New Haven Games has announced a “remake” of second edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. They’re calling it Realms of Eternal Epic. (I’m guessing the name was picked because the abbreviation they use, Ro2E, could be read as “return of 2e” or somesuch.) One of the reasons they’re calling it a “remake” instead of a “clone” is this:
...to fix some of the bad or complicated rules in the system...
Good luck getting two fans of a game to agree on what is bad. This is the reason the clones are having more success than most remakes. Make changes for legal reasons, and most people stay on-board. Make changes to make it “better”, and you lose most people. Because, while they agree some small changes could make it better, they don’t agree on the specific changes.
The bad is delicately remade with modern game theory so that only the game play improves.
This throws up another red flag for me. The vast majority of the RPG landscape was explored in the earliest years of the hobby. Find some grognards—the kind that tried every game that came out—and start talking about recent innovations, and you’ll learn about a lot of old games that trod that ground a decade or more ago. Are there still innovations to be found? Sure, but they are harder and harder to find. Is there really any “modern game theory” of any value that wasn’t known over a decade ago?
Anyway, those are just my opinions on what they’ve said so far. I wish them luck.
