I love reading rule books and I love reading campaign settings even more. I’ve went on before about how I write campaign settings just for myself even if no one else will ever actually play them so it comes as no surprise that I’ve got a little fed up rereading the D&D 4e books and that I’m looking for something ‘new’.
Coming home from my dyslexia testing on Monday I stopped by one of the larger book store chains in Glasgow to see if there was anything worth picking up. Usually I head in there just to see if they have a specific book but this day I decided just to have a look around the fiction areas as well. They have a small section for RPG books these days and it’s never really been stocked that well. They have the usual D&D books as well as the occasional TV related system such as the Firefly or Battlestar Galactica books but apart from the occasion WoD or Cthulu book thats it.
What they did have though was a few of the Scion books. I’d heard a little about them before and to be honest what I had heard didn’t tickle my fancy but after a quick flick through it is very similar to a setting I tried to write about 10 years ago using the old WoD system. I stood for a good 20 minutes reading the fluff that goes along with the Hero book. Why can’t games be released with a backstory this rich all the time? Needless to say I’ll be picking up the books on my next trip to the gaming store even if it is only to read them and never actually get my players into a game.
What other systems are there out there that go into the backstory in this much detail in the main rulebooks?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Why do I have such a downer on updates to game systems?
1. It’s expensive.
I’ve spent thousands of pounds over the years on roleplay books. At least 90% of that was on supplements and campaign settings rather than rulebooks so you can understand when I get a little miffed when the publishers bring out a new version that makes all those supplements and settings worthless in the eyes the new system.
2. Same old story just different rules.
So when WOD went through a reboot very little changed. The mechanics where mixed up and ‘refined’ and that’s about it as the same basic story kept going. To be fair to White Wolf they basically shot themselves in the foot when they first published that Gehenna was on it’s way. Or were they just very shrewd people that knew exactly how many people would buy the new rules?
With Dungeons and Dragons 4ed they’ve basically turned it into D&D lite. It’s not a refinement of the previous games or an expansion on the system. They’ve took the popular parts from online computer games and melded it together with the previous rules to create something that doesn’t feel, to me at least, like any D&D game I’ve seen before. Why not keep the old D&D line going or at least fix the bits that didn’t work and release 4ed as a new game line but one that uses the same world? Have it as an extension of the mini battles game and market it to the crowd of young gamers moving up from Pokemon and the other card games that seem to be morphing into spinnig top battles.
3. Did I say it was expensive?
Forget the cost of the books I’ve bought in the past that are now worthless. Lets look at how much it costs to get a Forgotten Realms game going now that 4ed is out. The DM/players guides come in at $60 for both of them and the setting books add another $60-70 onto that as well. Your talking over $120 just to play the basic setting and never mind any of the expansions they bring out in the future. What if you go to all that trouble and you find you really don’t like the new setting or you really don’t like the new 4ed rules?
4. Physical space
I live in a normal sized house in the UK. We have plenty of shelf space and yet I am forced to keep a sizable amount of my books in boxes in the attic. I cannot find anywhere to keep my almost complete collection of oWOD books never mind space for the new system should I ever give in and buy it.
5. Mental space
I’ve already memorised the rules and mechanics of 13 separate gaming systems over the years. Do I really need to squeeze another one in? At what point will my mind begin to fail and the AD&D equipment charts start to meld together and be mistaken for the Small Creatures Crit Table from Rolemaster?
The old games worked. Sure they had their flaws but so do the new versions. Pick one and stick with it but I just wish the old system I loved still had official work being published for them.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
I’ve previously mentioned that over the years I’ve lost an awful lot of my gaming books. I’ve misplaced at least half of my ADnD books somewhere and of all my other systems only my Rolemaster books seem to be in any fit state and that was only because I bought new copies on Ebay a few years ago.
Anyway I was intent on rebuilding my old collection any way that I could and whilst hunting down the Dark Sun campaign books that I’d misplaced over the years I remembered a system that I bought when I was 15 years old. It was quite famous at the time but if I were to ask almost any of my fellow gamers in my home town about it they wouldn’t have a clue. That game is of course MERP or Middle Earth Role Playing to those that don’t like acronyms. A lot was said at the time about how it was a handicapped version of Rolemaster or that it was too complex for beginners but we loved it. I was never a fan of the books when I was younger purely because of the size of them but I loved the setting and the half finished movie by Ralph Bakshi.
Over the years I picked up a few modules for it but it was never a game we could get much material for what with it being in the days before the internet and online shopping. We would spend whole weekends just working through complex back stories for our characters before we even thought about starting game but we’d always hit the level limit and want to go further. As time went on we ended up moving all our characters over to rolemaster anyway and keeping the campaign setting but to this day I miss the MERP books. There was so much history in the rulebooks that was not easily digestable from the novels that even after we moved systems we still used the MERP books as our number one resource for the campaign.
I miss those books. I’m really beginning to wish I.C.E. didn’t lose the rights to make LotR games in 1999 now.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
