Pyramid Review, Take 2
Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition
Published by Wizards of the Coast
Written by Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams
300 pages and Demo CD-Rom; $19.95
Iron Ration(alization)s: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love D&D 3E
If you were to steal an experimental time machine and couldn't think of anything better to do with it than travel back to the summer of 1991 in order to annoy a younger me, here's a good opening line: "Hey, John! Guess what? In nine years you're going to be sending an angry letter to the editor of a gaming magazine begging him to let you defend Dungeons & Dragons against some guy who thinks its time has passed."
You see, August 1991 found me in thrall to White Wolf's recently released Vampire: The Masquerade. (Go easy on me, I was all of twenty years old.) An anthropology major and a serious Anne Rice geek, I was thrilled by the Wolfies' cutting-edge vision of roleplaying game as monomyth, as Jungian psychodrama, as story. "Fie on your musty old critical hit tables," I was wont to cry. "Give me emotional nuance and thematic intensity!"
Age works strange turns upon us all. And so it is, that nine years later, I found myself firing off an irritable e-mail to Steven Marsh demanding a chance to rebut Pyramid's recent review of the Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition Player's Handbook. Fortunately for my wife, who would otherwise be subjected to endless harangues on the subject, he acquiesced.
Here goes. Sorry, college-age me.
I have read and reread . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: August 25, 2000
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