Post by devp on Nov 1, 2011 8:44:16 GMT -8
For a while, the At-Will blog has been one of my favorite sources of 4e hacks that challenged the boundaries of what 4e can do. The author recently announced the end of his 4e involvement. In part, due to drifting interests, but also due to the problematic gamer community that made further activity simply not worth his time.
Certainly, shifting your hobby-time to focus on what interest and excites your (rather than that which aggravates you) is the best decision ever! The new game projects sound awesome.
Still, this is really unfortunate. It's bad enough when there's a toxic community but people are just basically shooting the shit. There's something a bit worse a community has individuals who have spontaneous creativity and energy and the community norms work to choke off that creativity. The end result is some apocalyptic horror show where only image macros and sarcasm tags remain.
If we're talking about the 4e community, I see these problems:
* No sustainable support ever developed for game-hacking, third-party material, or DIY material. Making play compatible everywhere + ample DDI content = a little bit too much conformity relative to the history of D&D. 4e certainly works well with random material, but the culture isn't there to support it in even SG-sized groups of people.
There seems to be a cycle where (1) a 4e blog or a set of blogs develop an aesthetic, (2) it starts to escalate, (3) discovery by larger 4e boards, and finally (4) the torrent of haterade burns the creatives out of 4e. (This happened with fourthcore, pretty much.)
* The edition/revision wars have broken many souls, and even well-meaning 4e people must live in fear that any post, comment or module is itself a secret attack against the structure of their game and, therefore, their life choices and personal values.
* and all the other problems in nerds communities and internet communities ever
To be fair, I don't think the 4e community has unique problems here.
(lol at one point i totally dived in 4e stuff because i thought it was a break for indie-narr-designer drama and scenesterdom)
Certainly, shifting your hobby-time to focus on what interest and excites your (rather than that which aggravates you) is the best decision ever! The new game projects sound awesome.
Still, this is really unfortunate. It's bad enough when there's a toxic community but people are just basically shooting the shit. There's something a bit worse a community has individuals who have spontaneous creativity and energy and the community norms work to choke off that creativity. The end result is some apocalyptic horror show where only image macros and sarcasm tags remain.
If we're talking about the 4e community, I see these problems:
* No sustainable support ever developed for game-hacking, third-party material, or DIY material. Making play compatible everywhere + ample DDI content = a little bit too much conformity relative to the history of D&D. 4e certainly works well with random material, but the culture isn't there to support it in even SG-sized groups of people.
There seems to be a cycle where (1) a 4e blog or a set of blogs develop an aesthetic, (2) it starts to escalate, (3) discovery by larger 4e boards, and finally (4) the torrent of haterade burns the creatives out of 4e. (This happened with fourthcore, pretty much.)
* The edition/revision wars have broken many souls, and even well-meaning 4e people must live in fear that any post, comment or module is itself a secret attack against the structure of their game and, therefore, their life choices and personal values.
* and all the other problems in nerds communities and internet communities ever
To be fair, I don't think the 4e community has unique problems here.
(lol at one point i totally dived in 4e stuff because i thought it was a break for indie-narr-designer drama and scenesterdom)
