Who's the individual who has done the most damage to D&D?
Is it Lorraine Williams? Monte Cook? Who's done the most to butcher D&D?
In my opinion it is Cook, 3.X totally changed the game in a really bad way, splitted the community, brought hordes of people who play D&D like it's Diablo and even nowadays most of the problems with 5e are 3.X baggage.
>Is it Lorraine Williams
Despite her best efforts, 2e is regarded to be a good game. 3.5, not so much.
For anyone interested, remember that we currently have a 4e general up! Feel free to talk about 4e and appreciate 4e in that general!
In my honest opinion, Matthew Mercer is contributing more to the downfall of the D&D community than anyone else in history. Not even Monte Cook, not even Lorraine Williams, not even Micheal Merals, not even Gary Gygax himself have done as much damage to D&D. Mercer has made the game palatable to the kind of person who spends his Friday nights playing Cards Against Humanity while slobbering microbrews all over his beard while his wife's son is sleeping in the next room. The kind of moron who thinks mirthful laughter is the end goal of everything, and fails to understand the potential that RPGs have as a fulfilling hobby. Instead, he shits on that creative potential by turning the entire game into a joke, refusing to take anything seriously and making gimmick characters, bringing along his fat girlfriend to make a shitty elf druid character that she hardly roleplays, screeching autistically whenever she rolls a natural 20 because that is the only aspect of the game that her tiny female brain can comprehend, taking copious pictures of the game and posting them to Snapchat and Instagram to show what a geek she is, before getting tired at 11 and tugging at her cuck boyfriend's shoulder so that they both leave and disrupt the immersion even further, because the game doesn't matter to these people at all. It is a mode of entertainment, nothing else. And by entertainment, I mean they consider it nothing more than a Netflix special that they can pause at any time, because it is meant entirely to pander to their enjoyment and make them laugh to cover up how empty their soulless lives are. This hobby used to be full of passionate people who cared about the game and weren't afraid to show it. Now the hobby is being diluted by hordes of casuals who couldn't give a fuck.
I don't consider 4e to be D&D.
4e was more like a hiccup rather than a real D&D edition.
The only problem cook did with 3.x was lack of play testing. Cook made D&D more popular the TSR vould ever have.
Plus this post shows you never played A D&D back in the day because most people already played it like Diablo.
Why are you so insecure?
Okay.
Wow, good to know that 4e is so fucking dead that you morons need to shill your general in other threads.
Look around. Where else on this board do you see crosslinks to a general? I don't think I've seen one yet and I've been browsing Veeky Forums for an hour so far today.
/pfg/ doesn't need to advertise.
/5eg/ doesn't need to advertise.
/osrg/ doesn't need to advertise.
Why? Because people are actually interested in these generals. 4e is the ONLY edition that no one gives a fuck about. Why? Because it's not D&D. It's a MOBA wargame with a few good ideas and a lot of narrativist bullshit that nobody asked for. It's Mearls' pet project that he dropped like a homely girl on prom night. It's a well-designed game, don't get me wrong; in that it does what it sets out to do. But the problem is that what it sets out to do is bad, boring, and incompatible with D&D players' tastes, which, like it or not, was its market. Feel free to hurl all sorts of strawmen at me about "well FINE go back to playing 3.5 where you just full attack every turn" and similar bullshit that isn't even true. Please continue to assume that resource-based martials are the only possible type of martial that would be interesting. And that overly-structured healing and metagame narrative mechanics are what people look for in a D&D game.
But, I really don't need to argue any of that in the end, do I? I just need to point and laugh at the fact that your general (which already has like 100 posts) is so dead that you need to shill it in other threads, something that I don't think I have ever seen for a general on this board. Stop shilling, and get the fuck out.
>Get some new material you fucking hack this copypasta has been out for too damn long.
This post reeks of personal issues.
You should print this off, and take it to a psychologist.
Lol no. AD&D was played much more creatively, with a focus on resource management, avoiding fighting and finding creative solutions.
3.X takes a shit on this, gives you a brick of rules, changes the ability score rationale (from you are either weak, normal or gifted) to the modern -10/2 which limits creativity heavily, changed the inner workings of the game to make it instead of a more Conan like adventure to a "I reach lvl 10 and I am basically a demigod who can kill 10000 orcs because I have 50 AC", trivialised magic with cantrips, destroyed combat, added to the game "expected wealth" (Lol)
Made the game into a badly done computer like game(but in pen and paper), mixed with a bad simulator with the cherry on top of having horrible balance. I can't really express how different 3.X is from OSR or what is really D&D.
(a hint, fapping to your excel sheet of your character built with your 10 non core rule books is not D&D)
It's a pasta, you dip
How does any of that post show that I am insecure? Why is it my fault that the jews at Hasbro are trying to amp up the marketability of D&D by having it pander to a wider audience? Why is it my fault that Matt Mercer and his gang of chucklefucks have decided to capitalize on this for profit, by turning D&D into a comedic spectator sport? A bunch of voice actors playing D&D? What a fucking waste. You can hardly hear any talent they have because they are constantly flaring out the mics with autistic choruses of laughter over some dumb shit that the Vax faggot did. People make memes about their game. They have casualized the game and warped thousands of players' expectations, turned nat20 into such a meme that I can't even stand playing D&D anymore with anyone but the oldest crustied grognards, because despite being weird fucks they at least don't orgasm whenever a 5% chance event occurs. The entire show is mediocre at best. Matt's voice is the only asset he really has as a GM: his descriptions are good but nothing special, and his world is no better than your average fa/tg/uy's worldbuilding project. They don't even do an interesting type of campaign. If it was a west marches or hexcrawl I might actually bother to keep up with at least the session summaries, but it's just your standard "epick fantasy plot railroad in disguise" schlock.
>tfw you unironically kinda agree with this copypasta
Do I need help?
Look at the OP, which uses Monte Cook as a vector to attack 3.PF and 5e. This thread is clearly just another 4e shill thread from the very start, it was just trying to disguise itself.
>This post reeks of personal issues.
What personal issues? I want to hear EXACTLY what personal issues you think I have, with direct quotes from my text, and a logical explanation of why that implies a mental disorder.
Do it. Now.
>If it was a west marches or hexcrawl I might actually bother to keep up with at least the session summaries, but it's just your standard "epick fantasy plot railroad in disguise" schlock.
I know this pasta is designed to offend me, but this part actually did.
Holy fuck.
>west marches campaign is bad because I am a shit player with no personal initiative and all the DMs I've ever had have been shit therefore the campaign concept is shit because it requires a bit of forethought and someone who actually knows what they are doing.
I am 95% sure you don't even know what a West Marches campaign is.
I'm OP
4e is bad
5e is good for what it tried to do, trying to take a bit from every edition and streamline it, the problem it has it took too much from 3.X which is by far the worst edition of this game.
>preferably lower
Not an argument.
If you think agreeing with an opinion about tabletop RPGs on a forum is an indication that you need mental help, then you probably do. Stop taking yourself so seriously.
>This thread is clearly just another 4e shill thread from the very start,
Maybe. But since 4e got thoroughly BTFO by 5e, it doesn't matter. 4e created it's own autistic set of rules for success, succeeded within that framework, then claimed victory. Except, no one likes its core assumptions, and whenever you try to explain this to 4e faggots, they screech about how you are a martialcuck/casterfag and how "3.x causes brain damage" because they can't understand why people don't want to play their shitty wargame.
What I will give 4e, is that it was good for "big damn fantasy heroes" right from the start, fun for that sort of powerwank game. It's also good because it stays the fuck out of the roleplaying. Honestly 4e could have deleted the skill list entirely and it would have been a step in the right direction. But no, now we need 20 skill checks for everything in this goddamn game.
Preferably lower what?
Mearls is the obvious answer, but this guy laid the foundation.
>Wow, good to know that 4e is so fucking dead that you morons need to shill your general in other threads.
Somehow I seriously doubt that's actually a 4e fan.
>This thread is clearly just another 4e shill thread from the very start, it was just trying to disguise itself.
You seem to be seriously jumping at 4e shaped shadows. Monte Cook already got shit thrown at him even during 3.5 days for his ivory tower article.
What Mel Gibson has to do with anything?
It was me, I did it, I wanted to break the system all along.
Probably whatever idiot thought "let's kill our golden goose and go after the WoW crowd". 3.5 is great and 4rries screeching about it on Veeky Forums won't change that.
>
In my opinion it is Cook, 3.X totally changed the game in a really bad way, splitted the community, brought hordes of people who play D&D like it's Diablo and even nowadays most of the problems with 5e are 3.X baggage.
No, I disagree. You're right about 3.x but it was hugely popular, it was a successful update. It brought D&D up-to-date with current RPG trends of the 90s. That's all. It wasn't innovative, it was imitative, like 5E.
But I think the error has been done with 4E. It went in the wrong direction. And it forced 5E to be a pure BACKTRACK EDITION.
>Despite her best efforts, 2e is regarded to be a good game. 3.5, not so much.
It was a decent game for the year 2000/2001.
Because the unpublished novel he tries to pass off as a campaign is shitty
I second the 3.X conclusion, though not sure about the Diablo stuff since iirc older editions your levels were fueled by gold.
Personally I think that poster is (You) trying to start shit with yourself.
I don't. There's sort of this weird life-cycle to it where they pop up in other threads to complain about how unjustly everyone treated 4e, eventually make a general thread, then fade away after nobody really gives a shit about said general thread for a while until it all starts over again
The single biggest issue with D&D are it's roots in Chainmail and all those who that try and reinforce those aspects.
Instead of fantasy stories played out in our imaginations with the help of dice we get wargames and, worse yet, wargamers.
The Chainmail gamer is one who believes that the letter of the rules provides them some sort of foolproof simulation of reality rather than a group abstraction. They fail to understand anything about gaming or improvisation beyond what they can quantify on a character sheet.
I have never met a stat-monkey who wasn't an awful human being with a stunted personality, underdeveloped imagination, and politics of a crypto-fascist.
We need to free ourselves of the wargaming rules and go back to the simple narrativist rules of the Basic Set and the theatre of the mind.
Also the D20 license set back gaming development by at least 10 years by introducing an overly complex bag of situational edge case rules as a cure all for any thought or experimentation.
TheForge should have happened in the 90s. Instead, we got Mongoose.
It's Lorraine Williams.
Under Gygax, TSR produced D&D for a mass audience. From a humble beginning as a niche product for wargamers, the game grew to moving millions of Red Boxes to people for whom "War games" was just a movie about a supercomputer. There were a few pricey hardcovers but the basic strategy was expansion.
Then Williams decided to about-face and drive the hobby into the basement. Production values went up and prices with them. A vast array of expansion products was marketed to the hardcore fan base. (WotC followed the same strategy with much more financial success, but that's an aside.) As a result of Williams' turn, RPGs became associated with weirdos and recluses. On that note,
>hordes of people who play D&D like it's Diablo
Blizzard has probably done the most for D&D since Gygax's TSR. Diablo's success didn't just pave the way to World of Warcraft, it primed the pump for the D20 expansion.
>I have never met a stat-monkey who wasn't an awful human being with a stunted personality, underdeveloped imagination, and politics of a crypto-fascist
I wouldn't go this far, but I'll admit that d20 games do seem to attract this kind of individual. I once had a player who could not stand building anything less that a functionally invincible character. He'd whine and bitch if I banned any splatbooks because that meant fewer chances to powergame. When asked to please cut that shit out, he'd "explain" that he was simply unable to stop himself from optimizing. It was essentially a condition, you see.
>The Chainmail gamer is one who believes that the letter of the rules provides them some sort of foolproof simulation of reality rather than a group abstraction.
Nope, those are the PF/3.5 faggets, this wasn't a problem until they became the norm
>They fail to understand anything about gaming or improvisation beyond what they can quantify on a character sheet.
Yet again, 3.PF faggets
>I have never met a stat-monkey who wasn't an awful human being with a stunted personality, underdeveloped imagination, and politics of a crypto-fascist.
Wut? most of the D&D community are hardcore leftists
>We need to free ourselves of the wargaming rules and go back to the simple narrativist rules of the Basic Set and the theatre of the mind.
>hey guyz chainmail sucks and it is a huge problem
>but the first game, the one that resembles chainmail the most is the worse
>narrativist
as an avid narrativist gamer, no, fuck off. 4E is as much a narrative game as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic or a a republic.
Better to be associated with weirdos. There's no innovation in the mass market, everything is samey to appeal to the most people possible.
The 3.5 hate is a kind of grognard syndrome. As unbalanced as it was, 5e doesn't actually do much to fix it, it's still caster supremacy for the most part. All 5e has going for it is less content, which is a good thing for people who like a small game with only a few roles and less variety. 3.5 has more variety for the type who like a huge variety of shit to help build a setting with, so they're getting alienated by 5e, but these two types of people can't really coexist regardless.
>contains mechanics where you make decisions that your character could not possibly make based on the information available to them
>contains the random happenstance that your character can only do cool disarm move #423 once per day.
Yeah, it's a narrative game. 4e fags even admit this. Just because it isn't FATE doesn't mean it's not a narrativist game.
No. I prefer 3.5 to 5e but 5e has much better rules in a lot of categories.
>size based hit die types
>attack and saves are one number to fix the math
>bounded accuracy (shitty in execution but good in concept)
>action economy is less shit
>dex to damage with ranged weapons
>resistances/immunities/vulnerabilities, and damage type rules, are much better
>conditions are better
>grappling is fixed. It sucks, but it's fixed.
Problem is:
>barely any character options
>feats structure is shit
>ASIs out the ass and hard cap
>spells have been neutered beyond belief (could have just said if you take damage while flying you need to make a save or the spell ends, so fighters can shoot down a flying wizard pretty easily).
>backgrounds system is absolute trash and is just bloat that overcomplicates the system and tries to force roleplaying on idiots who just use it to power game anyway.
And a Ferrari is a computer. It has some relevant bits in it, but they're very slight.
Came in thinking Matt Mercer. Should've stayed with Pathfinder. Promoting D&D sucks, because people will never try anything else and think all RPGs are tactical combatfests.