Quote from: jeff37923;373115A few years ago on this forum, pseudoephedrine claimed that anarchy was a stable and desireable form of gevernment. If that statement doesn't convince you that he is full of shit, then nothing ever will.

Ah, Jeffy, I didn't realise someone had rung the idiot bell to call you in. If you're going to keep on bringing up my political positions, it would help if you could correctly state them. Were you someone of say, average human intelligence, I might ask what relevance my politics has to this thread, but I'm not sure you know what a big word like "relevance" means. Don't worry though, you're only a few modules of Hooked on Phonics away from at least being able to pronounce it.

Quote from: jibbajibba;372544Odd that a lot of complaints seem to be round modules, settings and supplements. All optional stuff you totally don't need.
 
For me 2e was just a streamlined form of AD&D with more character flexibility. As I said someplace else the flexibility was good becuase it was much more roleplay based flexibility than power play. Kits didn't really make you tough (that daft tree armed tree ranger aside) they just fleshed out more stuff. Priest spheres made priests weaker if anything.
The extra non-weapon proficiencies were crudely done but definitely an improvement.
 
Now Skills and Powers was broken. and after that I wasn't buying any product because I was at Uni and running my own stuff.
 
The stuff about devils and demons is incredibly trivial and at least by me totally ignored.
 

 
This is largely why I liked 2e.  I didn't have much money at the time and didn't buy most of the settings.  I picked up many of the splat books used but we mostly just made our own campaigns, sometimes mixing in 1e modules.  By the time the Skills & Powers books came out, I had gained enough sense to see that they were unplaytested crap so they didn't influence my game.  
 
I didn't care about the trivial earlier changes like loss of assassin and stupid names for demons.  I was spared from the metaplots and the railroady adventures (I've read a few in pdf or from others - wow were many of the modules bad).  If you just compared phb to phb, 2e was a cleaned up version that worked better with more flexibility.  
 
Warthur was right that Birthright should have been an addon, not a setting.  I borrowed a friend's copy to add kingdom management to my game and it was nice to have estimates for money and troops.  But the setting was too vanilla.

Quote from: Sigmund;372567To me, BR kicks FR's Frankensteinian, "everything but the kitchen sink", chock full 'o Mary Sues ass.

This is true, but I really wouldn't play in either one.  I'd go with the generic BR over Greenwood's masturbation fantasies added on by a hundred failed writers if forced to choose.

Quote from: BenoistBut you know what? Whatever. As I said, I'm tired of your bullshit. We went on for several pages on this thread, and that's just enough. I have better things to do. If you enjoy wasting your time, more power to you, I guess. Good day!

Good, get out of the thread you sloppy, whinging cunt. And don't throw your gibberish around these forums any more if you don't want to put up with me pointing out how full of shit it is.

Quote from: Nicephorus;373121If you just compared phb to phb, 2e was a cleaned up version that worked better with more flexibility.

Talking about the PHB, I can see how you're coming to that conclusion, and there's more than a little truth to it, on an organizational standpoint.

The DMG is another matter entirely, to me. It is -the- worst DMG produced for any iteration of (A)D&D, in my opinion. Not because of its organization, which is way better than the First Ed DMG, we'll agree on that, but because it has no "soul". There's nothing in there akin to the Gygaxian spirit, the feel of conversation from one DM to another. There are lists of magic items, a bunch of tools, sure. But no real personality there.

The MM is a different animal altogether. I much preferred the way it was done in First Ed personally, with its own hardcover. The idea of the binder you could add pages to from different supplements and appendices is a very good one, but the implementation failed miserably because -imo- it neglected to consider who the users were: mostly kids who lose pages, rip the puncture holes apart, and so on, so forth. Result? Twenty years later, I still have my First ed MM. The 2e MM didn't survive. The binder's still somewhere, in France, but there are so many pages missing it's not funny.
 

Quote from: Nicephorus;373121Warthur was right that Birthright should have been an addon, not a setting.  I borrowed a friend's copy to add kingdom management to my game and it was nice to have estimates for money and troops.  But the setting was too vanilla.

Loved Birthright. Still do.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;373123Good, get out of the thread you sloppy, whinging cunt. And don't throw your gibberish around these forums any more if you don't want to put up with me pointing out how full of shit it is.

LOL See? THIS is high-handed, pretentious and condescending.
This is ego at work. Learn the difference.
What are you, fifteen years old? :worship:

I'm hooked on phonics! It's been days since I had a fix, though. Last night as i lay in bed, shaking, I saw an eviscerated cat crawl across my ceiling. Rhymes with hat!

Quote from: Benoist;373126LOL See? THIS is high-handed, pretentious and condescending.
This is ego at work. Learn the difference.
What are you, fifteen years old? :worship:

Strong words from a man who thinks the height of wit is "Fuck you!" I see you still consider repetition to be the strongest form of argument you have.

Edit: Also, didn't you just claim you were "tired of [my] bullshit" and had "better things to do"? You're pulling a Sett here.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;373128Strong words from a man who thinks the height of wit is "Fuck you!" I see you still consider repetition to be the strongest form of argument you have.

You really crack me up, mister "whinging cunt"/jargon that never was.
Ah, well. Alright. Enough of this.
Have the last word. You "win".

Quote from: Benoist;373130You really crack me up, mister "whinging cunt"/jargon that never was.
Ah, well. Alright. Enough of this.
Have the last word. You "win".

You did this already. It hasn't gotten any more clever or believable the second time around.

Quote from: Benoist;373124The DMG is another matter entirely, to me.
 
The MM is a different animal altogether. I much preferred the way it was done in First Ed personally, with its own hardcover.

I find that I don't use DMGs that much other than for tables.  Hold for editions 1 -3.  (never played 4).  
 
The MM binder idea is cool - for the first 10 minutes.  It was unwieldy so I would take pages out for a game and leave it home.  then I would forget to put them back and couldn't find them.  Of course, the pages tore.  I think late 2e put out a standard book format.  
 
 
To me, genre emulation doesn't have to be about turning a game into a story with worrying about plot and structuring things like a book.  It's more about tweaking mechanics to achieve a universe similar to a work of fiction and then turning the characters loose in it.  For example, how common are magic items and spellcasters in the body of fiction?  Are the heroes godlike or more good as 1.5 men?  Then the characters are faced with the same sorts of decisions as they would be the the fictional world.  This is always I've used published settings and created my own settings.  "Usable new spell system and nice map."  I hate NPCs running the show and metaplot that isn't a direct product of player actions.
 
The absolute last thing I want to do is recreate the plot and characters of a movie or book.  
 
I've noticed that there are two types of Forgotten Realms players.  For the first, it has a nice set of maps, some cool locations and kingdoms that are recognizable as standard fantasy fare.  It saves them time so they can start running games quickly and are able to answer player questions like "how far to the nearest city."  It's not really different than Greyhawk.
 
But there are also people who are really into FR.  I never play in FR games so that I don't have to run into these people.

Quote from: Nicephorus;373133To me, genre emulation doesn't have to be about turning a game into a story with worrying about plot and structuring things like a book.  It's more about tweaking mechanics to achieve a universe similar to a work of fiction and then turning the characters loose in it.  For example, how common are magic items and spellcasters in the body of fiction?  Are the heroes godlike or more good as 1.5 men?  Then the characters are faced with the same sorts of decisions as they would be the the fictional world.  This is always I've used published settings and created my own settings.  "Usable new spell system and nice map."  I hate NPCs running the show and metaplot that isn't a direct product of player actions.
 
The absolute last thing I want to do is recreate the plot and characters of a movie or book.

Yes. That's what I was talking about when I was separating genre emulation (emulating the feel of the genre itself, its colors and patterns) from fiction emulation (importing narrative techniques and motifs into the game from the genre emulated). You like genre emulation, despise fiction emulation.

I relate with your feelings, obviously.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;373131You did this already. It hasn't gotten any more clever or believable the second time around.

Borr-ring...

Anyway, Pseudo, my beef with you in this thread, aside from the fact that you're continuing this argument with Benoist long after the substantive issue has been resolved (i.e., we know what Benoist means) is that you dredged up a beef with me (and Sett) for absolutely no reason connected with the actual topic. Here's the real connection:

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;373079If I had to point to a single, consistent conceptual problem that drives me absolutely nuts and which I think is obviously a problem when it's pointed out, it's the confusion between systems and styles of play (and, as a corollary, the belief that one causes the other).

This has everything to do with the 4e discussions, nothing to do with this one. If anything this thread has seen agreement on all sides that 2e's system isn't strongly tied to the style of play that has helped give 2e a bad name.

That isn't to say I agree with your quote, immediately above, but that's something that belongs in another thread entirely.

Quote from: Nicephorus;373133I find that I don't use DMGs that much other than for tables.  Hold for editions 1 -3.  (never played 4).  
 
The MM binder idea is cool - for the first 10 minutes.  It was unwieldy so I would take pages out for a game and leave it home.  then I would forget to put them back and couldn't find them.  Of course, the pages tore.  I think late 2e put out a standard book format.

It did, I own it (two copies in fact). It was out by the early 90's (I think I got my first copy around 1993-94).
 

QuoteI've noticed that there are two types of Forgotten Realms players.  For the first, it has a nice set of maps, some cool locations and kingdoms that are recognizable as standard fantasy fare.  It saves them time so they can start running games quickly and are able to answer player questions like "how far to the nearest city."  It's not really different than Greyhawk.
 
But there are also people who are really into FR.  I never play in FR games so that I don't have to run into these people.

There are canon nazis for almost every published setting out there. In FR's case it's particularly prone to produce that kind of personality because (IMHO, of course) the only thing that makes FR better than a homebrew is that it has a greater level of detail than most people would ever put into their homebrew settings while still resembling many of those settings in broad enough strokes to be familiar.

I'd contrast it with Dark Sun or Planescape, both of which have all sorts of other unique stuff going for them. For FR, the detail is what draws people in.

BTW, don't take that as a defense of FR. I'm not a fan. But I do recall when I first read it being absolutely amazed at how every innkeeper across Faerun seemed to have a name, class and backstory, and I've heard that sort of thing a lot from people who do still play it.

Quote from: Nicephorus;373133The MM binder idea is cool - for the first 10 minutes.  It was unwieldy so I would take pages out for a game and leave it home.  then I would forget to put them back and couldn't find them.  Of course, the pages tore.  I think late 2e put out a standard book format.

The MM binder is IMO emblematic of everything wrong with 2E AD&D (and TSR of that era). Which is to say it probably seemed like a good idea in the brainstorming session where it was proposed -- one page per monster so each DM can organize the book as they prefer and only have to carry with them the subset of monsters they're actually using instead of 3+ big hardback books -- but the actual product was made of pure, undiluted fail. Not only did it (pretty much inevitably) end up being way more inconvenient and taking up way more space than the traditional book-model, not only did the format pretty much guarantee that the most-used pages were going to get ripped and lost, but it wasn't even usable in its intended fashion because most monsters were printed two to a sheet -- one monster on the front, a different monster on the back -- so you couldn't really customize its organization, and couldn't even store it in straight alphabetical order, because frequently new monsters would fall between the front and back sides of previously-released pages.

Perhaps this idea could have worked if the monsters had been printed one per sheet (though considering how much filler-material had to be included to get most monster descriptions up to one page I have no idea what they would have done with twice the space -- perhaps a short fiction-piece starring each monster?) and on thicker, reinforced pages, but then we're looking at an even bigger space-hog, requiring several 2" thick binders just to get the "canon" monsters from the 1E books, not to mention all the additions and setting-specific monsters that followed.

It seems pretty clear that TSR announced (and sold to Random House) the MM binder because it seemed like a cool idea without giving any real consideration to all of the practical hurdles and limitations until it was too late, and then even when those issues became obvious they still stuck with the format for several years, out of a) laziness, b) inertia, c) unwillingness to admit they'd screwed up, or d) all of the above.