Quote from: bin Sayf;353516I'd much rather get switched on to nifty new stuff by reading guys like Jeff and Akrasia

Also, Jeff's, Akrasia's, etc blogger sites don't take 15 fucking minutes to load like Wizards.com.  So it's a happy confluence of circumstances, then.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;353408I mean, you still have the chump-faction blogsters trying to bash 4e and the people playing it (and Zach, it pains me to say that includes you, but it totally does

I read this blog.  Critical of 4e when it comes up, yeah?  Find me a quote from it where he bashes anyone playing it (even implicitly).

Quote from: Seanchai;353455Among others. With the advent of new editions of the game, particularly 4e, there sprang up a plethora of claims about OD&D and AD&D that bear little resemblance to the games themselves.

Except that it's just been settled...again...in this very thread...with corroboration from a WotC alumnus...that the 3e/4e use of minis isn't the same as it was in OD&D, Basic, etc.

In the words of Daniel Patrick Moynahan, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;353613Except that it's just been settled...again...in this very thread...with corroboration from a WotC alumnus...that the 3e/4e use of minis isn't the same as it was in OD&D, Basic, etc.

In the words of Daniel Patrick Moynahan, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

"Isn't the same" - certainly. Not existent at all? No.

And for every Gygax who "never used miniatures" there's an Arneson who "always used miniatures" .. so really.. it's ridiculous to say that it was all one way or the other.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;352651Until I read about him in this forum I never heard of Erick Wujcik, never played any games written by him, never read any articles on the topic by him, etc.

Just sayin'.

Agreed. Erick was a great guy and a good game designer, but all his accomplishments were in the 80's and 90's, so far as I am aware.

That said, the 00's are noted for his passing.

Ach...should add my own comments on the 00s here:

The last 9 years brought:

OGL - I wonder just how more evolved the hobby would have really been without it. As it is, I think it cemented a single rule system in as a defined standard of the hobby by a great many gamers

Indie Movement - a repurposing of what used to just be the small press industry of prior decades in to a more cohesive force -amazingly- that got a lot of alternate RPG concepts out there and visible, even if only the same handful of elitist alt gamers play them (for the most part).

Generation Gap - This is the first decade to see a distinguishable generation gap in gamers. We now have a hobby which genuinely spands all ages, and it ultimately fractured because of this, more than anything else, I feel. There are new young gamers out there who are excited to find some mysterious book called "Star Frontiers" in a used bin somewhere, and there are old geezers busily trying to reconstruct the original wheel in the OSR. It's a strange thing, and the hobby hasn't quite found equilibrium with how to handle this yet.

Computer Gaming and WoW - the massive surge and rise of video games as a primary entertainment industry has done more to cripple and enhance old-shool paper-and-pencil games than anything else. Millions of people can play WoW, Dragon Age or you name it, which means a couple things for pnp games: first, D&D loses some of its mystique and bad rep over time, once the broader audience of gaming as a whole thinks a game full of dwarves and night elves is perfectly acceptable as a pastime next to football. Second, it means that of the majority of computer gamers out there, some of them will filter down to PnP gaming and get in to it. Unfortunately this hasn't swollen the hobby much, because it's also much, much easier to play WoW or Dragon Age than it is to start an RPG group. Thus, for PnP games to remain competitive they have to make themselves more accessible, easier to manage and much, much prettier. Which is really tough for a cottage industry that only pretends 95% of the time that it makes any money at all.

Anyway, I think the 00's have demonstrated this shift in gaming as a whole, and the industry's struggle to deal with it.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;353613Except that it's just been settled...again...in this very thread...with corroboration from a WotC alumnus...that the 3e/4e use of minis isn't the same as it was in OD&D, Basic, etc.

I missed that. What settled it again?

Seanchai

Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to.

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned in the thread yet, but a major event of the last nine years was Eberron.  I'm not a great fan of the setting, for various reasons, but it really did shake the D&D scene out of the Tolkienesque standard.

Magic has always been poorly integrated into D&D, but Eberron had a good stab at making it an actual assumption of the setting, rather than something squeezed awkwardly into a version of the mediaeval real world.

The pulp-noir style of the finished product was an anticlimax, but it set the ball rolling for re-imaginations of the fantasy standard.

Quote from: Hairfoot;353974Eberron (...) did shake the D&D scene out of the Tolkienesque standard.

Hm? I thought that was done long ago, with Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Planescape.
Or even earlier, with Arduin.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;353985Hm? I thought that was done long ago, with Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Planescape.
Or even earlier, with Arduin.

Good point.  I probably should have said "mediaevalism" instead of "Tolkienesque".  Ravenloft, though, was a straight-up grab for pre-emo dollars.

Or maybe I just don't appreciate overwrought goth romanticism.

Quote from: Hairfoot;353988Good point.  I probably should have said "mediaevalism" instead of "Tolkienesque".  Ravenloft, though, was a straight-up grab for pre-emo dollars.

And a counter to the success of "Vampire" and the whole WoD.

However, "Planescape" isn't exactly medieval. More a mix of medieval, Renaissance, steampunk, alchemy, philosophy, Borges and what else. IMHO, it is still more "transgressive" and revolutionary than Eberron.