An Orgy of Bad Ideas

So I've been getting way into this whole Paizo/Pathfinder D&D 3.75 thing. It's fun, and interesting, because they're asking fans to come up with ideas and do brain storming to help them develop and re-work the 3.x D&D rule set. There's a big group of people on their message boards throwing out ideas and discussing what to do.

I've been throwing out plenty of my own ideas too; some bad, some good (in my opinion). My ideas aren't perfect, of course, and I keep finding people with better solutions than I've come up with. If my ideas don't get traction, fine, I can accept that gracefully and happily.

Now, there are some people with good ideas, but I have to say, by and large, the message boards have become a vast collection of horrible ideas. It's an Orgy of stupidity.

As I've said in the past, I've taken a radically different approach to stupidity, by cherishing it and pointing it out for others to see it in all its glory. I used to get angry and unhappy over it, but now it's just a big cosmic joke.

I have to admit though, these forums are trying my new found philosophy on idiocy. I do feel that my entire career in corporate America has prepared me for this event though: I've spent years arguing with retards and shitheads on the internet for no other reason than morbid curiosity and my own sick sense of humor. It's been like a lengthy training course, wasting that much work time on the internet. I'm now honed and ready to do battle with morons.

:hosed:

Ok, melodrama aside, there really are some terrible ideas there. For example, many, many people are in love with the Bard class. This I do not grok. The Bard is easily the worst class in all of D&D 3.x. It's just fucking awful. What kind of shithead is going to go into a battle and sing songs to uplift his companions? If I was fighting for my life with sword and armor, and one of my travelling companions broke out a fucking mandolin to lift my spirits, I'd punch him in the god damn head. I'd go all Animal-House-Bluto on him, if I lived, and smash the fucking instrument to itty bitty pieces, preferably over his retarded musical skull.

Now, I get the idea of great orators and inspirational music getting troops ready for battle and all. I can see inpiring an army, where the mass chaos and confusion of battle can be reduced by knowing your side is still standing and fighting. But really, is this appropriate in a small group of maybe half a dozen people? Sure, it's got some mild magical effects and all, but I would seriously question whether the asshole was pulling his weight or not.

I actually had some people try to say that a Bard is like Indiana Jones. When I pointed out that Indiana Jones never broke out the penny-whistle in the middle of battle with evil Nazis to make himself more courageous, they brought up the fucking movie theme music as if that was, in some inscrutable way, a valid point. Some of them were joking, but a few of these dolts weren't joking. Creepy and sad.

That's the tip of the iceberg of bad ideas though. People are trying to redo skill points, and there is plenty of intelligent good discussion going on, but there are also a hell of a lot of people who clearly don't know even basic math, and think that making things more complicated and difficult to understand is a good thing. For example, if juggling skill points is time consuming and problematic, WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU ADD *MORE* SKILL POINTS?!? If grapple mechanics are too complex and require too much rolling, WHY THE SHIT WOULD YOU WANT TO MAKE IT EVEN MORE COMPLICATED?????

:angry:

And then there are people whining about how they're trying to turn D&D into a power gamer's system, focused on combat...which as far as I can fucking tell it's always been, so I don't know what fucking game these mouth breathers have been playing.

And the use-rope devotees. I never, ever, ever, ever thought I'd see people who  miss the idea of wasting skill points on something as narrow and pointless as use rope. This is truly plumbing the depths of human stupidity. These are the same douche nozzles who miss Intuit Direction I bet.

And on the other extreme, there are people who apparently only want to have four or five skills, compressing the skill list to the point of complete incomprehensibility. If you want a change that extreme, go play another god damn system, you feeb.

And then there are inane ideas for feats, destroying core mechanics for no clear reason, and spitting in the face of the backwards compatability that Paizo has already stated is one of their big goals. There's a lot of arbitrary proposals; rules without any thematic or mechanical links at all.

I'm a huge nerd, a game geek of the first order. But there are other game geeks and dorks that really set the stereotype for the hostile, mysoginistic, egomaniacal, idiot gamer loser. And a lot of them have congregated at paizo's forum to share their stupid with us.

I suppose it's good to have all these bad ideas collected in one place, because in the future we can go and track all of these people down and stuff them back in the lockers they unfortunately escaped from back in highschool.