1e, and the numbering system has no relation to anything at all. Significantly, it leaves out chainmail, the pamphlets and BXCMI. So 4e is closer to 7e. Or there abouts. Maybe 6 or 8 depending on how you count it all. Maybe 9 if you differentiate between 3.0 and 3.5.

The moral of the story? Most things have nothing at all to do with trek.

 

[Steely Dan]

The moral of the story? Most things have nothing at all to do with trek.

And Exorcist III was good!

 

[Raduin711]

I was introduced to D&D in 2nd edition, and I loved it. It had a certain feel that I enjoyed a lot. While 3rd did the rules better, I still look back at 2nd edition fondly. I can't really understand how people would mark that edition as a "bad one"... it had a lot to offer. Look at all of the 2nd edition settings that fans are still asking for updates.

 

[Zamkaizer]

The Trek Law doesn't even apply to Star Trek anymore. The Director's Cut redeemed Star Trek I: The Motion Picture. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home hasn't held up terribly well. Calling Star Trek X: Nemesis weak would be a compliment. And Star Trek XI looks to be ten kinds of awesome.

 

[Fifth Element]

The Trek Law has never applied because 1e was by far and away the worst edition of D&D ever.

It took the wonderful, solid simplicity of the OD&D line and added a huge amount of clunky, time-consuming pointlessness such as different weapon damage vs S-M or L. Subsystems sprout like fungus all over 1e.

And Gary's prose sucks.

2e made a bad mistake in cutting the balls off D&D. It became less red-blooded. Less Conan, more Dragonlance. But the rules and text were a big improvement over 1e, so overall it was a lot better.

Don't hold back, Doug. Tell us what you really think.

You're right, of course. Also of course, there are many more reasons than the one the OP mentioned why the Inverse Trek "Law" is garbage. One is that 1e is not really the first edition of D&D. And if we're only talking about AD&D, that gets confused since 3E is the only edition of D&D, there was no D&D/AD&D split anymore. Another is, of course, that basing a hypothesis on 3 data points is beyond ridiculous. Another is, of course, that the Trek Law itself is merely a matter of taste, and some people surely consider some odd-numbered Treks to be quite good. And on, and on, and on....

 

[Orryn Emrys]

I don't know... I've been playing and running D&D games since about 1983. Original Dungeons & Dragons was a cool and simple system that gave fuel to an endless variety of wonky ideas and unbalanced schemes, with just enough rules to make it all work. The BECMI system was a whole lot of fun, throwing new and different ways to play into the mix with each release. 1st Edition AD&D was an extravagent set of uncoordinated subsystems that, fortunately, could be pillaged for what was necessary to run a great game. If some of the rules were simply ridiculously cumbersome (encumbrance, for example... pun intended) or patently non-sensical (1E bards jump to mind), or thoroughly unbalanced (I'm thinkin' psionics here... which was, of course, quite optional), they could be ignored without breaking the game, as long as a modicum of common sense was implemented. Good times were had by all.

I resisted the 2nd Edition switch with great tenacity. I'd spent years collecting what seemed to me at the time a veritable library of sourcebooks, and I had no intention of starting completely over. It was 1990 before I took the plunge, upon encountering new players who preferred the new system. 2E seemed brilliant to me at the time! The reorganization of the spell system, the new initiative rules and combat options (though I never liked rolling on a chart to see what unarmed combat or grapple maneuver your character decided to try), the restructured races and classes (yeah! 1st-level bards!)... and the continued (and persistent) expansion of character ideas with the 7,000 other books I couldn't keep from purchasing in the years that followed.

Then came 3E. Ironically, in the year or two prior to the announcement I'd started developing my own sort of game system. I abandoned the project when Eric Noah's website and the "countdown" articles in Dragon Magazine started showing me that 3E was going to be moving in a very similar direction to my own efforts... and was going to do it a lot better. I've never regretted getting behind the 3rd Edition release and supporting it from the get-go. We've had a fantastic run with it, and I was blissfully oblivious to the various challenges that the system provided me, as a Dungeon Master, in running the games as I wanted them to be. Certainly, there were things I avoided because the system made them so high-maintenance (large numbers of enemies, writing up numerous high-level NPCs, enemies that stacked their buff spells overly much), but I really just accepted all that as part of the system and made the game work.

I eventually overcame many of these complications with the advent of DM Genie and NPC Designer and such. Computerized campaign maintenance and combat management really made things possible that hadn't been before. It's been fun. I am, however, no longer oblivious, and I'm ready to see a game system that empowers me to do what I can imagine from the outset. I'm ambivalent about some of the "fluff" elements that have made their way onto the internet, but I'm not much for assuming that they represent the whole of the game. The rules, however, seem to me to have great potential.

To my way of thinking... None of the editions have really sucked. They haven't been perfect, by any stretch, with a smattering of strengths and weaknesses. But they are what you make of them. They've allowed me a lifetime of D&D, and it has been excellent, whatever the system.

I may not like everything they do, but I will approach the future with optimism and the will to cull whatever I wish from the system to come. I eagerly await the release of 4th Edition, 5th, 6th... what have you. And if I decide to continue to play 3.5, I don't imagine I'll ever look on the changes to come as anything but good.

Change is good. And if I want gnomes in my game, there will damn well be gnomes in my game.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I've seen this a bunch of times being brought up here. The Trek Law, for those of you who may not know, states that every odd numbered Trek movie will suck and every even numbered one will be good.

People are pointing to 2e and now 4e and claiming that, in some sort of Trek logic, we can apply an inverse of the law and even numbered editions will suck.

There's a serious problem with this little gem though. The idea that 2e sucked.

I certainly agree with this. I dislike 1E, liked 2E (though not Skills & Powers), disliked 3E (after actually playing it for a couple of years - I liked the concepts, though I didn't think it went far enough, as some here may recall), and if it's as simple as that, I guess I'll like 4E. We'll see, though. Initially everything I heard was good, but increasing stupidity and a general sense of "we made it simplified and kewl!" is making me wonder about it.

 

[Delta]

I agree with the Inverse Trek Law.

Frankly, I started saying that back as soon as 3.5 came out (which actually looked a lot to my eye like the same thing that 2E was trying to do).