A Geek History of Time - Episode 97 - Edition Wars Part III

Episode Date: March 14, 2021

So first thing foremost, I think being the addition of pant leggings is really when you start to see your heroes get watered down. The ability to go straight man, that one. Which is a good argument for absolute girls. Everybody is going to get behind me though, and the support numbers will go through. When you hang out with the hero, it doesn't go well for you. Grandfather took the cob and just slid it right through the bar. Oh god, Bob. Okay.

And that became the dominant way our family did it. Okay. And so, both of my marriages, they were treated to that. Okay, wait, hold on. Yeah, rage, I could. How do you imagine the rubber chicken? My grandmother actually vacuumed in her pearls. Oh my god, you know what I'm saying?

We had the sexual revolution. It might have just been a Canadian standoff. We're gonna go back to 9-11. Oh, I'm gonna go back to 9-11. Do you get it, Oberg? And I don't understand. But we're just going to go back to 9-11. Agra has no business being that big.

With the cultists, what in real week? This is a geek history of time. Where we connect Nurgere to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history teacher with one section of remedial reading right now, doing my magic over the internet, at least until the middle of April. And I have been given my marching orders to go back into the valley of death. I mean, in the classroom.

And the good news about that is that today my wife managed to get her first dose of the vaccine. So at least when I do that, I will not have to worry about bringing anything home to kill her. How about you? I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin teacher currently up here in Northern California. Have kind of been given marching orders, but we're still banding that about. So I assume that the abyss that I'm shouting into will suddenly turn into a Billy Club and hit us upside the head with two days warning, because that seems

to be how it goes. I am feverishly looking for ways to not go back to the classroom this year in terms of what's safest for me and my family, and also what's feasible for a father with school age children. So we'll see how that goes. It'll be a lot of yelling and perhaps I will have to burn through my strike fund. So that dates this as being the beginning of March that we are recording this. March of 2021, the year of the plague. Currently we're at 535,000 dead from COVID. We 11 days ago just hit 35,000. So we are seven times faster Yep, go us Onward and upward baby. Yes. Oh, there you go. See that hockey stick soar and

Here's open my friends put me in their will so Alright, so that's bleak as hell. Yeah So. All right, so that's bleak as hell. Yeah. lifting note. Yeah. So when when last we left off, let's let's talk about something desperately frivolous for a little while. Shall we? Please. Okay. So when when we last left off, I was talking about the

failings of the 3.5 digits in Dragon system. Yes. In order to lead into where the edition wars, in my opinion, went from being a kind of, how elite are you as a gamer? How much of a grognard are you kind of thing into a genuine, like almost religious conflict? genuine, like almost religious conflict.

Because my first question there would be given the year that it was, that that happened, which is what year? We're talking about 2007, 2008, of the development of fourth edition, the announcement of fourth edition, and the birth of Pathfinder as an alternative, and then the introduction of fourth edition in 2008. Okay, so 2007-2008, do you think that the near crusade Pope, anti-Pope effort over this. Do you think the Avignon? The Avignon-esque, yes, I love it.

The Avignon Hills. The Avignon Hills rules. Do you? Oh, well done. Thank you. I ain't even mad, well done. Do you think that happened as a product of the times in which it happened. Like had this

happened 10 years earlier that you would have not seen such a fervent and frenetic, I hate you and everything you stand for, stands, or do you think it was the age of the gamers themselves because at that point gamers who had grown up on all of it Maybe they tapped out at like I'm sick of all these changes. I still want there to be I don't want it to be a game I want it to be a strategy or do you think that there is That much of a sea change in the game That it led to this and I recognize that I'm setting up a false tricotomy. But I am curious. Well, you know, it's funny. I usually wind up saying, well, you know, come and see, come and say,

little column A, little column B. In this case, I'm going to have to say little column A, little column B, a little bit more maybe of column C. I think you have very concisely managed to kind of hit the nail on the head with basically I think the three main issues that were involved. All right. Well, so do you have anything on social media you want us to know? It's the shortest episode we've ever done. Oh my God. Yeah, no kidding. Damien skips to the end. Broke it.

Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down.

Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down.

Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. Broke it down. to your elbows into that that horses ass and yank it all out. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah So first what what we've got to talk about is is there there were a bunch of things that designers and players all acknowledged By 2007 they all acknowledged that the 3.5 had some had some issues. It was a remarkably granular kind of gaming system. You could break circumstances and conditions of characters and monsters down very, very, very by-nudely.

You know, having an advantage in elevation, gave you an advantage in combat. The Jedi rule, yeah. Yes, the Obi-Wan Kenobi rule. You know, having, you know, you could have a party member flanking somebody in that gave you a particular kind of advantage and that opened up Certain kinds of attacks of opportunity

Mm-hmm, you know, and and there were just all these this this myriad number of things sure for the game did a really good job of Of breaking down the guys that wrote it Clearly had been had been possessed by the spirit of a guy gags when they figured out okay No, man. We can break all this stuff down. We can, we can, you know, we can stat this out like Ad Men. Which is in and of itself interesting because I remember playing that game and I was in a in a game and the guy running and he's like, all right, we're going to switch over to 3-0. But it's not it's not Dungeons and Dragons anymore. Like, they're, yeah, the switch from, yeah, the switch to third was, yeah, you know, this is a great system, but it's not Dungeons and Dragons.

And I'm like, looking at it now, it's like, it's so, because it doesn't have FACO, is that the only reason? Like, because it's as granular, but, well, it's not as granular, but it is, but it's like, it's way, in a lot of ways, it's as granular, but well, it's not as granular, but it is. Well, it is, but it's like it's way in a lot of ways. It's way more granular. The thing is, second edition, first and second edition, AD&D, both place, well, in third edition to an extent, but it was even more notable. First and second edition that the idea behind this game is you go out and you kill monsters and you take

their shit. Right. And like I'm not saying that as any kind of judgment against it, I had a lot of fun doing that. Yeah. You know, 13 through 19 and, you know, and actually beyond then. But, you know, the mechanics of the game broke down when you started having to do things like,

well, okay, I wanna actually have the characters have to figure out a puzzle, or I wanna turn this into a game of, you know, and other game systems capitalized on this. Right. By introducing systems in their games for social combat where it was okay no look i'm trying to you know i'm competing with this NPC to try to win this other NPC over to my point of view right and here's a whole rule set about

how to do that in second edition eighty and if that didn't exist as any kind of set of rules now Right, there's certainly something to be said for will you know role play it and and that's great But the thing is you get to a point where you have somebody who is playing a character who in their head I want to be this person who is you know Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Clone Wars the silver tongue devil who's you's incredibly persuasive and deathly charming. But the player gets locked up when they get called on the spot in front of the whole group to role play. I remember having somebody at the table go, okay, my character has epic charisma.

I don't Which absolutely like kind of pigeonholes people into playing just martial classes Yeah, really, yeah, you know, so yeah, yeah, that that absolutely was much more in In many ways 30 and 35 answered that need because it gave you a rule set for the guy who doesn't have Epic charisma and stuff like that. Yeah. And it gave you a set of, no, no, these are the things you can learn how to do. Right. Like, like just because you're a fighter doesn't mean you can't also be perceptive just because you're a fighter doesn't mean you can't also know how to play musical instrument relatively well. Doesn't mean you, you know, and you could spend skill slots on doing stuff. And that was really, that was great.

Yeah. This was a huge big deal for me. The second edition rules made proficiencies, uh, official. Mm hmm. And proficiencies were introduced as part of the wilderness and Dungeon years survival guides in first edition if I remember correctly written by Doug Niles and And those were great rules, but it was still okay, well, you know When we go out into the wilderness, I am proficient in you know, repelling and rope use

So I have the skill so when we need to do that, I'm gonna be the one in the party who sets all that stuff up for everybody else. I'm gonna make the role. Okay, well that's great, but that's only one skill. And you didn't gain proficiencies very often. Right.

And it felt like a clue. And it was, well, you know, I'm proficient. And so since I am proficient, I make this role. And it's a stat test. And for those of you who in our audience, the like four or five of you who've never played Dungeons and Dragons, a stat test, or the more of you who've never played first or second edition,

a stat test was you needed to roll a D20 under the applicable stat. Right. So for example, Rope Use was a Dexterity test. So you had to roll a D20 at or under your Dexterity score. So obviously if you were the party thief, you were going to be the one everybody wanted doing the rope use stuff because Dextat. And so I mean that created a mechanic but it didn't, there wasn't a lot, there wasn't very much there there to kind of you know simplify the problem. Yeah it was a it was a rule designed to adjudicate something quickly so that you could streamline your way through it so you don't have to come up with arguments or house rule your way through how to tie knots in a piece of rope.

Like you five seconds it takes care of it. Yeah, make that roll. Yeah, we're moving on. Yeah, and the thing is that's great for things like, okay, I want to create a situation where the characters have to, you know, overcome this wilderness challenge, and that's great. But it still doesn't give you rules for, as I said, social combat. It doesn't give you rules for turning that into an encounter or making that puzzle and extending it so that it requires multiple members of the party to be doing something with

it. Right. You know, it's like, okay, the one guy who has the skill makes the skill roll, and we all go, yeah, and then we go do what we got to do. Or they fail skill roll, and we throw dice at them because you suck, you know, whatever. And I have to say this now, but one of the most memorable moments of my adolescent gaming career, it was actually a game at a game store. One of the guys in the group said something

that so offended another member of the group that he did, in fact, actually throw dice at him. Oh, wow. Actually, he flung from the far end of the, we're sitting on opposite ends of the table long skinny table one of them near the head one of them near the near the foot of the table and the guy that was offended flung a D4 and and didn't actually hit with enough force to cause like pain but but he managed to get the guy, like just tweak him

right on the point between his eyebrows. Nice. And startled him so badly, the guy actually fell on for backwards in his chair. So when I talk about throwing dice at somebody, I know what I'm talking about, I've seen it happen. But, I just, yeah, anyway, that memory came up. I had to share it. Sure. I knew you'd enjoy the story.

Yeah. So anyway, so third edition actually said, okay, look, we're gonna, we're gonna have skills, right? And when I first saw the 3-0 players' handbook and I saw the way skills were gonna work, I would like, it were going to work. I would like it won me over instantly. Like yeah, everything else they did, I was kind of iffy on some of the interior art, because some of the design choices were kind of like this looks an awful lot like Diablo and I'm not really a big fan of Diablo. I think you just hit on something really

good there, because 3.0 came out right around the time that broadband internet was just starting to creep into every neighborhood. People still had dial up internet. I think I still did. And if I didn't, I had just switched over to, you know, cable modem. And so a lot of people gaming on the computer

was a relatively new experience. And so you lot of people gaming on the computer was a relatively new experience. And so you're absolutely right. Like that aesthetic shift, and I don't think it was a bad one. It's just, it's an aesthetic shift. But that aesthetic shift absolutely was a product of that time. Oh, very much. And I remember being pleased and kind of like,

oh, and that's kind of cool. At the amount of representation that was shown through that art. So like aesthetically, I totally get if it's not a style that people liked, but the fact that they were including black and brown bodies in amongst the heroes with no explanation or no like, and this is a variant, it was just like, this is Ember. Yeah, there was no qualification, there was no. Right. And here you go, here's our monk.

Exactly. He said the Paragon example, here's our Paragon monk. Right. Ember. And like, oh, okay. Cool. And that was a major thing. As an editorial direction, that was very big,

because first edition and second edition had been really white. And we're going to, and I can hear members of our audience going, well, you know, yeah, but what about, and we're going to get to that later, because yeah, you're going to need to. We're going to, we're going to come back around to some of that in a bit. So, but the, so, so right right out the gate, the skill system was something that caught my attention in a really big way and I was really, really happy with it. And you know, everything else about it, I was like, okay, well, I don't know how thrilled I am about these other things, but the skill system is really great. And then the thing is between the time the books initially came out in 2000 and 2007 over the course of that 70 years span.

Skills started to show that the system had some real serious limitations. And the problem with it was that at high levels, they kind of fell apart. And at high levels, they turned into proficiencies with extra parts because what the way it worked was as a, for example, as a fighter, you had these skills that were your class skills. And you could expand those skills at one-for-one rate, spend skill points, get a rank. Right. All of these other things that aren't your class skills, you can learn how to do, but you're only going to get a half rank in them every time you spend a skill point, so you're not going to be as good at them. Okay, well, all right,

that kind of makes sense. But then the problem that you run into is based on the number of skill points you actually got per level, by the time you got to 12 level. The guidelines that the game gave dungeon masters for the difficulty of a particular task meant that the only person who's who had a good chance of succeeding at that task was somebody who had the skill at that level as a class skill and had been spending points in it the entire time. Right. So at first level, so if you if you wanted to succeed at tasks that were at encounter level, consistently at higher levels, you basically had to pick two or three things that you were going to be good at doing.

Yeah. Let's say you wanted to disable device because I remember that was a skill. So if you wanted to disable device, yes, as a fighter, you absolutely could cross cross, cross class, good lord, by that skill. But you're buying it two to one. Yeah, right? So there's no way you're gonna be as good

as the rogue who bought it at one to one, which, you know what, I'm okay with that. I'm fine with that. But if the difficulty, if the DC, the difficulty class of that puzzle or whatever, is set at the level that the DMG says that it's supposed to be set at, then your fighter, who might be the only one who decided he was going to, you know, do that. And you guys don't have a rogue in the party because that could happen. Um, suddenly, like, y'all are stuck at the front of the dungeon. Unless the GM was like, Oh, no, no, I need to look at what my players

have. I'm going to, I'm going to drop it down. Yeah. And the argument certainly could be that a good dungeon master was going to be like, okay, well, for my party, I'm going to find a way to wiggle on that and deal with that. Right. Yes, all of that's true, but it still means that to me, that indicates there's a flaw in the way the mechanic works. Right. Like to me, that's a problem. And that into a lot of players, into a lot of wizards-owned game designers, they looked at, like, yeah, we gotta figure out a way

to fix this. Yes. So that was number one. We gotta figure out a way to fix skills, so they're not just proficiencies with makeup. Number one, number two, because of the granularity of it, when you got to higher levels, combat became an absolute slog. Like you could have a group of people who were competent with the rules set,

understood about, okay, look, you get one move, you get one okay look you get one move you get one attack you get one other Action you know and under the circumstances you get a tax of opportunity and you can do this other thing You know you did the the way actions worked in three five If everybody knew how their actions worked and everybody you know knew Kind of what they were supposed to do and everybody knew what they were supposed to do, that spent things up and off a lot, but combat still became a slog, because you still had to keep track of actions.

You still had to keep track of a whole raft of modifiers, and God help you if you had multiple characters in the party who were casting buffs or debuffs. Right. You know, as a bless or bardic song or any of that kind of stuff. Like in the most recent 3.5 campaign I played in, our bard consistently for three years, continually had to keep reminding people,

remember plus, plus two plus two right You know because because somebody roll and be like oh, I got you know and have to look all over the character sheet to find all the modifiers and remember that oh right in this circumstance We've got these bonuses and then on top of that. Oh, yeah the bar is is doing his thing So I get you know this so so keeping track of all those modifiers was a pain in the neck. And then on top of that, if you wanted to make your character special, you would wind up buying a whole bunch of feats. Right. And feet interactions like somebody with a pharmacy degree would find it difficult to keep track of the interactions between different feats. I dare say though that the feet aspect of it is also a response to

MMORPGs On some levels because it's skill trees. It's a hundred percent skill trees. Oh, yeah, no 100 100% yeah, you're totally right You know is is okay when you when you take this skill at or this feet at fourth level that unlocks this that and the other thing And yeah, no, that's that's definitely it and the thing is if it's your character you know Mm-hmm, you know you you know what your one trick is and I'm gonna kind of get into this in a second But the problem is you and your DM need to know how your feeds are going to interact with the feeds of any NPCs or any of the special abilities that of monsters that show up because it all stacks because everything evenly. Yeah, yeah, everything stacks with everything else.

And it's going to turn into, well, hold on, let me go check the Splatbook where I got this from. Right. And, you know, is how is this phrased so that we can interpret in what order we apply these rules? You know? And, you know, I mean, we had so many occasions in the longest three five campaign that I was in. We had so many occasions on the system.

It was only one, it was, it was only one adventure session, but it lost last three years because of all the rules because somebody wanted to grapple. Yeah. Sometimes it felt like it. Yeah. Not gonna lie, but I mean, I love the people I played with, but like a couple of, either were a couple of times we got into combat. So I was just like, oh dear God almighty. And and I have to, I have to talk about this in this context, feet bloat. Book bloat was was a huge thing.

I've talked about this a little bit. I think that was the last episode was like, you know, my very, very good, one of my best friends. College roommate, guy, you know, I think I was one of my brothers. He came up with an amazing concept for a character. He had a half-orc barbarian and was despite to chain. Okay. Okay. And without getting too tedious about it his whole stick was built around the idea that I have all the attacks and then I get attacks of opportunity on top of those trips and then attack you again. Okay. Now, you try to get away from me. Give that guy an enlarging potion. And you have the guy who was on our side when I couldn't open a goddamn door.

Nice. At least he was on our side. Yeah, well, yeah, it's been a lot worse. Yeah, so, so, you know, his whole, like, at Third or fourth level. He was absolutely a goddamn murder bot. Mm-hmm. Like it was it was it was it was absolutely ridiculous Because it was okay this guy tries to get away from me trip him and because now he's prone I get a free attack Wack okay, well now he tries to get it again. Oh, I look I get another attack of opportunity Right and every time he was he was, he was doing like D4 plus

one plus a strength bonus. Yeah. And he, he, he had like, you know, so strength bonus was the biggest portion of his damage. But I mean, it was, it was ridiculous. And so it was a one trick pony kind of situation, but that pony was like bread with a Clyde's Dale on steroids. And the problem was in order to have all of his rules handy, he had to have a half dozen supplement books on hand with sticky notes on multiple pages all the time. And we regularly wound up running into situations where some circumstance meant he had to actually

look up the precise wording because, okay, well, in what order does this happen? Right. You know, and there are just so many sticky notes and this wasn't some quirk with him that became a known issue in the game. And and and then this was just a pet peeve of mine as the campaign went on. You know, in first and second edition, if you didn't have a magic weapon, there were certain

monsters you just couldn't affect, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. A lot of kinds of undead, some demons, you needed to have a plus one or plus two kind of weapon. Now some of that goes back to, yeah, second head, like you said, though. Yeah. But here's the thing in third edition, they said, you know what? We don't want to create a situation

where you can't do anything. Right, if you don't have a plus one sword, you cannot hurt a vampire at all. So we're going to we're going to get rid of that where it was like, okay, all right, I have this decision this makes sense. So instead, we're going to give them damage resistance. We're going to introduce damage resistance, which is okay. So this monster has DR five. Yeah. So the first five points you hit them with don't count. They ignore, but you never do, you never do less than one hit point of damage. Right.

Okay, cool. Yeah. Well, okay, that's great. Right up until you have a 15th level barbarian character whose whole stick is built around a whole lot of little attacks with a weapon that only does a D4 plus one. And so he went from being a complete murder bot to being a mosquito. Yeah, I could see that. Because of that one, because of that one issue.

And of course, the DM went out of that, you know, fighting away around that by, you know, buffing, buffing all of our equipment in a way that made that doable, but it's still wound up requiring work around it. It's like, I don't know, I don't like that. Yeah, I shouldn't have to use the rules to get around the rules so that I can yeah. Yeah, and it played into what game designers even had a term for, which was the Christmas tree effect, which was okay, based on the rate at which most adventurers get magic items, the stats of monsters have been built around that set of assumptions. So as a DM, the cruelest thing you can do to your characters is take away their shit.

Oh, yeah. Because because the moment you take away their magic weapons, all of a sudden the bad guys get so much worse. See, this is why I liked being a monk. You take away my weapons. It's like, oh, no, I have to use my fists to open that door. Yeah, yeah, you're still better. I know. Well, I've I've sworn, have I told you I've sworn off monks now? Really? Yeah, so I told my daughter. I was like, I designed a monk for the game that I'm currently playing. And I showed it to her and she's like, oh, this is really cool. He was a drow monk. I had a really cool backstory, you know, and it was really neat.

And I mean, the town that they live in is near this under dark area. So the whole town's economy is based on like, essentially like extraction economy under a mountain. And he's part of the city guard. So he goes down there, he's got the kick-ass long dark vision and all this. And while he does have a uniform weapon with him, he much prefers to, you know, like be very chill. Let's just get out of here. Let's just run. But if we need to, we will fight and I will,

you know, I'll punch and then leave. And then, you know, I'm like, okay, I got this character. And the party is like, okay, cool. And then I'm looking, I'm like, wait, there's no frontline fighters here. Oh no. And you and I were in a TPK where, Oh yeah. And I'm just like, fine, fine, I'm a barbarian.

I will be the fucking frontline fighter. I will be a barbarian. And I like my barbarian, I will be the fucking frontline fighter. I will be a barbarian. And I like my barbarian. Don't get me wrong. But I had, you know, and I poured it over a lot of the story and then I just added a few things here and there and tweaked them. But I was like, I can never successfully play a monk in any game that I've ever played. I'm done.

I'm done trying. I give. I clearly don't get to play a monk in this lifetime. Okay, no, no, no, no, because here's the deal. You the one the one occasion on which I have seen you play a monk who didn't get stuck just opening doors. Mm hmm. It did end, of course, in the TPK you mentioned. Yes. So I still not successfully played a monk. Yeah, but hold on.

Let me get a little further here. When the plague has been cleared from the land eventually in the crater pock tail scape that remains, we'll have to get together. And I will have to find a way to try to run a game. OK. with you and friend of the game Tessa and producer George. Yeah.

And we might have to get friend of the show Bishop involved. Sure. If we can find a way to work around the time difference. But anyway, when we do that, I really genuinely want you to play a monk because the most I have seen you come out in a character I have seen in play. Yeah. Was then and yeah, I just, yeah, no. Yeah, would be nice. We got to find a way to make that happen. Okay. Because clearly it's a frustrated life goal of yours. And as your friend, I want to try to help you achieve that. I appreciate that.

So. But back to the problems with 3.5, though. So you had to keep track of all of these modifiers. You had to keep track of all of these feats. And like every time they put out a new supplement, it was like, well, we got to come up with some new feats to put in the book. Like selling point is gonna be like one of the selling points is,

oh, hey, we got 24 new feats. And like after a while, if you started looking at me, you're like, okay, well, this feet is just this other feet with a different name. And like a very slightly different set of circumstances. Like you could turn these into one feet. And right, you could make this an update of the feet. Yeah, and we'd be good. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there was that and

you know, and it was all in like there were environment books for playing Seagowing Adventures for adventures and the desert adventures and the Arctic. They published whole supplements built around classes. Obviously, obviously, around, because that's always been a big part of what gets written. And then around organizations within settings. Yep. Okay, that's great. Published, you know, put out all this information for these settings, put out all this all this optional information for stuff for folks. That's great. But every one of these books included, like I just said, new feeds and new prestige class.

That's true. And so like, if you were running a game, you'd have to house rule that like, okay, look, these are the books I'm allowing. Yeah, this is a game based on, like here's the canon for the game. Yeah. Yeah. This is it.

This is what we're doing. Yeah. And, and, you know, they're, they're so back when it was first edition and, and to a certain extent into second edition. Most of the stuff that got published by TSR on a monthly basis, mm-hmm. Were modules. Yes. We got, we got a bunch of, we got, we got a writer who got together who who came up with an idea for an adventure Here is the adventure. Here are the maps here are the encounters. Here's the script here. Oh, right, right And that was that was most of the publishing that they did they you know with dragonlands

They got into they've started getting into publishing books and novels and doing fiction and they got into you know other stuff But generally speaking, what they were cranking out every month was modules. In three, five, it felt to me like that changed to every other month we're putting out a new, very skinny hardcover book. And if we're not putting out another hardcover book, we're putting out two softcover ones. And I often wondered if that was. That's all the supplemental rules. Yeah. I wondered if that was the Doritos effect. You know how like if you're going to sell Doritos, you have to sell all the brands of Doritos, which means they take up a shit ton of shelf space. And it's not even that they actually think that boiled egg flavored Doritos is gonna sell,

but they do know that boiled egg flavored Doritos takes up this much space. And now that's one fewer spot that Funions can put their shit up. You know, I hadn't thought of that, but I don't think so. Okay. Because before, I had thought of that, but I don't think so.

Okay. Because before the shift to fourth edition, when we're still talking about 3.5 being what was on the shelves, Dungeons and Dragons, despite all of the other games that had followed in its wake, the World of Darkness series, Traveler, all the plethora of science fiction games, all of the other fantasy games that came out, all of them were kind of also rands on the shelf. You know, you already had D&D taking up,

most of the shelf space a lot of the air in the room as it were and I don't think I mean, I don't know I could be in time. I wasn't in you know wizards marketing meetings. So I mean, I don't know right But I don't I don't think it was an attempt to crowd the shelf consciously. Okay. Especially after they put out the open the the OGL. Right. The open gaming license. Yeah. Yeah. When they when they put out the OGL, I think they they really were like, no, no, seriously. I think I think what it was and actually this just occurred to me. Now that you've brought that up, I think what it was was they figured, okay, look, we will leave the 8.99 module stuff to people who are operating under the open gaming license. They can do that stuff.

We're gonna do the prestige stuff with the fancy hardcover books. And we're gonna do 30 bucks for another book for right and that's going to be a higher price point that'll be you know higher higher you know profit margin on each item you know I think I think from a marketing standpoint it's more of that and and and that I come to that conclusion because of the OGL and because of what I remember seeing on the shelves from the independent non-wiserts publishers doing stuff. So that's my sense of it as to why they did that.

And so by the time the campaign that I'm talking about ended, my friend was carrying literally two backpacks full of hardbound books. Right. In order to cover all of the groubles that his character and his wife's character needed in order to pull off their their trickery. their trickery. And so, you know, there are, there were by 2007, and there were these really well-known, well-documented to borrow a term from, you know, electronic gaming and programming. These are very well-documented bugs in the system. And so in 2007, Wizards of the Coast announced that they were working on fourth edition. And around the same time, Wizards broke off their contract with a subcontractor. They had sold essentially, or at least, Dragon Magazine out to another subcontractor, another publishing company called Paiso Publishing.

And sometime in either 2005 or 2006, they broke off their licensing deal with Paiso. And they said said we're gonna we're gonna take a dragon magazine digital we're gonna we're gonna stop perennic it completely we're gonna put it online right and so peso turned around and said okay well under the open gaming license we're going to put out some of those modules that you guys aren't writing so we're gonna come out of their own setting and we're gonna we're gonna do this whole series modules built with our own setting and we're going to do this whole series of modules

built in our own world. And we're going to call it the Pathfinder series. Yeah, I remember this one, because this is when I was going to cons. Yeah. And so, so Paiso started releasing the Pathfinder Adventure paths. And then in 2007, they got wind of what Wizards was looking at doing with a new addition

of Dungeons and Dragons. And they said, you know what, we've gotten in the groove with what we've been doing with 3.5 rules set. So we're going to take this in a completely different direction. So we're going to take this in a completely different direction. And they took 3.5 and did a couple of things to try to fix the major known bugs in the system. And they wound up releasing Pathfinder under the Open Gaming License. And I want to say it was in late 2007. I actually got a set of the preview rules for, I don't know, 20 bucks. And it, it, again, it was, it was basically 3.5 of the couple of weeks. Uh-huh. And they introduced some new classes.

They wound up having to rename a whole bunch of monsters when they published new supplements they had to rename a bunch of stuff. They didn't have beholders in Pathfinder. Mm-hmm. Because the copyright for that, that concept was not something they could do something like under the OGL for whatever bizarre reason. Okay.

And so Pathfinder became the system that folks wound up sticking with when fourth edition came out. when fourth edition came out. So they were a whole bunch of people, a whole bunch of people who had the reaction to fourth edition that your DM had to third. Right. This is D&D. And so now I've got to explain kind of what the changes were.

So fourth edition, the fact it was being worked on got announced in 2007. And Wizards published two preview volumes over the course of 2007, Races and Classes and Worlds and Monsters. And it had a much artwork that owned up much, much of which wound up being in the players handbook and the DMG and monster manual. And it gave everybody a preview of what the thinking was about how the new game was going to work and how it was going to be different and why they felt it was a new direction to go in. Why? Why they felt it was it was the thing to do. I have both volumes. I actually, I was cleaning off one

of my bookshelves earlier today and I found my copy of Races and Classes and I read it and I mean back back when it came out. I bought it as soon as it was available because I'm a God new edition D&D. I got to find out what they're doing. And I remember reading it going, okay, you know what? I really like everything they're saying here. Um, one of like one of the things they said was, um, you know, just like in third edition, there's no reason why a dwarf can't be a wizard. And so they basically said,

we're gonna stick with third edition idea that there are new limitations on what races can be, what classes, we're not gonna have level limitations for different races and different stuff. And they introduced the concepts that they were working on with the way character abilities were gonna work. And it left me really happy and really excited. I was really looking forward to seeing this in print

and like, what is this like? But there were a whole bunch of people my age and a little bit older, who like threw a massive rage fest. Yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, so was this the system where you had abilities that you could use once per day, once per session, once per round kind of thing. Yes. Okay. So the way it worked was to go into the mechanics now and then get into the

rage fest in a minute. Yeah. The biggest changes mechanically were first off exactly what you just said. So when you created your character first level, for example, if you decided you were going to be a wizard level, you got to choose two at will powers. And those are represent spells that were essentially like cantrips. So you had two spells that you could use. However many times you needed to. Magic Missile was one of them. Magic Missile went from being a, and I have a first level caster,

I have cast my magic missile end. I am spent. Right. And that ended right there. And it turned into, I can cast magic missile every many times I need to. Like that is my utility, go to that is my can trip. That is my can trip.

Mm-hmm. Number one, then you had encounter spells. So once per encounter as a first level wizard, you could, I'm trying to think what an encounter spell was at first level. Actually, no, I think Magic Missile might have been an encounter spell. Okay.

Burning hands was one of the at wills. Okay. Sure, sure. And then at first level, you'd have one ability that was once per day. So you get this one really big spell you can use. And then when you get then then when you cast that you've got a you know make camp and rest and you get it back the following day. Kind of starting the idea of short and long rests too. Yes. So so number one you had you had at will and Counter and Daily Powers.

So, like one of the characters I went up creating, the group that had the really long running 35 campaign, we shifted over to fourth, because the original 35 campaign had run its course. We wound up becoming huge heroes to the people of the continent of Corvair. And I wound up writing an epilogue to the whole campaign that I'm still actually kind of proud of. And so we retired those characters, and we started a whole new campaign in Forth, and the first DM said, I don't want to run anymore,

and his brother said, that's fine, I want to. And so he took over his DM and we moved over to fourth edition and I actually had the chance to create a spell blade and I was so excited because he was a fighter wizard who was actually like a fighter wizard like all of his magical abilities were like I have I have the ability to do stuff in combat magically but I still act a lot like a fighter and it wasn't like okay well you know I can I can shoot my bow and I can use my sword and then I can throw a fireball you know it was the was, the magic I do is my sword lights up with lamp and green flame.

And when it does that, I can do this kind of cool shit with it. Right, right. I can use my magic to dimension door halfway across the battlefield. You know, I can call my sword to my hand from however far away it is. You know, I I mean, it was, it was, it was its own thing. And it was just so amazing. It was awesome.

Cool. And I was just so excited by it. And we started playing it. And there was a learning curve. And let's people in the group got frustrated with the learning curve because there were people in the group who just had not been role-playing as long, but we had some people who had been role-playing forever and we had a few people who had been basically role-playing since the beginning of our first campaign. There was a certain amount of frustration for those folks that was just related to, you know, I learned how certain amount of frustration for those folks that was just related to, you know, I learned how to do all this stuff. Now, I got to learn how to do it differently again.

But there was also a lot of simplification in the way a lot of stuff in the game worked. Skills got changed dramatically. DCs were lowered very, very dramatically. Saving throws, the way saving throws worked got changed. And fourth edition, I wanted to look at it off a lot more like what we see in fifth today. Right. And it was just, it was this was it was this major, it was this major major C change in the way of a lot of, in the way that a lot of mechanics worked. And it was very intentionally a very major change.

And so there were a whole bunch of people who were really angry because this was if they wanted to continue with a rule set that was going to be supported. If you're going to see new stuff being put out, you need to switch over to fourth because right. You know, Wizard isn't going to be publishing anymore, third edition stuff anymore. That's what they call a dead brand. Yes, basically. Yeah.

So, so a lot of people had spent a lot of money, my buddy that I mentioned before, being like near the top of that list had spent a lot of money on third. And so now, okay, I got to go buy a whole new set of rule books. I got to go, you know, and there's a learning curve. And that's frustrating. Sure. And then on top of that, there was this very intentional move to emphasize and counters that were not combat.

Now, real quick, I want to just back up a little bit. So your friend who spent a lot of money on the three-five books. I mean, again, you can see behind me in my office, there's an entire bookshelf, and it is literally double stacked of Star Wars books that are now called Legends. Now, none of these are actually called Legends, because I bought them, I mean, like the pages are yellow on the outside, like they are old, right?

Yeah. So how to put this? This was created, or this was made by Fiat to be not canon anymore. They never stripped the knowledge from my brain. They never came to my house and burned my books. Did they start a whole new series of books? Yes, and you know what? I've elected not to get into those because of people's review of the new canon. Not because I'm loyal to the old canon or anything like that.

Just I'm too old to like get into something that somebody has told me is flimsy at best and I'm like well, I've already read through some really flimsy at best books in there. I don't wanna start over and read another version of Planet of Twilight and have it suck that bad again. So it's what I don't get is that your friend who had all these books for three, five, couldn't still play them. It's not like like you said there was book bloat. It's not like he couldn't choose.

You know what? We're going to do a tundra adventure. So only these books count. Or you know what? We're going to like, there's still so many ways to fuck that pig. Like it's crazy to me that you're like upset that somebody brought a llama to the orgy now.

Nice. Yeah. Nice. That's. Thank you for that mental. Sure. You know, and the thing is I've thought about this. I have, I have, I have genuinely thought about this, this, because what you're saying is 100% correct. And I think what it comes down to, I think the emotional reaction. And I also want to note that my buddy who had spent all of this money on 35 and still has

this literal library 35. Yeah, a trove of 35. Yeah. literally library. A trove of three five. Yeah, yeah, it's like like oh my god someday you know some some hobby historian is gonna find his collection to be like holy shit we hit the mother load. We know everything we could ever hope to learn about this one system. My god I can write my dissertation like you know seriously it was it was that level of collection he, he had, still has as far as I know. Um, and the thing is he was like, I mean, there was a little bit of,

well, you know, I don't know about a new system, but okay. And he, he is one of those personalities who, who he immediately went through it. And the joke we made in the group was, oh, Nick is about to figure out how to break the world. Like he chose that guy. He has remained that guy. And so he immediately went into the fourth edition books and read through him with Gusto and picked them up

as they came out, because he's also a collector at heart. And he was not one of these revanchists. He was not one of these dead enders. He was maybe not an eager adopter, not an early adopter like me, was an adopter. And he saw it was like, okay, well, you know, if this is what everybody in the group wants to do, then okay, cool, we'll do that. And I think for a lot of, for a lot of the folks who got really angry and are still really angry.

Earlier this week, I think I shared with you and some of our friends in a Facebook conversation that we're in in messenger. I think I remember, at least I remember thinking I've got to share this with these guys. But in a D&D group on Facebook, there was a conversation actually about recent developments within D&D that was just so indicative of the toxic levels of, well, you know, this is my game and you're ruining my game kind of kind of outlook. Mm-hmm. And, you know, back to your original point at the beginning of all this. First of all, this is happening in 2007, 2008, which is, you know, Barack Obama is running for president the second time.

No, he's running the first time. First time. Okay. That is. You're right. Yeah. I'm right. My bad. Um, no wait. 2008. He's running for the first time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. You're right. You're right. Sorry. I, I blew the math there. Oh, eight and then 12. Yeah. Um, so he's running for president the first time. And we start seeing, we start seeing the beginnings

of a backlash in the culture wars where we'd been moving forward Whether whether we had you know politically or legislatively as a society we've talked about this previously You know LGBTQ acceptance had become basically pretty mainstream Yeah, and I'm glad that you distinguish between legislatively because yeah, there's there are People in power are reacting against the culture as it's marching forward. Yes, yeah, yes, but they are reacting that way in reflection of I think something that was also going on at the ground level amongst people who who were starting to feel insecure. So, and I'm not talking about economic insecurity, don't add me with that.

No, I'm talking about people who are actually... Yeah, culturally feeling insecure. It's around 2008 that I remember first seeing, actually it would have been a bit later now because I didn't get on Facebook until 09. But it was around the same time that I started getting emails and seeing stuff from members of my extended family

and for my dad that were, that were like these dire warnings about, God, the word just completely went away from me. Population figures. Demographics? Demographics, thank you. There were the dire warnings about worldwide demographics and the population of the Islamic world is is Expanding way faster than that of the Western you know democratic, you know

Right. Yeah. Yeah, and you know all of this kind of like The subtext of it being you as a white dude straight white dude really need to be worried. Mm-hmm and You, I remember kind of looking at that like, do I? Like, I don't, I'm not seeing this. It felt to me at that time, by the way, like white dudes who were used to being in power felt that there was okay so in wrestling if you hit a guy too hard you know here we're an hour into it and I finally referenced wrestling but if you hit a guy too hard in wrestling you know

it's it's a choreographed combat that's meant to look real but in wrestling if you hit a guy too hard and it's called giving him a potato. You potato him, okay? If he takes issue with that, he hits you back just as hard if not harder. He gives you a potato, but that's called getting a receipt. And sometimes you'll hit a guy too hard, and you're like, oh shit, I got a receipt coming. And it might not happen during that match. It might happen. And it's just happen during that match. It might happen. And it's just a way of kind of like keeping people from being to zealous and like,

hey, work this, don't shoot this. It felt culturally like white dudes, absolutely felt like they had a receipt coming and they were trying to guard against it. We're trying to dictate the when and the how. And so there was this, because I remember the demographic stuff, I remember a lot of that. And it was at a time of economic,

the supports of the Jenga tower were falling. Yeah. It's the great recession. Yes. So I do think that you have a layer of that as well, but also, you know, well, we kind of fucked this up culturally. We've been running Willie Nile for a very long time,

eight years of Bush. We've been bombing brown people as much as we want. There's like a fear that the receipt is coming. I think you're giving the people who were feeling this insecurity. I think you're giving them too much credit for awareness. Okay. I think the issue was for all of our childhood, if you looked at main characters on the covers of fantasy novels,

they were muscular white guys with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with to code them somehow racially, you totally could. And now all of a sudden, in the third edition rule books, they're starting to see people who don't look like them as the heroes. They're starting to see more and more women showing up in the artwork and in the rules and like the pronouns in the 3.5 rule book were explicitly and they stated at the beginning of the book I remember reading it going, oh well okay that's a thing. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Was we're going to alternate between he and she.

Yeah. Um, you know, and so they saw that and it was and that was that was something that you know got some grumbling from you know guys, guys our age, about like, why did you come on just like, you know, the default in the languages he, he, he kind of why you got to be social justice warrior about this stuff. She just costs so much more ink. He is one letter smaller. That's why we do it. It's economic. Yeah. Here you go, it's economical. No, it's not, it's not. But anyway, so, you know, and then in the genre, in this time, you're starting to see more representation, you're starting to see people who aren't white showing up, you know, in roles, not to the extent we're seeing representation now, which, you know, is a lot better, but still it was becoming a thing.

It was becoming a thing that was consciously being done. And I think that was just by itself uncomfortable. I don't necessarily want to go so far as to say threatening, but I think it was uncomfortable because the more of those kinds of faces you see in the artwork, the fewer of the old kinds of faces you see in the artwork because the space in a book is limited. Right. You know, as much as we want to argue that, you know, giving other people more rights doesn't take away rights from you, it's not pie. Right. Space in a book is literally pie. Like, yeah, like, you know, you're seeing a smaller and smaller share of that, that set of imagery looking like you anymore, and that to somebody who grew up just assuming that that was what they were going to see all the time, you know when you grow up in

in an unequal situation at the top of it, equality looks like a threat. And so I think there's some of that and then in fourth, there are all of these things changing and the way the rules worked, it wasn't as heavily focused on killing monsters and taking their stuff. The narrative was very consciously changed for non-human races and for monstrous races to not necessarily be automatically evil. There was some debate because half works were not originally, half works didn't show up in the first players handbook for fourth edition. Fourth edition, instead of having a player's handbook, fourth edition was done in a way that, okay, we've got the volume of having a players handbook fourth edition was was done in a way that Okay, we've got the the volume one of the players handbook. We've got volume two of the players handbook We've got volume three and

Initially, I think the plan was they were gonna have volume four et cetera Mm-hmm. So like as they came up with new ways to drive Characters they were going to release new players' handbooks that were thematically you know, centered around that. So like for example, the monk as a class didn't show up in the first players' handbook because the characters in the first volume of the PHP were martial heroes. These powers were rooted in, I'm a fighter or I'm a warlord or I'm a rogue, or divine heroes who were empowered by a deity or arcane heroes who were empowered by arcane magic.

And then they had the basic races, humans else half elves, halflings, dwarves. And then in the second volume of the players' handbook, they introduced some additional arcane heroes, so like the spell blade that I talked about was in the second play of the handbook. And primal heroes, so druids, barbarians, and in another class called wardens showed up in that volume. And they also broke up. I'm kind of getting off the track, but I'll come back to what I was talking about, but it's important to kind of note, because it's a philosophical change that I thought was really kind of cool, but a lot of players were really angry about

was they explicitly said, you know what, we've looked at the way different classes are supposed to behave in in combat when you're fighting monsters. The wizard, the wizard is the guy who stands back and throws fireballs and affects a big area Right cast balls like cloud kill which keeps monsters out of a certain area or puts up walls. So a wizard is a controller So a controller works to you know try to try to keep people pending But they're an arcane controller. Okay, their power comes from magic. A fighter, the party's fighter is a martial controller. Their job is to get up front and they're sticky. So like, I am fighting you. If you try to get away from me, I'm going to beat you up. Right. I'm going to I'm going to keep you away from the squishier members of my party. Meanwhile, the rogue and the ranger are strikers. I'm going to run up and I'm going to do a shit than a damage. And then I'm going to

try to get away. Okay. Right. And this makes perfect sense. So you can and and then and then the really to me brilliant thing about this idea is, well, okay, so we have a controller. What if we have a controller whose powers come out of, from a psychic source? Okay. And they came up in the third player's input. They had, they had a psychic controller.

They had a psychic striker, which by the way, way was a monk. And they had a psychic a leader. The other character type was leader, clerics, barreds, and artificers. For example, we're all leaders. They're the ones who buff the party, debuff opponents and heal Okay, and so one of the classes I really liked out of fourth edition was the warlord Who was a leader so did the job of a cleric, but did it as a martial character? Okay, yeah, they were basically like a fighter who was an officer who was like you get over there.

Right. And their abilities were I get to make an attack against this enemy. And the process of making an attack against this enemy, I can also give my buddy a free five foot move for them to get into a position to hit somebody. Nice. And that kind of thing. Yeah. And so I philosophically, I was like, this is amazing.

Mm-hmm. These ideas are great, but very pointedly, a whole lot of older gamers, my age, your age, and older than us, looked at this and went, you're trying to turn D&D into world of Warcraft. Because that's exactly how classes break down in wow. I remember this. I remember speaking to the owner of an FLGS and friendly local gaming store and he said, this isn't D&D, this is Warcraft. And it's because too many people are staying home,

playing Warcraft, and this is D&D's attempt to get them back. So it's selling its essence essentially to, you know, redundancy intended there, but it's selling its essence essentially in order to get the market share back. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and, and I think that answer is kind of half right. I think they looked at the way MMOs had developed and they looked at the way those mechanics worked and they said, you know what

How can we how can we Take what they've done and use that on the tabletop partly because All of those were planned from the ground up AD&D was basically an organic construct AD&D was basically an organic construct. Like, okay, we need, you know, if you wanna play your character, it hits people over the head with a sharp object. Okay, you gotta fight her.

Okay, you're gonna need a healer. So, okay, we gotta clear it. Okay. We'll wizard, so, okay, here's what is you can throw fireballs, you can do crazy shit like that. Okay. You know, you wanna be sneaky, okay, here's a thief. Like, you know, and it wound up organically developing

into what MMO designers looked at and went, OK, no. We're going to take this and we're actually going to make this a design feature. Like, we're going to have the DPS characters, and we're actually going to build the DPS characters to be good at behaving this particular way in game. And then, so forth edition is those ideas, then coming back around onto the tabletop. And I mean, I'm giving the designers at Watsy credit at their word for kind

of what they were saying at the time. Because I don I don't, I don't think I, I, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't, I don't think they really had reason to lie about it. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, so, so that's, that's, I think, where those ideas were rooted and I think the comparison is important. Because the other thing is it wasn't to bring people back. I think it was there's a new generation of people who've been introduced to the idea of getting together with a group of people and going and raiding a dungeon. They've been doing it online. Hey, right.

Let's encourage them to get together in person and do it this way. Right. So it wasn't that we've had a bunch of people leave and go to MMOs. It was there's a new generation of players that we could be reaching out to. And one of the problems with 3.5 by the end of it by 2007, 3.5 was really, really daunting for a new player

to get into. Yeah, because I mean, you daunting for a new player to get into. Yeah, because I mean, you had essentially a culture of people who'd grown up with one, a one, two, a two, three, three, five. So you've got a lot of gatekeepers. Oh, yeah. And you've got the intimidation factor on top of that of like, I remember I was playing with a group

And we booted the guy after the first game because it was just obnoxious. He was trying to win at D&D And he basically he's like, okay, well, you know, I'll play a cleric. We're like cool. We could use a cleric And so or no, he played a wizard. Sorry, and we already had a couple, a couple. I think we had a sorcerer and some other magic user. And he's like, okay, well, I'm gonna make my familiar toad. It's like, all right, cool. And he's like, okay, and then I'm gonna stay up on it. And like, he just was like trying to rules lawyer his way into having made cool shit

to win the next combat and on and on and on. Like, and there's like no role playing. There was no nothing. And it's like, oh, but you're, you're playing the wrong game then. I'm sorry. You're not going to fill with us. But you're with the wrong group of yeah. And so it was the opposite of, you know, gatekeeping. In many ways, we like showed him back to the gate, but it's like, no, you're trying to win.

You might enjoy another table over there somewhere. We're here to play and have a good time. But 3.5 was, I think, in many ways the final edition where that was an encouraged behavior. And, you know, because when you get to foreign pathfinder, you get to them, and by encouraged behavior, I mean, encouraged by the designers. By the nature of the system.

Yes, yes, where like they, the designers, that was in the air that they breathed. Whereas when you get to four, how do we get people to play? Not how do we get people to find a new strategy to win? Yes. Yeah. And yeah, and so I think that's,

and that philosophical change, I think was, I don't want to say, a lot of people reacted as though it was hurtful to them. That was changing. I think a big part of it is a demographic issue. I think a lot of 30 plus year old guys who had grown up playing first through 3.5 looked at what was going on with this and felt like this is not being made for me. This is for people 10 years younger than me. This is for millennials. This is for millennials and zoomers.

Before they had names. Cause before they had names. This is for Gen Y and Gen Z, not me, Gen X or my older brother, late Boer. And I think there was, for some of these people, there are still, you see and hear them talking in ways online, like there was a very deep level of personal betrayal. They felt with this shift. And some of these people are my dear friends, and I hesitate to be too judgmental about it.

But I've gotten an arguments with a couple of them where dude, you're just wrong. Right. Yeah. And I know, you know, feel free. I'm at EH PlayLock on Twitter. Please, please at me. Like I will, I will happily, I will happily wait, wait into that discussion one more time. Because look, I'm not trying to say you're wrong

for preferring an edition, but I am trying to say you're wrong for preferring an edition, but I am going to say you're wrong for calling forth edition cancer. Yeah, like somebody just this last week in a D&D group, somebody said, you know, I like forth edition and got this and this guy had this like immediate like you could see That just reading that somebody said they liked it had like touched him in the bad place right and this guy came back with this response It was like oh, yeah, well, you know, you're just basically saying that you like cancer and like Why do you have to be like that? Wow? Like how how badly were you hurt by this?

Yeah. Like how much stake can there be in a game system? Like, I mean, don't get me wrong when I ran up against the limitations of fourth edition. I was really disappointed. And there were some things in fourth that I looked at and went like, well, you know, that's pretty clunky and I don't know about that. But I never had, I didn't, I didn't let it be like an attack against me. Like, you know, somebody else saying, I prefer

chocolate doesn't mean if you like a vanilla you suck right It's so funny because when people say like when they when I get responses like that of people just like How could you like that? I'm like I like broccoli too? Like that's usually my my default answer is like oh People do this with music with me all the time and And I couldn't give a shit less about music. Like, oh, you like that stuff? I don't.

And that's the end of the conversation for me. It's barely the beginning of the conversation for me that I like any music. But be like, oh, God, I can never get into that. Oh, okay. Well, you know, I like broccoli. Yeah. Yeah. And, and again, I think I think the deal is there is this mindset. I think I think within within within the milieu of these games being attached to a system for people who have spent 30 years playing a game. The way that game works can become something they identify with very strongly.

Yes. Well, and, and, and I don't think it's entirely right, but I think I can kind of understand where the attachment and identification can lead to somebody feeling like they've been slided when somebody suggests something needs to be changed. Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a similar reaction when somebody suggests universal healthcare. And I'm not actually joking at this because the people who typically object to it are people who have spent a long time paying for For the Cadillac plan as it were

At the result is they They get mad at the idea that the rules that they have played by are No longer valid Yeah, I'm getting the the finger point and the point to the nose. I'm pushing my nose and putting it out. But I think, and literally in a game system, I have learned and internalized these rules. I have built a character or characters with whom I have a deep emotional attachment by virtue of the fact that I've played that character for quite some time and developed them

for quite some time. developed them for quite some time I mean we have friends who are authors and they get attached to their characters and you add to that the overlay of the rules system and then you have like I Get where the anger is coming from I don't agree with it. I think that you know It's it's time to do some reflecting but but you ultimately have better life choices. Yeah, you know, it's time to do some reflecting. Um, but, uh, but you ultimately have better life choices. Yeah. You know, like, like, let's, let's see why we're so bothered by the fact,

but it is I have learned these rules. And now you're telling me these rules don't count toward my continued success. And my rejoinder to that is always, well, you could still play this system. And that's the kicker. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and there's more I want to say on that, but I know we've gone over an hour at this point. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, well, over. And so I think I think I can pick up with what I want to say in our next episode. And then kind of round this out by then going from forth

into fifth. And then into like the most recent developments within fandom, which I think are going to reflect some things back on why third into fourth was such a big deal. Okay. So based on all of this, what are you taking away at this point in our conversation? Well, I think the comparison to universal health care, quite honestly. Like, you have, like, I think it all kind of culminated to that moment of just like, here are people who have played by the rules of capitalism and now they're mad that you're trying to change

them. Because they spent all that energy, it kind of goes back to what you were talking about with the fighter not being able to disable a device at 12 level. Like, I put all this class energy into this skill, and it's still not good enough, because things have changed. Yeah. And, I mean, I don't know, I mean, the aesthetic of the game, the time of the game,

it is a pre-industrial, it is a clearly European Eurocentric, wilderness, medieval fantasy model. What is that if not the appeal to tradition in the white male mentality? And so people who are attracted to this game, absolutely I could see them being like, oh, I'm gonna stick to, you know, I could see them being like, oh, I'm going to stick to, you

know, I could see them being dogmatic is ultimately. So yeah, I yeah. So that's my takeaway so far is that I'm unsurprised that a whole bunch of people got their feelings hurt that the game system changed to accommodate ultimately younger players who wanted to play instead of who wanted to win and I do think we're seeing a divide there. So. Okay, I don't I don't entirely think you're wrong. I think it's an aggregate. I think that last part is especially on the money. On an individual level, you know, like anything, you know, painted with a broad brush to save time, as we say so often, you know, it breaks down a little bit around the edges, but I think as a movement as a demographic issue, I think you're largely

on the money. I think generalization is largely correct. Yeah. And I think there's some other things at work, which I don't want to quite give away the store on right now, but we can get back to it. But you've started to touch on them a little bit, but I don't want to give it away yet right now. Sure. All right. So any books you want to recommend, what are you reading, what are you listening to? It's okay if not.

Right now, I don't have a whole lot going on in the reading realm. I've got three or four things that I've already recommended in the past that I'm trying to work on. Specifically, you know, I'm still working my way through the flying tires, the story of Claire Chinald. Lairson Alt and the American volunteer group in China, which just keeps getting more and more Hollywood while still remaining a history book. Like John, the movie, the flying tigers never did justice to the crazy shit that actually happened. Nice. So yeah, that's what I'm getting on. What are you reading right now? You're you're much more active as a reader recently than me. What do you what do you get going on?

Only because I insist on going outside when the sun is out to read for half an hour or actually not even half an hour for 15 minutes every day like on my lunch. So even when the kids are home, I feed them and then I go outside. And so I've been reading, I'm still plotting through the the Star Wars books. I finally finished Star by Star by Troy Denning and it's spoiler alert on a 20 plus year old book. It's the one where Anakin dies. Jason is kidnapped by the Yuzhan Vong and Coruscant gets taken over Borsk Fala goes out like a fucking G And it's it's really cool to see Him doing

Oh he was Yeah, but and Leah gives a really good speech at the end about resist. And I was like, oh, that's really cool. I bet you've had Reddit last year. I would have been like, this is so prescient. And this year I've been dulled into being okay with just neoliberal policies, because at least they're not fascists.

So I need to kind of reexamine myself a little. But, a little bit of looking in the mirror. Yeah, definitely need to. A little bit of thinking about life choices. Yeah, yeah, or just, you know, what I'm gonna let pass and what I'm not. Okay.

But here's what I do recommend this week. I actually have gotten the kids into playing various games as you know. Yes. We played Castle Panic again last week. Okay. And that was a lot of fun. And I really want to play, I bought Julia, three dragon anti.

Oh. Yeah. And we, all three of us had a lot of fun playing it. And I've taught them through playing Uno to gang up on me, that they should always gang up on me, that you should never rely yourself with the most powerful person to get the next person who's as powerful as you, but you should always. So I'm hoping through that and Castle Panic

that they recognize the utility and help usefulness of a union. So. Oh, I was going to say you were training them to be good let in as revolutionaries, but okay. Yeah, that too. Why not both? So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now you told people that they could find you on the Twitter. Is there anyone else that they can find you? They can find me at the same address on TikTok and on Instagram, although on Instagram actually look for me as Mr. Blalock at MR

Blalock, B-L-A-Y-L-O-O-C-K. You won't find very much there, but there will be a few very precious images of, and by precious I mean, Tweet, images of me and my son from a while ago. Nice. But yeah, so that's that's where I can be found. And of course, the two of us collectively, if you want to yell at both of us over our opinions on, you know, broccoli, broccoli or, you know, letting go of your attachment to a particular edition of a game, you can shout out both of us at Geek History Time on Twitter. And where can they find you? Da Harmony, 2H is in the middle on the Twinshta. You can also find me every Tuesday night on twitch.tv for slash capital puns. We run a live weekly pun show, have since the pandemic started and prior to that it was an actual in person one so come check it out. I will also on March 28th be on the UK pun off show, which is 11 o'clock our time. It'll be 7 p.m. there time.

11 o'clock a.m. our time on the 28th. Just go on Facebook or on Twitter look up UK Pun show or UK pun off and you'll you'll find it. And then yes just to be sure when you say 7 p.m. you're talking about 1900 GMT. Yes. Greenwich meantime. Yes. And the 11 o'clock AM figure is for those of you on the west coast of North America. Yes, PST. Good call. Since, since, since we do have, it turns out, it's a global audience. Hello New Zealand. There you go. Yeah. For you, I have no idea what time that's going to be. It won't even be on the same day. But, you know, that's where he's going to be. Yeah. That day, that time. And on the following day, I'll actually be on the show day. But you know, that's where he's going to be that day, that time.

And on the following day, I'll actually be on the show called Who Wrote This Shit with Chelsea Beers. And you can just type in WTS or Chelsea Beers, B-E-R-C-E. She's a phenomenal comedian. And she's going to have me on that show on the 29th of March at 6 p.m. PST So yeah, and that's yeah, that's good enough. That's where you can find to be so all right. Yeah Well until next time I'm Damien Harmony and I'm at Blalehawk and don't go anywhere or we will take that attack of opportunity anywhere or we will take that attack of opportunity.