First, a bit of poetry by our good friend fectin to set the mood.
The shades of night were falling fast,
as through the message board he passed,
a fool with vigor and with vim,
and motto which sustained him:
Ignoratio!
His chin was bare; his beard beneath,
bedraggled as if cheerful wreath,
once full of merry Christmas cheer,
had festered, forgotten, for untold years,
Ignoratio!
In happier games he saw the light,
of well-wrought rules, balanced and tight,
but grumbling grognards urged him on,
and from his lips escaped a groan:
Ignoratio!
"Don't roll fighter," Frank Trollman said.
"A Great Wyrm lingers overhead!
A wizard's needed to fight in the sky!"
Still loud that quarrelsome voice replied:
Ignoratio!
"I'll mount the church-tower; hide inside!
And when that lizard happens by,
jump on him, whilst my army, from below,
fills him with arrows!" (It just goes to show,
Ignoratio!)
A plan, at least, to fell the lizard
(though no plan's needed with a wizard),
Alas fell beastie sees him on the stair,
burns the risers, and traps him there!
Ignoratio!
Oh, curse that evil, agéd genius' guile!
Oh curse the Troll Man's mocking smile!
"It's his fault! Rainman! Somehow I'll prove..
(That's it! I know! I'll use...
Ignoratio!")
The dragon calmly turns about;
the archer army, frightened, routs;
with just one bite, the captain's gone,
leaving grognard all alone.
Ignoratio!
All night long, the city burns.
All night long, the neckbeard yearns
for a warm, mother-like DM,
who'll hide how much he coddles him,
Ignoratio!
But now cold snow is falling fast,
and grognard wishes he had classed
as something with a cold resistance.
Mais non! He's fighter at his own insistence.
Ignoratio!
But now there comes an end at last,
BENOIST is frozen fast!
(His head's still firmly... well, you know)
But hear him yet! He faintly gasps:
Ignoratio!
Following a trip to the dusty corners of the local bookstore, I've been reading quite a lot of KoDT lately. For those not familiar with the comic, it is basically a Seinfeld-esque parody of the social engineering and intricacies of TTRPG gameplay where the main characters (unwittingly) play maladaptive, murderous, willfully ignorant 'heroes' whose behavior would make Lina Inverse blanche. The main TTRPG they play is Hackmaster, which is a full-throated early 2E D&D clone.
While it's currently in vogue to parody the typical TTRPG group as dysfunctional and un-self aware, reading this comic it's not hard to see why it became that way. Even though the artwork is so awful that sprite comics laugh at it, I highly recommend it anyway. The dialogue and humor are brilliant.
So why the fuck am I bringing this up in the first place in the IMHO boards? Well, I have this conjecture, which came to me after reading a parody of the OGL debate. Basically, they have a golden boy visionary working in the ossified upper echelon of the Hard Eight (read: TSR) staff circa Lorraine Williams era who has been churning out gold lately. His latest idea is a word-for-word pitch of the OGL. And he's immediately fired for having the stupidest idea ever. Now while this would normally just come across as just grognard derping to a counter-intuitive idea, Jolly Blackburn is a lot more clever than most TTRPG fanboys
and the magazine in which it was published was at the height of the 3E D&D renaissance at the time. Like, we're talking 2004-2005 when everyone and their mother had their own d20 OGL heartbreaker. Hell, even kenzerco had more than their share of rip-off advertisements and articles on the phenomenon.
Since KotD is very unashamedly set in the 2E D&D era, that actually made me think that the comic was making a scathing criticism of the edition and the game. So I went back to earlier comics for evidence to support my hypothesis. And there's quite a wealth of evidence. The comic mocks the mentality shown in
the Stealth Buffing Thread left and right. The gamers are shown to be kvetching continually about how
their era of gaming was awesome and hardcore but are shown to be whiny and gladhanding in actual sessions. Bad roleplaying and people pretending that their bad roleplaying is the tits forms the basis of a ton of jokes. And most interestingly of all was when Bob Hertzog's dad got to sit in on a session of Cattlepunk and told his son point blank that he thought his son's and Brian's character were a gutless, evil toad despite how he plays his character like that in almost every game while being barely called out on it.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that KoDT is actually satire (there's too much affection behind some of the tomfoolery for it to be so) but I think it's pretty strong evidence of a barb and a message behind its jokes. That message being: 'TTRPGs are pretty all right, but it wasn't that great. Unless you're willing to go into the depths of social depravity, it's not really the best way to spend your life.' While
2E D&D Hackmaster isn't the only game that the characters in that comic play, it is the backbone of interactions in that comic. And honestly a lot of the social intricacies the comics' parodies are dependent on (loot-whoring, death-no-saves, rule and setting bloat, DM vs. PCs, even many of the rule quirks) are 2nd-edition dependent. So even if you think that the message that Jolly is trying to give can exist without criticizing 2E D&D per se, to me that's like saying Catch-22 didn't
have to take place in WW2.
So Dragon dragons were off the scale compared to others? I rarely looked at anything in the Dragon Bestiary for other than inspiration. Don't feel like re-installing the archive right now to look them up either. But those shouldn't be called "Old" dragons.
