I watched the latest kerfuffle with Wizards' D&D marketing and laughed. Companies do things to "fire troublesome fans," which is what they do. They dump the old and try to advertise to the people they want as their customers. Ideally, this is a part of a strategic plan, not just the employees "running the ship." You get these sick and dying companies, and they start to go "off the rails," and the employees are scrambling to try to save their jobs and trying to "be too popular," and you get this sort of mess.
But then another part of me says, "Who cares?"
Why are we trying to "fight to keep the old D&D alive" when we have better? We have people making the games who see them as "old school style" as we do, and in some cases, they are even better games.
We still have community-supported first-edition games! We don't have to buy PoD copies of the first edition (which are filled with scanning errors), and we can support games and communities that allow us to publish our first-edition adventures, settings, and rules expansions. OSRIC 2.2 and the upcoming 3.0 are two great first-edition games.
Adventures Dark and Deep is another fantastic game, expanding the first edition and giving us more toys. We do not need to "support 5E" or even care "what Wizards does" other than to laugh at them. Not at them, trying to turn D&D into a storytelling FATE-style lifestyle game, but at how incompetent they are at capturing the original core essence of the game we love. I am all for including others at my table, but they come here to play classic D&D and not experience more of the same pastel rainbows and unicorns life they already have.
The Wizards team does not understand the game and is out of touch.
But why fight a company that is that lost? We have better. I started with the first edition because that is the popular exit point for 5E and the classic game people seek. And this is not "bringing modernity" to the first edition; this is playing that same game that started all of this—to have that experience, to play the game the same exact way it was played in the 1980s.
ACKS is a game that is clearly better than current-day D&D, first edition, and most anything else on the market. Why am I wasting energy fighting a billion-dollar out-of-touch marketing team when I could be playing something cool? They want to make the game they think they can sell. Let them fail.
ACKS is more D&D than D&D.
The dream is alive here. The story of a character going from nothing to king, savior, or tyrant is here, supported, and the rules work exceptionally well. In D&D, what is your story? Become an overpowered and bored 20th-level superhero, mirroring the downfall of every superhero franchise in Hollywood, desperately trying to reinvent and reboot itself to stay relevant.
D&D is the story of a downfall, of a naive newcomer to becoming an overpowered and bored demigod.
Someone who never changes and becomes more dependent on their powers than the world around them. This one fact is the fatal flaw of every superhero story ever written. This is the "failing empire" plot, and it is embodied in every character in D&D, from levels one to the empire's end at 20.
I have this strange feeling in D&D that the franchise is more important than my character. In D&D, you can't change the world and campaign setting since it is a McSetting and a McUniverse, and it is a fast food franchise model that always must return to normal for the next group to wander through Playland and slide into the ball pit. This always bothered me about the direction D&D 4 took with baking in the campaign setting and universe model, and making the planes more critical than my campaign world.
ACKS gives you the tools to change the universe. The entire point of the game is to "wreck the campaign setting" and make it yours. The characters will shape the world, for good or ill, and change the direction, fiction, and history. You aren't forced to "play alongside" the Baludur's Gate 3 cast and have them be unkillable and insufferable GMNPCs, which the Forgotten Realms is notorious for. You will never be Elminster, the Harpers, the RPG characters, or anyone as crucial to the franchise. You will play alongside Ronald and his Happy Meal friends.
We have better.
We have a game that prioritizes you—not the IP, copyrighted content, marketing team, or characters—but you. The setting can change; shaping and crafting the future is yours. You and your story come first. Yes, you can do all this in D&D, but the game is becoming more about "playing with the Hasbro toys" than using your imagination.
The tools are here. I have used many applications and software that give me a third-rate experience, but they are popular, so I use them. Whenever I am forced to upgrade my software to something that works better, I wonder why it took me so long to make the jump, and I feel stupid. ACKS gives me the campaign and world tools I would have been sorry I did not use earlier.
Again, who cares about D&D and what they do?
We have something clearly better here.
