Dork Age/Tabletop Games


 * The Old World of Darkness, despite its good parts, did have quite a few Dork Age moments.
 * Take, for example, Gypsies, a game book that tried to replicate the Victorian trope of the mysterious, magical gypsy... in the 20th century. Apparently, no one realized it was stupidly racist until it actually went to press. Most White Wolf fans just pretend it never existed.
 * The Vampire: The Masquerade Sourcebook known as Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand presented the True Black Hand, a secret society of vampires devoted to fighting "Soul-eaters", spirits that were infecting the rest of vampirekind. Fans scorned the entire concept as a complete 180 from the game's mood, dubbing the idea "Vampions" (a portmanteau of "vampire" and the superhero game Champions). White Wolf eventually took advantage of a major event in the World of Darkness, the "End of Empires", to wipe out the True Black Hand, and subsequently revealed that the group got everything wrong.
 * To make the "Soul-Eaters" bit even worse, they were alien space parasites and in every way appeared to have been swiped whole cloth from Necroscope. The Tzimisce had always appeared to be a mashup of Necroscope's Wampyri and Dracula, but Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand's Soul Eaters made it pretty clear things with Vicissitude WERE the Wampyri with the Serial Numbers Filed Off (but still not as nasty as actual Wampyri). This was even more obvious because there was a Necroscope RPG by West End Games released a year before Dirty Secrets was published. Both the Necroscope RPG and WoD system used D10s for their dice, so while not using identical systems, it wasn't particularly difficult to port one system into the other (and with the timing, may explain what happened).
 * When it comes to Dork Age moments in the oWoD nothing can beat Sam Haight. Originally written as a mistreated kinfolk (one who has werewolf blood but can't change forms) who skinned five werewolves in order to become one himself and be corrupted by evil, White Wolf decided that it would be a good idea if he became a main villain for the rest of their gamelines as well. As a result he became a horrifically overpowered character who had powers from all the game lines at the time. After he was finally killed there was talk that he could come back as a super powered Wraith, at which point the writers said that he had his soul forged into an ashtray, and was promptly ignored save for a single line about a screaming ashtray in one of the last novels.
 * Warhammer 40,000 2nd edition is considering somewhat of a dork age. Rampant character cheesiness, vortex (black hole) grenades taking out dozens of regular troopers, and some extremely basic models combined to make it almost a version of past shame.
 * Vortex grenades are back, but since they're used only in Apocalypse games (i.e. absolutely huge ones), their lethality isn't really that overstated.
 * Most veterans found Warhammer 40,000 3rd edition a big Dork Age, where they stripped the setting of almost all of its background with pamphlet sized army books, dialed up the grimdark in the little background that's left while simultaneously dialing down the clever things about it. On top of this, the rules were oversimplified to the point where in each army book they had to introduce more and more special rules to differentiate the different statistics which were previously represented with something like a single number (like movement). Also, characters became MORE cheesy in 3rd edition than 2nd edition.
 * On top of this, they introduced the Tau (who many at the time didn't feel like they fit) and the Necrons who were inserted as a sort of Mary Sue race. Luckily the Tau have been made to fit better in recent times and the Necrons are not so infallible anymore. Perhaps ironically, it was the introduction of the Tau and Necrons that heralded the beginning of the "3.5 edition", where GW started trying to fix 3rd ed's problems.
 * Unfortunately, the Fifth Edition seems to be going through a Dork Age for the Space Marines. Mostly due to the horribly bad writing, utterly ignoring the most basic parts of the canon and incredible favouritism towards the Ultramarines. Also repeatedly invoking the Worf Effect upon the Sisters of Battle, scaling down their force and repeatedly featuring stories of them being horribly butchered. All of this can be blamed upon a single author, Matt Ward, who has fans screaming for Games Workshop to fire him.
 * After FASA was shut down, ownership of BattleTech passed to WizKids. The result was an attempted a continuity reboot of sorts with "Mechwarrior Dark Age" under the WK "Clix" system. The net effect of this was to piss off a lot of long-time players, who dubbed the game "Dork Age".
 * Fortunately for Shadowrun fans, though, they handled that license pretty well.
 * Some fans considered the Shadowrun products and novels to have suffered a Dork Age when they kept being infiltrated by cross-promotion from Earthdawn: a phenomenon that ended after FASA licensed the latter to another company.
 * With that beign said, the rection could be seen as both Fan Dumb and They Changed It, Now It Sucks; by releasing Dark Age, WK Games kept Battletech alive after FASA's demise and paved the way for the revival of the game under FanPro and later Catalyst Games labs
 * Part of the problem had to do with a serious lack of communication. WizKids strongly promoted Mechwarrior: Dark Age while simultaniously not promoting standard Battletech early on, giving the impression that they were killing the original game in favor of Mechwarrior. Then, when the Dark Age game was actually released, fans found that none of the original factions were represented fighting in something called "The Republic of the Sphere" which was built singlehandedly by some new character after most of the original factions were nearly destroyed by the Word of Blake, a techo-religious organisation. This, naturally, turned out to be quite a turn off to many older fans, who didn't n ote that it was All There in the Manual in fiction readily avalible on WK's website, in the tie-in novels and the information in the game itself, and what was depicted was Republic propaganda. The original factions were still very much around and the Jihad hadn't actually been quite as bad as it was originally portrayed, though it was a pretty major event - its just that many fans simply assumed the worst without bothering to check the facts
 * The less said about Mega Traveller and Traveller: The New Era, the better. Games Designer Workshop (not to be confused with Games Workshop) decided that somehow it was a fantastic idea to set fire to one of the best-realized sci fi settings in all of gaming. Players stayed away in droves, and GDW paid the price when it went bankrupt several years later.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! may have just passed its own Dork Age just recently; after years of trying to bring the game in sync on both sides of the Pacific, and making it as unified as possible, UDE chairman Kevin Tewert suddenly decided he could make the game much better than the guys at Konami who made the game in the first place, and nearly destroyed everything he had helped build up, up to then, in the process, driving the OCG vs. TCG Internet Backdraft across an even further chasm than it was. Never mind, It Got Worse; turns out UDE was selling counterfeit cards to a secondary distributor for sale at local Toys R' Us', striking a legal battle with Konami that had Konami taking back western distribution rights. While it's still ongoing, rest assured that this will instantly be treated as Yu-Gi-Oh's Dork Age by the fans.
 * Blizzard has also recently announced that they are ending the production of the Warcraft TCG under UDE's helm. Any chance there's a relation?
 * Considering that they also had members of the WoW team split off to form their own company specifically to produce the TCG themselves, I'd say so.
 * If you want to talk about specific sets listed here, well...
 * 1) Before the ban list, Dark Crisis was not well received, due to the lack of "good" cards and the mehness of the Archfiend archetype.
 * 2) Cyberdark Impact is almost universally mocked for being full of useless cards, including the unfortunate putting-down of the LV monsters with Allure Queen and Dark Lucius.
 * 3) Tactical Evolution is similarly reviled due to its limited useful card pool and the lukewarm reception to the Gemini monsters (as well as being the set that introduced the "TCG-Only" cards that helped started the UDE Dork Age above).
 * 4) For the more "elitist" duelists, most of the GX sets are classified as this, for one reason: the over-pimping of the near-universally reviled Elemental Heroes.
 * 5) The Gold Edition sets weren't very well received, either, thanks to them being generic reprints of rather old cards with the "gold" rarities that the sets were named after only adding a little foil along the edges.
 * Depending on whom you're talking to, any given edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
 * There are valid complaints about each one: 1st edition had all the flaws that the 1st edition of anything could be expected to have. AD failed to fix many of them. 2nd edition was needlessly obtuse and complicated. 3rd had extreme variation between power levels in classes, as well as some cumbersome skill rules (need both hide and move silently). 4th edition suffers from notoriously poorly written math (-4 to -7 on a roll of 1-20 is a pretty devastating gap written into the core rules), reverse power creep, as well as feeling a bit too much like a video game. And yet D&D (any edition) is still the best selling Tabletop RPG in print - except for the fourth, which is overtaken by Pathfinder, a third-party continuation of the third edition. So now a fifth edition is being worked on, which is preemptively being considered a Dork Age by some.
 * With the course the setting will take in the upcomming 5th Edition still not being completely known, the "Post-Spellplague-Era" of the Forgotten Realms seems to be held in this regard by many fans. Advancing the timeline by over a century, killing of many of the popular characters and dities, and all but annihilating most of the less popular regions of the world, it is a very different setting that does have its own merrits, but significantly different from its 20 year history.
 * Likewise, 5th Edition of Paranoia. The writers were less interested in the Black Comedy of the setting and more interested in taking blatant, unfunny potshots at other gamelines. (The only supplement released was a Take That at The World of Darkness.) Once the slate was cleared, 5th Edition was officially declared an "Unproduct", and all discussion of it deemed treasonous.
 * The HERO System arguably went through one of these with the infamous Fuzion System in the late 1990s.
 * Magic the Gathering had two genuine Dork Ages, during the Urza's and Mirrodin blocks. In both cases, a handful of Game Breaker cards led to a tournament scene in which all decks in Standard (the primary tournament format, using only cards from past 2 block and most recent base set, making for a low barrier to entry compared to formats where $500 cards are essential staples) were either "Obvious Top Tier Powerhouse.dec" or "Counter-Deck to Obvious Top Tier Powerhouse.dec." Both blocks led to extensive bannings (which Wizards of the Coast only does when absolutely necessary, under the logic that selling a product and then refusing to let the customer use it is an excellent way to discourage the customer from repeat business). In both cases, the issues was exacerbated by the powerful blocks being followed by underpowered blocks, meaning that the dominant cards stayed dominant for the full two years of their legality, rather being displaced in their second year. While the years since then have not been free of cries of "They Changed It, Now It Sucks," those two were the most prominent banning cases nigh unsurpassed until now. Even though 2011 saw the banning of a few cards in Standard tournaments, the number of cards banned are relatively minor.
 * Most fans of R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 prefer to vehemently deny the existence of Cyberpunk 203X (also known as v3), the game's third edition, for a number of reasons, the most prominent being the rejection of William Gibson-style cyberpunk themes in favor of Neal Stephenson-inspired Post Cyber Punk elements, a reworked rules system that solved few of the issues of the old rules while creating several new problems of their own, and foregoing hand-drawn art in favor of badly Photoshopped images of action figures dressed in strange costumes and stuck in ridiculous action poses.