Basements & Beards- Analogue Gaming Thread

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

The fall of western civilization in a nutshell, brought to you by Dungeon Crawl Classics (by Goodman Games).


The 9th printing had already switched to using gender-neutral pronouns, and now they've apparently axed any references to pioneers of the industry, because they're either considered problematic now or will be considered problematic in the not too distant future.
What makes this extra hilarious is that "Jaquays" refers to a famous dungeon module designer who has trooned out in his 60s. Way to go, shitlords.
Also love the "diversity is our strength" filler bit

Apparently they also had to apologize for a promotional flyer that had too many white people or something.
I wonder how many printings it'll take for the company to change to Goodpeople Games

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Have you been a good corporate drone over at Wizards of the Coast? Then there's about a 20% chance that the benevolent wizards have fired your ass as a christmas "present" to make up for their failing sales numbers

Also included amongst those fired is Mike Mearls, who was probably the biggest name still attached to D&D (he was a deisgner for 4e), though that's not saying much since these days he's mostly known for cringe like this:

[Le Redditeur]

Funny how that happens, uh. But it's to be expected, I mean, D&D sales must be down because it's not very popular, it's not like D&D was associated with a videogame that was a huge hit this year and even won GOTY or something. Certainly it's not their diversity and inclusion nonsense pushing tabletop gets away, that's a silly and bigoted thing to say. You bigots are FIRED from our game! But do keep purchasing the books and subscribing to our online services.

I wonder how their MtG division is doing. Because I'm willing to bet that the Blaragorn fiasco didn't do them any favors.

[Kugelfisch]

Oh no, the terrible act of wanting complex rules and intricate lore in your ultra nerd hobby!
Better dumb everything down into the fifteenth dungeon level so women, with their tiny dumb brains, can play as well.

I'll say it again, gatekeeping is the most noble act there is! Lurk moar or piss off, plebs! I bet there's some new Mahvul dreck in the cinema or some daft garbage on Nigflix for your kind.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Oh no, the terrible act of wanting complex rules and intricate lore in your ultra nerd hobby!

On a more based level, it's basically him saying he thinks that women and black people are too dumb to play normal D&D

I wonder how their MtG division is doing. Because I'm willing to bet that the Blaragorn fiasco didn't do them any favors.

Apparently they still managed to increase their sales for MtG (must be all the licensed gimmick shit), but their WotC branch managed to almost cancel out all that sweet profit.
If I'm not mistaken sales for MtG increased by 20%, whereas WotC as a whole only made a +2% profit.

And their D&D sales are mostly down 'cause they pretty much fucked up their books to the point that fewer and fewer people give a toss:

Campaign settings
The 5e renditions of old campaign settings have been joke. Everything's gone tame and soft af. They shit all over the original lore. Every setting feels the same because the current writers hate restrictions and allow all races and classes in every setting. Then there are the dumb controversities, created either out of sheer stupidity (turning Ravenloft's Not-Gypsies from a negative into a positive stereotype) or on purpose to gaslight people (turning Spelljammer's space monkeys into a thinly-veiled allegory for black people so they can claim the setting has always been racist).

New settings aren't anything to write home about, either. Their attempts to release MtG planes as D&D campaign settings has kinda fizzled out after Strixhaven (aka Faggy Potter and the Starbucks of Magic).
Then they had this Radiant Citadel, which isn't even a real campaign setting (as it was released as an adventure anthology) and is basically just a Planescape clone crossed with a questionable socialist "utopia".
Then they did a book about the setting used by Critical Role, which is not only not their idea, but has already been done before (and apparently better).

Adventure modules
A bit of a mess. A bit too much of a focus on the Forgotten Realms early on, then we got those lame woke adventure anthologies, whimsy shit (especially anything related to Strixhaven), and of course watered-down versions of famous adventure modules to go along with the watered-down versions of the their respective campaign settings.

This is probably the part of their portfolio that has hurt them the most in the long run (aside from pissing off fans of certain campaign settings). A steady output of consistently good-ish adventure modules is the lifeline of D&D and related games. Fuck, their biggest rival Paizo is essentially using their D&D fork as a means to sell their Adventure Paths.
Though I guess all those diversity hires had to do something...

Other Fluff Shit
Of course the various bits of creature lore in their Monster Manuals have been gutted, removing any "problematic" content under the pretense of allowing the DMs more freedom of how to use the monsters.
Which is bullshit, of course. DMs have always been free to just ignore the default monster lore, and D&D has been around so long that quite a few critters are effectively meaningless without their implied culture/background. If a race of assholes are no longer slavemongering assholes, why should I pick them over the better-known assholes like orcs?

Then there's shit like the book about the Deck of Many Things, which is just an excuse to push someone's Autistic Black Lesbian Paladin Self-Insert OC.

Crunch-centric splats
More races, more class archetypes, more spells, more everything. WotC has loved cranking the splat books out ever since they got the license, and even TSR got a bit crazy with that during the end of AD&D's life span.
Now while having more characters options is nice, too much character options can start to sour people on the game line.

• Option paralysis
• Options that are clearly shit
• Options that are clearly broken (especially if you combine them with options from other books for unintended synergy)
• Options that might be nice, but are skipped over because you know they won't get any more support outside of this one splat book (admittedly not quite as bad in 5e as they've focused to make everything an archetype of a core class, instead of making a whole new class like 3.X loved doing)
• New races that are mostly samey (the current D&D writers hate giving out fixed stat bonuses/penalties based on race 'cause that's like bioessentialism or something)

Now 5e actually does do something about the option paralysis and broken combos. If you indulge in their organized play aka the Adventurers League you are only allowed to customize your character with shit from one other book besides the core Player's Handbook.
Though this does raise the question of why you should get a new book if you're already set up with what you have?

And with the way this new anniversary edition is just turning into a 5.5 edition, they'll probably try to sell you all this shit all over again. Most likely digitally-only.

[Kugelfisch]

On a more based level, it's basically him saying he thinks that women and black people are too dumb to play normal D&D

That is exactly what he is saying and he means it that way too. But there's nothing based about it because their intent is to ruin everything. Make every game real fucking dumb and basic so even the drooling retard masses can get into it. All for hopes of profit.

They may succeed, they may fail. In any case, the game is going to get ruined. So gatekeep the fuck out of it. The least you can do is call the devs gay retards and make the nu-fans as uncomfortable and unwelcome as possible.

[Le Redditeur]

So their LotR nonsense actually worked? MtG players deserve the rope.

[Kugelfisch]

Well, do you know anyone that isn't a faggot still playing Magic in leagues? I don't.

[Le Redditeur]

Hell no. The worst part of playing Magic when I was younger was precisely the players. That's why I thought I could get back on the game with Magic Arena: no need to personally deal with the faggots, no need to spend money on cardboard (not even digital, it was pretty easy to farm enough currency to have three or four good decks every season). But then it quickly became clear that WotC hadn't improved the game one iota since I had quit it the first time, back when Ravnica was first released. On the contrary, they only made the game worst and more cancerous and were blatantly doing so to milk and dime players. The SJW shit is only the topping on the crap cake.

[Kugelfisch]

Magic has lots it's magic somewhere around the mid to late 2000s. Net decking was already bad at that point but it was the blocks and formats that got really bad.

The only playable and fun format today is Cube. It recreates what made it a phantastic game in the past. Which is just some friends having some random cards trying to come up with an idea for a deck and make it work. Highly sub-optimal builds.