7 Years of D&D Stories? And a "Big Reveal" Coming?

Mercurius said:

Except I met people who disliked 4E but had never actually played it. Isn't that irrational? They heard negative things about it and just assumed they were true - and many couldn't even pinpoint what those negative things were! Humans beings are often irrational.

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I'm not going to argue that human beings are rational.
But are these also the people who are participating in edition wars?
I think there are significant leaps of logic occurring here.
My wife would qualify as one of the people you describe. She plays in my game and will think about her character away from the table, but she doesn't spend a lot of time on it. She greatly enjoys playing and spends a lot of time not thinking about it at all. She has been in conversation with just me or me and larger groups of gamers and it was clear that she didn't like a lot of things she heard about 4e. If you walked up to her today and asked her to talk about 4E I doubt she could say much more than: "I know I heard a lot of things that didn't sound good to me, I don't recall the details." And while blind faith in people you trust *IS* adequate for something as trivial as an RPG, that would not describe this circumstance. She knows she had conversations about specific things and had her own clear opinion on them. She just doesn't care enough to dwell on it.

TwoSix said:

Disagree. There were plenty of people who made rational, considered decisions to not like 4e. There were plenty of people who tried 4e and eventually found it not to meet their needs. There were plenty of people who rejected 4e off of hearsay and or negative initial preferences and never revisited the issue. It's that third group that's the most tiresome online, as the people who found 4e's divergence from being the next evolution of the 3e paradigm as a personal attack are disproportionally drawn from that group.

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I don't think you have any evidence that people rejected 4E purely off hearsay AND those same people spent month after month blasting it online.

BryonD said:

I don't think you have any evidence that people rejected 4E purely off hearsay AND those same people spent month after month blasting it online.

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Of course not. It's purely anecdotal. I still think I'm right, though, since it's my anecdote.

Just a quick reply to something [MENTION=10479]Mark CMG[/MENTION] wrote before erasing his post. With regards to your assertion that I went from "largest" to "large" to "some," those qualifiers were used for different referents. "Largest" and "large" were in reference to a part, factor or aspect (of the edition war), not a quantity of people. I changed it because I think the less specific "large" is more accurate than "largest." "Some" referred to an actual quantity of people, of which I didn't specify.

billd91 said:

That's not necessarily irrational. After all, that's what the industry of criticism - whether of movies or books or anything else - is all about. Someone publishes an opinion and people who trust that opinion react to it. It isn't inherently irrational to look at a critic, evaluate how well your own opinions and tastes have matched theirs, and then conclude that their negative opinion of <movie, book, TV show, RPG, etc> is good enough for you to avoid said product.

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Fair enough, although I think actual "hatred" based on someone else's opinion is somewhat irrational. If don't see a movie because it gets bad reviews, that's one thing, but if I hate or even dislike a movie because of reviews, that's another. Further, I like what Wicht says...

Wicht said:

No. In all honesty it does not have to be irrational.

There are plenty of ways to analyze a game prior to playing it and if the game fails in the analysis before it gets to the table, that is not a sign of irrationality.

Lets move out of RPGs a moment and consider Boardgames. There are thousands of board games published every year. It is impossible to play all of them. It is certainly not likely one is going to own all of them. Decisions must be made. The intelligent gamer operates by word-of-mouth, considers reviews, takes into account prior preferences, and examines the artwork and production of a game all before ever deciding to play. None of these are the totality of a decision. Spyfall has yet to be published in the US, but word of mouth and reviews convinced me to write up my own copy on note cards and give it a shot with the family. Other games look stellar, but I know from analyzing the game beforehand that I will likely not enjoy it (Chaos in the Old World comes to mind).

There are, of course, far less RPGs published each year, but analysis can be done in the same way and is quite rational and common.

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Good stuff. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for timely irrationality!

Wicht said:

And let me once more, kindly, point out that you are poisoning the well of your own conversation by making this point. It is an assumption on your part, and one done in bad faith, as it assumes faulty motivations in others. Once you have made such an assumption you must then also try and figure out whether the person you are discussing the issue with are guilty of the irrationality you have accused others of, and it just goes downhill from there.

The edition wars, in my opinion, were not so much caused by vitriol as by a lack of empathy.

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Fair enough - and the last sentence may be true, although would say it is a combination of (perhaps excessive) sensitivity with a lack of empathy. Bad combo.

As I said, I don't really see irrationality as negative. If anything, I was simply surprised about some of the actual hatred of 4E. Dislike or ambivalence is one thing, but it is astonishing just how upset people got over the whole thing - on both "sides" of the line.

BryonD said:

I'm not going to argue that human beings are rational.
But are these also the people who are participating in edition wars?
I think there are significant leaps of logic occurring here.
My wife would qualify as one of the people you describe. She plays in my game and will think about her character away from the table, but she doesn't spend a lot of time on it. She greatly enjoys playing and spends a lot of time not thinking about it at all. She has been in conversation with just me or me and larger groups of gamers and it was clear that she didn't like a lot of things she heard about 4e. If you walked up to her today and asked her to talk about 4E I doubt she could say much more than: "I know I heard a lot of things that didn't sound good to me, I don't recall the details." And while blind faith in people you trust *IS* adequate for something as trivial as an RPG, that would not describe this circumstance. She knows she had conversations about specific things and had her own clear opinion on them. She just doesn't care enough to dwell on it.

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Right. This goes back to an angle I was taking in conversation up-thread. We tend to focus on the extremes of pro vs. con, but there was a large group of "moderates" in the middle that ran the gamut from like through ambivalence through mild dislike towards 4E. The edition war seemed to be waged by extremes on either side of that "mild majority," many of whom would find themselves unintentionally getting involved on some occasions (I speak from experience!).

Wicht said:

In the interest of promoting peace and harmony - let me try to interject a thought...

I think the actual disagreement is on Camp Two. Camp Two is actually two seperate groups. Granted that there is a group who "hated" 4e. They are actually a rather small group imo. There is a larger group of us who disliked 4e. As well, it is presumptuous to assign irrationality to the opinions people have concerning 4e. Such an assumption poisons the discussion. Rather than labeling such feelings as irrational, it is better to simply accept that they exist and, either move on, or try and understand the causes. By labeling it as irrational you do a disservice to your own potential understanding and empathy.

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Almost missed this one (which often happens to promotions of peace and harmony ).

Anyhow, sure. I think part of what happened here is that the word "irrational" has more negative connotations to some than it does to me. I don't see it as particularly negative at all. Plenty of wonderful things are "irrational." In fact, I would say the very best things in life are irrational (so to speak): love, imagination, eating ice cream.

I'm not sure how the "hate" part of Camp Two isn't part of Camp Three. If we are going to split Camp Two into two groups, I'd say there are those that liked (but didn't love) 4E, played it for awhile, then grew tired of it. This is my experience. Then there those that had an overall negative association but didn't necessarily "hate" it.

Anyhow, as far as irrationality goes, perhaps a better way of putting what I was trying to say is that when actual "hate" is involved, usually there's something more going on than a reasoned opinion, usually there some element of emotion or affect. I can dislike a person if I find them annoying or if they do things that are abhorrent to me, but to actually "hate" them they either have to do something truly awful or they have to rub something in me the wrong way.

That "in me" part is what I'm getting at. A lot of folks seemed personally offended by 4E, whether the game itself, the vibe and look of it, or WotC's handling of it. Again, I can understanding liking or disliking all of that, but when we get to actual hatred, clearly there's more going on.

Mercurius said:

As I said, I don't really see irrationality as negative. If anything, I was simply surprised about some of the actual hatred of 4E. Dislike or ambivalence is one thing, but it is astonishing just how upset people got over the whole thing - on both "sides" of the line.

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It may also be difficult to differentiate between intense dislike for an edition vs giving off intense emotion when discussing said edition vs another's interpretation of said feeling.

So if I was extremely passionate about "traditional" D&D, and 4E drew my ire, then I might dislike it to some level of intensity, but actual impressions of "hatred" might only emerge as a by-product of arguing online against those equally but oppositely passionate. (This is not something I personally experience, but I'm just speculating.)

Mercurius said:

Just a quick reply to something [MENTION=10479]Mark CMG[/MENTION] wrote before erasing his post.

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What's wrong with you? I've asked you to let it go and Umbran has told us to drop the discussion. You're discussing something that isn't even posted and dropping a "mention" on top of it. I can't discuss this anymore based on Umbran's moderator request so, please, let it go already.

TwoSix said:

Of course not. It's purely anecdotal. I still think I'm right, though, since it's my anecdote.

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Really?
I respect your personal experience and I'm not going to get worked up on that.
But you actually know someone who frequently and over a long term continuously posts "4E sucks" type comments without knowing anything about the game?

Nevermind

Mercurius said:

Right. This goes back to an angle I was taking in conversation up-thread. We tend to focus on the extremes of pro vs. con, but there was a large group of "moderates" in the middle that ran the gamut from like through ambivalence through mild dislike towards 4E. The edition war seemed to be waged by extremes on either side of that "mild majority," many of whom would find themselves unintentionally getting involved on some occasions (I speak from experience!).

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Sure, but you are now putting my wife in the "moderate" camp, which isn't perpetuating edition wars. That is the point I was making.
There are people without deep and highly educated opinions on the matter. But these are not the people waging edition wars. The case being made seems to be that there are uneducated people (true) and people waging edition wars (true), therefore the edition wars are being waged by people who are uneducated on the issue (not true)