Things don't suck

There are times when I despair at the actions of some of my fellow gamers. When new products come out, instead of racing out to see what they're like, they sit at home and say, "it will suck."

What depresses me even more are those who go, "Oh, I flipped through it in the store, and it sucked."

Really - you can tell whether a book is good or not by just flipping through it in the store? Well, good for you, I suppose.

There are times when people accuse me of being on the Wizards payroll. Oh, I only wish. It'd help my normally impecunious state no end. No, I just think that Wizards are doing a pretty good job most of the time. No, not all of the time. There are some Wizards products I think needed a lot more work - Races of Destiny and Map Folio II come to mind. I don't know if I gave MF2 a review of 1 out of 5, but it came very, very close.

There is one product I've been buying for the past five years that probably would count as one of the least useful of any D&D item I've bought - that would be Dragon Magazine. Its sister magazine, Dungeon, is far more useful to me. Dragon, on the other hand, goes into my evergrowing collection of D&D stuff after a few hours perusal, and rarely gets pulled out again.

On occasion I pull it out again because of a really stellar article that has suddenly become useful in my campaign, but those occasions are rare. Why then, do I continue to buy it? Mainly because it keeps me in touch with a segment of the D&D community, and you never quite know when an article might actually be good. With Erik Mona now at the reins of both magazines, I do think things may be looking up.

However, I normally don't go around saying how bad Dragon is. I just don't talk about it at all. I figure that there are people out there who get a whole lot more use out of it than me, so why not let them enjoy it rather than constantly harping on about how it isn't the magazine it used to be.

That is, if it ever was the magazine it used to be. I've got the Dragon Archive (issues 1-250), and most of them don't seem that useful, either!

Conversely, I find most of Wizards releases for D&D to be very useful indeed. All right, I admit I'm not that fond of Libris Mortis and Lords of Madness. That's mainly because the subject matter isn't interesting to me in the first place. (Why do I have them? Temporary madness or the completist urge in me - you choose!)

This isn't to say that all the books I like were always immediately useful. Frostburn is a case in point. At the time I got that my players were on the definitely tropical Isle of Dread. I'm yet to run an ice-themed adventure of my own design, but Frostburn has been very apparent in some recent RPGA adventures I've run. That's good!

Material in a D&D book or article really needs to serve one of two purposes:
* It must inspire an encounter, adventure or campaign
* It must inspire a character

What helps it is if the material is inspiring to a large number of people. Material that only inspires one player is something of a waste. That's on a global scale, of course - it is rare that material will be useful to everyone in a group.

One of the important things to remember about D&D in particular is that the variety of adventures it can support is quite wide. Some of the possible areas of adventure require specific support that will not be useful to everyone, but will be very useful to those who want to run such adventures. Books like Frostburn and Sandstorm are good examples of those.

Do you need Sandstorm to run a desert adventure? By no means! What Sandstorm does is cut out a lot of design work that otherwise you might have to do, and address issues that you might not have thought of. Natural game designers - of whom I am not one! - will just happily invent away and come up with a perfectly enjoyable desert adventure with no need for Sandstorm. For us less gifted types, we use the shortcuts given by Sandstorm and other books of its type.

What then if you disliked Sandstorm and can't think of anything better for yourself? Well, we have a classic conflict of stylistic needs. What you needed couldn't be filled by Sandstorm. Does that make Sandstorm suck? No.

At this point, the more annoying members of the online community start popping up with threads like "Sandstorm sucks!" Arrrggghhhh!!!!

However, a thread like "I didn't like Sandstorm and here's why" is far more interesting.

One of the big traps that people fall into is making generalisations. "Sandstorm sucks" implies that no-one will find it useful. "3e is too complicated!" is another one that keeps on popping up. Neither is that useful. The confrontational tone of thread titles is one of the biggest reasons for flamewars about the quality of books.

However, discussing something like "The complexity of 3e" or "Thoughts on Sandstorm" are far more neutral and likely to generate good debate. After all, plenty of people don't read anything about a thread except the title before replying...

Can something suck, then? Oh, my, yes!

When the target audience for a product almost uniformly reject it, then you can pretty much say that a product was a complete failure - and yes, it sucked!

There a point to this article that probably has been buried under a lot of words above, and here it is: constructive criticism is hard to do but very useful; generalised statements are easy and stupid wastes of time.

Which as a couple of generalised statements themselves are somewhat suspect! Add a "most" and "normally" in front of "generalised" and "stupid" respectively.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to pick up Heroes of Battle in the next few days. I've already seen one particularly obnoxious poster declaim that it has nothing useful in it. Thankfully there are several contrary opinions from people I actually respect and given my optimistic view of such matters, I may well find that it is a book that I like.