Love for an Edition That Lost (was Spacebuckler Updates)

Everyone likes stories, right?

If I had to make a list of my top 5 RPG settings, SJ would likely be at
the top. Also in there somewhere would be the setting for White Wolf's
Mage: The Ascension (Note I mean Mage specifically, not the whole World
of Darkness). I think it is a fascinating and versatile setting where
you can play many, many different types of games, from a gritty,
street-level game to a cosmic voyaging campaign, mixing the flavors of
SJ and Planescape, and many things in between.

At some point WW came out with Mage 3e (They called it "2nd Edition
Revised" but this was a pure marketing crock. If there was ever an
edition of a game that wasn't simply a "revised" but rather a fully new
edition, it was Mage 3e). I bought it with great glee and excitement,
but I was soon filled with disappointment and anger. Mage 3e, in my
opinion, was a castrated version of the setting, and seemed to be
castrated because the authors didn't like aspects of 2e, and couldn't
find solutions other than the most blunt.

On the primary Mage mailing list debate and flames ran for weeks. Some
lauded the new Mage, others lambasted it. To make matters worse, some
of the authors of the game were on the list, and they often referred to
the "problems" with 2e, which I got tired of, since I rarely saw what
they referred to as problems as being bad things, and were often good
things. I heard quotes from the primary developer that were made on
Usenet, and many of those annoyed me.

During this time I made my opinion heard, along with many others.  Mage
was going a direction I did not like, and I felt they were likely to
lose me as a Mage customer. What was the point of buying books that
were half-filled with a metaplot I didn't like and wouldn't use?

After a while, though, things calmed down some. I was unhappy, and
really got tired of all the posts referring to the new stuff in Mage I
didn't use. For me the signal-to-noise was getting worse and worse.
But, I stuck around, and enjoyed those posts I found useful.

You know what I didn't do? Take pot shots at Mage 3e. After the first
couple of weeks, whenever someone brought up stuff particular to Mage
3e, I just deleted that message. And whenever someone would gush over
3e and say how they felt it fixed all those silly mistakes from 2e, I
just deleted it.

I know what its like. I have been there. But I got over it, and so can
others.

Some people are excited over some of the 3e/d20 products that have a
similarity to Spelljammer. Why piss in their pool?



Leroy Van Camp III
malacoda@????????.net
ICQ #20039817

There is a time for bingo and there is a time for funerals. Try to keep
them separate.