Jeremy Mac Donald's page

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

My only problem with the article is that it's a touchy-feely mess. "I felt the need to write an article saying that we shouldn't dislike people because they're different", and the idea that his article is some kind of clarion call of rationality and sanity. He was brave enough to write a three page article pointing out that the biggest religions have passages calling us to love each other. I'm sorry, I live what he's preaching every day. My church that I attend 3-4 days a week has a celebrate recovery service to help people suffering from any kind of addiction be it sex, drugs, abuse, etc. I serve food to the homeless and needy every week, and my best personal friend other than my black wife is my transgendered homosexual buddy Dom, and while i appreciate the sentiment of the article, I think it was insipid and uninspired repetition of points I've either made or heard made everywhere from Saturday morning specials to friggin cable news reports.

I agree with and live what he's writing about, but I read the thing and found it dull and obvious, sorry I'm not jumping on the bandwagon to say how wonderful the article is for pointing out that the sky is blue and wind is windy.

In video game terms Pathfinder is a complex strategy game like the Civilization series, many layered, a bit complex, perhaps not as easy to just pick up and go, but rewarding and re-playable.

4E is a first person shooter, easy to pick up, very straightforward and a lot of fun, but...well...you are here to basically do one thing, aren't you.

I said from the beginning that 4e was created for computer integration, with simplification and equalization following the classic Diablo/WoW chain.

And people like those things.

But once you get tired of hack and slash...well...don't we all pull out Civ?

See, these folks tend to bother me much more than those who are just frothing at the mouth and cursing out WotC - since those tend to be easy to dismiss.

Well-written and calm posts like this, which nonetheless present a condescending, insulting, and incorrect point as though it was natural fact, are much more problematic.

I find 4E better for roleplaying, for setting building, for exploration and detail. There are definite areas where trade-offs have been made - for me, both as a player and a DM, those trade-offs help avoid the 'min/max' mindset that I felt permeated 3rd Edition. It made it possible to focus on actual character concepts and development, and not worry about 'winning' the game as 3rd Edition seemed so focused on. The greater focus on narrative over mechanics makes for more robust story-telling and more immersion in the story for the players. The specifics of the core setting and cosmology resonate more for me on the level of myth and fantasy than the potentially dry 'histories' of earlier settings.

Now, for whatever reasons, many other folks have not run into those problems with 3rd Edition. Or they find the greater simulationism of 3rd Edition to make for a more intense experience. Or they simply prefer the Great Wheel vs the Astral Sea, or Greyhawk vs Nerath, or whatever - and all of that is perfectly fine.

But then some folks, like ciretose, or sunshadow, or however many others, go on to say, "My preferences are because I like complexity and storytelling and RP, and you like 4E because it is a simple first-person shooter based on Diablo/WoW, and you don't do anything but combat."

You don't have to like 4E, you don't have to find its specific approaches useful for your games. But these claims just are completely ungrounded in reality. The standardization of rules in 4E wasn't to simplify it for a computer game, it was to make those rules easier for DMs to use. It features more than combat, and has some of the best books out there for giving guidance on roleplaying and storytelling in the game. It has a fantastic diversity of classes, now more than ever - and I personally find it the best edition out there for supported a robust array of viable character options, and ability to really customize nearly every aspect of a character. And many products, especially the most recent, are filled with tons of background and flavor, with interesting monsters and places and organizations. It has some crappy adventures, but also some awesome ones - like most editions.

It is no more, by default, 'hack and slash' than any other edition is. That, as always, comes down to the DM. In my case, I find that the specifics of 4E make it easier to run a more story and character-based game - as I'm currently doing with a Ravenloft game. I am certainly using a number of house rules, and I've introduced some items that aren't really standard fare for 4E. It is, in a way, a blend of 3rd Edition and 4E. But 4E is, by far, the most easier base for me to start from - and many of the very things I'm doing in my game are directions the system is expanding in anyway (rare items, curses, etc).

You "said from the beginning that 4e was created for computer integration" - and I suspect that because you said it would be so, you have only been able to view it as such. In actually, 4E was created for tabletop roleplaying gamers, just like every edition before it. The innovations and changes it made were not a fan of everyone, sure. But the intent behind them was absolutely to make the best game the designers could make.

You might not agree with their success, or whether the game is right for you, but it is simply petty to insist that the designers were trying to make a video game rather than an RPG, or insist than anyone who likes the game only does so because they want mindless hack-and-slash.

That makes perfect sense if you assume that money would not have been better spent by someone besides corrupt bureaucrats who did not take that money by force.

First of all, it's very hard to take you seriously when you claim that the money bureaucrats spend is taken by "force." It's taken by law, through a power enumerated in the Constitution that allows for taxation. The government doesn't come to your house with guns and shake you down for whatever you've got. It's all very regular, done with paperwork, prescribed by laws, and nice and non-violent.

So claiming that government spending is taken by force is just ridiculous hyperbole that indicates a lack of seriousness. Claiming taxes is theft is great and all, but that's an anarchist argument. The idea that the government is just a bunch of thug who give themselves authorization comes from Pierre Proudhoun. Pretty awesome guy, but the next part of his battle cry of "Taxes are Theft!" was "Property is Theft!" Guess what prevents workers from claiming the means of production as their own? Because guess what protects the merchant from having his goods stolen?

The same law that taxes him. The same law that says property is more than what you can hold on to. And that law is applied with force -- and in reality, a lot more force than taxes. Steal a car and you're a lot more likely to get assaulted by a police officer than if you "forget" to declare your third house on your taxes.

The American government, the one created by the constitution, is not the descendants of a bunch of hopped-up feudal warlords (i.e. aristocrats) who think they can mercilessly steal from the commoners to fund their lavish lifestyles. That would actually be the corporate class, which you may have noticed tend to move back and forth between the "private sector" and the "public sector" a lot.

Dick Cheney, first a Wyoming Congressman, then Director of Defense, under which he gave oil equipment manufacturer Halliburton choice defense contracts, became Halliburton CEO, then became VP of the United States. Revolving door?

I mean, have you ever worked for a corporation? I don't mean an incorporated business, I mean one of these giant corporations with tens of thousands of employees. Or just hundreds of employees. A place like Boeing. You ever worked for a company like Boeing? Bureaucracy up the wazoo.

You think Wal-Mart isn't a massive bureaucracy? You think General Electric isn't a massive bureaucracy? What makes you assume they'll spend it better?

And yeah, I do think the government will spend it better in a lot of cases. Because there are a lot of things we need in order to have a well-functioning economy and in some cases the government can address these needs more efficiently than the private sector can. The governments revenue is tied to the overall economic well-being of the nation, so the government is the best caretaker of those tasks that are most effective when widely distributed throughout the population, and difficult to capitalize.

Backstories are fun and useful, but not all that necessary.

HOWEVER, when someone wants to considerably change the campaign world, backstories become vital--like the OP example. If I were the GM in that example, I'd say, in an confident, flippant manner, "Nah, that doesn't happen. Choose a race in game."

Especially if you're a first level character, you shouldn't have a lot of backstory. The story is what's going to happen, not what's already happened.

@ Scott Betts: I think your doing a great job here buddy. I can't post all the time to defend 4E (something that's more prevailantly needed on these boards than others) so keep on fightin' the good fight.

Shouldn't we not be fighting in the first place?