Hey, readerland. I'm back once again. It's been a while and for that I apologize. Tonight's blog is going to be a combo gaming/wrestling blog. Should be interesting to see if I can tie these together like I think I can.
So, I was on a gaming forum yesterday and someone was talking about trying to use 4E's Inherent Bonus to Pathfinder. Inherent Bonus gives a character bonuses as they reach certain levels. That sounds fine and all, but I said I couldn't see using anything like that because it gives the characters combat bonuses specifically and they don't apply to the "roleplaying" part of the game.
A response that I got basically said that I was wrong because the bonuses given to the characters could replace the "standard" magical weapons that characters get. I attempted to point out that players prefer to receive THINGS instead of an abstract bonus and another poster said that he didn't like the rule because as a regular rule, it's boring, but it would be good to use if you were playing a low-to-no magic game, which I agree with. I and another poster were told that the Inherent Bonus doesn't remove magic items from the game, it removes boring-but-necessary magic items from the game.
Now, I dunno about you, but I REALLY dislike being told what to think by pretty much anybody. To have another gamer tell me what's "boring" and "unnecessary" (assuming they aren't one of my players complaining about the game I'm running) is crap. If he had phrased it as an opinion ("It doesn't remove magic items from the game, it removes what I think are boring-but-necessary magic items from the game") then I'm okay with that. But no. So, I got a bit miffed.
The thing that REALLY got me, though, is that the guy who responded to me completely ignored the section where I originally said "If I were going to use something like that, I would give the bonuses to skill and so forth in order to foster more roleplaying." It seems to me that Yahtzee was right in his review of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm: it's all about the numbers. You want to have the best numbers. And I get that, but what happened to actually, you know, roleplaying?
Personally, and this is of course only an opinion, but I blame 4E and MMORPGs. 4E, from what I gather (never played it), has turned into a tabletop miniatures wargame and MMORPGs (again, never played one) are full to the brim with people who are simply there to raid and kill other people, which means you need to have all the best weapons and armor and magic and whatever else in order to complete another raid...so that you can get better weapons and armor and magic and whatever else. I understand, but I don't get it.
The people that I play Pathfinder with are "old school" gamers, so they know there's a balance between roleplaying and combat and they're okay with that. It seems like the newer players are either all powergamers or they were "brought up" in a game system with little to no roleplaying. When creating my last few characters as a player, I tried to make something different than I had played before. For example, one of my GURPS characters was a male exotic dancer-turned-smuggler in a dark cyberpunk-ish setting full of gun and violence. And he had hemophilia. Because it was good roleplaying.
So, you're probably wondering by this point how wrestling fits into all of this. Pro wrestling has been described as "soap operas for men" and I can't really argue with that. Every wrestler is playing a role of some kind, whether it's a dead man (The Undertaker), a Punjabi playboy (The Great Khali), a leprechaun (Hornswaggle), or they are flawless (LayCool...if you don't know any of these people, Wikipedia is your friend), they're all playing a role. This even includes the announcers.
Matt Striker (not his real name) was a teacher in real life, having a Bachelor's degree in History and a Master's degree in Educational Psychology, before making it big in the WWE. He has retired from in-ring competition and he became the color commentator for the WWE version of ECW, alongside Todd Grisham as play-by-play man. From ECW to Smackdown (again, my opinion), Striker and Grisham had great chemistry and they filled their roles well. There was a lot of criticism from the Internet Wrestling Community that Striker talked to much and he explained things that didn't need explaining, like why a headlock was such a good, basic move. What was he doing? He was teaching people! You know, the role he played!
Michael Cole, announcer for both Raw and Smackdown is another that has gotten a lot of criticism from the IWC. He has turned into a bad guy and has grown a personality. He verbally attacks his broadcast partners and has physically attacked Jerry Lawler, the color commentator on Raw. My only issue with Cole is that he yells too much, completely drowning out everything else. Other than that, I like the character. It works well, because the best commentating teams have always been the heel (bad guy color commentator and the face (good guy) play-by-play man (sometimes called the "voice of reason").
Of course, I have a issues with the commentating style in the WWE anyway. Hardly anybody actually calls the match that's in the ring anymore. It's all about the main event for that show or what's happening at the next Pay-Per-View. That's partly why I liked Matt Striker on commentary, because he actually knew what he was talking about, having been a wrestler, and he called the match that was going on in the ring. Fortunately I still get to watch him on Superstars.
Okay, I'm not sure that tie-in worked as well as I'd hoped, but for now, it's the best I've got. Take care, everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment