The Times has given up on the video game beat for the moment. Now it’s Dungeons & Dragons on the front page*:
Gamers bicker over Dungeons & Dragons rules. Some have left childhood pursuits behind. And others have spurned an old-fashioned, tabletop fantasy role-playing game for shiny electronic competitors like World of Warcraft and the Elder Scrolls.
But there might yet be hope for Dungeons & Dragons, known as D&D. On Monday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns the game, announced that a new edition is under development, the first overhaul of the rules since the contentious fourth edition was released in 2008. And Dungeons & Dragons’ designers are also planning to undertake an exceedingly rare effort for the gaming industry over the next few months: asking hundreds of thousands of fans to tell them how exactly they should reboot the franchise.
I believe the term for this is “crowd-sourcing.”
It pains me to disappoint my retinue who depend upon me for insight but here I have none. The game mystifies me.
I admit a brief exploratory phase in high school that involved both West End Games’ Star Wars RPG and the World of Darkness. Perhaps it was best that I discovered Tolkien late in life, lest I too might have ventured down the D&D hole.
Comment by Gabriel — January 9, 2012 @ 1:11 pm
It turned you to Satan, right?
Comment by Neko_Bijin — January 9, 2012 @ 5:10 pm
It did me! It made me like girls in bikini armor and want to invade the innocent orcish home to plunder their goods, wears and free their slaves!!! Though I would think WoD would be more to the Satan side than D&D. AND then there is that EVEL Battletech.
Comment by Joskney — January 10, 2012 @ 2:30 am
I have been playing D&D for 31 years (eeek). I currently have a 2.5 edition game campaign that I have been running for nearly 15 years. But I quit buying at 3 edition and loathed the 4th. The only other game system that takes up more room on my shelves and the one I have more sourcebooks is my Shadowrun collection. Battletech had been a hobby game for me (one I was really adept at playing), until I ended up being a game tester for CBT and Moderator.
Comment by Joskney — January 10, 2012 @ 2:24 am
Hey, your avatar works now! Any plans to post some here soon?
Comment by Neko_Bijin — January 10, 2012 @ 9:17 am
As an official “old fart”, I blame the death of RPG on the change from a generation raised on fantasy books, to one raised on fantasy computer games. People used to having to use their imaginations to bring a story to life could, in many cases, transfer this from reading to gaming. Those raised on video valium, on the other hand, wait as imperfect consumers of someone else’s imagination. “Feed my brain! Don’t make me think for myself!” could be the paradigm of the iPad generation …
Comment by Anonymous — January 19, 2012 @ 1:24 am