The King said:
How I hate CCG Games. Not because of the fun but they are expensive to buy if you want the whole collection.
Definitly not gamers-friendly.
Collectible Card gamess are an instrument of social control developed by MK-Ultra. Victory goes to the rich, who can buy the cards which are both rare and powerful (thus difficult to attack and/or defend against), so they provide a motivation for kids to learn to GET MONEY TO BUY THINGS, as opposed to teaching them any social skills as are taught by RPGs. It is possible to play an RPG with pencil and paper and nothing else but a vivid imagination (I've even run once without dice!), but it is impossible to play a CCG without money -- yours or someone else's. A role-player may never gain socialization skills beyond learning that while hacking and slashing made-up monsters is okay, hacking and slashing the person sitting next to you at a game table is
not acceptable. Some CCGs don't even teach that much, because the bottom line is: whoever has the most real-life money will ultimately win.
I have hundreds upon hundreds of Mythos cards (costing hundreds upon hundreds upon
hundreds of dollars), and I'm sure that I'm still missing some cards. I would dearly love to buy Call of Cthulhu CCG cards, because they are beautifully executed, but I haven't started because I don't want to have to spend a fortune trying to track down some elusive scrap of cardstock which has no intrinsic value and limited resale value. Given the vast possibilities of Conan card subjects, I would be extremely reluctant to start collecting them because (as happened with Mythos) just as I am surely closing in on the most elusive rares, some new set would pop up and I would want those cards, too, thus increasing the number of rares which I must hunt down. *sigh*
The money-making powers of Magic: the Gathering, have certainly made their mark on Hasbro. Wizards has repeatedly published books which state that they are absolutely definitive, even as they had new editions or conflicting (but over-ruling!) rule books or supplements are on their drawing boards. The most egregious example concerns the publishing of the 3.$ rules after many publishers had developed product lines of their own using the D20 system, which then either had to be re-published in revised editions or became instantly obsolete (and thus no longer competitive with WOTC after the other publisher had introduced new gamers to FRPGs based on the D&D core rules, which many people shunned simply because they bore the taboo name "Dungeons & Dragons"). There have been other examples of such duplicity. The very last line of text in
Faiths and Pantheons categorically states that there are no other deities on Toril than those presented therein; WOTC thereupon published several books with
new Forgotten Realms deities, and decreed that they were canonical. And they mixed player information with DM information again (and again and again), meaning that EVERYONE had to buy EVERY book in order to keep up with the never-ending stream of new rules, and if a player could afford one and DM couldn't, the player was suddenly placed in the position of power vis-a-vis the rules. Thus the lesson taught by their CCG has been carried over into D & D: GET MONEY TO BUY MORE THINGS OR YOU LOSE.
Pfui to that.
I run 3.0, which allows me to use a wide range of material from other publishers, including Mongoose. If WOTC doesn't like that, they are free to buy back all of the 3.0 books I bought from them even while they were writing their 3.$ books. And I don't play Magic, either. Why should I buy into a game whose publisher sells me a product and then tells me that it is against the rules to use it, as WOTC has done repeatedly with Magic cards?
A Conan Collectible Card Game? No thanks. A Conan card game with all of the cards available as a set and no gambling on a package's contents? A game in which my skill or luck is the deciding factor and not how many hundreds of dollars I'm willing to plow into it Sure!
