Third Time’s the Charm
TSR has been bought out by the makers of Magic: The Gathering, and here, apparently, comes a third edition of our favourite poorly-managed campaign fodder. Yikes. That is unfortunate. I can’t imagine what they’ll do to the system besides screw it up. 2nd edition is perfect. How on Earth do they mean to mangle it?
In 1st edition, there were uncountable gaps and very roughly-calculated rules. It was obviously a good idea, but it needed to be revised and edited to come completely into form. Some things had to be removed altogether in order to make it fair, only to be reintroduced later, in a modified form, as optional add-ons to the core rules.
They did a damned good job evening the game out, too; It was smooth. The only possible two things I can see which would warrant a third edition would be, one, to clean up all of the clutter of add-ons and “extra” rules; to attempt to incorporate everying in a grandiose, global, overly-large way (as opposed to the sleek, bare-bones approach we all know and love, which encourages imaginative interpretation)… and two, to make money by forcing everyone to buy everything over again.
Seeing as how they were just bought out by Wizards a few months ago and TSR hadn’t seen need to release a third edition in the, what, fifteen years of ad&d/2nd? Seeeing as how they were just purchased by a new company, my theory is Wizards want their new acquistion to rain in the moola. Look for a fourth edition in 2000, judging by their strategy with their own product. It’s probable they don’t so much care about the integrity of the system as they do that they can make this famous name, AD&D, pay off for them in a big way. How do they do that? Print a whole lot of new books. But how can you make sure people will buy them? Well, you could release a lot of interesting, highly-demanded material which has, as yet, gone unpublished, which, of course, takes time and imagination — or you could fuck with the established rule system and reprint all of the base, neccesary material, forcing everyone really into the game to buy it all over again,
Of course, I could be wrong. They could have a small team of extremely talented, imaginative, logical, insightful people evening out the system even more and simplifying gameplay to an extent we can only imagine while sacrificing none of its inherent functionality in the process.
Which do you think is more likely?
I’m lapsing back into a zone of deathful lonliness again, dangerous mostly because it causes me to drop my guard and latch onto any emotion I can pull out of people, however destructive it may be to me, without realizing until later how much of a schmuck I’ve been.