I Hate Fun...

[jeffx]

At one point I thought someone here might have written this.

http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2008/06/i-hate-fun.html

Enjoy,

[Minstrel]

Quite possible they did since BIP is the first link on the links section to the right.

[Shacia Amastacia]

Wow, that's an awesome blogpost. It's long, but I'd reccommend that everyone read it. It's made me understand much better why some of you here hate 3 & 4 e.

[Blackmote]

heh, yeah that would be Jim Raggi. I've known him for about ten years now. Never had the opportunity to game with him. Hell, when he lived here in Atlanta I never knew he was into AD&D. It wasn't until he moved to Finland that he brought that subject up.

And as you can tell if you read through that lengthy dissertation, he is as passionate as anyone I have ever met when it comes to his beloved game.

whew, wish I had that kind of time to sit and write all day.

LOL!

Testify, Jim! Testify!

*throws horns*

[Halaster Blackcloak]

Oh yeah! Excellent read! I could swear he signed up here or perhaps at the old site. He made some great points I'd like to comment on.

Those who take their activities seriously are the only ones who matter.

Amen! I've taken this approach with everyone in my life. My recently failed new campaign died because two of the three players were not taking it seriously. Well, the niece would have, but the sister (and mother of the niece) didn't. So the campaign didn't even die, it just never took off. Screw it. I decided that from now on, anyone wanting to game with me has to deliver to me a type-written history of their character, two pages long single-spaced. They'd damned well better know what their character's favorite color is, what their favorite foods are, and their character's mother's maiden name. My time, my life, is valuable and I refuse to waste another moment of it on slackers.

The clue phone is ringing, and it’s a collect call for these fun-seekers: YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO LIKE IT. Goddamn, risk and challenge and failure are as much part of role-playing as prancing around like Errol Flynn… er, sorry, Legolas (sorry, wouldn’t want to make a reference that the average modern person wouldn’t know off the top of their head) or something. Shit out there is trying to KILL YOU and there are critters out there that will fuck you up but good if you’re unlucky or not careful.

The clue phone is ringing and it's a collect call!

I love that! He's so right about 3etards and 4orons. It's all about having fun, and god forbid anything in the game be "unpleasant" these days.

I don't understand how vapid a person must be to actually enjoy such emasculated games.

The point isn’t to make role-playing some sort of masochistic experience where it’s all suffering and death and pain and failure. The point is, if all these things are real and present dangers, then success means more. And I think it’s telling that so many people reject this idea.

Amen! This is why I used the word "vapid" and the word "emasculate" in my last statement. My choice of words is carefully considered. Running characters in a world where all the corners are padded with heavy-duty foam, and all the edges are filed dull, well...that to me is hell.

To guarantee success is to defeat the entire purpose of role-playing.

So true. And that's precisely what WOTC is doing with the game.

Real choice in the manner of game play was lost, or at least obscured and made more difficult to achieve, all the while increasing the options for individual characters… That was a great trick, giving players the illusion of more choice and increasing the detail and complexity of the rules while slapping the handcuffs on the game itself. Brilliant. Fuckers.

It's funny, because there's a guy named L. Ron Hubbard, who wrote a book called Dianetics and who founded a cult called Scientology. The cult literally controls the lives of its members. And what did this cult leader say in his book?

"If you really want to enslave people tell them that you are going to give them total freedom."

Amen. And that's precisely what WOTC is doing. "Oh, you have total freedom in 3E/3.5E/4E! Unlike that clunky AD&D system that was so restrictive and slavish."

Yeah. We can all see where that went. Emasculated DMs who require not one but two DMGs to run their game, and players who are obsessed with obeying the rules. Player who (literally) would write the WOTC forums with posts entitled "EMERGENCY! Need help for game starting in one hour!", and who would then go on to ask "What do the rules say as far as the time it takes to unlace a boot?". I shit you not, this actually was happening there!

One guy suspended his game that night because he could not get an "official" rule on such a silly issue. In fact, several people did that, from what I can remember.

Yup. Total freedom!

Jim did puzzle the hell out of me with one line though...

Fucking hell, it's like someone not wanting to visit China for the Olympics for fear of the fallout from the two atomic bombs that got dropped there during World War II.

We dropped two atomic bombs on China?

I hope that's a typo.

[Zherbus]

It's an awesome blog. I loved it. I have a ton more to say, but lets leave it at:

I have way more fun knowing I survived an actual deadly situation. It's boring to be like, yeah well I'll stack feat X with skill Y and ninja power Q to avoid dying in Lava.

[Halaster Blackcloak]

Zherbus wrote:

It's boring to be like, yeah well I'll stack feat X with skill Y and ninja power Q to avoid dying in Lava.

But Zherbus, you don't need to do all that to survive falling in lava anymore. Get with the times bro! That's so "3E". Now in 4E you can simply fey step out!



Oh man, I think I'm going to have more fun ripping on 4orons than I did on 3etards!

I have way more fun knowing I survived an actual deadly situation.

Exactly! The way I picture 3E/4E is like when kids these days color in a coloring book and they just scribble all over, outside the lines, and the parents/teachers coo "Oh look at the lovely art Johnny did! Look how wonderful it is!". It's training them to be narcissistic, self-indulgent princes and princesses with entitlement attitudes. No need to stay inside the lines! Same idea. No need to take a risk. Oh, look how Johnny slew the dragon. Well duh! When you can fart and heal 4x your total hp 3x/day and ignore damage, well...

[Varl]

That was such an articulate and intelligent blog, I saved it to read again and again. I don't want to sound like Nostradamus here, but this is what a friend and I have been discussing for years, right after the intiial release of 3e. It's sad our predictions are coming true too. I wish we were wrong.

A few of my favorite passages by Jim:

It’s like these people don’t even know that “winning” in role-playing is done simply by enjoying the process of playing the game.

101 stuff here.

The point is if all these things are real and present dangers, then success means more.

Again, you'd think this would be 101 stuff to most people with a brain, but apparently the obvious has eluded corporate.

Some would say that traditional Dungeons and Dragons was poorly designed because first level characters were weak and that there was an uneven playing experience. It never seems to occur to these people that traditional Dungeons and Dragons was designed perfectly and that play experience was intentional. Mentzer’s introduction shows what Dungeons and Dragons is all about, and it’s not flashy heroism. It was never about that until Gygax was removed.

Well said.

As the game was altered through the years, this was lost. I don’t know why it was decided that games sold in the form of number-filled books with fancy vocabulary would appeal more to people that didn’t care to actually read literature, but that’s what happened. Real choice in the manner of game play was lost, or at least obscured and made more difficult to achieve, all the while increasing the options for individual characters… That was a great trick, giving players the illusion of more choice and increasing the detail and complexity of the rules while slapping the handcuffs on the game itself. Brilliant. Fuckers.

My favorite part of his rant is this. It's so true. I laughed (regrettaly) so hard at how true this is.

....and we see that the same people who decried D&D as a hackfest now embrace it for being specifically built as a hackfest.

Sheeple. They go where the company goes, even if it's over a cliff. I bet if they told these sheeple the next incarnation of D&D has APCs and RPGs in it, they'd be giddy about it and asking which classes get to use them.

Hasbro may have a legal claim to the “Dungeons and Dragons” name, but they certainly have no moral claim to it.

True, but unfortunately, moral rights to AD&D are only as useful as one's own front door and gaming table.

Stop acting like we’re guests in their house when it’s the exact opposite.

Good luck switching that paradigm around. These days, they bring junk and horrible-tasting crap foods to our houses and expect us to eat it, all the while saying that if we alter the flavor of the food they bring i any way, it'll no longer be edible food and they'll sue us or send us CNDs until we comply, because their food is the only one that can be eaten. This is why so many of us OOPers want to purge at what the industry is being fed.

We need to make sure our game isn't defined by people who don't like it, we have to be visible and make noise so these people see the earlier versions of the game are being played and are perfectly viable options for them.

It's why we're here.