im guessing this will be coming, but in case for some reason it isn't ... when you click to the spells monsters and other sections of the compendium, particularly the game play parts of the rule book, there's text but no diagrams ... one of the great things back in the early days ( when I started playing D&D as a kid in the early 80s ( possibly late 70s? ) ) were the diagrams by Gary Gygax ... I found it fascinating to read his explanations of basic probability curves with respect to using dice ... and to be honest, one of the things I absolutely hate with a passion about the modern world of gaming and the direction it has taken, is the dumbing down of everything to the lowest common denominator.
games serve a great function as teachers - IF they are designed to do so - but instead of working to raise people up to a higher standard of thinking, they've been doing the exact opposite in a lot of cases ( not to mention the degradation of standards of behaviour and the philosophical aspect of role playing being lost on a lot of people, who just use it to bolster their fragile egos - and which the gaming caters to - by making it all about becoming super powerful and having all the best gear ... ie: no one wants to role play a weedy character with major personality flaws and who's easy to beat in a fight, but whom is highly important to the cultural political landscape of the campaign ).
Gygax included diagrams in addition to the probability charts/graphs, such as his diagram depicting the character alignments ... and I feel there's a certain need to not only include those diagrams, but for people to get back a little to the roots of where the game began, and to appreciate why some of those things were done the way they are.
i do understand that some rules were dumbed down for the sake of speed of game play, but that's why this technology is great, because it should be allowing us to now reverse the dumbing down and yet keep the gains in game play speed
im guessing this will be coming, but in case for some reason it isn't ... when you click to the spells monsters and other sections of the compendium, particularly the game play parts of the rule book, there's text but no diagrams ... one of the great things back in the early days ( when I started playing D&D as a kid in the early 80s ( possibly late 70s? ) ) were the diagrams by Gary Gygax ... I found it fascinating to read his explanations of basic probability curves with respect to using dice ... and to be honest, one of the things I absolutely hate with a passion about the modern world of gaming and the direction it has taken, is the dumbing down of everything to the lowest common denominator.
games serve a great function as teachers - IF they are designed to do so - but instead of working to raise people up to a higher standard of thinking, they've been doing the exact opposite in a lot of cases ( not to mention the degradation of standards of behaviour and the philosophical aspect of role playing being lost on a lot of people, who just use it to bolster their fragile egos - and which the gaming caters to - by making it all about becoming super powerful and having all the best gear ... ie: no one wants to role play a weedy character with major personality flaws and who's easy to beat in a fight, but whom is highly important to the cultural political landscape of the campaign ).
Gygax included diagrams in addition to the probability charts/graphs, such as his diagram depicting the character alignments ... and I feel there's a certain need to not only include those diagrams, but for people to get back a little to the roots of where the game began, and to appreciate why some of those things were done the way they are.
i do understand that some rules were dumbed down for the sake of speed of game play, but that's why this technology is great, because it should be allowing us to now reverse the dumbing down and yet keep the gains in game play speed