fectin wrote:Wait, what? 4E is like TORG?!
Yes. Bill S worked with TORG and 4th, and BOTH have the premise "
cinematic multi-genre role-playing game", or at least were designed to be that way.
read TORG once, so VERY unfamiliar as to how it turned out, but that is not the point.
Yeah LW owned Buck Rogers at the time Gary found out the Blumes had run TSR into $1.5 million into debt, and Gary asked Flint if he could set up a meeting with his granddaughter to try to gain her as an investment before the Blumes sold TSR to another company, like LW eventually did to WotC, and Adkinson did with WotC to HASBRO.
Buck Rogers is jsut a speck on the argument I was making though because how, as Frank reminds people, closely involved with sci-fi LW was being the granddaughter of the creator of the Buck Rogers IP (others contributed but Flint came up with the main concept, modern day man hurdled into the future and now has to live through it and figure out history and try to make it home). At the time Gary sought Lorraine, she already controlled the Dille Estate, including Buck Rogers.
So Bill's love for sci-fi and LW owning a big old sci-fi property, gave them a close relationship in terms of interests. Bill mostly worked on sci-fi style games (
Alternity, TORG, Star Wars by WEG, etc), and showed little to no love for medieval fantasy, similar to LW's disdain for the customers of TSR (obviously because they werent worshiping sci-fi and her grandpa but a Tolkienesque genre), so Bill being gone is GOOD for D&D. removes one of the final remnants of LW, and removes someone from D&D that didnt even seen to like D&D, a medieval fantasy, sword and sorcery, game.
EDIT: Flint Dille, was a newspaper baron that bought the rights to Buck, and adapted it. so where i miswrote Dille created it, he just put it into syndication with help of a writer and artist to draw it. which makes LW an even bigger bitch like Disney of today, or anyplace that claims ownership of its authors works and gives the author no rights (which is what copyright was designed for to protect the creators rights for a short time, not forbid anyone from ever using some businesses property that they have the rights to DISTRIBUTE.)
this ENTIRE BUCK ROGERS thing was spawned from this (to remind people):
FrankT wrote:CCarter wrote:So my disgust is pretty much beyond words but I suppose I should try.
Where is he getting this shit from? Someone should tell Mearls that
Alternity captured 4% of RPG market share back in the 90s, up against brilliantly engineered (not) games like 2nd Edition and Amazing Engine, and then died the horrible death it deserved. He should have enough dumpsters to rummage through with 1E, 2E, 3E and 4E without using that one.
The head author of Alternity (Bill Slavicsek) was mysteriously still working at WotC with some sort of fancy title and writing their Ampersand columns until June of last year. So it's to be understood that there are still probably a pile of Alternity-style ideas sitting on the desk. Especially since Mike Mearls got Bill Slavicsek's desk and presumably all the Alternity notes that were sitting on it.
So i am guessing Mearls using a mechanic similar to something found in Alternity is what starter it all due to some sort of "expertise mechanic" that resembles "expertise dice" in DDN. THEN Frank reminding that Mearls took over Bill's job, and with NDAs and contract agreements, it means Bill's gaming notes ALL belonged to WotC/HASBRO, so Mearls could be using them to carry on forward with 5th. because as well ALL know, Mearls couldnt design a game, let alone lead other in designing one.
which is probably the REAL reason behind the public playtest. not to emulate pathfinder and gain popularity by mimicry, or to appease the gaming public; but simply because Mearls has no idea how to design a game, and showed with 4th how little he understands about D&D (read L&L articles, as well Wrecan's blog about said articles about the lead designers of 4th). So Mearls is grasping at straws just to keep his job, because WotC will be the LAST job he ever gets in game design, unless he returns to.. well whatever the hell he was doing before being hired by WotC in 2005.
