Changeover Poll

[Treebore]

RPGs do you one better - they give you almost their entire workings (though not necessarily the decisions behind them) in the book!

Tha'ts perfectly fine. Nobody is blaming you for that in any way shape or form. What we are arguing, however, is that it is not necessary for us to play 4E to know (with a very reasonable degree of certainty) that we don't like it.

RPG's give you their entire workings, but you don't know how well those mechanics work until you actually use them.

I agree, but reasonable certainty was not good enough for me. Like I said, D&D has been my favorite RPG for nearly 25 years now, so I had to be absolutely certain I wasn't going to like the most recent iteration.

Fortunately not liking it was no big loss, I just play the iteration I do like.

 

[merelycompetent]

I guess I am saying that liking or disliking a system is arational - neither rational nor irrational.

Fair enough. I disagree that liking/disliking is "arational", but that's better than labeling it irrational.

If you use a strict definition of rationality, it is a decision-making process.

Here, I strongly disagree. The strict definition of rationality is *more* than a decision-making process. Here, you appear to be using one definition of rationality, when several can apply.

Preferences as such cannot be rational or not - these are apriori goals. Rationality can be used as a process to decide on something based on the preferences as inputs, but the preferences themselves are not rational or irrational. That's what I am trying to say, because in my experience many people conflate the decision-making process with the preferences themselves. I think we are mostly in agreement on that - we are just approaching it from slightly different angles.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree - you are, in my opinion, assigning new definitions to the terminology you are using when precision and care are very important. That, to me, makes your assertions fundamentally flawed. For me, a preference and a like/dislike can be arrived at through logical thought processes - such as analysis of a game system (though the type of analysis may introduce flaws, as Wulf, Treebore, and others have posted about). Therefore, the preference/like/dislike is rational. I haven't seen anything posted here (or elsewhere) that effectively counters that conclusion without monkeying with definitions of the words involved.

With that in mind, I do not agree that the preferences posted here and on other threads about 4E are irrational or conflated. I don't have enough information to make such a determination for the simple reason that only a few posters have listed how they came to their preference. In those cases, the majority seem very rational to me.

Since I've probably bored a lot of people to tears, let me close this with a request: Please don't label my likes, dislikes, or preferences as a blanket "irrational" unless you can prove it conclusively. Most of them (and especially the ones about 4E) I have arrived at through careful consideration, study, and/or experimentation. Calling them "irrational" is insulting.