Quote:
Originally Posted by ColBosch
And yet, a certain very vocal percentage of that fanbase wants MORE RULES and MORE TABLES. *sighs* It was very frustrating to work on some of those products.
|
I can only imagine...I've read the horror stories of the Forgotten Realms developers and their arguments with their publisher over sacrificing lore in the name of crunch...new base classes, new prestige classes, new feats, new skill tricks, etc.
The book in question for last night was a Shadowrun book, but yeah...Battletech needs a new edition in the worst way. It had what...4 editions between '84 and '96, and has been carrying on with expansions, band-aids, and minor refinements for 22 years? It's time. It was time 10 years ago.
My big annoyance with that game has to be that since the passing of the baton, there have been too many writers and not enough game designers...the tone shifts, the power spikes, the hand-waving to create epic apocalyptic / messianic storylines and conspiracies puppeteering conspiracies that puppeteered conspiracies, that's when I started to go from a passionate fan to merely a player, and started to lose patience with the ever-increasingly-complicated tables / case rules / etc.
Sure, come the War of 3039 the universe needed a shake-up...you can only have so many galaxy-spanning border-nibbling "world wars" based on one noble telling another noble their mother dresses them funny before it gets a bit stale...but really felt it went to the opposite extreme. I really enjoyed the "A rotting universe where its best times were behind it, but there's still some hope in the form of occasionally rediscovering lost technology" feel, and even enjoyed the "scrambling to stop being hopelessly outgunned in the face of a foreign invader" feel of the early Clan invasion, so was sad when it became more like throwing legions of shiny super-mechs at each other like they were Gundam mooks.
But hey, it contributed to my eventual discovery of Ogre, so that's a win. :D