Gaming: the poor Realms!

[alpharaposa]

It seems WOTC had to 'fix' the drow...

I have plenty of 2nd ed, and I'm sticking to 'em. What is the point of getting new players, if everybody who loved the game from before stops playing?

Comments

[neppyman.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just me being cynical, but I've seen how WOTC handles out-of-date stuff with Magic.

Expansions were intentionally phased out and made obsolete - made not legal for tournament play - over time. There were two reasons. The first was that it wasn't fair to newer players to start "behind" in terms of expansions. But the second (and more obvious) reason was... simply to sell more product.

I wonder if some of the revisions that WOTC is making now aren't being done for the same reason. Quite a few good changes were made (simplifying character creatiion, getting rid of level caps and race/class restrictions), but when a plot change like this comes along, I have to wonder if it's simply being done to sell books...

[yechezkiel.livejournal.com]

Non-competitive players of CCGs do not get expansion cycling and new base sets because they are bad at the game, even though they probably don't realize it. You may have won games at your comic book shop or whatever, but if you played on the GP/PTQ/PT level, you would see the problems, which are sometimes evident even at the end of a "block" in Magic or an "arc" in Legend of the Five Rings.

A perfect case in point is Decipher's Star Wars and Star Trek, which both made explicit promises to never cycle out cards. In the case of SWCCG it led to a game that was bloated and unplayable, dominated by obscure combos and impossible-to-acquire marquee cards. The number of new rules and keywords made the game unlearnable for new players, to such a degree that not even its license could save it. By the time Lucasfilm gave the license over to WotC, the game was practically dead, already. In the case of STCCG, the situation became so untenable that Decipher was forced to completely remake the game into something new, but it was too late.

Magic, and other CCGs that have remained successful, cycle sets for a number of reasons: 1) It allows for the introduction of new abilities (or the revisitation of old ones) without compounding the game with 100 different abilities that new players find overwhelming, 2) it allows for tweaks to be made in the card pool that can prevent dominant decks to remain so for years, a problem Decipher's games had for their entire run, and 3) it keeps new players from being put in an impossible "catch-up" position. Players are, of course, always free to play with whatever in their own play groups, and in the case of Magic, there are a number of extended and legacy formats available, even for competitive play (a legacy GP just this past weekend drew thousands).

As for the Realms, it's another issue, but one with some similarities.

I run 4th Ed. Realms. I love it, and so do my players. Old Realms had become overdone and oversaturated to the point of camp; it was sort of a joke amongst those of us (which included me until 4e) who were gamers who didn't play D&D. It sort of summed up what was wrong with D&D and its players for a lot of people, though I never felt that strongly. 4e realms bumps up the timeline to give a bit of a tabula rasa for a new generation of gamers to paint on, along with the old ones who hang on. It's not like Ed Greenwood disapproves of the new realms, either, an assumption plenty of the old guard make without justification. There is a big element in geek culture that opposes change, any change. 4E is simply just more fun than AD&D or 3E because it allows for the same level of sophistication with a much slicker set of rules. It's OS X to the Windows of the old games, in a lot of ways. 4E Realms is much the same way, you should read the books and judge for yourself, but in the end, it's an RPG, so they are what you make of them, anyhow.

[aefenglommung.livejournal.com]

I avoided canned campaign settings. They were fun to read, but not to play in.

The d20 system sounds boring to me. I love polyhedral dice of all sorts. They're cool.

All this probably explains why I haven't played in -- what? -- 12 years? (And that was for nostalgia's sake, I think.)