The description of the new WotC Organized Play program made me throw up in my mouth a little.
I keep hoping 4e might come back from the brink. Mike Mearls keeps posting “Ah yes, the good things we are starting to remember from older D&D editions” posts on his blog. Maybe D&D isn’t degenerating into a tactical minis game forever after all, I think.
And then they just up and announce it’s a tactical minis game. No really, go read the link. The new OP is “tailored to groups of players who enjoy solving tactical puzzles, optimizing characters, and using rules to their advantage.” You come and minmax character builds and run them through a tactical simulation. If you die, it’s back to the save point and try again. Again, really, “Adventuring groups will often attempt a challenge several times before solving it.” The “D&D Fortune Cards are a required and integral part” isn’t even in the top 10 disturbing things about this.
Frankly, Organized Play is behind a lot of the bad stuff that started to corrupt 3e. It breeds a certain mindset and playstyle with very tightly constrained encounter difficulties, point buy min maxing, etc. that ends up corrupting the expectations of players. Now they are, as the kids today say, “Sticking it in and breaking it off” as far as that’s concerned.
I wonder how the people that always object to saying that 4e is becoming exactly like a computer game can even begin to continue to say that with a straight face now.
I mean, I don’t mind wargaming. I remember a lively game of Stargrunt II I played at a Gen Con. But WotC needs to start a separate tactical game line and stop making everyone think that it is a roleplaying game. It just breeds more “It’s only about the kill” goons that inhabit local game tables, Internet forums, and eventually the ranks of adventure and supplement authors.
P.S. If this is your first visit here and you just don’t understand WHY… I’m not gonna bother to link you to the past posts that explain how 4e is different from roleplaying games, etc.; if you can’t type “4e” into the search box above if you really want to find out, then you fall below the minimum INT required to care about whether you understand what’s going on…
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