The Gaming Den

Koumei wrote:Actually, Frank and I have been talking, and will specifically review 3Ed 40k. Obviously it'll take some time.

While 3e WH40k is probably a high-water mark for the franchise rules-quality, it wasn't like 3e didn't have any issues. I wonder what ideas in 3e were bad, as well as the overall good the edition achieved by trying to become less of an RPG and more of a Wargame.

The rules changes in 3e for Fragmentation grenades are one thing that gave me quite a few cases of cognitive dissonance. My units could no longer throw them for blast radius attacks; and grenades now were strictly a way to even the Initiative odds when charging fortifications. Which, iirc, isn't precisely how fragmentation grenades are often used. While meant as an anti-fortification arm for infantry, grenades tend to be used as "replacements" for going into a trench or bunker oneself and shooting/bayoneting those inside. While the depiction in 3e's rules is that of an "augmentation" to HtH combat against fortified enemies.

AH, any chance of you reviewing Guide to the Sabbat? You've brought it up in the Guide to the Technocracy review.

Which edition?

Ancient History wrote:Which edition?

Whichever you think is more horrible?

...that's a hard decision.

2e horrible is kind of endearing; 3e horrible is nauseating. Pick your poison.

Mord wrote:2e horrible is kind of endearing; 3e horrible is nauseating. Pick your poison.

... Guide to the Sabbat vs. Guide to the Sabbat?

Longes wrote:

Mord wrote:2e horrible is kind of endearing; 3e horrible is nauseating. Pick your poison.

... Guide to the Sabbat vs. Guide to the Sabbat?

Yea. Having read both (and having both in my library right now), I can say Tthe 2e GttS is kind of endearing to me because it was a legit attempt to expand the Vampire world to a new play style. The content in this book consists of mainly new ideas written by people who had passion for the game and the concept. The content is pretty bad, yes, but the enthusiasm behind it is palpable and I find it hard to dislike on that basis.

The 3e GttS suffers from the same problem as most Vampire 3e material, which is that the overall direction has crawled up its own ass and forgotten to give anyone a reason to care. This would have been tolerable if any of the mechanics were actually better than the previous edition, but 3e takes the same broken horseshit and strips out the passion without adding anything by way of new ideas or a reason to give a shit.

The only memorable part of 3e GttS to me is the sidebar where they explictly disavow Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand. Say whatever else you will about DSotBH; at least someone involved was really excited about it. Vampire 2e had a zeitgeist that embraced this kind of thing and went with it, while Vampire 3e sits back and snidely makes fun of it in a fruitless attempt to seem more 'adult' and 'cool' about the notion of playing pretend.

V20 recanonized the soul-eaters by the way. In their own shitty Black Hand book.

Frank and I will do Guide to the Sabbat 2E.

Maybe a OSSR of 1e/2e/3e SR? Since we have an "Drunk Review: SR 5e" I think it may be interesting to go over one of the Old-School SR Corebooks and see how they have held up, maybe with explanations of the history behind it. I at least would be interested in it.

I'm putting in a request for 2E Drow of the Underdark. I honestly thought I already had, but I can't find it.

Game On,
fbmf

I'd like to hear someone's take on Underground (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergrou ... ying_game)). Never got to read/play it myself, but I was always fascinated by the adds for it in Dragon when I was a kid.

Trill wrote:Maybe a OSSR of 1e/2e/3e SR? Since we have an "Drunk Review: SR 5e" I think it may be interesting to go over one of the Old-School SR Corebooks and see how they have held up, maybe with explanations of the history behind it. I at least would be interested in it.

I too would be very interested in this.

Less a request, more a curiosity.

Why was Ravenloft 3e published by a third party?

codeGlaze wrote:Less a request, more a curiosity.

Why was Ravenloft 3e published by a third party?

Sword & Sorcery w/ Arthaus printed an 'official licensed product' from Wizards of the Coast - Dungeons and Dragons Campaign Setting: Ravenloft Core Rulebook. It clocks in at 221 numbered pages (including the Index).

Authors: Andrew Cermak, John W Mangrum and Andrew Wyatt
Additional Playtesting: Biscuit, Jeff Cisneros, Adam Garret, Jess Heinig, Virginie Lagrange, Nick Peretta, Colic Stuck and Ian Stuck.
Developer: Kelly Jester
Editor: Jeanee Ledoux
Art Director: Richard Thomas
Layout and Typesetting: Ron Thompson
Interior Artists: Leanne Buckley, Mike Chaney, Talon Dunning, Anthony Hightower, Jeff Holt, Steve Prescott and Richard Thomas
Front and Back Cover Designer:Ron Thompson

Anything specific you want to know about it?

Edit - I'm sorry - I completely misread your question. I thought you asked if it was published by a 3rd party, not WHY.

It was an officially licensed product, so someone paid them a bucket of money for the right to print it themselves. Since they were worried about 'fracturing the base' with too many game worlds, they didn't want to publish it themselves. Presumably the amount of money offered was enough that they felt it was better to allow this than for the authors to file off the serial numbers and publish 'Crowsroost'.

codeGlaze wrote:Less a request, more a curiosity.

Why was Ravenloft 3e published by a third party?

Popular consensus at the beginning of 3rd edition was that 2nd edition AD&D had shat the bed by attempting to support too many settings at the same time. The 3rd edition team made a hard commitment to not support all the fringe settings of 2nd edition first party. No more Spelljammer, no more Planescape, no more Maztica, no more Birthright, and so on and so on.

One of the genius moves of this was that when they did it, they pointedly did not say that everyone needed to stop playing those settings and opened them up to 3rd parties to develop. Hence the Planescape and Darksun fan communities made their own thingies and that was totes OK.

White Wolf of course got their start when the Dot Meister got inspired to incorporate Ravenloft into Ars Magica 1999. So White Wolf was filled with Ravenloft fans and when they found out that Ravenloft was literally up for grabs they jumped on it. And they put out a bunch of Ravenloft shovelware under their S&S imprint.

-Username17

3e Dragonlance happened in much the same way. Mostly to get Weiss' name attached to it, I suspect.

It had the dubious distinction of including a sorcerer type cleric class (the Mystic), which made no fucking sense for DL at all, which is a new low even for such a shit setting.


I wonder what the current rationale is for not doing other settings- they're pretty firmly entrenched in only talking about the 'Sword Coast' area of the Forgotten Realms, even shoving the reprints of old Greyhawk modules in there. (Tales of the Yawning Portal)

Voss wrote:3e Dragonlance happened in much the same way. Mostly to get Weiss' name attached to it, I suspect.

It had the dubious distinction of including a sorcerer type cleric class (the Mystic), which made no fucking sense for DL at all, which is a new low even for such a shit setting.

This is not a defense of the Dragonlance setting. In so much as people liked the setting, they liked the 'War of the Lance' period. The 3e books cover time after that when divine magic has returned to the world. That setting basically has all the problems that the new Star Wars movies has - you've already won but for the story to continue a shittier Darth Vader and a shittier Empire has to continue the fight. So yeah, you get divine magic and things that make Dragonlance not Dragonlance, but you're still fighting the same war against the already defeated remnants of the evil forces.

Voss wrote: I wonder what the current rationale is for not doing other settings- they're pretty firmly entrenched in only talking about the 'Sword Coast' area of the Forgotten Realms, even shoving the reprints of old Greyhawk modules in there. (Tales of the Yawning Portal)

I think it's a combination of it requiring actual work and risking not making back their publishing costs. If they spend $10 million and make $15 million, that'd probably be good, but if they spend $10 million and make $5 million, that would be bad. If they spend $250k and make $1 million (which is probably about how things are working now) they can continue indefinitely. If they don't risk anything, they can't lose!

deaddmwalking wrote:This is not a defense of the Dragonlance setting. In so much as people liked the setting, they liked the 'War of the Lance' period. The 3e books cover time after that when divine magic has returned to the world. That setting basically has all the problems that the new Star Wars movies has - you've already won but for the story to continue a shittier Darth Vader and a shittier Empire has to continue the fight. So yeah, you get divine magic and things that make Dragonlance not Dragonlance, but you're still fighting the same war against the already defeated remnants of the evil forces.

Didn't the war of the lance end with a stalemate rather than a victory? Something about restoring the balance, IIRC.

Or did some of their much later material finally end things?

I haven't read that much, but I thought it was supposed to be a victory. There was some 'Time of the Twins' stuff that I think I recall where Raistlin defeats Takhisis but then learns that's bad (ruling over a dead world) so he doesn't do that.

From Wikipedia:

The six Heroes of the Lance march to fight against Verminaard, the lord of the draconians, and the Dark Goddess; the heroes ultimately prevail with the just-forged Dragonlance.[1]

End of the war[edit]
Fizban reveals he is in fact Paladine, and that the gods never left Krynn, but instead it was the people who abandoned the gods. The War of the Lance officially ended in the year 353 AC.

But in reading more it does seem that Kitiana is set up as the next big-bad with the 'blue dragon army'. Honestly I don't know (or care enough), but I had a friend that was pretty crazy into Dragonlance and I have a bunch of books. I just recall the post-Lance world to be a real let-down. It's extra grim-dark because winning doesn't mean winning.

Trill wrote:Maybe a OSSR of 1e/2e/3e SR? Since we have an "Drunk Review: SR 5e" I think it may be interesting to go over one of the Old-School SR Corebooks and see how they have held up, maybe with explanations of the history behind it. I at least would be interested in it.

I'd like to put another vote toward this. My introduction to Shadowrun was the Sega Genesis video game, which is "based on" 3E 2E SR the same way Baldur's Gate is "based on" 2E AD&D. I actually got to play a few games of SR4, and fucking loved it (our table solution to the Matrix was to have everyone take a Hacker contact and pretend cybersecurity didn't exist), and we've all seen Frank's rants on how Catalyst screwed the pooch on the update, but I'd like to see a take on how the earlier editions stood on their own, before smartphones or even PDAs were things that real people in line at Starbucks owned.

EDIT: New information

There's an old 3E book called Tournaments, Fairs, & Taverns, by Natural 20 Press, that I'd like to see an OSSR of.

Zaranthan wrote:

Trill wrote:Maybe a OSSR of 1e/2e/3e SR? Since we have an "Drunk Review: SR 5e" I think it may be interesting to go over one of the Old-School SR Corebooks and see how they have held up, maybe with explanations of the history behind it. I at least would be interested in it.

I'd like to put another vote toward this. My introduction to Shadowrun was the Sega Genesis video game, which is "based on" 3E SR the same way Baldur's Gate is "based on" 2E AD&D.

SR 2nd edition was '92, SNES game came out in '93, SEGA game came out in '94, SR3 came out in '98.

My mistake, the person who introduced me to SR tabletop told me that and I took them at their word.