The Inverse Trek Law?

[Man in the Funny Hat]

How dare you, sir? How dare you introduce logic into an internet discussion?

Call it a weakness... or perhaps flaw is better since then I get in-game perks to counter it.

 

[SSquirrel]

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.

The Trek Law never worked either b/c I always enjoyed the first movie. Finding Voyager had become a sentient being after accumulating enough knowledge was very cool IMO. And of course, ST4:We Have to Save the Whales or GreenPeace Will Cry was just atrocious. It might well be "What does God need with a starship" bad. I really can't choose between the 2.

As far as your defense of 2E, 2E was not a terrible system. It maintained a lot of the things I dislike about 1E w/class and level limits for races and such, but it did clear up the rules a lot, reduce the combat matrices down to a short table for THAC0 and things like that. 2E will live on forever b/c of the settings that were created during it. The fluff during the 2E period was great, the rules were just revisions to 1E that didn't change anything too drastically. And how can any system that ends up having Battlerager Dwarves and Dark Sun both in it be a completely bad thing?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

The Trek Law never worked either b/c I always enjoyed the first movie. Finding Voyager had become a sentient being after accumulating enough knowledge was very cool IMO.

Agreed.

 

[Infinity]

I agree with Hussar, BryonD, maggot, GVDammerung, and Archade. The inverse Trek rule definitely applies based on everything the public knows about 4th edition to date. 2e was a travesty caving to concerns that the non-gamer community had about ties to Satanism and witchcraft, and discrediting Gygax, the damn co-creator of the game. What you had left with 2nd edition was a sterilized hack of 1st edition AD&D with rules and class changes that made no sense. What we are seeing with 4th edition is something similar with the removal of the genius work of Jonathan Tweet. He took what he had to work with: a flawed legacy system loved by many. He could have made something unrelated to the old system and just called it D&D, but he didn't. Jonathan Tweet and the rest of his crew kept the game in the spirit of the old game and optimized it as best as they could. Every change they made brought advantages and disadvantages over 1st edition, but by and large was a remake worthy of the D&D legacy that Arneson and Gygax started. 4th edition seems to have little to do with the traditions of D&D at all. This new 4th edition could just as well be a 1st edition of a brand new fantasy RPG with a name other than Dungeons & Dragons.