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No edition warring here, just my personal take:
Was playing D&D and AD&D since the early '80s, wasn't super-keen on 2nd but it wasn't horrible, 3rd and 3.5 did it better... but when they rolled out 4e locally they told the vendors that they had to return their 3.5 books to get their 4e shipments.
As someone who wasn't sold on 4e, and was looking for a couple of 3.5 titles, that was exactly the wrong approach to take. Definitely boycotted because of that shortsighted customer-unfriendly move.
I was quite a bit angry at that, and stopped playing FRPG for the better part of five years... slid over some to BESM, some freeform rpg with a steady stream of SW (WEG d6), and LARPing (Wod 1st).
When the burnout came, it shut down almost everything.
It took until mid-2013 before I was willing to give a d20 (PF1) a shot, and our first group was trying to do 'all the things' before wisdom prevailed.
2014 was the first time I played PF1 (via PFS) at a convention, and while I didn't fall in 'love' with it, it was a much more fun experience than trying to jury-rig a rules system that had been out of print for over twenty years (WEG d6) was.
It usually takes me about three or four years to get 'comfortable' with a system these days.
Starfinder has slowly been winning my heart for it's somewhat whimsical yet sometimes dark setting.
Not sold on PF2 yet.
Want to play a bunch of PFS1 more.
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In the comments of the second most recent OPM manga, on this page, if you scroll down a bit...someone put a picture of Garou vs Darkshine holding two giant rolls of toilet paper, talkin' bout it looks like going against corona, and days later, it still makes me laugh.
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Old and busted take on editions
My first set was the blue box. We played dwarves and elves and fighting men and magic users and every dungeon had a ring of wishes. Crazy stupid gaming, but fun for the my age. I played parts of B2 and read and reread B1.
1st edition was a hot mess, but it was the real deal. It was "advanced d&d." First module was White Plume Mtn. Blackrazor! Played this A LOT. We understood it. It never made sense if you used all the parts, but wtf it was gaming.
I have the 2E material. I played the 2E modules. Quite honestly, I can't say that I remember noticing a difference between 1E and 2E. Thaco. Skill proficiencies. Okay. Later there were the player options books, but I don't recall that being core 2E. It really just felt like an extension of 1E, or at least that was how we played it.
3E was released. I loved that GH was the core setting. I was initially furious that I had just spent all this money on the 2E splat. I set out to be disruptive and get other people to hate 3E. I fell in love instead. Largely as a function of the living greyhawk campaign. But 3E was what happened when you put people who did number theory and game statistics on the job of tidying up the mess that was Gygax and Arneson's patch work rule set. The unified mechanic of the d20 and roll high instead of the mess of percentages, roll high, roll low jumble of 1E/2E was elegant. There were parts of 1E/2E I missed, but the fundamental clarification of the rules made me endorse whole heartedly.
3.5 seemed to me to be a money grab at the time. Looking back, I saw that it did, in fact fix some things that they missed when they put 3E together. The brokenness that was haste being a big part of that. Did it need a new edition? Not sure. Regardless, it got bloated. There was so much splat. I had to run campaigns that were core rulebooks only because I could not always keep up. I ran campaigns that were anything goes. They were a hot mess of powers. In its own way, it helped me run the mythic campaign later because you had to just shrug and go ok...you do the thing, how do i keep the story on track and everyone have fun when you do the thing.
Towards the end of 3.5, the industry was testing out some new mechanics. Mike Mearls had his power point pools in Iron Heroes (i think). There was the book that gave you encounter powers/attacks. I used that heavily in our first run through Rise of the Runelords when it was being run out of the magazines instead of published books.
I get the need for 4E. The bloat was too much. I went into it wanting to love it as the next incarnation of the best game. It made me leave the hobby for several years. The gimmick of the power sets, the introduction of FR as the core setting (I have always and admittedly irrationally hated FR), war forged, tieflings and aasimar as core races. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. I used to do a lot of home brew. I understood the 3/3.5 CR system and how to add levels and muddle with a monster to make it what I wanted. I never quite got the hang of balancing the different roles and mook/boss mess that 4E made of monsters. I ended up just finding a monster that did basically what I wanted and reskinned it. I wanted a big bugbear smith, well, the little dragon was good for that reskinned where his breath weapon became the smith using the forge to create a cone of fire. I never felt like I could make a monster that was mine. Much of the animated rant someone posted resonated as true about combats. Ugh.
As I said, I left gaming for several years. It was not until Skull and Shackles came out that I returned because, well, pirates. I jumped on the PF wagon and felt like it was close enough to 3.5 that it was good. The splat kept coming, but so did the monsters. We played S&S, Shattered Star, I ran WotR (sooo broken, but such a viscerally good story, we did not care), I ran Rise of the Runelords. I stepped back some while I did my ironman training, and the crew dabbled in 5E.
5E. Easy to learn. That was the initial report. And it is true. But so limited. The complaints about splat seemed to resonate with the designers, but this was a little too narrow. The published modules are well written and coherent. But somewhere, they sucked the joy out of the rules. Minimizing magic items meant that you never had any sort of skinner box reward for finding a new piece of loot. Cash became worthless after a few levels. O look, you find 1000 gold coins. You have nothing on which you can spend it. I ran a series of games based in the world of the Black Company with a heavy dwarven forge toy element. We revisited U1, U2, U3, as well as some home brew dungeons. This explained the lack of magic items, but still a little unsatisfying. Tried Tome of Annihilation but combats just meh. Better than 4E, but joyless. I still have trouble building appropriate challenging monsters. why is this guy a 'scout' and this guy a 'cultist' or what have you, why can't you just let me make him a chimera with 3 levels of rogue.
PF2. Have not been able to get over nerd rage of being frustrated at character creation. The rigid process thereof makes me want to throw the book across the room. My crew assures me you can get to where you want, but when I have to ignore the first 100 some odd pages of the book to make a character, I said no. They are starting an age of ashes campaign. I am sitting out.
Curmudgeon I may be, but my current plan is to run a GH 3.5/PF1 blend on fantasy grounds. That is my sweet spot.
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I used to play 1st edition and then 2nd edition.
I hated them both so much that I stopped playing D&D for 17 years or so.
One day while explaining to a friend why I hated D&D he said "They fixed all that in 3rd edition!". So when I happened to come across the 3rd edition Forgotten Realms book at a used bookstore I picked it up and was immediately blown away by it's amazingness.
I was optimistic when 4th edition started coming out, but then they released 4th edition Forgotten Realms and I solemnly vowed that day that I would never, ever, buy a single thing published by Wizards of the Coast ever again.
Fortunately, while looking for a first level adventure (as rare as f**%ing unicorns in the 3.5 days) a guy at the store suggested Kingmaker, so here I is.
I've looked at 5th edition, enough to see it's pretty much a blatant rip off of Pathfinder Classic, but it will be a cold day in hell before I play it.
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My brothers STILL have arguments over THAC0.
Whooooooooooo, drinking.oooooooooh, hangover
I wanna get drunk with woran!
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Also, for the record, the reason I ask for a Galt AP is because I used to request a pirate and then Egyptian pulp style Adventure Paths and once I had such success with those I was all out of ideas and picked an area from the campaign setting at random.
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I wanna get drunk with woran!Whooooooooooo, drinking.oooooooooh, hangover
I'd rather bake.
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Quiet day.
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Everyone must be trying to figure out their THAC0.
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Crookshanks is reading the Deadpool 2 (not for children) Children's Book to her bunny.
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I've gotten my time to lose a shopping list down to 3 minutes.
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If I'm not supposed to touch my face, and no one else is supposed to touch my face.
Then who the f%#% is going to touch my face!!!
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So the good Polish deli and grocery is still open for business, but it's 28 miles away, and while that's not a big deal to drive, I have meetings that start every morning at 8:25 online and meetings that run to 3:30 every afternoon, and I'm teaching online in-between, so I can't sneak off for a grocery run. But I'm exhausted and don't feel like going today, and of course they are closed Sundays.
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I didn't see much wrong with 3.5, myself, but as time goes on, I find myself increasingly drawn to the Old School Renaissance stuff, i.e. retro-clones/adaptations of 0e/1e/BECMI and so on, just because most of the updated versions fix all the stuff that was a pain in the arse first time around, or at least try to, and there's no mucking about with 1000000 feats/archetypes/skills and so on.
My special favourites are Four Against Darkness, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. DCC is the easiest to pick up if you're used to 3e/3.5e, and their aesthetic is something I am particularly taken with.
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Fantasy grounds >> roll20 but still unsatisfying
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I didn't see much wrong with 3.5, myself, but as time goes on, I find myself increasingly drawn to the Old School Renaissance stuff, i.e. retro-clones/adaptations of 0e/1e/BECMI and so on, just because most of the updated versions fix all the stuff that was a pain in the arse first time around, or at least try to, and there's no mucking about with 1000000 feats/archetypes/skills and so on.
My special favourites are Four Against Darkness, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. DCC is the easiest to pick up if you're used to 3e/3.5e, and their aesthetic is something I am particularly taken with.
Check out acks
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I've looked at 5th edition, enough to see it's pretty much a blatant rip off of Pathfinder Classic, but it will be a cold day in hell before I play it.
Eh, only if your definition of PF Classic is exclusively the Beginner Box. It's very streamlined and basic and very much a starting d20 game for newcomers and people who like simplicity. Basically the exact opposite of PF1.
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From reading first-hand accounts all over the web, Animal Crossing seems to be having that effect on people.
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I drove all the way to Southlake (which, of course, is in the far northwest of Dallas, not South, but no matter) to get two pounds of my favorite sausage, and some good Prussian rye bread, and some spiced plum-filled chocolates just because they were there.
And my anxiety wasn't nearly as bad as last time I went to the store. Which is good, because I'm planning on doing my big grocery run from now through the 14th on Monday after I'm done with my online classes, and then on the 15th I'll do the shopping for the next week and a half. We'll see how it goes.
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I just cleared out a ton of junk from about a third of my room, as my last free opportunity to get some cleaning done before the parents get home and I have to work around people in the ensuing work/travel space.
Most of it was spent digging up letters, bills, contracts, long-expired IDs and other cards, and other sensitive documents dating back as far as 2008 and shredding them.
I am exhausted and sore and the trash dumpster is full a single day after trash day (I really should have done this like Thursday or Wednesday) but I feel accomplished and that corner of my room looks very nice now.
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Awesome, I actually did that with my half of our room yesterday.
It looks so nice!
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Parents are here. If they're exposed, I've been exposed.
No going back at this point, I suppose. Here goes nothing.
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Parents are here. If they're exposed, I've been exposed.
No going back at this point, I suppose. Here goes nothing.
Prayers for good health and an uneventful fortnight of waiting. Yikes.
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Thanks. I'm not as nervous as I have been prior, they've been doing a fair amount to keep themselves safe while on their trip and apparently the CDC says the plane's filters will have kept the virus from spreading rampant among the very sparse passengers, so they've taken every precaution that can be taken without having cancelled the trip in the first place.
Still, yeah. Nervous.
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Mrs Sunrise and I are watching a movie called VelociPastor.
We are five minutes in, and it is already as bad as it sounds.
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Keeping my fingers crossed for ya, Orthos. I suspect we'll all be where you are sooner or later.
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Mrs Sunrise and I are watching a movie called VelociPastor.
We are five minutes in, and it is already as bad as it sounds.
The kids watched it. They loved it. Because it was apparently so amazingly terrible that they couldn't believe it had been made.
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Signs you may overstock:
GothBard: Don't go too overboard in emptying the fridge and freezer; I hear the grocery shortages may last into June.
NobodysHome: June, hmm...? ... cool! By that time I think I'll have managed to make some space in the garage freezer to fit some new stuff.
Yes. We're almost 3 weeks into the lockdown. From our fridge and both freezers, you wouldn't suspect that there's any kind of shortage of anything.
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Prayers for good health and an uneventful fortnight of waiting. Yikes.Parents are here. If they're exposed, I've been exposed.
No going back at this point, I suppose. Here goes nothing.
I'm not in the prayer corner, but I do completely agree with the sentiment and intent.
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Parents are here. If they're exposed, I've been exposed.
No going back at this point, I suppose. Here goes nothing.
I was going to post something about lysoling them and their stuff down, but I didnt think it was a good idea at the time. Now I'm sorry I didnt post it.
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Thanks. I'm not as nervous as I have been prior, they've been doing a fair amount to keep themselves safe while on their trip and apparently the CDC says the plane's filters will have kept the virus from spreading rampant among the very sparse passengers, so they've taken every precaution that can be taken without having cancelled the trip in the first place.
Still, yeah. Nervous.
I'm glad to hear that at least.
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I was going to post something about lysoling them and their stuff down, but I didnt think it was a good idea at the time. Now I'm sorry I didnt post it.Parents are here. If they're exposed, I've been exposed.
No going back at this point, I suppose. Here goes nothing.
I actually did consider it, not sure where I got the idea if not from FAWTL. But I couldn't find any Lysol in the house.
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I'd rather bake.I wanna get drunk with woran!Whooooooooooo, drinking.oooooooooh, hangover
I'd rather get baked.
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If you really want to get er done use ammonia then bleach...
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
(please don't actually do this! Mustard gas!!!)
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I had a friend that was cleaning up his cat pee with bleach. He didn't put two and two together why he was getting high. Cat urine has a lot of ammonia in it apparently.
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So...
Shiro and GothBard showed me how to buy the COVID-19 Humble Bundle, and encouraged me to do so since the money goes to charity. And, looking at a single humble bundle, I was thinking, "There is no way in my lifetime I will ever START all of these games, much less PLAY all of them!"
I dunno; I guess if you look at my old Sega Genesis collection I did collect maybe as many games as are in a single humble bundle, but... holy carp!
I guess as you get older you just find other things that consume your time...
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I think the YouTube algorithm has gotten some wires crossed. I'm trying to find uplifting things to listen to while I work, so what does it recommend?
Freaking Komm Süsser Tod of all things
Screw it. I'm going back to Cats.
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The kids watched it. They loved it. Because it was apparently so amazingly terrible that they couldn't believe it had been made.Mrs Sunrise and I are watching a movie called VelociPastor.
We are five minutes in, and it is already as bad as it sounds.
Mrs Sunrise died laughing several times, and even I -- a man with never before any interest in B movies -- thought it was dammed funny. And we both agreed it is intentionally bad, the writer-editor-director definitely had a huge laugh making this film.