Quote from: T. Foster;... ([iSpelljammer[/i] was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me as far as TSR settings...

BS.

Spelljammer was the JESUS setting.  It gave everyone everything they ever wanted in a flood of insightful, out-of-the-box thinking and jaw-dropping originality:

The waning empire of Space Elves; though past their absolute dominion over all that came to pass in the crystal spheres, they still engender contempt in everyone else with their aloofness and arrogance.

Differentiating space orcs from ground orcs by spelling their racial name backwards.  Scro?  Pure awesome.

Porting in you favorite races from EVERY TSR setting (not all of them, I know).  Space Drow and Kender.

Hippo men.  With Pistols.

And don't forget the awesome githyanki pirates with eye patches and puffy shirts :rolleyes:

People let tsr politics and the lame modules color their feelings for AD&D 2 in too harsh a light.  While I always had problems with the rules (mostly the same problems I have with every edition of D&D), I had my best campaigns in 2e and I thought the rules were much better than 1e.  I still can't figure out the combat rules of 1e.  Perhaps the best way to play D&D is with 2e rules and 1e modules.

I actually LOVE Spelljammer BECAUSE it is Gonzo AD&D In Space.

There are some really cool concepts in there, IMO. But really, it's the sort of thing, you either go for it, laugh it up and enjoy the ride for what it is, or you just gag and puke in short order just at the idea of playing this thing.

See... I love this Gythianki pirate, for instance. Brought a smile on my face, and made me laugh a little. If there's a setting that truly doesn't take itself seriously, this is it. But it does -not- have to suck in actual play. It totally can be awesome.

and don't forget the...

Quote from: mhensley;372412and don't forget the...

See. That's what I'm talking about. THE Gonzo AD&D setting.

Quote from: T. Foster;372395Publisher-dictated metaplot jerking around with settings and expecting everyone to buy new products to stay "current" (see also: Greyhawk Wars/From the Ashes/Return of the Eight, Forgotten Realms Time of Troubles/Horde Invasion/etc., Mystara Wrath of the Immortals, various Dragonlance shit, Traveller Fifth Frontier War/Rebellion/Hard Times/Virus/New Era, Paranoia Crash Course Manual, Cyberpunk 4th Corporate War/Cyberplague, etc. -- pretty much every published rpg setting that survived into the 90s) just annoyed the hell out of me and was one of the main factors that drove me away from the contemporary rpg scene in the early-mid 90s.

That I can't stand anymore, either. Rebooting settings with metaplot evolutions periodically, which in effect allows some random fiction writer for the Forgotten Realms (say) to reboot my FR campaign (say) every now and then if I want to keep up with official material, is something I just would not support anymore.

I buy a setting. I like it, and run games with it. If the publisher just reboots the setting with some metaplot bullshit, the publisher just says "bubye" to my dollars, as far as I'm concerned.

This is where I officially distance myself from T.Foster.

The Fuck?!?! Wrath of Immortals is teh aweosemeee!!111!!!
The old golden box is utter bullshit in comparison.

Also: FFW: holy fuck Traveller is not a serious undertaking for true connaisseurs without the FFW boardgame!

Quote from: Benoist;372407I actually LOVE Spelljammer BECAUSE it is Gonzo AD&D In Space.

There are some really cool concepts in there, IMO. But really, it's the sort of thing, you either go for it, laugh it up and enjoy the ride for what it is, or you just gag and puke in short order just at the idea of playing this thing.

See... I love this Gythianki pirate, for instance. Brought a smile on my face, and made me laugh a little. If there's a setting that truly doesn't take itself seriously, this is it. But it does -not- have to suck in actual play. It totally can be awesome.

Illithids == Daleks. Nuff said. Big Spelljammer fan here.

I think Spelljammer probably fares better in retrospect (where it's easier to view it as a wacky gonzo "play while drunk/high" setting) than it did at the time, where TSR was, at least in public (who knows what they were saying in the staff breakroom) treating it as serious/legitimate "AD&D canon," the Universal capstone-setting that was supposed to tie Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms together into a single unified whole -- and then they started including Spelljammer elements in non-SJ products (e.g. WGR1) and even made the 1990 GenCon AD&D Open (at that time the premiere AD&D tournament event) a Spelljammer adventure, and it just felt like they were trying to ram that discordant crap down my throat.

Man, T. Foster, you could be a fucking German romantic the way you talk! I assume you don´t watch Dr. Who? Or used to read Mad magazine?

Quote from: Settembrini;372420This is where I officially distance myself from T.Foster.

The Fuck?!?! Wrath of Immortals is teh aweosemeee!!111!!!
The old golden box is utter bullshit in comparison.

Could be; I never owned WotI (and consider the golden box utter bullshit anyway). But isn't that the product that sunk the island of Alphatia and instructed everyone to go out and buy the Poor Wizard's Almanac in order to "upgrade" their Mystara campaigns to the new baseline?

QuoteAlso: FFW: holy fuck Traveller is not a serious undertaking for true connaisseurs without the FFW boardgame!

I'll give you this one too. I like the FFW as well (and also like The Rebellion for that matter), but it did set the trend that ultimatelt led to TNE (which I very much did not like) in motion, and I know that had I left it off the list I would've gotten some response along the lines of "you're full of shit; publisher-dictated metaplot didn't start in the late 80s, just look at the Fifth Frontier War (1980) -- a big honking piece of publisher-dictated metaplot right in the middle of your precious old-school Classic Traveller! No difference whatsoever from TSR telling you to reboot your Forgotten Realms campaign after every new series of novels. Suck on that, you would-be-grognard douchebag!"

OK, I see your reasoning. Trouble is: dogma doesn´t work. So there´s good metaplot and there´s bad metaplot. Sorry, but that´s just how I see it. Fundamentalism doesn´t model reality.
And in reality, there´s some utterly splendind metaplots driven by a company.

It´s like this:

If you have a doofus girlfirend, and most likely will have to stay with her? It´s easier to blame women in general. But in fact...you get the idea.

Quote from: T. Foster;372423I think Spelljammer probably fares better in retrospect (where it's easier to view it as a wacky gonzo "play while drunk/high" setting) than it did at the time, where TSR was, at least in public (who knows what they were saying in the staff breakroom) treating it as serious/legitimate "AD&D canon," the Universal capstone-setting that was supposed to tie Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms together into a single unified whole -- and then they started including Spelljammer elements in non-SJ products (e.g. WGR1) and even made the 1990 GenCon AD&D Open (at that time the premiere AD&D tournament event) a Spelljammer adventure, and it just felt like they were trying to ram that discordant crap down my throat.

I totally see where you're coming from, particularly in the way the TSR production evolved up to Spelljammer, and afterwards.

I personally like the idea of a Spelljammer vessel showing in some old school module, just like you'd have, say, a crashed spaceship in Blackmoor. It can be handled either well, or very poorly, depending on the context.

As for the idea of "AD&D Canon" - I am completely adverse to it, the concept, I mean, as both a player and a GM. There's no such thing as "canon" to me as far as RPGs are concerned. I do my thing with the products, and I expect my GM to do his own when I play (unless we're in some sort of cooperative campaign with rotative DMs and such, but even then, I want the DMs to be able to do with their universe whatever the heck they want with it, and not have to adhere to any Official (TM) Canon just because the publisher says so).

The very idea of canon, as in fictional canon, is, to me, completely antithetical to the very idea of role playing games, and the way actual gaming groups take possession of the universes they play, as they play them.

As a scholarly pursuit, with aims of theoretical arguments and comparisons between RPG products, and so on, so forth, I don't mind the concept of "canon". As a GM or a Player, I do mind. Not that it's particularly relevant to what you were saying in this instance, Trent, but that's just what popped into my mind as I read your post.

Quote from: Settembrini;372428OK, I see your reasoning. Trouble is: dogma doesn´t work. So there´s good metaplot and there´s bad metaplot. Sorry, but that´s just how I see it. Fundamentalism doesn´t model reality.
And in reality, there´s some utterly splendind metaplots driven by a company.

It´s like this:

If you have a doofus girlfirend, and most likely will have to stay with her? It´s easier to blame women in general. But in fact...you get the idea.

OK, point conceded. But I still say that there was enough bad metaplot, especially in the 1988-93 era when it overtook seemingly every commercial rpg setting, including those that had not previously been metaplot driven, to make me wary of the whole concept.

One approach to metaplot that I really liked was the Hero Wars timeline as presented in the Avalon Hill-era RuneQuest stuff -- they detailed each area as of a certain year, gave you a timeline of specific metaplot events that were going to occur over the next several years and more general hints of what was going to occur in the more distant future, but they did it all up-front so each individual GM could make an informed decision how (or if) he wanted to incorporate those elements instead of being kept in suspense and at the whim of the publishers who may or may not have their heads completely up their asses.