I Try Not To Be Negative

I do try.

I fail horribly, I realize, but it's very difficult to keep a good attitude and not be rather peeved when I seem to be in a world where the people who make no sense are the ones deciding how things should be.

Today, by way of the Sandbox of Doom, I read Jonathan Tweet's impressions after playing Swords and Wizardry, found here.

It's no surprise that 3e and 4e come across as completely different games than what had come before, considering the people that worked on them seem to have either no clue about, or no respect for, earlier editions of the game. I read these comments and wonder if the designers' collective attitude was something along the lines of "We finally get to fix all this stupid shit!"

While several of Tweet's comments are just personal preference ("too-random character creation"), a few things strike me as... troubling.

"We didn't use miniatures. That's a break with tradition, but it seems to represent a bald refusal to be realistic and or attempt simulation."

Minis optional is far more traditional than required battlemats and tactical combat.

But when did minis come to represent realism and/or simulation?

"Swords & Wizardry even has two AC systems that it uses side-by-side: the old-fashioned 9-down system that they have to include for tradition's sake and the 10+ system that they have to include because it's just clearly better."

More intuitive for new players first playing the game, maybe. After a combat or two, there's really no difference. All it takes to read a chart is at least one eye and the IQ of a flower bulb. I use BFRPG in my weekly games and that has an ascending AC. But "just clearly better"?

"too much arithmetic (5% XP bonus, copper pieces, etc.)"

Have gamers turned into "Math is Hard!" Barbie in the past decade? Does Mr. Tweet not realize the entire d20 system is composed of nothing but 5% increments? And of all the reasons to not like copper pieces... arithmetic?

"all spells are daily, which makes spellcasters play too differently from the fighters"

My brain truly breaks under the weight of this argument. Isn't that the point of different character classes from a game design standpoint, to deliver different fundamental play experiences?

I really should just catalog this sort of thing, because people always want more than one blog post here and there as "evidence" and doing a serious research project to unearth things I really hate just seems... counterproductive. But there is this old review of Keep on the Borderlands by Mike Mearls ("The Keep on the Borderlands literally serves as exhibit A in the great case against Dungeons and Dragons."), and also the blog post where Mike Mearls pretends to just now (as of last August, anyway) understand wandering monsters, and then Mearls' recent explanation of some of his influences when designing 4e, including naming Legolas as an inspiration for the ranger class (dude, Aragorn is right there), and saying things like "the rogue has been saddled with the status of 'class that has to suck since it's the only one that can deal with traps.'"

But don't mind me. I just watched Steve Miner's Day of the Dead last night so I'm just really aching from the remake madness.

Incidentally, I also saw Diary of the Dead last week, which wasn't perfect (obvious CGI blood, and little too much "action adventure" kills in a couple of places), and added nothing new to the entire zombie oeuvre, but retained the absolute core of what the Romero zombie movie is: A small movie about people and their reactions to a civilization-ending disaster happening around them. That's why Land of the Dead was such a failure, I think, because the setting was alien to here and now and so the characters were not very real-world, and thus the whole thing seemed more blatantly made-up than an exercise in "What if it really happened?"

Savini's own 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, excellent in its own right, even blatantly uses Barbara to hammer the core ideas home: "They're us. We're them and they're us," and "They're so slow. We could just walk right past 'em and we wouldn't even have to run. We could just walk right past 'em. We have the guns. If we're careful we could get away." Yeah. Romero scripted that himself (and hammered the point home more sarcastically in Diary).

There's a point to zombie movies, and there's a reason why the classics are the classics and why so many others just seem... gratuitous. It's not even about the "run" vs "not run" issue. I think the 28 x Later movies get it exactly right for the same reason Romero has more often than not (and I have to mention Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead somewhere in the 'good' category), and why movies like Shaun of the Dead resonate while everyone from Lucio Fulci to Zack Snyder (to name two of the most competent examples who have done Romero zombie remakes/sequels) makes movies that may be an exciting momentary diversion, but are fundamentally different than the works that inspired them to the point where one wonders if they really understood the source material in the first place.

ah well. Someday, I'll be dead, and I'm sure some asshole somewhere will still be doing something that really pisses my dead self off. And then I'll rise from the grave and bite that fucker's face off.