Of Dungeoning and Dragoning
I've played Dungeons and Dragons since 2nd Edition (also known by its nerdier title, "Advanced Dungeons And Dragons"). I've mucked around in loads of other roleplaying games as well, and enjoyed most of them, but D&D has a special place in my heart. It's always provided me with the most entertaining characters and memorable moments. I know certain people have a real hate-on for d20-based games, and I understand why- the ubiquity of that rules system led a lot of companies to simply produce new contexts for the d20 rules rather than design something new and innovative. This is sad partially just for the loss of new stuff that might have been, but also because d20 isn't a good approach for most settings or genres. But does a better job than anything else I've tried at telling heroic Tolkeinesque fantasy stories, and that's what D&D is about.

When Wizards Of The Coast (WOTC) released the game's fourth edition last year, there was a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of nerds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Said nerds had spent hojillions of dollars on books for the previous edition of the game, books that had superseded and outclassed each other to the point that very little of the game's original material was relevant or competitive any more. The game was a bit of an unwieldy mess of addendums and exceptions, and dozens of sourcebooks with different design approaches meant that hundreds of new rules could interact with each other in some truly stupid ways. This isn't to say that there wasn't fun to be found in the game's third edition (and its bastard stepchild, 3.5), it's just that as players you had to work to find that fun. In any case, the concern upon the fourth edition's publication seemed to be that WOTC would be coming to nerdly burrows everywhere and pilfering the now-obselete books, which clearly hasn't happened. Lots of folks are still happily playing 3.5, and many others have moved on to Fourth Edition. Like me.

I'm currently running a game for a group of my friends, and I honestly believe the new edition is the best thing that's happened to the game. This is for lots of reasons, but most of them come back to one thing: the game, for the first time, has been approached by the designers as a game rather than a simulation. As much as roleplaying games are about group storytelling, they don't need to match up to reality as long as they're internally consistent. As the Dungeon Master, I don't care about verisimilitude, I care if my players are having a good time. With the new edition, we've yet to have to forage through sourcebooks and crunch heady rules in order to find the fun. Moreover, everything the player characters do has the feel of epic fantasy heroics, in which realism has very little place. That sounds like good game design to me.

Last weekend, I had a brief meeting with a group of gamers who were looking for another player for their D&D 3.5 game. I still own the relevant books, and I don't dislike the system- and in any case, the most important thing about a roleplaying game is the people playing it. Good gamers can have a great time with a mediocre system, and socially inept pedantic nerd-tards can ruin anything if they try hard enough. This particular group had a firm handle on the latter. Without boring you with too many obscure details of in-game rules mechanics, they seemed to get off on ranting about how unrealistic the new edition is. Heck, even 3.5 required a number of extremely odd house rules to bring it up to their standard of verisimilitude. I bowed out, for two reasons: Firstly, I'm irritated by the notion of adding more and more context-specific rules in order to model reality more accurately in your roleplaying game- it makes the game less like a game and more like a simulator, which isn't fun for me. And secondly, I was about to turn bright crimson and break out ranting until cartoon steam shot out my ears. Because:

-If you want a game that's realistic, why play a heroic fantasy game at all? Someone has surely published 'Houses And Humans', in which you struggle through a day job before returning home to your family. Someone has to change little Bobby's diaper? Roll for initiative!

-D&D gets lots of the details wrong when it does attempt to model historical stuff. Splint mail and banded mail armour were of limited historical relevance, but they show up all the time in D&D. Rapiers had no martial combat application- NONE. There's no such thing as 'plate mail' armour. The list goes on, but even the mundane details don't support a simulationist approach.

-Who even cares if the goblin warrior's armour is historically cromulent? IT IS ON A FRIGGING GOBLIN. Any arguments about what would be 'realistic' stop right there.

-Fourth edition, unlike 3.5, supports balance- a twentieth-level wizard, for example, is exactly as powerful in his own way as a twentieth-level fighter, simply because the players have more fun that way. Complaints that a wizard should 'obviously', in a realistic system, be more powerful than a swordsman of comparable experience, simply because wizards are magical and fighters are relying on talent and skill, are ludicrous. You want realism? Great. THERE ARE NO GODDAMN WIZARDS.

The list goes on, but the long and the short of it is this: why do some nerds give us socially functional nerds a bad name? Why the condescension towards gamers who 'just' want to have fun, tell a cool story, or enjoy a game for what it is?