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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thresher" data-source="post: 1312560" data-attributes="member: 9983">By about 1996 our group had pretty much gotten jack of 2E, we'd propped that wobbly wagon up with a lot of house rules but eventually it crumbled into a steaming pile of crap. After that we went back to other game systems we'd liked and knew held up to a few years of constant campaigning without going to crap, Shadowrun, Mage, Vampire, Dark Ages Vampire, SLA Industries and a couple of others.D&D in short, became a dirty word.We like long games, games where you didnt have to constantly keep an eye over your shoulder to make sure the wheels didnt fall off and D&D wasnt it.Looking back on it, those years after 2E produced some damn fine roleplaying and GM'ing from us. While those characters wouldnt mean anything to anyone else they where played with such heart and soul it was emminently refreshing to see and such characters where very rare occourances in D&D for us previously, I think it was something of a comming of age.During that time I also got back into computing, I started playing Doom2 and Quake mostly online and there was much lamenting, though later we started playing some HL and Counterstrike. Actually I think I hosted the first Beta1 CS server in Australia from home and progressed all the way through to V1 of the game before hanging up my desert eagle due to the deluge of cheaters. Though not before leaving such a wake of carnage and suffering that the nic my team used is still talked about in hushed whispers at LAN games, praying that we dont return... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Sadly I moved away from the city where my friends played, though I went into writing a large amount (and I mean LARGE!) game supplements which I sent up to them to be play-tested before unleashing them on unsuspecting game communities around the internet and when I could I went up to see them. But work and a commitment to making people dead as a part time CS-Killer (I actually won a fair bit of dough playing CS competitions) and distance made it tough.So, having written close to 430,000 words of game supplements, dozens of illustrations, multitudes of fiction and killed damn near anything that walked crawled or breathed in CS I went looking for something else... or more likely, it found me...The Dark AgesI chose not to choose life... I chose something elseKickin around the house looking at all the new games comming in and Dave my housemate/guy who slept on the couch, has a new game. Not really like any I had seen before, I'd been spared the curse of 'Evercrack' by being a hardcore quaker but this one seemed to be different. At first we called him a [offensive word] for playing one of these MMORPG's and heckled him for the dated graphics, lame animations and then he took us out on a 'raid' where 80 a side charged in and hacked each other to pieces.... oooh!3months later my first level 50 hacked and destroyed its way through multitudes of mobs and enemy players alike and it was all over rover.Yep, no roleplaying, no writing, no art. I went to work, I came home and killed stuff in DAOC and it got kinda 'blurry' there for about 12months, but I loved it... possibly too much  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" />Oh how the mighty had fallen into the depths of depravity and it was only on a sunny... (or maybe it wasnt, I dunno, didnt get out much) day 12 months ago that I was sitting around crafting crap in a daft game that was turning into a 2nd job.I didnt need a 2nd job!Goddamnit! I aint getting paid for this! So I quit DAOC...The return.While I was still playing some of my friends would attempt contact via email to see if I was still alive.GM "Wanna play some D&D?"Me "But Ive got a level 50 minstrel now!"GM "A what?"Me "Nevermind, D&D, that game we stopped playing years ago because it sucked arse?"GM "Its a new edition!"Me "So, who makes it?"GM "Wotc"Me "The same [really, really bad word!]'s that made those daft cards you spent all your dole on and dropped SLA because it was 'too mature and too dark' for their target audience? And Pokebum cartoons...?"GM "Yeah... them"Me "D&D is for dumb newbs, its 'entry level' tard material for munchkins!"GM "This one's better, trust me"So I took a leap of faith and drove up there. I figured I was wasting away what was left of my life and turned up with some folders of reams of yellowed paper that was my old 2E character (that didnt suck) and sat down. It seemed weird that she was older than most of the kids that some of us had...The first 6months of 3E where pretty rough, at face value it looked better than 2E but it still took us 8months of houseruling to fix a lot of the bugs in the D20 system and its progressing a pace quite well. By 3.5 there was a definate improvement in the game which even to my jaded opinion was beginning to drag the game out of the mire of being branded 'dumb no0b system' and while it wasnt perfect, we where managing to have a lot of fun!Im pretty sure they regret dragging me back into the fold, while my appearances at the game table are infrequent due to work they are also accompanied by additional reams of material to bog up the busted bits of D20 which I inflict on them...I cant help it really, its in my nature to fix things rather than complain without contributing at least an effort to make things better when something dosnt work.</blockquote>

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