That it passed is scary. Constitutional rights are for American citizens and don't apply to the rest of the world.
One of the major problems with that approach, even if valid, is that the government can just claim anyone they're holding isn't an American citizen.
How do you get your chance to prove you are or tell your side of the story? Right.
When the government can get away with throwing anyone in a cell and essentially throwing away the key, it should scare the fuck out of all of us a lot more than terrorism ever could.
I assure you, merit badges or not, any group of teenage boys is going to have discussions about sex, official or otherwise. Scouting is no exception.
Right. So basically, being a scout is going to be just like all the other times they're going to be hanging around other guys their age in their life. They're going to need to figure out how to do that sooner or later, if they haven't already by that age.
No matter who you are, your whole life you will be with groups of people that are like you in some respects but not others. You will need to learn to get along with those people. You will need to find common ground. This seems easier to me as a scout than in many cases, because probably you're all there because you like a lot of the same activities.
Either it's okay for them to be scouts from this perspective, or we definitely shouldn't let them go to school either. Scouting you can leave or maybe join another troop if you're uncomfortable -- school you're much more stuck with.
But why are you assuming the commercial tool will gain you $200 at all?
I'm not, necessarily -- note the last paragraph of my post.
An employer that makes you use a free tool when a commerical tool is better and reasonably priced is wrong; so is an employer that makes you use a commerical tool when a free tool is better. My stance is, within reason, use the best or most appropriate tool for the job.
The Scouting Organization is an organization to help boys become normal men. This includes dealing with all the issues of normal adolescence encountered along the way. It collectively has no provision, ability, nor desire to help boys grow up to be homosexuals, or deal with homosexual issues of adolescence encountered along the way.
Really. I don't remember there being a merit badge for dating (or insert the slang copulation synonym of your choice) women.
Seriously, what about being a Boy Scout is straight-specific? If anything, I'd think a gay boy would be even more qualified to be a Boy Scout, because they should be less disappointed about being stuck out in the woods with only boys for a week. They could try to recruit their boyfriends to try out scouting, and they'd never miss an activity for a date.
PvE players are only wasting their *own* time. That's considered entertainment about the same as watching TV. PvP is wasting other peoples' time and in non-consensual play, forcing others to change their play style as well as having their time wasted.
Incorrect. By choosing to play a game that allows for this kind of PvP, they've already consented.
No one wants to get broken bones, but if you're a pro tackle football player, that risk comes with the territory. There's less violent/dangerous options out there, but that's not what they picked. Same thing with people who choose a PvP game while PvE alternatives exist.
Everyone in your example is making an informed, rational decision except for you. Why would the management invest $200 in saving you a week of overtime when they don't have to pay you for it? Also, if $200 is worth less to you than your week of unpaid overtime, you should have bought the tool and used it on your own. I hope that having this pointed out to you triggers an epiphany--the only irrational actor in the free market here was you.
In a vacuum, that's perhaps true, but nothing is. It's the economics equivalent of one of those first year physics problems where you pretend all projectiles are perfect spheres and encounter no wind resistance.
For example, maybe the poster would have done something else useful for his employer during the non-overtime time that he wasted with the inferior tool, something that would have been worth more than $200.
Or, maybe it drives the poster to change jobs and work at a company that will actually pay for the tools it takes for him to be most productive. I've done exactly that in my own career. Time spent as a developer trying to solve some business problem with code is fulfilling to me; time spent as a developer wrestling with a shitty tool is not. I guarantee that the costs involved in finding and hiring a replacement developer are more than $200.
(For the record, I've worked for a company that insisted on non-free tools for everything, and I've worked for a company that refused to play for anything. They're both wrong.)
WoW has 10 million subscribers for reasons other than people who kill other people. I won't go into it but its pretty obvious why WoW is successful. Those 10 million people, if they knew how much fun UO was - I can't attest to its current form - would switch in an instant.
I don't think this is true. A lot, lot more gamers are looking for a more casual game. The kind they can play while watching "Grey's Anatomy" at the same time and if they screw up and die, hey, no big deal.
For every hundred guys on WoW who thinks he's a bad-ass PvP'er, there's maybe five who would actually stick with a game like UO. People like to talk bigger than their inner carebear really is, so to speak.
Sadly, the truth is that the more prevalent PvP is and the more brutal the death penalty in a PvP game, the more niche the game would be. There's a reason almost all MMORPGs were modeled on the foofier MUDs. A MUD like a Carrion Fields or a Shattered Kingdoms where a PvP death can potentially be so much more than an inconvienience would be an even more niche game than UO even with modern graphics and user interface.
For what it's worth, my wife had been DMing at gaming conventions for years before I met her.
Strangely, she has a (I say deserved, she disagrees) reputation as a killer DM. I think she can get away with it more than a guy can because of the boobs. Even most socially retarded geeks manage to not throw a tantrum when a cute girl kills them.
First, there's the whole multiclassing issue. 4E has seriously pared this down, and while you could crunch out 3/3.5E multiclassing to do some broken things and it needed some fixing, IMHO they threw the baby out with the bathwater on that one. Sure, the core fighter and barbarian classes were relatively boring, but there were so many great prestige classes or alternate base classes for those kinds of characters that you could mutt together something cool that fit exactly what you wanted. The way 4E does multiclassing means that, no matter how many more books they print, this won't change. (Unless they drastically change their multiclassing rules.)
Second: While 4E characters get more choices in terms of powers, these choices don't feel as weighty to me as the choices 3/3.5E characters did get to make. For example, in 3.XE, a spiked chain based fighter built to trip and disarm plays drastically differently from one built to power things down with a greataxe, plays drastically differently again from one built to be an archer, one built for mounted combat, one built to dual wield, one made for grappling, etc. etc. etc. -- and that's even without getting multiclassing into the mix. The powers choices a 4E fighter makes by comparison don't seem to add that level of play variation.
What's the big deal? If someone doesn't like a new rule, can't they just ignore it or use an old 3.5 rule?
It depends.
If you're playing with a bunch of your friends at home and you can all agree on how the rules should be changed, you absolutely can. (Although 3.5 and 4 are different enough that in most cases it'd be hard to mix and match.)
If you do a fair amount of tournament or convention gaming, you're pretty much stuck with the rules as written. They've got what they call "living campaigns" where hundreds or thousands of people will be playing the same adventures together, usually in tables of six or so at a time. I can play one adventure with my buddies at home, then the next with five strangers at a convention, and I keep the same character and it's following the same story. Sometimes they'll do big interactive events at a gaming convention where bunches of tables of half a dozen or so players each will be running concurrently and effecting each other -- maybe the interactive is about orcish forces sieging a keep in elven lands, and a big table of a dozen characters are manning the walls by the front gate, other tables have other parts of the wall, another table is trying to stealth out to get the message to the keep's allies, another table of higher level characters is trying to sneak out and assassinate the orcish chief, and so on. What the characters are doing effects each other; if that last table fails to kill the orcish chief, maybe he'll come charging at the front gate with his lieutenants later on, making more trouble for those folks.
Playing a game like that, you're pretty much stuck with the most current version of the rules as written. I'm not saying a game like that is strictly better than a home game with your friends, but it's pretty different, and if you enjoy that kind of gaming you're stuck.
The difference amounts to around percentage point or two over the last year, and that's pretty much all to Macs. Linux has gone from 0.4% to 0.6%, Mac up to 7%.
Yup. Further: while not all Mac owners have a setup that lets them boot their system into Windows, nearly all Mac owners who intend to use their Macs for gaming do.
Ditto for Linux, really, except swap WINE in there.
Is that worth how much it would cost to port it? Oh, wait, if it was a web app, porting it would cost a whopping $0.00.
The cost to port may be zero, but the cost to initially develop is much higher. (And now you're also dealing with cross-browser issues, unless you're going to run it in Flash or Silverlight.)
Some things can be developed equally easily/quickly as an installed app or a web app. Anything with a complicated user interface or a lot of graphics is not in that list.
Some friends of mine were running one of the D&D game days going on today to introduce 4th edition. Due to some unforeseen circumstances I wasn't able to make it in time to play, so when I did show up about an hour later I decided to just hang out and watch.
What really surprised me and I totally did not expect from anything I'd heard about 4E is how much longer combats took to resolve. A little bit of that was clearly, okay, here are people are familiar with 3E and can play 3E fast and this is new so it takes longer, but... more, the amount of hit points everyone has have gone up a lot, the access to healing that everyone has has gone up a lot, characters can heal while doing other things, damage hasn't gone up a lot, and spells and powers that can really turn the momentum of a fight (e.g., 3E slow vs. creatures with a large number of weak attacks) have pretty much gone away.
The D&D game day module was for pregenerated first level characters. In all earlier editions of the game, combat for first level characters will go pretty damn fast. No one has the hit points to take much of a beating, and maybe your cleric has 3 cure spells to throw around. In 4E, everyone at the table is getting healing surges for hit points back all over the place. No joke, in the middle of one combat I left to get some dinner and decided to have a sit-down meal at a restaurant about 15 minutes away. I got back around an hour and a half later and the same combat was still going and no end was in sight. In previous editions that would never, ever, happen with first level characters.
Maybe I'll come around to thinking that's a good thing, but personally, I enjoyed the way 1-3E played at low levels, and the way they played at mid levels, and the ways in which those were different. (If 4E actually did successfully fix how much the game broke down at high levels, I may be able to make peace with this.)
Definitely you could play 3.5 without minatures, but you had to ignore a lot of the rules to do so. Attacks of opportunity, five foot steps, difficult terrain, flanking, squeezing, reach -- to name just a few, these are things that either aren't factors or play drastically differently without minatures. Whole styles of character become weird or unplayable.
I played first and second edition mostly without minatures; IMHO, if you're playing 3E or 3.5E without them, you're really playing a homebrew variant. Too, too much of the combat rules depend on them. (Really, this sort of all started in late 2E with the Player's Option stuff. Same thing, you can't really play it as written without minis or some similar representation.)
I'm still skeptical about 4E, but I think if you go back and try to reread the 3.5E combat rules with an open mind, you'll see that miniaturecentrism in combat isn't a new thing. Probably you can fudge around it or ignore it just as much, but in either case you're not playing the game as written.
I don't really agree with your observations about 3.5. Disclaimer: much of my experience with 3.5 comes from playing at conventions and in living campaigns -- which I find means I usually have seen the crunchy parts of the game refined more than most people. For example, where here I often read people complain about 'having' to play the cleric, I've seen enough clerics in the hands of really good players to realize that it doesn't have to play that role and easily rank among the top offensive classes in the game.
Commentary inline:
1. In 3/3.5 DnD, a medium to high level character is defined more by his gear than by his skills.
If by skills you mean literally skills, I would agree with you.
If by skills you mean all the different abilities a character has that don't come from their gear, we weren't playing the same game. I can come up with character builds for which it were true, but I never actually saw people play those kinds of characters.
2. In 3/3.5 DnD, medium to high level characters preceded each combat encounter with buff spells and potion drinking.
Eh, when you start getting to the point of some spells lasting all day, sure.
Otherwise, my experience playing the game skews much more towards surprise fights the players either aren't ready for, or aren't ready for in the right way. Obviously this can vary by campaign/adventure/DM.
3. In 3/3.5 DnD, medium to high level classes with melee focus (Fighters, Barbarians, Paladins) really didn't deal anywhere near as much damage in battle as spellcasters.
Yes and no. Sure, a cleric that tanks themselves up by casting rounds worth of short-duration buff spells can outperform a fighter in damage. On paper it's purely better. But what if you don't have that kind of luxury of knowing exactly when your fight will occur? Or what if you fight five times in a day? And no matter what, you won't have the fighter's feats.
Overall the most ridiculous damage I can remember seeing in 3.5E occured when the spellcasters chose to cast their buff spells on the melee characters, rather than showboat and try to crank their own damage up. The barbarian in a level 5 party throwing out 100 points of damage in a round with no magic items involved and without critting isn't all that hard to manage, and that's way beyond the pale of what the spellcasters could manage alone. Granted, we're talking against single/few targets here -- obviously Firestorm is always going to damage 30 guys better than the barbarian will.
4. In 3/3.5 DnD, high AC meant an opponent was hard to hit and damage reduction (DR) meant some damage was absorbed and negated before the opponent was actually hurt.
In my experience, fights in which DR required math were in the minority. Either the players would be able to bypass the DR, they'd be attacking with a means that didn't involve DR, or they'd know they couldn't beat the DR (e.g., low strength rogue without adamantite vs. an iron golem) and wouldn't even attack. Circumstances in which the characters were trying to physically beat through the DR were rare, and even in that case... oooh, you subtract 5, 10, or 15 from the damage you do with a hit. It's the kind of subtraction six year old kids are expected to know how to do; it's not exactly rocket science.
I'm not writing off 4e - I want to make that clear. It's great in many ways. But this and the necessity of miniatures are my two concerns.
Out of curiousity, did you play 3E at all? I honestly can't imagine playing it 'right' without a battlemat and minatures, or some reasonable facsimile thereof.
Anecdote, sure, but your "normal people" comment was nonsense.
If you assume idiocy is normal, sure. One of my in-laws has the same problem -- it's because he clicks on everything stupid in sight. Thankfully, he now owns a Mac and when he manages to somehow get viruses even on that, it's the Apple store's problem and not mine.
However, I also know lots of very non-technical people with Windows machines (and Macs, for that matter) that don't ever get virii.
In Windows, you better have your AV up to date as malware, trojans, and viruses is pretty much standard on the shady side of town.
Citation?
I mean, yeah, if we take a Linux box and a Windows box and give them to the kind of bozos who surf for porn and click on all their pop-ups, the Linux box is going to get way less shit on it... but normal people who have Windows machines who don't do crap like that and also don't run antivirus, etc. don't end up with that shit. Maybe ten years ago, but now, not so much.
(Although I have to admit: "Linux on the Desktop: Get your Web-Porn On" would be a pretty bad-ass slogan.)
Step 1 - Kill off the Ballmer turds like Zune, Xbox, and maybe even search
You need to have a bit longer-term of a vision here.
Has the first version of any Microsoft product in a market ever been a success?
The first versions of IE were trash. Today it's the dominant browser in the world. (Will it still be in two years? Maybe not, but it's hard to call a product with a lock on the market for half a decade a failure.)
The first versions of Word were trash. Today it's the dominant word processor in the world.
You can argue about the methods that got those products to dominance, and I think that's worth talking about in other contexts, but not so much this context of talking about a company's financial successes or failures. If the combination of underhanded competitor-stabbing and an increasingly good product could work then, I think there's at least a chance it could work again now.
Will Zune have crushed the iPod five years from now? I doubt it, because I think Apple this time around is a little more savvy than the Netscapes and Wordperfects of the world in their day, but I wouldn't count it out just because Zune v1 wasn't great and didn't sell that well. That's just par for the course. Hate Microsoft if you disagree with their principles or lack thereof, but underestimate them at your peril. (Cue Godwin-inducing analogy.)
Wordperfect for DOS was the shit. Wordperfect for Windows was just shit.
Probably you can lay some of the blame for that at Microsoft's door, but most of it has to go to the folks managing Wordperfect at the time.
Personally, I just kept running DOS Wordperfect for a goodly long while and resisted Word for years, but most people didn't.
Navigator, same thing. I laughed at the first few versions of IE and avoided using them whenever possible. Then IE got way ass better. (Then, after it eliminated the competition, it stagnated and became terrible -- but for a while, it was the best thing going.)
Slashdot Mirror
and they are hardly throwing away the key
What do you call 6+ years without a trial, and until this ruling, with no trial in sight?
That's a long damn time.
Not to be inflammatory, but...
How shocking that people locked up without a trial and tortured for years would harbor anger towards our government. It's clearly all their fault.
To be completely clear, I think anyone held in Gitmo for 6 years would hate America regardless of how they felt going in.
That it passed is scary. Constitutional rights are for American citizens and don't apply to the rest of the world.
One of the major problems with that approach, even if valid, is that the government can just claim anyone they're holding isn't an American citizen.
How do you get your chance to prove you are or tell your side of the story? Right.
When the government can get away with throwing anyone in a cell and essentially throwing away the key, it should scare the fuck out of all of us a lot more than terrorism ever could.
I can't buy China's official story on this one.
Damn you, falling U.S. dollar!
I assure you, merit badges or not, any group of teenage boys is going to have discussions about sex, official or otherwise. Scouting is no exception.
Right. So basically, being a scout is going to be just like all the other times they're going to be hanging around other guys their age in their life. They're going to need to figure out how to do that sooner or later, if they haven't already by that age.
No matter who you are, your whole life you will be with groups of people that are like you in some respects but not others. You will need to learn to get along with those people. You will need to find common ground. This seems easier to me as a scout than in many cases, because probably you're all there because you like a lot of the same activities.
Either it's okay for them to be scouts from this perspective, or we definitely shouldn't let them go to school either. Scouting you can leave or maybe join another troop if you're uncomfortable -- school you're much more stuck with.
But why are you assuming the commercial tool will gain you $200 at all?
I'm not, necessarily -- note the last paragraph of my post.
An employer that makes you use a free tool when a commerical tool is better and reasonably priced is wrong; so is an employer that makes you use a commerical tool when a free tool is better. My stance is, within reason, use the best or most appropriate tool for the job.
The Scouting Organization is an organization to help boys become normal men. This includes dealing with all the issues of normal adolescence encountered along the way. It collectively has no provision, ability, nor desire to help boys grow up to be homosexuals, or deal with homosexual issues of adolescence encountered along the way.
Really. I don't remember there being a merit badge for dating (or insert the slang copulation synonym of your choice) women.
Seriously, what about being a Boy Scout is straight-specific? If anything, I'd think a gay boy would be even more qualified to be a Boy Scout, because they should be less disappointed about being stuck out in the woods with only boys for a week. They could try to recruit their boyfriends to try out scouting, and they'd never miss an activity for a date.
PvE players are only wasting their *own* time. That's considered entertainment about the same as watching TV. PvP is wasting other peoples' time and in non-consensual play, forcing others to change their play style as well as having their time wasted.
Incorrect. By choosing to play a game that allows for this kind of PvP, they've already consented.
No one wants to get broken bones, but if you're a pro tackle football player, that risk comes with the territory. There's less violent/dangerous options out there, but that's not what they picked. Same thing with people who choose a PvP game while PvE alternatives exist.
Everyone in your example is making an informed, rational decision except for you. Why would the management invest $200 in saving you a week of overtime when they don't have to pay you for it? Also, if $200 is worth less to you than your week of unpaid overtime, you should have bought the tool and used it on your own. I hope that having this pointed out to you triggers an epiphany--the only irrational actor in the free market here was you.
In a vacuum, that's perhaps true, but nothing is. It's the economics equivalent of one of those first year physics problems where you pretend all projectiles are perfect spheres and encounter no wind resistance.
For example, maybe the poster would have done something else useful for his employer during the non-overtime time that he wasted with the inferior tool, something that would have been worth more than $200.
Or, maybe it drives the poster to change jobs and work at a company that will actually pay for the tools it takes for him to be most productive. I've done exactly that in my own career. Time spent as a developer trying to solve some business problem with code is fulfilling to me; time spent as a developer wrestling with a shitty tool is not. I guarantee that the costs involved in finding and hiring a replacement developer are more than $200.
(For the record, I've worked for a company that insisted on non-free tools for everything, and I've worked for a company that refused to play for anything. They're both wrong.)
WoW has 10 million subscribers for reasons other than people who kill other people. I won't go into it but its pretty obvious why WoW is successful. Those 10 million people, if they knew how much fun UO was - I can't attest to its current form - would switch in an instant.
I don't think this is true. A lot, lot more gamers are looking for a more casual game. The kind they can play while watching "Grey's Anatomy" at the same time and if they screw up and die, hey, no big deal.
For every hundred guys on WoW who thinks he's a bad-ass PvP'er, there's maybe five who would actually stick with a game like UO. People like to talk bigger than their inner carebear really is, so to speak.
Sadly, the truth is that the more prevalent PvP is and the more brutal the death penalty in a PvP game, the more niche the game would be. There's a reason almost all MMORPGs were modeled on the foofier MUDs. A MUD like a Carrion Fields or a Shattered Kingdoms where a PvP death can potentially be so much more than an inconvienience would be an even more niche game than UO even with modern graphics and user interface.
What makes the PvE player's wasting time killing pixels somehow superior to the PvP player's wasting time killing pixels?
Glass houses and stones and all that.
If a new GM was actually a "her", I'd be shocked.
For what it's worth, my wife had been DMing at gaming conventions for years before I met her.
Strangely, she has a (I say deserved, she disagrees) reputation as a killer DM. I think she can get away with it more than a guy can because of the boobs. Even most socially retarded geeks manage to not throw a tantrum when a cute girl kills them.
There is far more customizability now than in 3e.
I think this is pretty hard to argue, honestly.
First, there's the whole multiclassing issue. 4E has seriously pared this down, and while you could crunch out 3/3.5E multiclassing to do some broken things and it needed some fixing, IMHO they threw the baby out with the bathwater on that one. Sure, the core fighter and barbarian classes were relatively boring, but there were so many great prestige classes or alternate base classes for those kinds of characters that you could mutt together something cool that fit exactly what you wanted. The way 4E does multiclassing means that, no matter how many more books they print, this won't change. (Unless they drastically change their multiclassing rules.)
Second: While 4E characters get more choices in terms of powers, these choices don't feel as weighty to me as the choices 3/3.5E characters did get to make. For example, in 3.XE, a spiked chain based fighter built to trip and disarm plays drastically differently from one built to power things down with a greataxe, plays drastically differently again from one built to be an archer, one built for mounted combat, one built to dual wield, one made for grappling, etc. etc. etc. -- and that's even without getting multiclassing into the mix. The powers choices a 4E fighter makes by comparison don't seem to add that level of play variation.
What's the big deal? If someone doesn't like a new rule, can't they just ignore it or use an old 3.5 rule?
It depends.
If you're playing with a bunch of your friends at home and you can all agree on how the rules should be changed, you absolutely can. (Although 3.5 and 4 are different enough that in most cases it'd be hard to mix and match.)
If you do a fair amount of tournament or convention gaming, you're pretty much stuck with the rules as written. They've got what they call "living campaigns" where hundreds or thousands of people will be playing the same adventures together, usually in tables of six or so at a time. I can play one adventure with my buddies at home, then the next with five strangers at a convention, and I keep the same character and it's following the same story. Sometimes they'll do big interactive events at a gaming convention where bunches of tables of half a dozen or so players each will be running concurrently and effecting each other -- maybe the interactive is about orcish forces sieging a keep in elven lands, and a big table of a dozen characters are manning the walls by the front gate, other tables have other parts of the wall, another table is trying to stealth out to get the message to the keep's allies, another table of higher level characters is trying to sneak out and assassinate the orcish chief, and so on. What the characters are doing effects each other; if that last table fails to kill the orcish chief, maybe he'll come charging at the front gate with his lieutenants later on, making more trouble for those folks.
Playing a game like that, you're pretty much stuck with the most current version of the rules as written. I'm not saying a game like that is strictly better than a home game with your friends, but it's pretty different, and if you enjoy that kind of gaming you're stuck.
The difference amounts to around percentage point or two over the last year, and that's pretty much all to Macs. Linux has gone from 0.4% to 0.6%, Mac up to 7%.
Yup. Further: while not all Mac owners have a setup that lets them boot their system into Windows, nearly all Mac owners who intend to use their Macs for gaming do.
Ditto for Linux, really, except swap WINE in there.
Is that worth how much it would cost to port it? Oh, wait, if it was a web app, porting it would cost a whopping $0.00.
The cost to port may be zero, but the cost to initially develop is much higher. (And now you're also dealing with cross-browser issues, unless you're going to run it in Flash or Silverlight.)
Some things can be developed equally easily/quickly as an installed app or a web app. Anything with a complicated user interface or a lot of graphics is not in that list.
Some friends of mine were running one of the D&D game days going on today to introduce 4th edition. Due to some unforeseen circumstances I wasn't able to make it in time to play, so when I did show up about an hour later I decided to just hang out and watch.
What really surprised me and I totally did not expect from anything I'd heard about 4E is how much longer combats took to resolve. A little bit of that was clearly, okay, here are people are familiar with 3E and can play 3E fast and this is new so it takes longer, but... more, the amount of hit points everyone has have gone up a lot, the access to healing that everyone has has gone up a lot, characters can heal while doing other things, damage hasn't gone up a lot, and spells and powers that can really turn the momentum of a fight (e.g., 3E slow vs. creatures with a large number of weak attacks) have pretty much gone away.
The D&D game day module was for pregenerated first level characters. In all earlier editions of the game, combat for first level characters will go pretty damn fast. No one has the hit points to take much of a beating, and maybe your cleric has 3 cure spells to throw around. In 4E, everyone at the table is getting healing surges for hit points back all over the place. No joke, in the middle of one combat I left to get some dinner and decided to have a sit-down meal at a restaurant about 15 minutes away. I got back around an hour and a half later and the same combat was still going and no end was in sight. In previous editions that would never, ever, happen with first level characters.
Maybe I'll come around to thinking that's a good thing, but personally, I enjoyed the way 1-3E played at low levels, and the way they played at mid levels, and the ways in which those were different. (If 4E actually did successfully fix how much the game broke down at high levels, I may be able to make peace with this.)
Definitely you could play 3.5 without minatures, but you had to ignore a lot of the rules to do so. Attacks of opportunity, five foot steps, difficult terrain, flanking, squeezing, reach -- to name just a few, these are things that either aren't factors or play drastically differently without minatures. Whole styles of character become weird or unplayable.
I played first and second edition mostly without minatures; IMHO, if you're playing 3E or 3.5E without them, you're really playing a homebrew variant. Too, too much of the combat rules depend on them. (Really, this sort of all started in late 2E with the Player's Option stuff. Same thing, you can't really play it as written without minis or some similar representation.)
I'm still skeptical about 4E, but I think if you go back and try to reread the 3.5E combat rules with an open mind, you'll see that miniaturecentrism in combat isn't a new thing. Probably you can fudge around it or ignore it just as much, but in either case you're not playing the game as written.
I don't really agree with your observations about 3.5. Disclaimer: much of my experience with 3.5 comes from playing at conventions and in living campaigns -- which I find means I usually have seen the crunchy parts of the game refined more than most people. For example, where here I often read people complain about 'having' to play the cleric, I've seen enough clerics in the hands of really good players to realize that it doesn't have to play that role and easily rank among the top offensive classes in the game.
Commentary inline:
1. In 3/3.5 DnD, a medium to high level character is defined more by his gear than by his skills.
If by skills you mean literally skills, I would agree with you.
If by skills you mean all the different abilities a character has that don't come from their gear, we weren't playing the same game. I can come up with character builds for which it were true, but I never actually saw people play those kinds of characters.
2. In 3/3.5 DnD, medium to high level characters preceded each combat encounter with buff spells and potion drinking.
Eh, when you start getting to the point of some spells lasting all day, sure.
Otherwise, my experience playing the game skews much more towards surprise fights the players either aren't ready for, or aren't ready for in the right way. Obviously this can vary by campaign/adventure/DM.
3. In 3/3.5 DnD, medium to high level classes with melee focus (Fighters, Barbarians, Paladins) really didn't deal anywhere near as much damage in battle as spellcasters.
Yes and no. Sure, a cleric that tanks themselves up by casting rounds worth of short-duration buff spells can outperform a fighter in damage. On paper it's purely better. But what if you don't have that kind of luxury of knowing exactly when your fight will occur? Or what if you fight five times in a day? And no matter what, you won't have the fighter's feats.
Overall the most ridiculous damage I can remember seeing in 3.5E occured when the spellcasters chose to cast their buff spells on the melee characters, rather than showboat and try to crank their own damage up. The barbarian in a level 5 party throwing out 100 points of damage in a round with no magic items involved and without critting isn't all that hard to manage, and that's way beyond the pale of what the spellcasters could manage alone. Granted, we're talking against single/few targets here -- obviously Firestorm is always going to damage 30 guys better than the barbarian will.
4. In 3/3.5 DnD, high AC meant an opponent was hard to hit and damage reduction (DR) meant some damage was absorbed and negated before the opponent was actually hurt.
In my experience, fights in which DR required math were in the minority. Either the players would be able to bypass the DR, they'd be attacking with a means that didn't involve DR, or they'd know they couldn't beat the DR (e.g., low strength rogue without adamantite vs. an iron golem) and wouldn't even attack. Circumstances in which the characters were trying to physically beat through the DR were rare, and even in that case... oooh, you subtract 5, 10, or 15 from the damage you do with a hit. It's the kind of subtraction six year old kids are expected to know how to do; it's not exactly rocket science.
According to a story posted on /. earlier today, the next version of OS X abandons the pre-Intel Macs, FYI.
I'm not writing off 4e - I want to make that clear. It's great in many ways. But this and the necessity of miniatures are my two concerns.
Out of curiousity, did you play 3E at all? I honestly can't imagine playing it 'right' without a battlemat and minatures, or some reasonable facsimile thereof.
Anecdote, sure, but your "normal people" comment was nonsense.
If you assume idiocy is normal, sure. One of my in-laws has the same problem -- it's because he clicks on everything stupid in sight. Thankfully, he now owns a Mac and when he manages to somehow get viruses even on that, it's the Apple store's problem and not mine.
However, I also know lots of very non-technical people with Windows machines (and Macs, for that matter) that don't ever get virii.
In Windows, you better have your AV up to date as malware, trojans, and viruses is pretty much standard on the shady side of town.
Citation?
I mean, yeah, if we take a Linux box and a Windows box and give them to the kind of bozos who surf for porn and click on all their pop-ups, the Linux box is going to get way less shit on it... but normal people who have Windows machines who don't do crap like that and also don't run antivirus, etc. don't end up with that shit. Maybe ten years ago, but now, not so much.
(Although I have to admit: "Linux on the Desktop: Get your Web-Porn On" would be a pretty bad-ass slogan.)
Step 1 - Kill off the Ballmer turds like Zune, Xbox, and maybe even search
You need to have a bit longer-term of a vision here.
Has the first version of any Microsoft product in a market ever been a success?
The first versions of IE were trash. Today it's the dominant browser in the world. (Will it still be in two years? Maybe not, but it's hard to call a product with a lock on the market for half a decade a failure.)
The first versions of Word were trash. Today it's the dominant word processor in the world.
You can argue about the methods that got those products to dominance, and I think that's worth talking about in other contexts, but not so much this context of talking about a company's financial successes or failures. If the combination of underhanded competitor-stabbing and an increasingly good product could work then, I think there's at least a chance it could work again now.
Will Zune have crushed the iPod five years from now? I doubt it, because I think Apple this time around is a little more savvy than the Netscapes and Wordperfects of the world in their day, but I wouldn't count it out just because Zune v1 wasn't great and didn't sell that well. That's just par for the course. Hate Microsoft if you disagree with their principles or lack thereof, but underestimate them at your peril. (Cue Godwin-inducing analogy.)
They weren't bad products.
It sort of depends on the version.
Wordperfect for DOS was the shit. Wordperfect for Windows was just shit.
Probably you can lay some of the blame for that at Microsoft's door, but most of it has to go to the folks managing Wordperfect at the time.
Personally, I just kept running DOS Wordperfect for a goodly long while and resisted Word for years, but most people didn't.
Navigator, same thing. I laughed at the first few versions of IE and avoided using them whenever possible. Then IE got way ass better. (Then, after it eliminated the competition, it stagnated and became terrible -- but for a while, it was the best thing going.)