[smascrns]

Originally Posted by Jesternario

you folks just love to bash the reviewer is all I see. I get the feeling that I would have gotten similar criticisms if I had praised the game.

As someone that had furious interactions with fanboys of games I reviewed (DD3, Sorcerer & Sword come to mind)... I think you're completely out of touch. No one is bashing you. People - me included - are criticising your approach to reviewing and the concepts you work from. No, you are not the ultimate voice on what constitutes and what doesn't constitute role-playing. No, it's not you that decides that dice and mechanics are not part of role-playing. Live with it.

I stand by my comments in the review. There are plenty of other games that give you a reason to role-play and give a reward for it.

So does DD, yes it does. It's just another game in the middle of the crowd, not outside of it.

That's not roleplaying folks. That's just interacting.

Well, that's what most people do in their lives: Give me the money, take the Big Mac. Let's do this shit for the company and hope it is still alive by month's end so that I can earn my pay. For an awful lote of people life is "just interacting". On all accounts, it's a viable model for role-playing.

But this doesn't change the fact that the game that started the industry never completely moved away from it's roots as a new kind of miniature combat game (and that is how it started. Gygax got tired of his fantasy wargame and started focusing on individual figures rather than whole armies).

Before it started the industry it started the hobby. It was the players that saw role-playing in DD, it was not Gary Gygax as far as I know. Maybe they had more wisdom than you do.

4th edition takes the game back to it's roots with the move toward tactical combat

Tactical combat is part of life, a part of life that can be roleplaying as well as anything else.

and a practical forced inclusion of miniatures.

Minis are perfectly compatible with roleplaying. Do you know anything about marketing? In marketing services business people have a hard time because services are not tangible. So, they sometimes create physical things they offer with the service, things that give it "physical evidence", in order to help costumers relate better to the services they get. Likewise, rpgs are not tangible but a lot of people relate better to tangible things than to ideas. Minis are useful for these people because they give their roleplaying "physical evidence". Different people, different tastes. Who are you to dictate that they are not roleplaying because they have a mini in front of them?

But I'm not going to convince any of you who have made derogatory comments at my review, am I?

Of course, you fail to notice that you yourself are making derrogatory comments about people that like their mechanics and their minis in their roleplaying.

My review was objective and looked at the game from the perspective of one who wanted to see something good in it.

No, it wasn't. It was coloured and biased by a particular an non-consensual view of roleplaying. I have nothing against that view provided that it is not enforced on me as being the ultimate word on my hobby. That's what's wrong with your review.