I thought they were proud of the fact hat the game was essentially the same with slight cleanup over the years.

Ultimately print systems can't function as living rulebooks but the business model is dependent on core book sales and compatibility eats into sales and history has shown the print book game industry can't survive without incompatible new editions.

"This game is awesome! I can't wait to change everything about it!" - The Table Top Gamer Creed

Changes are made solely on avoiding paying any royalty fees. This is how franchises have always worked.

Quote from: Battlemaster on June 23, 2022, 12:24:47 PM
If the reviewer was  accurate and his review's prose suggested competence and fairness, chaosium took its perfectly good rules system and basically fuckified it severely.

It seems a lot of changes complicated, adding dice pools or eliminating the simple resistance table. Others seem fair, like allowing players to push some rolls,  or keeping POW from being the most vital stat.

But in general the changes seem to have fucked up a perfectly good system.

Can you link to the review, Battlemaster? I've been playing Call of Cthulhu since the first edition, and I switched over the 7e for the last campaign I played in (we ran through Masks of Nyarlathotep). In general, there were a lot of 7e changes that seemed more like change for change's sake. However, I didn't think it was overall more complicated or any more fucked up than previous editions. I like the system overall both earlier editions and 7th edition, but still have a bunch of gripes with it.

Speaking of new editions broadly, unfortunately, there is a company profit bias to put out a new edition just to get players to buy the core rulebook over again. 7th is annoying in that the previous editions were extremely minor such that you could easily play with the new edition and not notice any change. 7th edition is compatible - so it is still easy to use material for older editions, but there was just enough cosmetic changes that it motivates players to buy it.

About new editions broadly, the best reason for a new edition is that player feedback and new material in the game has suggested a bunch of improvements. While I disliked the politics of it, I thought in terms of rules, D&D 2nd edition was well handled, though for me the best example is Hero System 4th edition which was excellently handled. They cleaned up a lot of the cruft and incorporated new material published.

Still, the frequent bias is to go for the profit of getting the player base to buy the core book again, which carries with it the bias of aiming the game most at the die-hard players rather than newbies. Hence a lot of new editions get more and more complicated.

Quote from: Battlemaster on June 23, 2022, 12:24:47 PM
Ok, recently asked about CoC, and was told it didn't go woke, so I read a review of 7e.

Good news: sounds like it wasn't 'woke' in it's candid handling of the 1920-30s era.

But I got a surprising bit of bad news.

If the reviewer was  accurate and his review's prose suggested competence and fairness, chaosium took its perfectly good rules system and basically fuckified it severely.

It seems a lot of changes complicated, adding dice pools or eliminating the simple resistance table. Others seem fair, like allowing players to push some rolls,  or keeping POW from being the most vital stat.

But in general the changes seem to have fucked up a perfectly good system.

Why do game companies insist on ''fixing'' what is working fine?

Just to sell a new edition?

Bolding mine.

Your critical thinking skills are seriously deficient. Do you know anything about the reviewer? Could this be a hit piece written by someone who hates Chaosium? Have you compared this review to any others of CoC 7th to see if it is just copypasta or other reviewers have the same complaints? Have you done the breathtakingly obvious intelligent thing and looked at it yourself to see if is worth buying?

Or are you just going to go with some random reviewer's opinion because they have a command of written English?

As far as why do publishers put out new rulebooks that make the old ones obsolete, that's called business. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Nobody is forcing you to buy. More often than not, older editions of RPGs are better.

The wokeness of Chaosium permeates everything they produce and for good measure they have been going back and wokifying old adventures too.

The last edition of CoC I glanced through had a section earning the reader of how wacist all those horrible white peoples were back then! ghasp!

So the odds of them not inserting some into 7e or going back and "fixing" 1-xe are rather high at this point.

As for fucking with the system. That ones easy.

90% of the time its not because they want to improve the system. You could do that with errata and supplements. No. The reason is marketing pushing the edition treadmill to try and gouge players of a few more bucks rather than trying to oh, I don't know, do something sane like just selling the game to new players.

Greedy morons will inevitably kill the goose that lays the golden eggs because they are greedy morons. This is not like say pre-2e TSR where Gygax just loved to create new systems and tried to keep everything more or less compatible and the changes such that you had essentially basic and advanced rules sets.

Sometimes you will see a new edition though for oddball reasons like the prior designer is gone and the company either can not use some aspects of the rules or setting or do not know how to. Or the company changes hands and the new owners want a new edition under their branding. And other reasons that are outside the range of greed.

And on rare occasions the new edition is really just a face lift. New art. Same rules, or same rules with errata added.

Quote from: jhkim on June 24, 2022, 10:12:36 AM
While I disliked the politics of it, I thought in terms of rules, D&D 2nd edition was well handled, though for me the best example is Hero System 4th edition which was excellently handled. They cleaned up a lot of the cruft and incorporated new material published.

I loved 4th edition Champions/Hero System and had a great number of the books.  Ended up selling it because the system was way too overcomplicated and way too much math for most players.

The later editions of Hero Systems only seemed to make the game even more overcomplicated.

Quote from: Omega on June 24, 2022, 11:52:45 AM
The wokeness of Chaosium permeates everything they produce and for good measure they have been going back and wokifying old adventures too.

The last edition of CoC I glanced through had a section earning the reader of how wacist all those horrible white peoples were back then! ghasp!

So the odds of them not inserting some into 7e or going back and "fixing" 1-xe are rather high at this point.

As for fucking with the system. That ones easy.

90% of the time its not because they want to improve the system. You could do that with errata and supplements. No. The reason is marketing pushing the edition treadmill to try and gouge players of a few more bucks rather than trying to oh, I don't know, do something sane like just selling the game to new players.

Greedy morons will inevitably kill the goose that lays the golden eggs because they are greedy morons. This is not like say pre-2e TSR where Gygax just loved to create new systems and tried to keep everything more or less compatible and the changes such that you had essentially basic and advanced rules sets.

Sometimes you will see a new edition though for oddball reasons like the prior designer is gone and the company either can not use some aspects of the rules or setting or do not know how to. Or the company changes hands and the new owners want a new edition under their branding. And other reasons that are outside the range of greed.

And on rare occasions the new edition is really just a face lift. New art. Same rules, or same rules with errata added.

Oh waaah waaaah!  It deals with the reality of the 1920's!  It makes white people look bad because it tells tge truth about America a cebtiry ago!  Waah!  Waaah!

Jesus the woke can be annoying AF but some of the people who constantly bitch about woke are as bad. Yes, America in the 1920's had open racism even in the east. If telling the truth about it is woke to you, fuck you.

Here's a review I saw.   https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/16/16242.phtml

CoC hasn't improved since its first edition.

Very few games ever do.

At best, they do some stuff differently and maybe clean up some wonky bits.

At best.

Quote from: Battlemaster on June 23, 2022, 12:24:47 PMWhy do game companies insist on ''fixing'' what is working fine?

Just to sell a new edition?

Yes.

I guess my question would be, "What were you looking for in a new edition?"

Your older edition books still exist. I lean toward the idea that newer editions should try to do something different, if they are to exist at all, simply because the older books exist and won't disappear.

If you write anything in your pronouns section you should take a penalty to sanity (if there is such a thing) because your grip on reality is tenuous at best.

I think it's bullshit to attack CoC 'woke' because it states that 1920's America (and most other countries in even the western world)  was unbelievably racist by today's standards. I mean, fucking read lovecraft sometime!

That's just the right saying truth makes them look bad.

I do agree about pronouns. I mean I can call Chelsea Manning she, tho I see Bruce Jenner as more of an it,  but I absolutely refuse to call an individual 'they'. I just cannot use what has always been the plural to a known individual.

That's what separates people like me from the woke, there are limits to how far I'm willing to go cater to extremist groups. I'm not willing to rewrite my entire vocabulary to appease small fringe groups.

Quote from: Battlemaster on June 24, 2022, 11:08:07 PM
I think it's bullshit to attack CoC 'woke' because it states that 1920's America (and most other countries in even the western world)  was unbelievably racist by today's standards. I mean, fucking read lovecraft sometime!

I've read Lovecraft -- every story and novel ever published in fact, and I can only imagine that people harping about how "racist" his works are have never themselves read them.

There is almost zero mention of race ... anywhere. No mention I can recall of anything regarding racial traits, comparisons, or denigration of any kind. The only "racism" I've seen in his stories is the very occasional use of words that were fine at the time but now deemed terrible because the Word Police change the "correct" terminology every 8 years just to keep you off-balance (to the point where it's now correct to say "People of Color", but woe to the bigot who says "Colored People". Even Gary Trudeau had a jab at that one.)

Quote from: Battlemaster on June 24, 2022, 02:46:05 PMOh waaah waaaah!  It deals with the reality of the 1920's!  It makes white people look bad because it tells tge truth about America a cebtiry ago!  Waah!  Waaah!

This is a thread that you made complaining about unnecessary rules changes, but now you are defending the same company for wasting time and effort adding unnecessary historical commentary into the rulebook.

At least the guys pointing out Wokeness are being consistent.