October 2007 Archives
I swear to God, this movie sounds so fucking emo I might actually off myself. Which, of course, would be ironic as I would likely end up in the film.
Join me in not seeing Wristcutters: A Love Story as a statement, because it sounds totally awful. Like Dashboard Confessional's latest album, whatever the crap that is.
P.S. Happy Halloween!
Ridiculous? Sure, but it's part of a larger costume. I am debating wearing it to a high-level meeting later this morning.
That's a taxidermied chipmunk. Oh yeah!
Jesus Christ, is it just me or does Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition sound a hell of a lot like World of Warcraft?
Seriously! This page lists a bunch of information on the new edition of the game, due out this May. What really draws the parallel for me is the classes subheading of the "Specific Rules" section. If you scroll down a bit, you'll see they've broken down the roles of any given adventuring party into four types:
- Defender (fighter/paladin)
- Leader (cleric/warlord(?))
- Controller (wizard)
- Striker (rogue/ranger)
Now, I know a lot of you will mock me endlessly for even blogging on this point, but you all can get a step-ladder and jump up my butt. Basically, this is the exact break-down of World of Warcraft (WoW) party. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
To me, it sounds an awful lot like the Defender role is a lot like the tank role of WoW: a player whose job it is to make sure the monsters attack only them, thus protecting the weaker characters.
Controller sounds an awful lot like crowd control, which is the art of making sure that if the enemies outnumber the good guys, they (the bad guys) don't overwhelm everyone.
Striker is very obviously the WoW concept of "melee DPS (damage done per second, a value represent in whole numbers)." That is, characters that don't necessarily do a lot of damage with each individual attack, but, to compensate attack quickly.
Lastly, the Leader role sounds an awful lot like the "magic/long-range DPS" role in WoW. Similar to melee DPS, magic or long-range DPS characters are players that use magic spells to cause damage from a distance. I would associated these two due to the fact that a leader generally stands back from a group, directing their actions and commanding them while attacking when necessary.
A lot of you won't really care about the above, but I hope the following makes a bit of sense.
The question stands, then, why would Wizards of the Coast, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), so blatantly rip-off the World of Warcraft party scheme? I can think of one reason: revenue. More specifically, the revenue potential of the currently 7+ million subscribers World of Warcraft enjoys.
Let's do some simple math. First, let's assume that everyone who plays the new 4E D&D buys the Player's Handbook, a pretty stand-alone book that can get anyone into the game. My 3.5E hardbound (the books only come in hardback) Player's Handbook runs $30 new. So, assuming they are able to tap into the 7M players of WoW and assuming those 7M players only buy the Player's Handbook (there are also two other books, the Dungeon Master's Guide and the Monster Manual, which are very handy for the game), that puts us at:
7M * $30 = $210,000,000
That's a lot of fucking money. But that's kinda the wrong reason to release a new edition. Sure, if you have significant changes to the ruleset then release a new edition, but 3E came out in 2000 with 3.5E following within 3 years. So, in 2008 we'll have an additional edition? That's 3 new editions in less than a decade. Prior to that we had 2 editions released in twenty years.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the changes to me are very evidently money-oriented, not game- or player-oriented. Christ, even the 3.5E changes could have been a $10 errata chapter sold separately. So to have them dropping this bomb on us, it's sort of infuriating and ridiculous. The thinly veiled "cash in on WoW" scheme is just a bad idea. Don't get me wrong, I think trying to capitalize on that market is a good call. But the manner in which it's approached is totally wrong (see the D&DInsider offering from the link above).
It's just a bad call. First Eberron and now this? I guess the silver lining is that all the 3/3.5E supplements will be liquidated.
Three years running and I've gone every year. This year was better than the last two simply because I was joined by 4 friends. Amazing time (even if the parade was a bit shorter than previous years).
If you've never been, mark your calendars for late September 2008. It's gonna be great.
