Who cares if D&D dies?
on
Layoffs at WotC
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I know this might sound harsh. but after roleplaying for nearly 15 years, D&D just doesn't offer anything interesting anymore. I used to play it when I was 10 and thought all that there was to RPGs was hack an' slash, but that was a long time ago.
There are some nice odds and ends that came out of TSR - I personally thought that Ravenloft, Darksun and Planescape were interesting attempts to breath new life into the increasingly stagnant fantasy genre, but look at how bland the rest of the backgrounds are: Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Birthright - footnotes to Tolkien at best., they are nothing more than cashcows. The D&D system just plain sucked, still does, and if you just want to do hack an' slash then there are plenty of multiplayer computer games such as Diablo II, Everquest, and even the biosphere offerings will more than fill your needs and are probably much more fun. Or why not just do wargaming instead - Games Workhop and other cater to this market just fine?
The reason that roleplaying keeps me interested theses days is the background, complex plots, characters and interesting players/GMs - the sort of interactivity that computers games will not yet achieve for some time to come. Look at the two biggest RPG companies aside from WotC: Whitewolf and Steve Jackson Games:
Love or hate it (which I do in equal amounts) WW has done much more to actually build interesting and innovative fictional environments for roleplaying with the World of Darkness and Trinty Universe lines than TSR/WotC has ever managed with various flavours of D&D. They sell not because the system, but because of the content and quality of the background material.
Likewise, GURPS is popular not because of the system, (although it is a much better attempt at a universal system than D&D3 will ever be) but because of the hugh range of excellently written background books -regardless of what system you like to use, even if you hate the system, many of the books are still highly entertaining, and useful.
The opensource game license is an interesting idea, but I believe ultimately flawed. They are working from the premise that getting into RPGs is hard because there are so many systems and they are so different to learn - their solution is that we all use the D&D system and so don't have to learn new systems for different genres of play and then everyone can then write their games for the largest possible market (D&D system). The problem with this is that one system doesn't suit all types of games, all types of genre and all types of groups! If you are into interesting system mechanics then look at Phage Press' Amber Diceless Roleplaying games (set in Zelazn'y Chronicles of Amber Universe), or Jonathan Tweet's Everway RPG, based on using vision and fate card. Both are truely unique and interesting games because the systems facilitates storytelling. The first time that we played Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu was a milestone for our gaming group: WHAT WE CAN'T JUST KILL THE ENEMY? We had to actually think about innovative ways to defeat the enemy while avoiding combat!
Our group LIKES there to be different flavours of rules for different types of games we play - hell most of the games we play these days barely require any rules: the ROLEplaying of characters is what is important not the ROLLplaying of dice! Do the roleplaying community a big favour and let D&D die!
Slashdot News Flash - Katz
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 2, Troll
Slashdot News Flash - Katz STILL has nothing interest or substance to say.
Centre of the net? Bulls**t. The whole point of the net is that it IS decentralised and anarchistic. There has never really been a centre - but there are clusters. The groups and communities that he mentions as 'having had their time', etc all still exist and contribute to the experience that is otherwise known as the Internet, for better or (in AOL's case) for the worst
The Media's focus on what is hot might have changed, but so what? Media attention is the most fickle of creatures. I never understood the anti-Katz sentiment on Slash as I never bothered reading his articles, but now that I have I can't think why he is given such bandwidth!
Mod me down as a troll or flamebait, but I dare someone to point me to a link with a Katz article which actually has any useful or genuinely though provoking information about technology and culture!
The more people that use POP, the more processors that IBM & Motorola can sell - this helps the old economies of scale kick in and make PPC processors cheaper.
Cheaper PPCs would help AIM compete with the commodity x86 marketplace.
Time and time again,/.ers complain that Apple takes but does not give back to Open source. If you believe that the only way to contribute to the Open Source Movement is by releasing all your intellectual property under the GPL license then by your estimations then it has taken and not given back. However, you are then being just as blindly bigotted and dogmatic as those who would only want software released under strict licenses at considerable expense and lack of freedom to the enduser (i.e. MS).
Apple has contribute to Open Source in several small, but significant ways. For a start, there are currently six open source projects at Apple that it is providing funding for under the APSL:
1) Darwin (the foundation of Mac OS X)
2) Quicktime streaming server.
3) Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA).
4) Open play - a cross platform network abstraction layer.
5) Headerdoc.
6) Documentation.
Apple gave back all this stuff away despite the fact that the BSD license doesn't force them too (in the case of Darwin).
Furthemore, Apple provides employment for Open Source programers, such as Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD) and Guy 'Bud' Tribble (ex-Eazel) - although admittedly since Eazel went tits up because it couldn't make a profit from a GPL product, I don't think Dr. Tribble will be doing as much work on GPL software for a while.
What if I accidentally leave my computer on while having sex with my girlfriend - it may take my vocal signals as a que to fire up my mpeg porn collection. The rapid and violent removal of my genitals is sure to follow . . .
Who cares? I always wanted to be a transformer since the age of 10 a anyway.
Neanderthals bit the bullet and then homo sapiens ruled the day and does so, albeit for a small period of time. Evolve or die. They will be faster and smarter than us, so what the fuck - let them make all the decisions.
Homo technicus or whatever nano-organism that comes after humanity will piss upon us from a great height - so where do I sign up to sell out humanity? Maybe they'll buy me off with some cool new hardware in exchange for betraying the human race! I'm sure that if AI ever gets going it will have evolved by accident from some GPL skunkworks project that gets accidentally released on the internet. Therefore posthumans should = more GPL and > hardware - slashdotters should support the notion of the end of hummanity by default surely!
Maybe I have been playing too much Deus Ex lately or perhaps it is because I happened to be watching the Terminator on TV a the moment.
Arguing that the use of the cells was immoral because permission was not obtained is silly. People shed billions of cells everyday, from death skin, etc. Using tumourous tissue for non-profit research which may benefit all cancer sufferers and has no consequence for the patient's health or on the outcome of their treatment without permission is a perfectly moral as far as I'm concerned.
If you take the extreme view that ANY form of bodily residue requires some form of legal consent before it can be used, then
would you regard it as immoral to use forensic material found at a crime scene without the permission of the criminal who left it there?
Cancerous tissues are usually incinerated after removal from a patient if they aren't used for research purposes - how often are people asked for permission for their surgical waste products to be incinerated after an operation? Is this a real ethical dilema, I think not . . .
Why should there be any compensation for the families? It is highly likely that the cell sample was taken as part of a standard biopsy as part of a monitoring/treatment program. My understanding of the HeLa line is that it is a standard cell lineage for doing oncological research by academics and is freely available to other cancer researchers at cost. Very few academics actually profit all that much from research and I dare say no one is profiting from distributing the HeLa cells. I know of a number of cases where oncologists could have patented cancer genes, but instead chose to do you right thing and gave away their rights so that the speed at which new treatments were developed was greatly increased.
There are plenty of other people with cancer in the world, whom I'm sure would give a cancer cell sample for free if it would contribute to finding a cure.
Cancer cells may be immortal, insofar as they don't undergo programmed cell death, but they usually continue to mutate at an incredible rate relative to healthy somatic cells - there will be a great number of genetic differences between todays HeLa cells and the original healthy host cells. It isn't as if someone's 'genes are being stolen'.
This is a disaster - if I can't rely on my Diablo character being safe, then I may as well be spending my quality time on my relationship with my girlfriend or something;-)
Zelazny's Amber series
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 2
I've never read anything other than the Chronicles of Amber - well worth purchasing in the omnibus form since it comprised of 10 books originally. Lots of great ideas, nasty characters with plenty of backstabbing. Zelanzy is the master of the retrofitted plot - things are rarely as they seem. The Amber series is fantasy fiction as it should be, not the tired swords and sorcery dribble that has come from every post tolkien wannabe with a fetish for elves, dwarves and orcs.
Slightly off topic, Zelazny/RPG fans should definitely check out the Amber Diceless Roleplaying game published by Phase Press (dunno if it is still in print though) - revolutionised our RPG group's perspective of gaming. Why be a 1st level fighter on a dungeon crawl or a poe-faced vampire pretending to be human when you can instead be a demi-god who can reshape the fundamental nature of reality.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this might sound harsh. but after roleplaying for nearly 15 years, D&D just doesn't offer anything interesting anymore. I used to play it when I was 10 and thought all that there was to RPGs was hack an' slash, but that was a long time ago.
There are some nice odds and ends that came out of TSR - I personally thought that Ravenloft, Darksun and Planescape were interesting attempts to breath new life into the increasingly stagnant fantasy genre, but look at how bland the rest of the backgrounds are: Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Birthright - footnotes to Tolkien at best., they are nothing more than cashcows. The D&D system just plain sucked, still does, and if you just want to do hack an' slash then there are plenty of multiplayer computer games such as Diablo II, Everquest, and even the biosphere offerings will more than fill your needs and are probably much more fun. Or why not just do wargaming instead - Games Workhop and other cater to this market just fine?
The reason that roleplaying keeps me interested theses days is the background, complex plots, characters and interesting players/GMs - the sort of interactivity that computers games will not yet achieve for some time to come. Look at the two biggest RPG companies aside from WotC: Whitewolf and Steve Jackson Games:
Love or hate it (which I do in equal amounts) WW has done much more to actually build interesting and innovative fictional environments for roleplaying with the World of Darkness and Trinty Universe lines than TSR/WotC has ever managed with various flavours of D&D. They sell not because the system, but because of the content and quality of the background material.
Likewise, GURPS is popular not because of the system, (although it is a much better attempt at a universal system than D&D3 will ever be) but because of the hugh range of excellently written background books -regardless of what system you like to use, even if you hate the system, many of the books are still highly entertaining, and useful.
The opensource game license is an interesting idea, but I believe ultimately flawed. They are working from the premise that getting into RPGs is hard because there are so many systems and they are so different to learn - their solution is that we all use the D&D system and so don't have to learn new systems for different genres of play and then everyone can then write their games for the largest possible market (D&D system). The problem with this is that one system doesn't suit all types of games, all types of genre and all types of groups!
If you are into interesting system mechanics then look at Phage Press' Amber Diceless Roleplaying games (set in Zelazn'y Chronicles of Amber Universe), or Jonathan Tweet's Everway RPG, based on using vision and fate card. Both are truely unique and interesting games because the systems facilitates storytelling. The first time that we played Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu was a milestone for our gaming group: WHAT WE CAN'T JUST KILL THE ENEMY? We had to actually think about innovative ways to defeat the enemy while avoiding combat!
Our group LIKES there to be different flavours of rules for different types of games we play - hell most of the games we play these days barely require any rules: the ROLEplaying of characters is what is important not the ROLLplaying of dice! Do the roleplaying community a big favour and let D&D die!
Slashdot News Flash - Katz STILL has nothing interest or substance to say.
Centre of the net? Bulls**t. The whole point of the net is that it IS decentralised and anarchistic. There has never really been a centre - but there are clusters. The groups and communities that he mentions as 'having had their time', etc all still exist and contribute to the experience that is otherwise known as the Internet, for better or (in AOL's case) for the worst
The Media's focus on what is hot might have changed, but so what? Media attention is the most fickle of creatures. I never understood the anti-Katz sentiment on Slash as I never bothered reading his articles, but now that I have I can't think why he is given such bandwidth!
Mod me down as a troll or flamebait, but I dare someone to point me to a link with a Katz article which actually has any useful or genuinely though provoking information about technology and culture!
The more people that use POP, the more processors that IBM & Motorola can sell - this helps the old economies of scale kick in and make PPC processors cheaper.
Cheaper PPCs would help AIM compete with the commodity x86 marketplace.
Time and time again, /.ers complain that Apple takes but does not give back to Open source. If you believe that the only way to contribute to the Open Source Movement is by releasing all your intellectual property under the GPL license then by your estimations then it has taken and not given back. However, you are then being just as blindly bigotted and dogmatic as those who would only want software released under strict licenses at considerable expense and lack of freedom to the enduser (i.e. MS).
Apple has contribute to Open Source in several small, but significant ways. For a start, there are currently six open source projects at Apple that it is providing funding for under the APSL:
1) Darwin (the foundation of Mac OS X)
2) Quicktime streaming server.
3) Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA).
4) Open play - a cross platform network abstraction layer.
5) Headerdoc.
6) Documentation.
Apple gave back all this stuff away despite the fact that the BSD license doesn't force them too (in the case of Darwin).
Furthemore, Apple provides employment for Open Source programers, such as Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD) and Guy 'Bud' Tribble (ex-Eazel) - although admittedly since Eazel went tits up because it couldn't make a profit from a GPL product, I don't think Dr. Tribble will be doing as much work on GPL software for a while.
I'm sure this was one of the technologies that you get in Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri - so it must be workable!
What if I accidentally leave my computer on while having sex with my girlfriend - it may take my vocal signals as a que to fire up my mpeg porn collection. The rapid and violent removal of my genitals is sure to follow . . .
Who cares? I always wanted to be a transformer since the age of 10 a anyway.
Neanderthals bit the bullet and then homo sapiens ruled the day and does so, albeit for a small period of time. Evolve or die. They will be faster and smarter than us, so what the fuck - let them make all the decisions.
Homo technicus or whatever nano-organism that comes after humanity will piss upon us from a great height - so where do I sign up to sell out humanity? Maybe they'll buy me off with some cool new hardware in exchange for betraying the human race! I'm sure that if AI ever gets going it will have evolved by accident from some GPL skunkworks project that gets accidentally released on the internet. Therefore posthumans should = more GPL and > hardware - slashdotters should support the notion of the end of hummanity by default surely!
Maybe I have been playing too much Deus Ex lately or perhaps it is because I happened to be watching the Terminator on TV a the moment.
Death to the fleshlings!
Arguing that the use of the cells was immoral because permission was not obtained is silly. People shed billions of cells everyday, from death skin, etc. Using tumourous tissue for non-profit research which may benefit all cancer sufferers and has no consequence for the patient's health or on the outcome of their treatment without permission is a perfectly moral as far as I'm concerned. If you take the extreme view that ANY form of bodily residue requires some form of legal consent before it can be used, then would you regard it as immoral to use forensic material found at a crime scene without the permission of the criminal who left it there? Cancerous tissues are usually incinerated after removal from a patient if they aren't used for research purposes - how often are people asked for permission for their surgical waste products to be incinerated after an operation? Is this a real ethical dilema, I think not . . .
Why should there be any compensation for the families? It is highly likely that the cell sample was taken as part of a standard biopsy as part of a monitoring/treatment program. My understanding of the HeLa line is that it is a standard cell lineage for doing oncological research by academics and is freely available to other cancer researchers at cost. Very few academics actually profit all that much from research and I dare say no one is profiting from distributing the HeLa cells. I know of a number of cases where oncologists could have patented cancer genes, but instead chose to do you right thing and gave away their rights so that the speed at which new treatments were developed was greatly increased.
There are plenty of other people with cancer in the world, whom I'm sure would give a cancer cell sample for free if it would contribute to finding a cure.
Cancer cells may be immortal, insofar as they don't undergo programmed cell death, but they usually continue to mutate at an incredible rate relative to healthy somatic cells - there will be a great number of genetic differences between todays HeLa cells and the original healthy host cells. It isn't as if someone's 'genes are being stolen'.
This is a disaster - if I can't rely on my Diablo character being safe, then I may as well be spending my quality time on my relationship with my girlfriend or something ;-)
I've never read anything other than the Chronicles of Amber - well worth purchasing in the omnibus form since it comprised of 10 books originally. Lots of great ideas, nasty characters with plenty of backstabbing. Zelanzy is the master of the retrofitted plot - things are rarely as they seem. The Amber series is fantasy fiction as it should be, not the tired swords and sorcery dribble that has come from every post tolkien wannabe with a fetish for elves, dwarves and orcs.
Slightly off topic, Zelazny/RPG fans should definitely check out the Amber Diceless Roleplaying game published by Phase Press (dunno if it is still in print though) - revolutionised our RPG group's perspective of gaming. Why be a 1st level fighter on a dungeon crawl or a poe-faced vampire pretending to be human when you can instead be a demi-god who can reshape the fundamental nature of reality.