The artists of the core books were terrible most of the time with the odd glimmers of brilliance as noted by the illustration of the invisible stalker as pictured below:
Pretty good eh?
anyway, the expanded material like Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft etc were fucking epic.
Especially Planescape. That’s back when they took more risk with their art they had a good mix of classical fantasy art that had a real “rock album” feel to them. Went well with the Somewhere in Time and Powerslave albums any way…
Don’t forget that D&D opened up Pandora’s Box for the dozens of other RPG systems, some awful, some really useful. D&D, regardless of which edition you prefer, broke ground for all those other games: GURPS, Hero Systems, Seventh Sea, Age of Conan, War Machine, the 'Verse, Shadowrun, and many others. I personally owe D&D a debt of gratitude for starting me down that path at lunchtime, years ago.
It is more than that. The 2nd edition manuals, compendiums, campaigns, etc., had a less glossy corporate appearance and feel. 3rd edition and later felt like reading a textbook made for a 100 level class (like the glossy psychology or economics textbooks you have to buy). I might be projecting my early experiences of D&D into this which may be distorting my view, but I really felt something was off when 3rd edition came around*. As I said, it is tough to explain.
In any case, Tony DiTerlizzi’s art in Planescape was brilliant. And the Monster Manual Appendixes were amazing. Planescape still has my favorite art of all D&D products.
* I should also note that the change started late in AD&D 2nd edition with the re-release of the glossy core books versus the ‘good’ older non-glossy core books (my groups hated them).
Over all the base level quality of the art has gotten better but there’s definitely a more homogenized feel to the new art work, it’s lost a lot of the old charm that the books had.
You don’t get the stunningly beautiful art you got with Planescape but you also don’t get as many of these:
or
The big issue I’ve always had with 3rd edition is how much it’s tuned for miniatures combat. On the one had, it makes things easier by creating a consistent set of rules… on the other hand, it creates so many rules that you end up spending a lot of time looking things up in order to be consistent, and unless your DM makes an effort to loosen things up you lose a lot of the more organic interactions that tended to come out of the older rules.
Haven’t really touched 4th edition, though I’ve seen rants about it that sound like it limited options even further.
It apparently doesn’t matter to you. That’s fine. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter period.
(The video game industry is bigger than the movie industry – twice as big in North America. So in at least one important sense, games do actually matter.)
Friend was the representative for his gaming group in college, they asked for some minimal amount of funding.
‘But you’re just a bunch of guys who are playing games! Why should we fund you?’
His response, ‘Yeah, but so is the basketball team. Why should my student money be funding them?’ was effective at shutting the asker up and getting funds.
I remember when THAC0 was introduced - I thought about it for a minute, and then went “HUH.” I thought it was a brilliant streamlining of the to-hit tables from the original rulebooks.
I was intrigued by Battlesystem (woo-hoo - minis gaming!), but never got into it (woof - collecting minis on a middle-schooler’s budget, and mass scale stuff was a little tiring anyways) EXCEPT for the intro of THAC0.
Disclaimer : 1st/2nd edition fan, and I also enjoy BECMI (and its Basic and B/X predecessors).
2nd disclaimer : the Spouse and I are now a GURPS household, so we’ve kinda passed on the Edition Wars.
Yeah, I was in GURPS land for three decades, and hardly payed attention to the fracas beyond the gates. I bought some D&D books now and then, in hope of keeping up, but gave up in despair.
Now I’ve given up on writing for GURPS. Too much precedence you have to incorporate before doing anything original.
I have wonderful memories of playing D & D day after day during seemingly endless summers in Jr. High, still too young to have anything to do with girls, substances, or vandalism. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for umber hulks.
I used to be a D&D player, the AvangionQ avatar name I use has a D&D base, but I still haven’t felt the urge to get back into the game … as far as D&D goes, I look forward to when they finally release a video game based on 4E …
You don’t have to be a D&D player to understand that it is a significant cultural phenomena. D&D and its ordered structures played a non-trivial role in the way we handle computers and programming down to the concepts we use in current languages. Classes and objects, methods and properties. Object oriented programming was required to model the complex ruleset, character charts and interactions that D&D implemented. It helped drive the systems that we built to interact with others online through the object oriented nature of MOOs and MUDs - some of the earliest internet accessible live chat systems that also allowed you to have “things”. While those may have only been reflected as text at the time, the principle concepts haven’t changed as we have made our systems more visual.
Your knowledge of D&D lacks suffiicient depth for you to insult the author of the article in such a way. Go troll Youtube instead.
