dev_chieftain (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dev_chieftain) wrote2012-01-10 11:55 am
dev_chieftain) wrote2012-01-10 11:55 am
D&D tonight
Tonight is more AD&D! I'm looking forward to it. Last week we started to kinda-sorta maybe get our focus back. (We've been too silly to actually do much for several weeks). This week, who knows! Perhaps we shall continue. We had returned to our ship and were about to leave port, but I don't know what the rest of the party wants to do once we reach it. We have to decide whether we're going to let the anti-magic rod fall into Bishop Dinta's hands, and more or less we need to decide if we care enough about the Sulaftan religion to just go find the true Speaker of Sulafta or whatnot. If we bring that person to the capital and put the crown on him/her, I imagine that would at least put an end to this nonsense from the bishops.
We also need to figure out if we're going to go try to evict that gold dragon from our island. Having learned that that elf and her cleric have gone off to try to do so makes me leery of going there. Either we'll find elf and cleric corpses-- which would be okay, I suppose-- or they'll have bested the dragon, in which case there would be no living with them, and Llewain and Esra both would have to wear the most displeased of faces.
I posted an update at Tabletop about the recent announcement that Wizards is developing 5th edition. Maybe check it out if you're at all interested?
We have been watching more of DS9 season 7. It's really disappointing, somehow, to see how much clumsier the writing staff was after ST:NG ended. Too many chefs, definitely; and in some ways, maybe they were starting to get tired of the show, because there are just so many more generic lines and ideas being trod here. The Sisko-was-born-of-a-prophet plot was very annoying, but it was less annoying when the prophet pointed out that Sisko hallucinating the 50's Earth "reality" was a trick by the Pah Wraiths. I hate the Pah Wraiths because they're silly; I hate the hackneyed suggestion that nothing fantastic can ever actually happen, so if someone is seeing something fantastic, they're secretly a mental patient somewhere. (For the best take on this boring idea, see Twelve Monkeys, which makes it interesting; for the same old, same old in order of best descending to worst, see the DS9 take on it, Shutter Island, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sucker Punch. These are just things I can easily name that have done this in the exact same way; what's depressing about it is, like so many contemporary composers, each new writer seems to think he or she is treading some exciting new ground and doing things NO ONE has ever done before.)
Even with all this grouchiness, however, I am enjoying it and I do still like the show. Avery Brooks is still in it! I'd have to say my feelings on the characters have changed a lot, though:
Season One: I liked Sisko, Odo and Quark best. Jadzia was close to my heart too, and while Bashir was embarrassingly nerdy, he's MY kind of embarrassingly nerdy, so I loved him anyway. Kira drove me crazy, and I didn't realize at first how much I'd love O'Brien. Very quickly, I really, really loved him! I liked Jake okay, and Nog was fun from time to time, but Rom in season one is actually totally different from later, inexplicably no-longer sexist Rom-- so I didn't like him originally.
Season Four: I loved the entire main cast, with the notable exception of Worf, whose interloper status was only exacerbated by his ham-handed romance plot with Jadzia. The upside: they didn't get together for quite some time. The downside: Good god, Worf, why are you SUCH A JERK.
Season Five: Odo is destroyed. The Changeling plot completely alters his character and he does some things I just cannot forgive him for, for no good reason. Worse, Kira DOES forgive him, all because the writers in season six eventually decided to put Kira and Odo together instead of maintain the unrequited romance. I regret that they did. I love Kira; but Odo becomes a shadow of himself in later seasons, and that's depressing. On the upside, Worf is becoming more tolerable by this point, Martok is added-- Martok is AWESOME-- and I still love the rest of the main cast.
Season Seven: Really don't like Odo, but everyone else is still more-or-less intact. With shadow-Odo who is now in lurve, Quark suffers a bit. Their banter about each other and with each other heavily defined them. Now the writers are all jonesing for romance, so Quark is unusually fixated on Jadzia as 'the one who got away'. It doesn't fit, as Jadzia was by no means the love of Quark's life, and he normally has more fun teasing people more entertaining than Bashir. Worf is back to being a dick because of what happened to Jadzia-- not my favorite choice-- but it doesn't look like it'll last. And Ezri. How do I feel about Ezri? I want to like her, but she's awful a lot of the time. The writers hadn't had enough of "female character tries hard, but gets pushed around by big charismatic characters tougher than her, cries, and feels emotionally weak"? Because that was what I hated about early Jadzia plots, and now it's back WITHOUT any chance of "Haha, but I love Klingon stuff so whatever!" later on. Ezri is cute, but I feel like cute has no place on DS9, and going through the motions of "oh, I'm going to leave, REALLY" when it's patently obvious she's going to stay seems a little silly. I love Kira, but the new hair is weird.
Major highlights so far: The wormhole reopens, validating Kira's defense against the Romulans, and she gets this huge smile on her face. I lean over to Danny: There'll be no living with her now. He says, laughing, Never give Bajorans religious hope! They'll be unstoppable!
The most terrible exchange ever: Ezri and Bashir are sitting down and talking. He is clearly grieving for Jadzia-- misses her-- and says, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you have Jadzia's eyes, it's really quite remarkable."
Ezri tells him not to flirt with her. (He wasn't.) Because she couldn't handle it if he did. (Oh boy, how subtle.)
Then she says the worst thing any thinking creature could ever say to anyone: "If Worf hadn't come along, it would have been you."
The only acceptable thing about this exchange was Bashir's expression of horror, because wow. That is just. AWFUL.
Worse, then Worf comes to threaten to kill Bashir for 'dishonoring' Jadzia's memory. Bully!
Edit: Going to add my personal thoughts about 5E here. I'd put 'em on the comm, but I really want that to be a place of discussion and not just me soapboxing at kindly strangers.
The thing about this announcement is, I just can't decide where I stand on it. On the one hand, I'm always happy to see new games and play tabletop in new ways, at least just to try it. I feel like WotC is just giving up on 4E, and for the most part, I don't feel like the people who determine the market understand the product. A big reason people are capable of playing and enjoying the previous versions of D&D even now without needing a new edition is that those versions have nostalgic value, on top of being totally viable games. I'd like to see WotC move towards a more friendly attitude with regards to their consumers.
Instead of treating us like these skittish cash cows they're trying to milk for every dollar, why can't they offer us a variety of D&D products in a way that doesn't bank on selling 40$ books? (40$ US-- I shudder to think how expensive that purchase is in, say, Australia, which I have on good authority suffers some pretty shitty markup). The thing is, having picked up AD&D, even though I liked 4E (which puts me in the minority, I know), I feel that D&D's biggest problem is that the industry is SO tight-knit, everybody assumes we all already know what they're talking about.
WotC's biggest problem with the game is that it's clearly not bringing in enough new players to make their acceptable profit margins. It's fair to assume they want to gain new players of D&D as much as possible, but I feel like nobody's going about it the right way. The attitude of D&D 3.5 and 4 was a bit more 'you know the deal, I don't need to explain what a fantasy world contains, pick dwarf elf or human, your class, okay let's go'.
The thing is, people who've never played D&D, and people who've never researched mideval history, do not know what the fantasy world is meant to contain. Children especially are not going to know what to expect, and giving them a streamlined set of rules (which I find are often stifling to the imagination of players, speaking as one who has definitely been stifled before) is destructive to the playing experience. It's one thing to add products to the D&D market. I could see WotC doing really well if they marketed D&D board games, were willing to print and sell D&D of every edition (which would be a much less aggressive stance, and encourage buyer loyalty because it does not try to erase the previous versions of the game from history), and sold the miniatures, models, dungeon tiles and so on as a supplementary thing to this hobby. I don't really understand what makes them choose not to do that, actually, because selling NO product is a lot worse than selling OLD product, isn't it?
One of the really big selling points of D&D for people is nostalgia, especially people who learned the game on an earlier edition. For me, I learned 3.5 and hated it-- HATED it!-- and when 4th Edition came out, I was really excited to have the chance to come into the game with exactly as much knowledge of the rules as everyone else. Later on, having learned more about AD&D and just plain old D&D, it's pretty hard to pick a favorite. Each edition has some things I like, and some I don't. The really tough thing about the tabletop experience is finding a group of people who want a similar experience to what I want out of it. That has absolutely no bearing on what books get bought, though, so in that sense WotC is out of luck. The product by definition depends on imagination and friendship to be worthwhile; in that sense, I feel a new edition is a waste of R&D that could be spent improving the old one.
If the old editions were reprinted and sold, however-- maybe even as Print on Demand books, who knows-- then the new edition would be wholly optional. People coming in to D&D for the first time would be able to try the newest one if they wanted, or look at the source if they preferred. (There are benefits to both approaches. Gygax's writing in the older books is whimsical and fun, but intentionally circuitous in a way that can be infuriating for a new player with a seemingly simple question to which there is ultimately no definite answer. 4th Edition books are great for being very straightforward, compared to their predecessors.) When the new edition is optional, it feels like the company is genuinely seeking to improve the product. When the new edition is the only edition, it feels like the company is being greedy, and just trying to capitalize on the control they have over the product by trying to force buyers to continue buying ONLY from them. That attitude, more than anything, is what makes me lean more towards Paizo than WotC.
We also need to figure out if we're going to go try to evict that gold dragon from our island. Having learned that that elf and her cleric have gone off to try to do so makes me leery of going there. Either we'll find elf and cleric corpses-- which would be okay, I suppose-- or they'll have bested the dragon, in which case there would be no living with them, and Llewain and Esra both would have to wear the most displeased of faces.
I posted an update at Tabletop about the recent announcement that Wizards is developing 5th edition. Maybe check it out if you're at all interested?
We have been watching more of DS9 season 7. It's really disappointing, somehow, to see how much clumsier the writing staff was after ST:NG ended. Too many chefs, definitely; and in some ways, maybe they were starting to get tired of the show, because there are just so many more generic lines and ideas being trod here. The Sisko-was-born-of-a-prophet plot was very annoying, but it was less annoying when the prophet pointed out that Sisko hallucinating the 50's Earth "reality" was a trick by the Pah Wraiths. I hate the Pah Wraiths because they're silly; I hate the hackneyed suggestion that nothing fantastic can ever actually happen, so if someone is seeing something fantastic, they're secretly a mental patient somewhere. (For the best take on this boring idea, see Twelve Monkeys, which makes it interesting; for the same old, same old in order of best descending to worst, see the DS9 take on it, Shutter Island, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sucker Punch. These are just things I can easily name that have done this in the exact same way; what's depressing about it is, like so many contemporary composers, each new writer seems to think he or she is treading some exciting new ground and doing things NO ONE has ever done before.)
Even with all this grouchiness, however, I am enjoying it and I do still like the show. Avery Brooks is still in it! I'd have to say my feelings on the characters have changed a lot, though:
Season One: I liked Sisko, Odo and Quark best. Jadzia was close to my heart too, and while Bashir was embarrassingly nerdy, he's MY kind of embarrassingly nerdy, so I loved him anyway. Kira drove me crazy, and I didn't realize at first how much I'd love O'Brien. Very quickly, I really, really loved him! I liked Jake okay, and Nog was fun from time to time, but Rom in season one is actually totally different from later, inexplicably no-longer sexist Rom-- so I didn't like him originally.
Season Four: I loved the entire main cast, with the notable exception of Worf, whose interloper status was only exacerbated by his ham-handed romance plot with Jadzia. The upside: they didn't get together for quite some time. The downside: Good god, Worf, why are you SUCH A JERK.
Season Five: Odo is destroyed. The Changeling plot completely alters his character and he does some things I just cannot forgive him for, for no good reason. Worse, Kira DOES forgive him, all because the writers in season six eventually decided to put Kira and Odo together instead of maintain the unrequited romance. I regret that they did. I love Kira; but Odo becomes a shadow of himself in later seasons, and that's depressing. On the upside, Worf is becoming more tolerable by this point, Martok is added-- Martok is AWESOME-- and I still love the rest of the main cast.
Season Seven: Really don't like Odo, but everyone else is still more-or-less intact. With shadow-Odo who is now in lurve, Quark suffers a bit. Their banter about each other and with each other heavily defined them. Now the writers are all jonesing for romance, so Quark is unusually fixated on Jadzia as 'the one who got away'. It doesn't fit, as Jadzia was by no means the love of Quark's life, and he normally has more fun teasing people more entertaining than Bashir. Worf is back to being a dick because of what happened to Jadzia-- not my favorite choice-- but it doesn't look like it'll last. And Ezri. How do I feel about Ezri? I want to like her, but she's awful a lot of the time. The writers hadn't had enough of "female character tries hard, but gets pushed around by big charismatic characters tougher than her, cries, and feels emotionally weak"? Because that was what I hated about early Jadzia plots, and now it's back WITHOUT any chance of "Haha, but I love Klingon stuff so whatever!" later on. Ezri is cute, but I feel like cute has no place on DS9, and going through the motions of "oh, I'm going to leave, REALLY" when it's patently obvious she's going to stay seems a little silly. I love Kira, but the new hair is weird.
Major highlights so far: The wormhole reopens, validating Kira's defense against the Romulans, and she gets this huge smile on her face. I lean over to Danny: There'll be no living with her now. He says, laughing, Never give Bajorans religious hope! They'll be unstoppable!
The most terrible exchange ever: Ezri and Bashir are sitting down and talking. He is clearly grieving for Jadzia-- misses her-- and says, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you have Jadzia's eyes, it's really quite remarkable."
Ezri tells him not to flirt with her. (He wasn't.) Because she couldn't handle it if he did. (Oh boy, how subtle.)
Then she says the worst thing any thinking creature could ever say to anyone: "If Worf hadn't come along, it would have been you."
The only acceptable thing about this exchange was Bashir's expression of horror, because wow. That is just. AWFUL.
Worse, then Worf comes to threaten to kill Bashir for 'dishonoring' Jadzia's memory. Bully!
Edit: Going to add my personal thoughts about 5E here. I'd put 'em on the comm, but I really want that to be a place of discussion and not just me soapboxing at kindly strangers.
The thing about this announcement is, I just can't decide where I stand on it. On the one hand, I'm always happy to see new games and play tabletop in new ways, at least just to try it. I feel like WotC is just giving up on 4E, and for the most part, I don't feel like the people who determine the market understand the product. A big reason people are capable of playing and enjoying the previous versions of D&D even now without needing a new edition is that those versions have nostalgic value, on top of being totally viable games. I'd like to see WotC move towards a more friendly attitude with regards to their consumers.
Instead of treating us like these skittish cash cows they're trying to milk for every dollar, why can't they offer us a variety of D&D products in a way that doesn't bank on selling 40$ books? (40$ US-- I shudder to think how expensive that purchase is in, say, Australia, which I have on good authority suffers some pretty shitty markup). The thing is, having picked up AD&D, even though I liked 4E (which puts me in the minority, I know), I feel that D&D's biggest problem is that the industry is SO tight-knit, everybody assumes we all already know what they're talking about.
WotC's biggest problem with the game is that it's clearly not bringing in enough new players to make their acceptable profit margins. It's fair to assume they want to gain new players of D&D as much as possible, but I feel like nobody's going about it the right way. The attitude of D&D 3.5 and 4 was a bit more 'you know the deal, I don't need to explain what a fantasy world contains, pick dwarf elf or human, your class, okay let's go'.
The thing is, people who've never played D&D, and people who've never researched mideval history, do not know what the fantasy world is meant to contain. Children especially are not going to know what to expect, and giving them a streamlined set of rules (which I find are often stifling to the imagination of players, speaking as one who has definitely been stifled before) is destructive to the playing experience. It's one thing to add products to the D&D market. I could see WotC doing really well if they marketed D&D board games, were willing to print and sell D&D of every edition (which would be a much less aggressive stance, and encourage buyer loyalty because it does not try to erase the previous versions of the game from history), and sold the miniatures, models, dungeon tiles and so on as a supplementary thing to this hobby. I don't really understand what makes them choose not to do that, actually, because selling NO product is a lot worse than selling OLD product, isn't it?
One of the really big selling points of D&D for people is nostalgia, especially people who learned the game on an earlier edition. For me, I learned 3.5 and hated it-- HATED it!-- and when 4th Edition came out, I was really excited to have the chance to come into the game with exactly as much knowledge of the rules as everyone else. Later on, having learned more about AD&D and just plain old D&D, it's pretty hard to pick a favorite. Each edition has some things I like, and some I don't. The really tough thing about the tabletop experience is finding a group of people who want a similar experience to what I want out of it. That has absolutely no bearing on what books get bought, though, so in that sense WotC is out of luck. The product by definition depends on imagination and friendship to be worthwhile; in that sense, I feel a new edition is a waste of R&D that could be spent improving the old one.
If the old editions were reprinted and sold, however-- maybe even as Print on Demand books, who knows-- then the new edition would be wholly optional. People coming in to D&D for the first time would be able to try the newest one if they wanted, or look at the source if they preferred. (There are benefits to both approaches. Gygax's writing in the older books is whimsical and fun, but intentionally circuitous in a way that can be infuriating for a new player with a seemingly simple question to which there is ultimately no definite answer. 4th Edition books are great for being very straightforward, compared to their predecessors.) When the new edition is optional, it feels like the company is genuinely seeking to improve the product. When the new edition is the only edition, it feels like the company is being greedy, and just trying to capitalize on the control they have over the product by trying to force buyers to continue buying ONLY from them. That attitude, more than anything, is what makes me lean more towards Paizo than WotC.