That is to say, after picking a set of classes to take over 4 years that would satisfy all the requirements, there were few if any additional classes necessary to make up the hours required for graduation, thus, not much latitude to pick classes for interest or grade padding outside of that list.
Sounds like your undergrad experience was pretty different from mine (UIUC). I didn't really have any flexibility to pick 'easy A' classes per se -- I mean, yes, I did have to take some humanities / social sciences / etc. classes that were generally easier than my math / physics / engineering / CS classes, but I also needed X specified amount of each of those to graduate. All my technical classes had to fall within a fairly narrow set of choices and roughly zero of the ones I took were applicable to what my career has ultimately been.
(At this point, someone usually makes the argument that all those classes taught problem solving and I solve problems and therefore it's all great. I'm not saying my education was professionally useless, but almost all of it was about on the relevance level of being a Spanish major and then shipping off to Japan for your first job.)
I was offered a small scholarship to Iowa State back in the day and it's more than possible that I picked the wrong school, not that most of us have any real idea of what we want to do circa junior year of high school when you need to decide. Still, I have to think that being forced to take that many more courses in embedded-ish programming I'd have had a better background in it at that point, not that it's been of much help to me.
I'm neither surprised by this nor do I necessarily find it something to get up in arms about.
There's not really time in a 4 year degree (well, along with all the other crap that goes into it) to teach someone the kinds of things you need to know to be a good business application developer and to teach someone the kinds of things you need to know to be a good embedded applications developer.
A good embedded developer needs experience with languages that run "close to the metal" of the machine, needs to know how to manage memory, needs to know how the machine architecture works, needs to know how to perform optimizations within that world, etc.
A good business applications developer needs experience with languages that abstract or hide a lot of the above details in order to let them focus on business logic, needs to know a decent amount about databases, needs to know about software architecture and design patterns, needs to know about networking, generally needs to know something about UI design, etc.
Yes, there's some overlap.
Speaking as someone with a college education emphasizing the former and a career emphasizing the latter, I'm not convinced this is a terrible thing. There are a lot more business style applications that need writing in the world than embedded applications. That specialization and the need for it I don't see going away any time soon, but it's the exception rather than the rule, and I'm not convinced there's something holier about understanding the guts of the machine than in understanding how to design a complex system for extensibility, maintainability, high availability, or whatever best suits the project.
So, how many times would you have voted to re-elect FDR, if you had been around in the 30s and 40s?
Depends on how good of a job I thought he was doing, really.
But what you're saying a few posts above is less like that and more like saying people should never have elected FDR at all, because Teddy Roosevelt had been president previously.
She's the best if you don't mind the Presidency being passed from one family to another (Bush to Clinton, Clinton to Bush, Bush to Clinton).
Regardless of who you think should be president, I think this particular argument is terrible, since it essentially equates Bill Clinton's presidency, which -- whether you think Bill deserves much/any of the credit for it or not -- was probably the most prosperous America has been in my lifetime -- with the G. W. Bush presidency, which has been craptacular on many levels.
I mean, if you think Obama or McCain or whoever will be a better president, by all means, vote for them, but you've got something loose in the head if you're doing it because OMG the Bush dynasty needs to end.
That might be the deal now. It wasn't when I bought mine. You can put your serial number in elsewhere on the Apple site to get the details of your warranty, and I assure you it doesn't tell me I had a year of coverage.
I know lots of people who have iPods and love them. I wouldn't buy another one based on my experience. $400 is way too much for something that broke in month 7 of ownership.
Hard drive crapped out just past the six month warranty period and Apple's not interested in doing anything with it for less than $180 + shipping + labor. I hate to say it but I'd rather spend that money on a Zune.
1) Classes -- this is a really bad idea, it doesn't match reality or fiction. Even in official adaptations, no fictional character from source literature (e.g. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the Lord of the Rings, Conan) could be converted into a legal D&D character.
Have you played third edition D&D at all? IMHO, this has no longer been a valid criticism.
That aside, having played a handful of class-based games and a ton of non-class-based games, I'd say it's a design choice and one isn't necessarily better than the other. I don't think a game like Call of Cthulhu would play right with classes, and I don't think D&D would play right without them. Ironically, I find that you get less homogenized characters in a class-based game that does classes right, than in most skill-based games.
Does anybody really own with druids playing the game? Because otherwise it's pretty much only theoretical ownage.
Yup. I actually won't play druid with my friends anymore because the druid is so good hardly anyone else gets to do anything. Although it's kind of cool to have a tough character, I think most of us are more interested in D&D as a cooperative/team game than the 'druid and his sidekicks' show.
Many times at cons I've sat at a table roughly along the lines of: 5 reasonably tough 8th-9th level non-druid PCs, plus me with 6th level druid, playing an adventure meant for 9th-10th level guys... and everyone gets bored because the druid is easily dealing more damage than the rest of the party put together. This is, say, with just material in the PHB + Complete Divine. Nothing too outlandish there.
I'm a competent player, but I'm not great, and I'm definitely not anywhere near that dominant with any other kind of character. I've met at least half a dozen people who are much better with it than I am. In hands that understand half of its potential the druid genuinely is just that good.
It's a long post and I'm just going to hit a few points:
- I'm familiar with the B9S mechanics, and I'm not in principle averse to mechanics roughly of that kind for fighterish characters. I enjoy playing both spellcasters and fighterish characters in 3.XE. I have reason to believe the way the classes sort out in 4E will be something I like less. Probably my preferences aren't yours so I wouldn't worry about it.
- Honestly, I've seen many, many more 3.0/3.5 clerics played more along the tank or DPS paradigms than healer. Into/past the midlevels most other characters can't really keep up with them, and sadly none of the melee-ish characters (as solo characters) really keep pace at all. It's hard to convince the cleric to heal when he can wade into melee and whip out a few hundred points of damage instead without really even having much or anything in the way of magic items that lend themselves to it.
This may mean I deal with bigger powergamers than you do; I spent the bulk of third edition doing a lot of convention play. When everyone pretty much has to play with the rules as written and you play with a few dozen different people in a weekend, even without getting into esoteric material, optimization ideas spread [i]fast[/i] and new adventures tend to be written to push players that are playing, if not perfectly, certainly not poorly.
It's a lot different than home game play and brings out a lot of the best and the worst of the game at once.
- Rogues: There's a lot more to their skill list than traps and locks, though there is that too. UMD is a fun and important one, for example.
Short version... by level 10 or so it shouldn't be very hard for you to grapple and pin a Pit Fiend.
(Yes, there are problems with that, such as the Pit Fiend probably shouldn't put him in that situation... but the fact that, push come to shove, you can do it easy should be some indication.)
Grappling is probably the area where the druid excells above all others, but it's also great in a lot of other areas. Ideally a druid shouldn't go with any of them in all situations, but beating the second or third best at practically everything in the game is hard to deal with.
And you have badass direct damage spells. Fire seeds is great. Fire storm is great. Flamestrike is a lower level for you than cleric, which means cheaper metamagic if you want to roll that way.
And you have badass battlefield control spells.
And you can swap to summon a pile of animals.
And you've got an animal companion, which at very low levels is about as good as most party melee characters, and eventually is a poor man's melee character, but still, free. Buffing your animal companion is a very effective strategy in a ton of situations. Whereas the cleric pretty much needs to cast buff spells and then fight, the druid's animal companion can be fighting as he buffs it.
And you've got a ton of spells that buff animals, including most of your summons (including broke-ass animal growth, which also is applicable to your animal companion and yourself in wild shape).
And you get 4 skill points a level, including having spot and listen as class skills.
You have a ton of great utility spells.
Etc.
You can't swap for heals like a cleric can, but I find this is actually a boon because it keeps people from thinking of you as too much of a healer if you simply don't slot those spells.
5) I don't know the playtesters, but it's hard to imagine anybody but twinks wanting to work at WoTC in the first place, so I think they have that one covered.
I don't know, man. I remember all the sharpest super-twinks I know declaring that in 3.0 druid was either the flat-out toughest or in the running for toughest class (depending on who you asked), and 3.5 made them tougher. The word on the street (which I believe but can't vouch for the truth of) was that in the internal games at WotC no one really wanted to play druids so they thought they needed to be better.
If they have any in your area, attending a local gaming convention is probably the best way.
Usually over the course of a day/weekend/whatever you'll get to game with different handfuls of people at a time. Even if you decide the con scene isn't to your liking, probably you'll get to game with some people that you get along with and would like to play with again, and some people you don't. Talk to the people you do enjoy playing with and there you are.
I don't know specifically what you're talking about when you say "the most interesting parts"
Some of it for me is certainly in resource management, which from the rest of your post is something I can tell you don't particularly enjoy. I really like prepared spellcasting (AKA memorization), although I also like that you can play spontaneous casters if you choose. I really like the variety of having some characters in a group that are on a fairly even keel of power where others have only a few moments of greatness throughout a day (often, many fights) that they have to carefully hoard and marshal at appropriate times. I like that there are a ton of feats and spells and things in the game that are combat-important but don't deal damage, such as sleep or entangle. I like that you can play a wide variety of characters that all feel/play really different.
This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list, but everything I know so far about 4E suggests that some of these things are going outright and others are being diminished in importance severely, and that we're moving more to a game where everyone's got a bunch of 'once per encounter' abilities, and every fight of their career involves every character firing off their toughest ones in succession. In other words, choosing nearly the same sequence of actions in nearly every fight.
I don't know what it means to "fill the gaps liberally with WoW", except as far as WoW simply game-ified what players and DM's were already doing. Maybe you could elaborate on that.
Things like: pushing more to an 'everyone does damage' model vs. non-damaging malediction/battlefield control, or designing classes more along the MMORPG 'holy trinity' of tank/healing/DPS. The 4E rogue sounds like the typical MMO DPS-machine; the 3E rogue, I would argue, is more defined by his skills -- especially since as his level increases the number of sneak-attack-able enemies he typically encounters drops drastically.
But if you could (for example) build a character you would RP the exact same way you'd play your paladin as a fighter/cleric or something much, much tougher (and you could), why wouldn't you?
Honestly, there's power-gaming, and then there's just wanting to be a useful member of the team. Not everyone has the teenage fixation on being the toughest guy, but I think most people like to feel more like a contributing part of the group and less like the soldier with two broken legs whose comrades are slowly dragging back from enemy lines at great risk to themselves.
I've had experience with the various releases of D&D rule sets over the years. So I say if this one doesn't improve the game in any meaningful way for you, just play with you're favorite rule set or even modify your favorite edition. It is a game of imagination after all.
This is completely true for home play, but if you're into "Living Campaigns" or other tournament/convention-based play, you're more or less stuck with the rules as written. If they bork up the game to the point that it's not fun for you anymore, you're kind of screwed.
I don't really have the time or energy to be a conventioning or even very regular gamer anymore, but there was a time.
I'll try to reserve my judgment for when the real 4E books are released, but I'm not optimistic.
Are you -crazy-? Paladins are probably the most powerful class in DnD! Oft ridiculed for being the choice of people wanting to play "easymode", both RP and combat-wise.
Uh, in what edition would that be? Because it's not 3.0 or 3.5.
... who feels like they may have simplified the most interesting parts clear out of the game, filled the gaps liberally with WoW, and ended up with a game that, admittedly, has a much lower barrier to entry but is also not particularly interesting?
I mean, you can make Monopoly a lot easier to play and simpler to learn if you ditch hotel and house building, the rent for each property is the same, and instead of rolling the dice to move you move one space each time on your turn, but would it be fun?
3/3.5E's not perfect by a long shot to me either, but what we've seen of 4E so far is honestly just not interesting to me.
Is it really that hard to believe that a socialist system like in the UK can actually be cheaper than the for-profit capitalist system?
For me, not at all, for what it's worth.
In my mind a system that only concerns itself with the health of its people in "worthy cases" is worse than the status quo of profiting from suffering but allowing everyone to get care.
I really can't see how a system which gives health care to fewer people is in any way an improvement. If you don't want to pay for the expensive emergency care of uninsured persons, find a way to make it cheaper, not shut them out in the cold to die.
That's not what I was getting at at all.
I'm saying, if we decide to go the route of making everyone buy health insurance (as car insurance is mandatory in much of the U.S., for example), I'd consider it acceptable for my taxes to pay that mandatory health insurance cost in some cases. The people that it didn't pay for would buy health insurance as normal.
I'm not convinced that approach is better than a socialized system. It's a 'what if?'
The thing that always sticks with me about socialized medicine (and note, as I say this, that it still may very well be the best available choice) is that to my understanding it doesn't reward preventative measures, and in most implementations the greatest need is always served first. That is to say, if I take great care of my body and am generally in good health but develop a very painful but not life-threatening condition, surgery for me is a lower priority than life-saving lung removal surgery on a lifetime chain smoker with lung cancer.
I'm not saying the chain smoker should be allowed to die to speed up my surgery in that case, but the idea under the current health insurance system that bigger risk groups / less healthy patients pay more, while often unfair, does create an incentive to try to remain healthier. I'd be most interested in some kind of socialized medicine solution that keeps this incentive while addressing some of the many other problems of the current system.
Hospital treatment isn't free. The money has to come from somewhere. Ultimately that's the kernel of the problem: everyone wants to treat having quadruple bypass surgery as a basic human right like freedom of speech or religion, but freedom of speech doesn't cost a gigantic pile of money.
I don't wholly disagree with most of what you said, but I think 'everyone has to buy health insurance' is a better starting point than what we have now. If the problem with that solution is that it leaves Peace Corps workers out in the cold because they couldn't afford to buy health insurance on their crappy wages, and we feel like the Peace Corps is generally a good thing for everyone, then let's decide that our tax dollars will cover the health insurance for specific cases like that.
A system in which the public decides to cover the health care expenses of some worthy cases, to my mind, beats the status quo where the public essentially covers everyone by default.
Slashdot Mirror
That is to say, after picking a set of classes to take over 4 years that would satisfy all the requirements, there were few if any additional classes necessary to make up the hours required for graduation, thus, not much latitude to pick classes for interest or grade padding outside of that list.
Sounds like your undergrad experience was pretty different from mine (UIUC). I didn't really have any flexibility to pick 'easy A' classes per se -- I mean, yes, I did have to take some humanities / social sciences / etc. classes that were generally easier than my math / physics / engineering / CS classes, but I also needed X specified amount of each of those to graduate. All my technical classes had to fall within a fairly narrow set of choices and roughly zero of the ones I took were applicable to what my career has ultimately been.
(At this point, someone usually makes the argument that all those classes taught problem solving and I solve problems and therefore it's all great. I'm not saying my education was professionally useless, but almost all of it was about on the relevance level of being a Spanish major and then shipping off to Japan for your first job.)
I was offered a small scholarship to Iowa State back in the day and it's more than possible that I picked the wrong school, not that most of us have any real idea of what we want to do circa junior year of high school when you need to decide. Still, I have to think that being forced to take that many more courses in embedded-ish programming I'd have had a better background in it at that point, not that it's been of much help to me.
I'm neither surprised by this nor do I necessarily find it something to get up in arms about.
There's not really time in a 4 year degree (well, along with all the other crap that goes into it) to teach someone the kinds of things you need to know to be a good business application developer and to teach someone the kinds of things you need to know to be a good embedded applications developer.
A good embedded developer needs experience with languages that run "close to the metal" of the machine, needs to know how to manage memory, needs to know how the machine architecture works, needs to know how to perform optimizations within that world, etc.
A good business applications developer needs experience with languages that abstract or hide a lot of the above details in order to let them focus on business logic, needs to know a decent amount about databases, needs to know about software architecture and design patterns, needs to know about networking, generally needs to know something about UI design, etc.
Yes, there's some overlap.
Speaking as someone with a college education emphasizing the former and a career emphasizing the latter, I'm not convinced this is a terrible thing. There are a lot more business style applications that need writing in the world than embedded applications. That specialization and the need for it I don't see going away any time soon, but it's the exception rather than the rule, and I'm not convinced there's something holier about understanding the guts of the machine than in understanding how to design a complex system for extensibility, maintainability, high availability, or whatever best suits the project.
What means exactly? Far as I'm aware none of these "any means necessary" include breaking the law.
According to numerous accounts, the 'any means necessary' includes all manner of brutality and illegality.
Here's an interesting one if you're unfamiliar:
http://www.xenu-directory.net/critics/fishman1.html
Have you ever tried working on Flash as a developer? I'd pretty much rather slam my balls in a car door than do so again.
Anything that makes Flash actually have to compete in the marketplace is a good thing.
So, how many times would you have voted to re-elect FDR, if you had been around in the 30s and 40s?
Depends on how good of a job I thought he was doing, really.
But what you're saying a few posts above is less like that and more like saying people should never have elected FDR at all, because Teddy Roosevelt had been president previously.
Adoption of the DX10 stuff has been slow, and even a lot of the games that support it currently only use it for a few things.
For example, the water effects in Bioshock look amazingly better in DX10... but as far as I can tell that's the only difference vs. DX9.
She's the best if you don't mind the Presidency being passed from one family to another (Bush to Clinton, Clinton to Bush, Bush to Clinton).
Regardless of who you think should be president, I think this particular argument is terrible, since it essentially equates Bill Clinton's presidency, which -- whether you think Bill deserves much/any of the credit for it or not -- was probably the most prosperous America has been in my lifetime -- with the G. W. Bush presidency, which has been craptacular on many levels.
I mean, if you think Obama or McCain or whoever will be a better president, by all means, vote for them, but you've got something loose in the head if you're doing it because OMG the Bush dynasty needs to end.
That might be the deal now. It wasn't when I bought mine. You can put your serial number in elsewhere on the Apple site to get the details of your warranty, and I assure you it doesn't tell me I had a year of coverage.
I know lots of people who have iPods and love them. I wouldn't buy another one based on my experience. $400 is way too much for something that broke in month 7 of ownership.
Maybe yours does. Mine says 180 days, and the folks at the Apple store confirmed that when I brought it in just for kicks.
Hard drive crapped out just past the six month warranty period and Apple's not interested in doing anything with it for less than $180 + shipping + labor. I hate to say it but I'd rather spend that money on a Zune.
1) Classes -- this is a really bad idea, it doesn't match reality or fiction. Even in official adaptations, no fictional character from source literature (e.g. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the Lord of the Rings, Conan) could be converted into a legal D&D character.
Have you played third edition D&D at all? IMHO, this has no longer been a valid criticism.
That aside, having played a handful of class-based games and a ton of non-class-based games, I'd say it's a design choice and one isn't necessarily better than the other. I don't think a game like Call of Cthulhu would play right with classes, and I don't think D&D would play right without them. Ironically, I find that you get less homogenized characters in a class-based game that does classes right, than in most skill-based games.
Does anybody really own with druids playing the game? Because otherwise it's pretty much only theoretical ownage.
Yup. I actually won't play druid with my friends anymore because the druid is so good hardly anyone else gets to do anything. Although it's kind of cool to have a tough character, I think most of us are more interested in D&D as a cooperative/team game than the 'druid and his sidekicks' show.
Many times at cons I've sat at a table roughly along the lines of: 5 reasonably tough 8th-9th level non-druid PCs, plus me with 6th level druid, playing an adventure meant for 9th-10th level guys... and everyone gets bored because the druid is easily dealing more damage than the rest of the party put together. This is, say, with just material in the PHB + Complete Divine. Nothing too outlandish there.
I'm a competent player, but I'm not great, and I'm definitely not anywhere near that dominant with any other kind of character. I've met at least half a dozen people who are much better with it than I am. In hands that understand half of its potential the druid genuinely is just that good.
It's a long post and I'm just going to hit a few points:
- I'm familiar with the B9S mechanics, and I'm not in principle averse to mechanics roughly of that kind for fighterish characters. I enjoy playing both spellcasters and fighterish characters in 3.XE. I have reason to believe the way the classes sort out in 4E will be something I like less. Probably my preferences aren't yours so I wouldn't worry about it.
- Honestly, I've seen many, many more 3.0/3.5 clerics played more along the tank or DPS paradigms than healer. Into/past the midlevels most other characters can't really keep up with them, and sadly none of the melee-ish characters (as solo characters) really keep pace at all. It's hard to convince the cleric to heal when he can wade into melee and whip out a few hundred points of damage instead without really even having much or anything in the way of magic items that lend themselves to it.
This may mean I deal with bigger powergamers than you do; I spent the bulk of third edition doing a lot of convention play. When everyone pretty much has to play with the rules as written and you play with a few dozen different people in a weekend, even without getting into esoteric material, optimization ideas spread [i]fast[/i] and new adventures tend to be written to push players that are playing, if not perfectly, certainly not poorly.
It's a lot different than home game play and brings out a lot of the best and the worst of the game at once.
- Rogues: There's a lot more to their skill list than traps and locks, though there is that too. UMD is a fun and important one, for example.
Short version... by level 10 or so it shouldn't be very hard for you to grapple and pin a Pit Fiend.
(Yes, there are problems with that, such as the Pit Fiend probably shouldn't put him in that situation... but the fact that, push come to shove, you can do it easy should be some indication.)
Grappling is probably the area where the druid excells above all others, but it's also great in a lot of other areas. Ideally a druid shouldn't go with any of them in all situations, but beating the second or third best at practically everything in the game is hard to deal with.
And you have badass direct damage spells. Fire seeds is great. Fire storm is great. Flamestrike is a lower level for you than cleric, which means cheaper metamagic if you want to roll that way.
And you have badass battlefield control spells.
And you can swap to summon a pile of animals.
And you've got an animal companion, which at very low levels is about as good as most party melee characters, and eventually is a poor man's melee character, but still, free. Buffing your animal companion is a very effective strategy in a ton of situations. Whereas the cleric pretty much needs to cast buff spells and then fight, the druid's animal companion can be fighting as he buffs it.
And you've got a ton of spells that buff animals, including most of your summons (including broke-ass animal growth, which also is applicable to your animal companion and yourself in wild shape).
And you get 4 skill points a level, including having spot and listen as class skills.
You have a ton of great utility spells.
Etc.
You can't swap for heals like a cleric can, but I find this is actually a boon because it keeps people from thinking of you as too much of a healer if you simply don't slot those spells.
5) I don't know the playtesters, but it's hard to imagine anybody but twinks wanting to work at WoTC in the first place, so I think they have that one covered.
I don't know, man. I remember all the sharpest super-twinks I know declaring that in 3.0 druid was either the flat-out toughest or in the running for toughest class (depending on who you asked), and 3.5 made them tougher. The word on the street (which I believe but can't vouch for the truth of) was that in the internal games at WotC no one really wanted to play druids so they thought they needed to be better.
If they have any in your area, attending a local gaming convention is probably the best way.
Usually over the course of a day/weekend/whatever you'll get to game with different handfuls of people at a time. Even if you decide the con scene isn't to your liking, probably you'll get to game with some people that you get along with and would like to play with again, and some people you don't. Talk to the people you do enjoy playing with and there you are.
I don't know specifically what you're talking about when you say "the most interesting parts"
Some of it for me is certainly in resource management, which from the rest of your post is something I can tell you don't particularly enjoy. I really like prepared spellcasting (AKA memorization), although I also like that you can play spontaneous casters if you choose. I really like the variety of having some characters in a group that are on a fairly even keel of power where others have only a few moments of greatness throughout a day (often, many fights) that they have to carefully hoard and marshal at appropriate times. I like that there are a ton of feats and spells and things in the game that are combat-important but don't deal damage, such as sleep or entangle. I like that you can play a wide variety of characters that all feel/play really different.
This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list, but everything I know so far about 4E suggests that some of these things are going outright and others are being diminished in importance severely, and that we're moving more to a game where everyone's got a bunch of 'once per encounter' abilities, and every fight of their career involves every character firing off their toughest ones in succession. In other words, choosing nearly the same sequence of actions in nearly every fight.
I don't know what it means to "fill the gaps liberally with WoW", except as far as WoW simply game-ified what players and DM's were already doing. Maybe you could elaborate on that.
Things like: pushing more to an 'everyone does damage' model vs. non-damaging malediction/battlefield control, or designing classes more along the MMORPG 'holy trinity' of tank/healing/DPS. The 4E rogue sounds like the typical MMO DPS-machine; the 3E rogue, I would argue, is more defined by his skills -- especially since as his level increases the number of sneak-attack-able enemies he typically encounters drops drastically.
But if you could (for example) build a character you would RP the exact same way you'd play your paladin as a fighter/cleric or something much, much tougher (and you could), why wouldn't you?
Honestly, there's power-gaming, and then there's just wanting to be a useful member of the team. Not everyone has the teenage fixation on being the toughest guy, but I think most people like to feel more like a contributing part of the group and less like the soldier with two broken legs whose comrades are slowly dragging back from enemy lines at great risk to themselves.
I've had experience with the various releases of D&D rule sets over the years. So I say if this one doesn't improve the game in any meaningful way for you, just play with you're favorite rule set or even modify your favorite edition. It is a game of imagination after all.
This is completely true for home play, but if you're into "Living Campaigns" or other tournament/convention-based play, you're more or less stuck with the rules as written. If they bork up the game to the point that it's not fun for you anymore, you're kind of screwed.
I don't really have the time or energy to be a conventioning or even very regular gamer anymore, but there was a time.
I'll try to reserve my judgment for when the real 4E books are released, but I'm not optimistic.
Are you -crazy-? Paladins are probably the most powerful class in DnD! Oft ridiculed for being the choice of people wanting to play "easymode", both RP and combat-wise.
Uh, in what edition would that be? Because it's not 3.0 or 3.5.
... who feels like they may have simplified the most interesting parts clear out of the game, filled the gaps liberally with WoW, and ended up with a game that, admittedly, has a much lower barrier to entry but is also not particularly interesting?
I mean, you can make Monopoly a lot easier to play and simpler to learn if you ditch hotel and house building, the rent for each property is the same, and instead of rolling the dice to move you move one space each time on your turn, but would it be fun?
3/3.5E's not perfect by a long shot to me either, but what we've seen of 4E so far is honestly just not interesting to me.
Is it really that hard to believe that a socialist system like in the UK can actually be cheaper than the for-profit capitalist system?
For me, not at all, for what it's worth.
In my mind a system that only concerns itself with the health of its people in "worthy cases" is worse than the status quo of profiting from suffering but allowing everyone to get care.
I really can't see how a system which gives health care to fewer people is in any way an improvement. If you don't want to pay for the expensive emergency care of uninsured persons, find a way to make it cheaper, not shut them out in the cold to die.
That's not what I was getting at at all.
I'm saying, if we decide to go the route of making everyone buy health insurance (as car insurance is mandatory in much of the U.S., for example), I'd consider it acceptable for my taxes to pay that mandatory health insurance cost in some cases. The people that it didn't pay for would buy health insurance as normal.
I'm not convinced that approach is better than a socialized system. It's a 'what if?'
The thing that always sticks with me about socialized medicine (and note, as I say this, that it still may very well be the best available choice) is that to my understanding it doesn't reward preventative measures, and in most implementations the greatest need is always served first. That is to say, if I take great care of my body and am generally in good health but develop a very painful but not life-threatening condition, surgery for me is a lower priority than life-saving lung removal surgery on a lifetime chain smoker with lung cancer.
I'm not saying the chain smoker should be allowed to die to speed up my surgery in that case, but the idea under the current health insurance system that bigger risk groups / less healthy patients pay more, while often unfair, does create an incentive to try to remain healthier. I'd be most interested in some kind of socialized medicine solution that keeps this incentive while addressing some of the many other problems of the current system.
Hell, I'd be willing to give that idea a shot.
The only thing I'm positive about is that the system we have right now sucks.
Hospital treatment isn't free. The money has to come from somewhere. Ultimately that's the kernel of the problem: everyone wants to treat having quadruple bypass surgery as a basic human right like freedom of speech or religion, but freedom of speech doesn't cost a gigantic pile of money.
I don't wholly disagree with most of what you said, but I think 'everyone has to buy health insurance' is a better starting point than what we have now. If the problem with that solution is that it leaves Peace Corps workers out in the cold because they couldn't afford to buy health insurance on their crappy wages, and we feel like the Peace Corps is generally a good thing for everyone, then let's decide that our tax dollars will cover the health insurance for specific cases like that.
A system in which the public decides to cover the health care expenses of some worthy cases, to my mind, beats the status quo where the public essentially covers everyone by default.