*stare*

*BITE!*

Now, you are a familiar face.

I haz flamed NO ONE! NO ONE I say!

Passionate? Yes. I'm hugely passionate. Fire personality mixed with an air spirit? It's bound to happen. But there were no insults! Just hints of unfair treatment and a bit of whine from the pinot noir next door.

HAHAHAAAAA!

Lovez me. Lovez you. Lovez all.

My dice bag sits on my desk. I have, inside of it, three full sets of polyhedron dice in various shades of purple and blue -- including a really nice set of blue scarab-style, iridescent with gold numerals. *sigh* Me lovez me some dice!

You did?

I have a chainmail bag myself.

The first rule of gaming is that powergamers will always come up with ways to min-max the rules. As long as there are greedy and competitive "must win" players who won't be satisfied with anything less than perfection, there will be loopholes to be exploited and lousy DM's who allow those bullshitters to exploit them.

Personally, I've always found the appeal in the game itself, rather than in the rules. One of the things that I liked about 3rd Ed. is that the rules became more streamlined, less "in the way" than they were in 2nd. They allow equally well for a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl or an in-depth political intrigue where the most combat you see is a well-mannered fencing duel between pampered nobles.

The other nice thing...is that it was the first real attempt at a standardized system for gaming, that made a bold start at opening up the industry beyond just WotC. Though, obviously, it doesn't work quite as smoothly as we sometimes wish it would (the disaster of d20 Star Wars being a _prime_ example) it was still a wonderful try and a bold vision.

Now. Is it perfect? Fuck no. Will 4th Ed. be? Nope. Thus far, none of the systems have been capable of satisfying all of the players, all of the time. And just like anything else, those who are dissatisfied will always have the loudest voices.

My thing, however, is this: do we really need a completely new revision of the rules, so soon?? After all, we had 2nd edition rules for _forever_ -- but now there seems to be this rush to force new and "improved" changes on us every few months. They had barely released 3.0 before they were proposing changes and revisions to be called 3.5...and now we're on to a solid 4.

So the question, I suppose, is this: is the tabletop industry feeling pressure from the video game industry to...keep up somehow? Or is it reactance to player dissatisfaction with the glaring system flaws?

Haha! Actually, the thing with being able to play online? That's WotC catching up to what everyone's already doing. Personally, I've been playing in and running dice campaigns in all sorts of RPG settings -- from D&D to Star Wars to WoD -- for years.

I find it hilariously amusing that they're just now getting this trend when it should have been one of the FIRST things that they incorporated into 3.0 when they did that rework. Better late than never is not the case here, I think...but that's just my opinion.

The good news is, though, that all of you will be learning at the same time. So the uber-new players won't feel like they're never going to catch on.

After a while you can down load the books.

If you want to keep to 3.5 I say do. if they like it go to 4.0 when they are ready. 4.0 is mainly them fixing what they messed up & making races easy to make into playable races.

Also if they don't like D&D try the new ShadowRun 4.0 as I hear it's easy to learn & less dice to deal with so it's great for the less math savvy people like my self.

Yeah, well, I'm kinda the book keeper amongst my friends, so I think it'll fall on me to shell out the scratch.

THAC0 rulez. Hardcore.

And d6 Star Wars will ALWAYS be the best. Period.

Is it possible? Yes. But not with WotC holding the licensing. The fact has been proven over and over and over again that d20 + Star Wars = DISASTER. And WotC won't put time and effort into developing a system that WILL work, when they've got their heads stuck up their asses to the point where d20 is the ONLY system and is guaranteed to work with everything that you can imagine.

Bullshit.

So, when I get a little free time, I'm going to design a system that WILL work. Of course, I won't be able to market it as being for Star Wars or anything....but trust me...it'll work. And it'll be marvelous.

Excellent!