2 posts tagged “nerd”

#00001  It's Considered the Standard RPG

Can you imagine if when someone discovered the potato, he created fries and then everyone decided that was the only food that could be made out of potatoes, french fries, homestyle fries, salted fries, twisty fries, crinkle fries... that's it.

That's how I feel about the modern computer RPG's.  I acknowledge that Gary Gyjax was a pioneer, but 25 years after he developed D&D, modern computer RPG's are unable to move beyond some of his most rudimentary and simplistic designs even when it's obvious that a variant would serve their purposes better.  D&D is always level-based, it is always Tolkeenesque, which I find quite absurd.  Can you imagine if all science fiction writing had to include Romulans and Vulcans to be accepted as a viable Sci-fi space setting?  So why does every fantasy setting have to include Orc's and Elves?  Sure, they're fine as ideas go, but there's no rule anywhere that says that every fucking fantasy setting has to have them, it's just that one series of games that only a tiny portion of the world ever played plagiarized them from one author, and they're suddenly considered the standard, anything else just wouldn't survive as a fantasy concept in the computer gaming world.

There were games invented that have succeeded that aren't level based, they don't have elves and dwarves and orcs, they don't have rolled stats and they are actually playable without banning a certain class from play, or needing a dozen house rules just so things make sense.  But for some reason these ideas get tossed by the wayside in favor of the same old Tolkeenesque, clunky level-based concepts with no consistency in the rules, or grounding in reality.

So that's the first reason I don't like D&D.

But this isn't one of them!!!