The New Site

Posted on : 08-07-2004 | By : Brian | In : News

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Well, we’re back (hopefully for a longer period of time this time). My wife and I have designed this newest version of the GCG site from the ground up, and from a coder’s perspective it’s a big improvement. At any rate, I’ve ported over a few articles from the last iteration of the site, just so there’s something here. I hope to have a review of Eberron up relatively soon; I haven’t finished reading the book yet, though. Suffice it to say, though, it can be firmly filed into the “I was wrong” category (those of you who have read the article entitled “Eberron, Unearthed Arcana, and WotC” will know what I mean by that). Eberron is a very enjoyable read, but I’ll cover it in greater detail in my upcoming review.

At any rate, more will be avialable as time passes. Eventually, there will even be a forum, web links, and downloads.

Eberron, Unearthed Arcana, and WotC

Posted on : 20-04-2004 | By : Brian | In : News

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Ok, first things first: Unearthed Arcana. I just got finished reading a list of its contents on EN World, a d20 news site. I must say that I was alternately intrigued and dismayed by what I read. On the one hand, there are some really interesting variants in this book, at least from what I can tell from the brief descriptions provided. Some of them seem long overdue. Variant paladins are interesting; now you can be a paladin of one of four different alignments (Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Evil). I also like the idea of ‘gestalt characters’, which basically means you get to take two classes at once, and combine the effects of both. On the other hand, there is some truly unoriginal stuff in there, too. Racial paragon classes, for instance, are stolen directly from Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed (a separate game with a similar name), bloodlines seem like a rip-off of Midnight’s Lifepath system, and they’ve even included an alternate damage system that uses six ‘conditions’, a system that’s been used in about a hojilion other RPGs, including everything that White Wolf has ever made. Plus, you’ve got action points and generic classes taken from d20 Modern, a vitality/wound point system taken from Star Wars, and a sanity system taken from Call of Cthulhu. Oh, and did I mention the variants that just seem plain silly, like one that lets the players roll all of the dice (basically, there are defense rolls instead of attack rolls and spell power checks instead of saving throws)?

I don’t know. I’ll probably wind up buying it eventually, despite the growing disappointment that I’m feeling toward WotC, and I’ll probably even want to use a bunch of the variants as soon as I read them. What can I say? I guess I’m just a sucker for crunchy bits.

As for Eberron . . . snuh. I still feel like there’s not a lot of originality inherent in the setting. However, Dragon keeps publishing these maddeningly tantalizing articles on how the setting is shaping up (much better than the first article, the one that I ranted about), and I think they’re starting to bore through my skull and into the juicy wetness that represents my innermost thoughts and desires. I like D&D a lot, but I like it more with a crapload of options and an extra dose of flavor. That’s what attracted me to Forgotten Realms and, later, Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed. It seems like every time I read something new about Eberron, there’s a ‘been there, done that’ feeling; however, there’s also a feeling that I haven’t necessarily been there or done that in D&D. Maybe I’m getting too hung up on originality here. After all, I’m a big fan of the Realms, but there was never anything terribly original about Faerûn; it’s basically the bastard child of Middle-Earth.

In the end, I guess it just makes me sad. I’m still a fan of WotC’s products; they’re generally high-quality and fun to play. However, they haven’t been terribly original for a long time. I mean, what are their big products? You’ve got D&D, which is in the midst of its third iteration (with a fractional value, even). You’ve got Star Wars, which is not only licensed from a popular franchise, but also draws heavily from the old West End Games RPG. You’ve got Call of Cthulhu, which is based entirely on Chaosium’s game of the sam ename, which in turn is based on the fiction of some guy named Lovecraft. I guess he wrote stuff, or something. You’ve also got d20 Modern which, while good, is hardly original. The campaign setting is Earth in present day. You can mix it up by adding in monsters, magic, and/or psionics, but none of this is terribly original either. Despite all this, though, I continue to buy, and enjoy, their products. So, maybe I should just get off my soapbox and continue to enjoy their products, and ignore their lack of innovation. They are, after all, a big corporation, and RPGs make up a very small part of their revenue. Maybe I should leave innovation up to the smaller companies that have less to lose by it.