Quote from: Nexus;846148Topher was a poster here? That must have been interesting...

No doubt. I think not though. :-/

(scratches his head)

I don't quite understand the intense hostility to Christopher using "evolution" as a metaphor for how D&D -- and, really, the whole industry -- developed.  

People weren't uniformly inventing (or "designing," if you're insisting on pedantry) completely new games with completely new mechanics and paradigms, all in a pristine vacuum.  They saw OD&D, and/or its successors, and thought "Hm.  I'd like to make a game just like that, only for superheroes," or "Hm.  You know, that rule sucks.  It'd work better if we tried this approach instead," or "Hm.  This pseudo-JRRT stuff is lame, and I'd rather use my very well developed and non-European setting instead," or "Hm, I'm reading the prozines/APAs and people are saying this and asking for that."

Heck, same with D&D itself.  The D&D supplements came out because a lot of folks thought that the original three books just didn't cut it.  AD&D came out because management felt the previous version was deficient.  3rd edition came out because management felt the previous version was dated.  4th edition came out because management figured a lot of people were pissed off at 3rd edition.  And so on.

There's nothing wrong with "evolution" as a word to describe this process, and of course it doesn't freaking imply that no human being had a hand in the process or that every single change was beneficial to the game or the hobby.  :confused:

Meh, I shrug at the definition fight. Sometimes it matters, but I also assume my audience has a broader grasp of definitional inflection. Like how so many people think they are clever being pedantic over the use of "literally" as an autoantonym/contronym, I find it a waste of time to correct such blinkered reading. As a hint, he's probably using definition #6, to give an idea of how large a space we have to work with the word "evolution." (Yes that was deliberately vague, an invitation to pique one's curiosity.)

Quote from: Nexus;846148Topher was a poster here? That must have been interesting...

Not here.

Quote from: Xúc xắc;846174It's obviously your opinion. It's just really hypocritical to shoot down "Edition X sucks more than Edition Y" by saying "None of them suck because there's no right or wrong; edition Z sucks the most!"

No, just as bit rhetorically sloppy.

Quote from: Ravenswing, Blue Man Groupie;846225(scratches his head)

I don't quite understand the intense hostility to Christopher using "evolution" as a metaphor for how D&D -- and, really, the whole industry -- developed.  

Because people keep using "evolution" to mean "newer games are better".

1. That isn't what evolution means. In fact, the argument is actually an example of religious thinking distorting science, and it's become one of the most perniciously persistent sources of misinformation about natural processes. It's basically Flat-Earthism, except not a joke.

2. And in the RPG context, it's always used as a stealth appeal to (false) authority: "Old school games objectively suck. But I don't have the balls to say that. So I made an analogy to Science! showing the idiots how stupid old stuff really is!"

Quote from: Pat;8462451. That isn't what evolution means. In fact, the argument is actually an example of religious thinking distorting science, and it's become one of the most perniciously persistent sources of misinformation about natural processes. It's basically Flat-Earthism, except not a joke.

Evolution specifically deals with biologically inheritable traits, if you're trying to get all science-y. It's completely inapplicable to games in that context, but if you're going to appropriate the term for rpgs, it COULD mean "better". This isn't some sort of religious problem, it's a problem with people using terms outside their realm of applicability. Specifically, for rpgs, I would ditch "evolution" and go with "metamorphosis" in the Hegelian sense, as THAT is what people are actually talking about. Or you could just say "evolve" and not be a pedantic fuck.

Quote from: Brad;846247Evolution specifically deals with biologically inheritable traits, if you're trying to get all science-y. It's completely inapplicable to games in that context, but if you're going to appropriate the term for rpgs, it COULD mean "better". This isn't some sort of religious problem, it's a problem with people using terms outside their realm of applicability. Specifically, for rpgs, I would ditch "evolution" and go with "metamorphosis" in the Hegelian sense, as THAT is what people are actually talking about. Or you could just say "evolve" and not be a pedantic fuck.

I already stated that it's an inaccurate analogy, in my previous post. And it's not pedantic; this mistaken view of how evolution works is actually a huge problem in the biological sciences, and contributed to a century of people wasting time on crap concepts like racial senescence, or overlooking animal behaviors (like tool use) that disprove human exceptionalism. And it's still a widespread misapprehension today. And it's clearly derived from a Creationist response to On the Origin of Species.

And I'm not familiar with Hegelian metamorphosis. All I really remember about Hegel is thesis + antithesis = synthesis.

Quote from: Tetsubo;845876This: 'But, I preferred AD&D to 3E as it was more atmospheric', I don't get. How can a set of rules have 'atmosphere'? Some of the setting material from the AD&D era is great. I still have some of it. But I wouldn't ever use the rules again.

Maybe they're referring to Gygax's faux-Vancian prose -which I enjoyed, by the way.

Or they could mean the artwork. Trampier's art looked like old woodcuts and cross-hatching and evoked something arcane, creepy and sinister. Elmore evoked Superfriends.

Not that it really matters. The charts and tables remain the same regardless of Gygax and his writing style, and if anyone felt that strongly about the art, they could do what I did with minimal effort.

Quote from: soltakss;845842How can people apologise for liking Alf? It is comedy gold.

So was Vanilla Ice.

No matter what your game- somebody hates it; 1e players seem unresonably surprised by this fact, especially aftter the oft quoted '30 years' they have been struggling to persevere.
Someday, we'll all be dead.

Quote from: Elfdart;846257Elmore evoked Superfriends.

The fuck he did.

My 2 cents:

Its not that all games from that era (early 80s to mid 90s) are objectively bad, it's that a large number of those games share certain traits that I personally find bothersome, in special an elevation in complexity/clunkyness without without apparent justification, coupled with a shift in gaming mindset from sandbox/player-driven to railroadish / "GM prepares the story that the players get to follow without deviation." And both AD&D 1st and 2nd editions drink on those fountains in a higher or lesser degree.

And about the evolution argument, I kind of agree with it, but only on the "people taking what works and discarding what doesn't" part. I don't think an 80s game is objectively worse than a 2000s game or something. Its pretty similar to the videogames industry, really: apart from the interface/usability aspect (which could be compared to the layout and organization aspects of rpg books) there is nothing nowadays that's objectively better, from a pure "having fun" criteria, than games released 20 years ago. (damn, Dwarf Fortress is one of the big hits of the decade and it runs on ASCII )

Quote from: Ulairi;845308Why do so many people seem to dislike AD&D now?

Because it's a shitty game. 2nd Edition is significantly better than 1st Edition, but it's still a clunky mess of broken mechanics that virtually no one ever plays without substantially house ruling the hell out of it.

Collectively, AD&D is the worst RPG published under the D&D trademark.

(And, yes, I am including 4th Edition in that assessment.)

Ad&d should have used Jenga.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;846336Because it's a shitty game. 2nd Edition is significantly better than 1st Edition, but it's still a clunky mess of broken mechanics that virtually no one ever plays without substantially house ruling the hell out of it.

Collectively, AD&D is the worst RPG published under the D&D trademark.

(And, yes, I am including 4th Edition in that assessment.)

D&D had the widest reach in popular culture under Ad&d. I play Ad&d without a lot of house rules. We pretty much run it raw.