I'm trying to play through as a Paragon (good alignment) this time instead of a Renegade (bad alignment). The Renegade was fun but kind of mindlessly dickish to everybody and in order to get your bonuses you had to come off as an absolutely selfish hardass all the time, even when you didn't wanna be. I appreciated them posing the Renegade as a Dirty Harry type, who gets the mission done and saves the world but in questionable ways, but too often I was basically just being a prick for prick's sake. In contrast, Paragons pick the most compassionate response possible... but they end up being a bit generic nice guys as a result, with uninteresting dialogue and no real twists.
I'd love an RPG that allows me to be more than a saint and an asshole. A deadpan snarker, a schemer, an unhinged oddball, a comedian, whatever... just some variation other than rolling as the epitome of good or evil.
And thus we come to Dungeons 'n Dragons 4e, which is freeform and thus allows that! I'm enjoying the rule changes, and particularly like what they've done with Rangers (although I'm trying to find some interpretation of the rules that lets me master a crossbow instead of a generic longbow) and the whole thing feels RIGHT. But one thing doesn't, and that's the DDi (Insider) service.
DDi provides a character builder, character visualizer (basically a 3-D dressup doll), rules lookup table, issues of their D&D branded magazines, a map editor, and the online game table. All that sounds good, but there's a problem -- they want $15 for it. Now, you may recall from my earlier posts that I have no problems paying cash. And I felt that the DDi service would be better than the free offerings because it's polished and pro and offers new features the free solutions don't. In essence, DDi would be Better Than Free. (All web enterprentuers need to read that article.)
Well... upon more research... it's not actually better than free. The rules lookup is just that, the rules, it's not like online books and the resources are pretty limited in scope. The builder can easily be duped by free programs. The visualizer MIGHT be awesome but I highly doubt it's gonna come close to COH's editor or even a well done SL avatar. The map editor isn't going to be much better than a free editor -- but wait, it's got 3-D elements, right? Yes, but you have to pay extra for 3-D tiles and 3-D miniatures, via micropayments! Obviously being an SLer I have no objections to micropayments, but MPs just for bits of art, and MPs on top of a subscription is too much to swallow for too little value.
The real killer for me is the game table. It's not actually a 4e game table, it doesn't do any of the rules and math gymnastics for you, it provides NO TOOLS whatsoever beyond "move tokens around on a whiteboard" and "roll a die". That's it. In other words it's doing nothing that the free game tables aren't already doing, and they don't charge you money for their service or their artwork. You can't even say the matchmaking service is the real gem of the pile because there are free matchmaking services, too. Having it all integrated in one package... character vaults, game tables, services... that's appealing. But it's not $15 plus unspecified MPs appealling.
So, what ARE you getting that's irreplacable? WOTC magazines. That's it. No thanks. Unless they severely beef up the features and make DDi something powerful and indispensable to gamers, they are charging way the hell too much. What they have right now -- an end-to-end software chain and some mags -- is worth maybe $6 a month at most. It's not even comparable to an MMORPG's level of content and ongoing service.
Finally in the "stupid" category, we have Second Life(tm)'s 5th Birthday Party. It's been a yearly resident-run event, but this year, Linden Labs(tm) are stepping in to take control...
EDIT: The Lindens have more-or-less reversed their reversed reversed decision, or something. I'll include what I originally wrote under an LJ-Cut.
Finally in the "stupid" category, we have Second Life(tm)'s 5th Birthday Party. It's been a yearly resident-run event, but this year, Linden Labs(tm) are stepping in to take control specifically to kick out a group of heinous bastards who have no right to participate and stain us all with their horribleness and must be purged from the virtual earth. That's right, I'm talking about... kids.
Nope! Not furries, not goreans, they're specifically welcomed. But child avatars aren't. Oh, they can show up and party, but the parade floats and exhibitions they'd set up -- all PG rated and utterly nonsexual, just toys and games and fun stuff -- are not allowed. And why? Because some moron senator who has no idea what he's talking about thinks SL is a haven for child predators. ...and yet child avs can drop in. They just can't submit content to the party. Huh? What? Logic? Sensibility? Then again, these two concepts have been long missing from LL's vocabulary since they stopped being creative enablers and started being PR flacks.
Okay, the update is that kid avs and kid av submissions are welcome, but since the whole event was changed from Mature to PG, goreans are not. Which is fine. But what isn't fine is that they hijacked a resident run event in an effort to sanitize it, then burned a bunch of folks in the process and tried to unburn them, etc. If they wanted to run their own official party, yay, but taking over a resident event is just obnoxious.
Anyway, Flotsam Beach and related enterprises will not be participating in this hijacked party. ...we didn't have plans to do so in the first place, so it's a bit silly to boycott now, but dangit, we are. There are some alternative, purely resident run events around the grid; visit those instead.