Thank you. That's good to know. It sounds like Usenet did what the agenda-driven Forge failed to understand, that reference works are meant to report what people *believe* games to be. NOT what a single "Hallelujah! we found the truth!" one-true-way philosophy purports these "actually" are.
Frankly there is only one person in this conversation who seems to have a single "Hallelujah! we found the truth!" one-true-way philosophy. That isn't Ron Edwards, who was pushing back against the "Roleplaying not Roll Playing" advocated in the White Wolf rulebooks. It's your approach.
Skills, i.e. your discrete resolution mechanics, aren't part of D&D as the battle against GURPS in the 80s as not an RPG stands testament to.
First, as I've pointed out, the first part of this statement is untrue. Discrete resolution mechanics are
all over the place in D&D. From the Thief Skills to the Strength "Bend Bars/Lift Gates %" to even a wide range of spells. "I cast Knock. The door opens." A resolution mechanic. Any claim that D&D doesn't have discrete resolution mechanics is simply, trivially false.
One single counter-example is enough to disprove your statement.
As for the D&D vs GURPS battle? I wasn't there. But if this battle really happened and people really were claiming that GURPS wasn't an RPG because it had unified rather than disjoint resolution mechanics? Guess what? You got squished like bugs
even within the D&D community. Your arguments were marginal in the 1980s (and I'd point out that Traveller and Runequest also had resolution mechanics).
Again, D&D has no resolution mechanics of any kinds.
Repeating untruths doesn't make them more true. I've given resolution mechanics in D&D.
Again, they aren't rules. They are NEVER told to the players.
This again is completely false. Once D&D was published then players had access to the rules. Once a second person within the gaming group started to run games then at least some of the players had to know the rules. And Monte Haul DMs were a problem because it was expected you took characters from game to game each run under different DMs - so when one handed out too much loot that unbalanced everyone.
Gaming isn't an identity through negation. "We don't seek depiction or narrative design" is Edwards refusing yet again to actually talk about games as understood for centuries.
Indeed. Edwards is not talking about chess. Or whist. Or poker. Or football. Or billiards. Or polo. He is talking about
tabletop role-playing games. A genre first published in 1974. Your objection about "games as understood for centuries" is like writing articles about the evolution of FPS computer games and not talking about Pong, Pac-Man, and Civilisation.
He simply refuses to treat them as a sphere of behavior and understanding we can live within.
That's because D&D was inspired by stepping outside the rules, as Arneson did in Braunstein.
- Do Not Trust anything in those articles to be forthright about games as historically understood.
Indeed. They do not cover games outside the Tabletop RPG genre. They are in part about what makes tabletop RPGs different from card games. Or team sports. They are useful about Tabletop RPGs but have no relevance to other forms of game.
Those articles are not the final word. They are a rejection in near entirety of everything that has been understood as games prior.
Except about Tabletop RPGs, yes. GNS grew out of the Usenet GDS (IMO a more useful system). And aren't really a rejection of it.
2. Games don't have themes.
Strictly false. Almost every single boardgame there has ever been has a theme. Or are you now claiming that Monopoly isn't a game? Because it certainly has themes.
If you don't know it, that's fine. It was word of mouth when I grew up in the 80's and the expected act of play by DMs and players.
You mean it is what your personal local playgroup
thought. "Word of mouth" is just another way of saying "Local rumor". It was local urban myth. And myth passed on to you ten years later that is so far as I can tell in flat contradiction to the actual statements of people who were there back in the early 1970s when D&D was actually designed.
You were told things that were not in the rulebooks, and that contradict the rulebooks, and that contradict the history of the way D&D came to be. This is a thing that happens - especially as Gygax wasn't good at clarity in intended goals. And it leads to an interesting if idiosyncratic way of playing D&D. Which is fine - the game grows by people doing odd things with it (precisely because it isn't a traditional game).
But why you treat the word of mouth of your local gaming group as in a better position to know than Gygax, Arneson, Moldvay, Mentzer, and numerous others is beyond me.
Look at the context, the D&D faithful of course. Check your history.
Something you would do well to do. Forget what your friends told you in the 80s - and look at what actually happened in the 70s.
It's the holiday season and this is getting tiresome. You don't understand, I understand. I've gone to great lengths to help you understand.
What you haven't gone to great lengths to do, however, us check your assumptions and update them when they are shown to be wrong. Whenever a statement of yours is shown to be directly contrary to what happened you have doubled down rather than thinking that it means you don't know it all and would do better than to listen. You've gone to great lengths to convey your position, that I'll grant. It's just a position based on misunderstandings and misconceptions.
I have a player in my group who is a die-hard 4E fan, and it gets irritating to hear his criticisms which largely amount to ‘it’s not the same as 4E’ (regardless of context). The observation I make in his case is that a) he has limited experience of playing anything other than D&D4E, and b) he’s invested so much in the 4E line that it’s hard to let it go. From my experience, the acceptance of 5E may take some time….but in terms of my preference and enthusiasm it’s been the best thing to happen to D&D for a long, long time.
Am I the only 4e fan darkly amused by this and the years spent saying "That's not what the 4e rules say. Here are page references."?
