Everquest literally ruined people lives long before warcraft!

They're still updating fucking EverQuest II.

Actually, their devs are hilariously inept at promoting themselves, even when trying to appear off-the-cuff. I think I shall submit one or two of them as examples. Tune in to the hopper for further developments.

That's when you employ the good old Dragon Quest "but thou must!" approach!

"There is a super-interesting town full of intrigue up ahead! What do you do?"

"We go around it."

"The only path available to you is populated entirely by unkillable Rape Dragons. Only one magic item can defeat them, and it is located somewhere in Super-Interesting Intrigue Town."

"We keep going anyway."

"Oh no! A Landslide! The path is blocked by giant unmovable boulders, each the size of a mountain! Looks like the only place to go is Intrigue Town."

"We make camp by the boulders and go into suspended animation for sixty million years, by which time erosion should have taken care of the boulders for us."

"YOU ARE NOW IN INTRIGUE TOWN."

"But-"

"THAT IS WHERE YOU ARE."

Hah! But when I ran a game we emphasized the "open world" sense as much as possible. I had to have half-planned threads everywhere, and then improvise.
When the other guy ran it, it was the other extreme. We were trapped in a save-the-world-from-big-evil plot. Pat Robertson would have loved it.

DMing is easy.

1. Write a plot that goes on in the background of the world that will eventually lead to the ruin of everything, and let the players choose their own level of involvement.

2. Sell them into slavery occasionally to private armies fighting wars they never bothered to learn about, or use them as pawns for undead war monsters that just encountered them by accident.

3. Sit back and kill the weak ones.

Oh, come on. Being a half-elf cleric/wizard/barbarian is much better. Admit it.

And lose my sweet, sweet Bonus Feat? YOU CAN SEE YOURSELF OUT, SIR.

Please. Pat Robertson is a Human Cleric 12/ Rogue 1/ High Proselytizer 10. With his character sheet, I'm inclined to trust his mystic insight into the ways of the world.

Looks like a Pale Master to me, if we want to rip out the Prestige Classes.

He's an old troll masquerading as a cleric. Use fire.

NO. HE'S A HIGH PROSELYTIZER. THIS IS SERIOUS, WHAT YOU SAID IS JUST SILLY.

I suppose we could split the difference and say he's a Cleric of Myrkul. But only in secret! In the public eye, Pat is a High Cleric of Ilmater, and serves as chief religious advisor to many of the most powerful lords in the land.

The player characters hear rumors that pilgrims of other good-aligned deities have been going missing in Pat's city. The party goes to investigate, and through a series of dungeons and optional encounters (Act I of this module) works to gradually uncover the truth.

Just as the party nears a major breakthrough, agents of the Church of Ilmater appear, and tell the player characters that High Cleric Pat requests an audience (they ask nicely at first, but will resort to nonlethal violence if refused). Pat tells the players that his Church has been conducting an investigation of it's own, and has discovered that the disappearances are the work of a secret cabal of Communist-Necromancers. Having shown their worth, he'd like the players help in dealing with these fiends. If the players accept, they begin Act II; otherwise, Pat will accuse them of being necromancers themselves, and imprison them (Supplement Quest 3-c)

The party undertakes a new series of quests and encounters, revolving around finding and eliminating the various magic users implicated by High Cleric Pat (Act II). However, these "villains" are actually innocent patsies, blood sacrifices to Pat's dark master, as were the pilgrims his Church eliminated earlier. Pat uses the public's growing fear of secret necromancers to force through legislation, making the practicing of magic a crime punishable by death, and ensuring a steady supply of fresh sacrifices to Myrkul. The player characters succeed in uncovering the truth just in time, and must find a way to stop him as he attends the King's yearly grand parliamentary council.

Evil Homer gets all my stars and is a far better DM than I.

I dont care how much he abuses his powers to make me suffer, I want evilhomer to be my DM

We need a POETV D&D night.

no prestige classes though
and no half-minotaur vampire gunslingers
none of that crap

Yes it was.

Yes it was.

Yes it was.

Yes it was.

No you can't.

It's boring if you are with boring people or are a boring person yourself. My introductory games were more fun than 99% of modern videogames - we had a great dm, an experienced crew and each scenario was just another "area" of a continually evolving world map. I asked our DM if he had helped us in certain situations, but everything i asked about happened by roll of the die alone, no fudging. Too many hilariously nerdy moments where our gnome somehow saves everyone with an illusion, and my character almost died a kajillion times.

It was basically how every game should be. I had a great group to play with, that's really the key to not being bored.

A million stars for that Chick quote sir.

Also, I wonder what Palladium OCC Pat would be?

Pat would be a Nega-Psychic (see Psyscape) split class with Doomsayer (see Rifts Chaos Earth - The Rise of Magic)

He'd also be a munchkin.

I first played D&D while in the unwanted, and cps abducted, kids ward of the hospital. The teenagers (I was just barely 8) invited me to play with them and it was a huge deal to me, since it's something the staff, the teens, and the pre-teens could get together and do inside the tiny ass barracks style ward. It was a lot more fun than being walked around the enclosed yard for two hours. It was a bigger world than having to look up to see the square sky framed on all sides by skyscrapers.

Aside from making D&D into a glorified miniatures game, they also instilled a rule that magic items are only worth 1/5 their retail cost (sucks to be a potion maker, I guess) and every combat action/spell you can perform is now a "power" and each one has a name.

Think about that: You no longer have the simple concept of "I try to hit the orc with my sword." Now you have to pick from a list of attack "powers" and, like a retarded anime character, say something like "I use the Way of the Exanguinating Winds."

Ironic. It originally moves from a minatures game to a roleplaying game based on the sophistication of the participants, and now in its decline the game has to become a miniatures game to be simple enough for its target audience.

It is 1,000 years too early for you to attempt the Way of the Exanguinating Winds, kouhai.

Only if you learn Aklo.

why would you learn Aklo
waste of a skill point

The world will then be a less funny place.