But wait: "I know D&D, and you, sir, are no fan of D&D." Not true. I'm just not a fan of games that daisy-chain sparsely detailed areas together and require you to run from one end to the other battling enemies pulled from the tired old passive-aggressive playbook. I don't want to go spelunking in dungeons where every corner's perfectly squared and every segment's implausibly flat as a pancake. And I really don't care for situations where, for instance, you clear out a bandit camp, trigger a script and then the bandit camp's suddenly—presto—full of bandits again. It has nothing to do with D&D, but rather the collision of tortuously detailed rules with a mediocre game engine and a dog-tired storytelling approach that—in 2006—no longer entertains the way it thinks it does.

Convincing hardened D&D'ers that their beloved system may finally have teetered over into fetish is like rolling boulders up a hill, but it is, in the end, the big problem here. It's easy to say "But it's a D&D game, so fidelity's a virtue." Too easy. If you really want computer-aided D&D, it's far more satisfying to grab a copy of Code Monkey's eTools and stick with your local haunts.
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