Climate Change, Farewell Fawell, Gaming News

[tcpip]

Unitarian Extension Movement's forum on climate change, species deaths and alternative technology last Sunday was excellent. Most appropriately the following day had a wonderful opportunity to slap-down some serious idiocy courtesy of the von Mises Institute. It really was like shooting fish in a barrel. Climate change was also a media feature this week with recognition that extremes will affect Australia, and especially Victoria.

A couple of days ago my flist seemed to in celebration over the demise of Jerry Fawell. His apocalyptic beliefs, and hatred of secular liberalism and abhorrent theology certainly generates little sympathy from this corner of livejournal. Rather appropriately, nom_de_grr plays Godwin's and challenges us to find the differences (in speech) between Fawell and Hitler. The key point: both are people who sought not to keep their theological beliefs to their own lives, but rather to impose them on others. Appropriately angel80 links to North Korea's Juche as a religion.

Monte Cook makes some very good comments about Dragon and the state of D&D. On Sunday ran the first session of Stormbringer's Rogue Mistress which is just great. Also have completed a further two scenes for the HeroQuest Glorantha epic.

Best title goes to reddragdiva. Science proves that trolls really are a bunch of dicks. Mightily impressed by beagl linking the free LP for a compilation of New Zealand undergound music (yes, I've been looking at properties in Dunedin again). Do you have ten favourite movies? List them on slipjig's survey.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I read exactly the opposite from his comments; that attempting to recapture a sense of nostalgia isn't possible because well, the excitement of first-time play is over.

Something that I did catch however is the suggestion that current first-time gamers are going to have a great sense of nostalgia looking back at gaming today because the games are better.

[cinematic.livejournal.com]

I think the 'excitement of the first time' argument could be used for many things in life. You could say the same thing about sex, or your favourite meal, or whatever. But when those things become boring you change them or spice them up. Same thing with D&D. I don't see how role playing is really any different or some kind of special case. And if you didn't experience some kind of fun or nostalgia, I think you would have stopped playing RPGs a long time ago.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

And if you didn't experience some kind of fun or nostalgia, I think you would have stopped playing RPGs a long time ago.

True enough; his point however that game systems are better these days should imply (all other things being equal) that rpg nostalgia should be better in the future.

Of course, one of the problems is despite some rather archiac design and so forth from a contemporary perspective, RPGs in the late 70s and early 80s still had a great deal of 'newness' about them. For this reason alone I am very appreciative of the work that White Wolf did in the 90s and The Forge people are doing today; they are regeneration a sense of "this is new and interesting".