Fandom and Fan-atics

It's been a couple of days since my last blog entry and there has been a whole bunch of things happening. Some good and constructive and others less so. Sadly, because we are all fans of our respective games for a whole variety of reasons, we can all get very passionate about these things. From time to time, lines might be crossed. I have read other gamers stay away from a particular game because fans of said game were to fanatical. Regardless of the game, we have all seen it.

This causes two things: Assumptions on a game based on nothing but hearsay and being lumped in a group as a whole because of what behavior is being exhibited by other fans of the game you happen to be involved in. None of this does anyone any good.

All one has to do is consider is the label: TETSNBN (The Edition That Shall Not Be Named) and the disdain that *some* people refer to it. Not everyone does it and that's still nothing to a term like '3tard'. Take a step back and look at that and some might think that to be a bit infantile.

We all have our opinions and the internet is a large vehicle that enables us all to blatantly voice them. I'm not a fan of 4th Edition though 'hate' wouldn't be the word I would choose. Despite multitudes of 3rd Edition / d20 material I own, I typically use those books to mine them for material for the games I do prefer to play. I thought Spelljammer was AWESOME but can't accept any Star Wars RPG other than the original WEG version.

Bottom line: I'm not going to tell you what you should play or shouldn't. I'm not going to judge you if you actually like 4th Edition but I admit that I could be bewildered by such a proclamation. In the end, we all play the games we do because we enjoy them. Invariably, you'll find people that share your opinion or, will not. Simple. But if we are all gamers, we should all try to have a minimum amount of respect when decide to share our opinions. Doing so would be like 'good sportsmanship'.

Now I'm not going to go in the specifics of any one incident and a public apology has been made to the most recent one I witnessed earlier today. Hopefully everyone involved will take something from this and we can move on to better things.

Thus ends the 'negative vibes'. Now for the good --

Some people have been receptive to what we've been writing about. There are a few that understand we want better fan-created efforts and involvement. I've proposed an idea and if it takes off, I'll post it here (it's a contest). In any event, people have gotten to talking so we'll see where it goes.

M