wingsandsword
Legend
Is spending time on online message boards distorting our view of the gaming community away from online forums? Personally, the view of the gaming world I get from reading message boards is nothing like the view I get from going to FLGS's, local gaming conventions, and local gaming club meetings.
In my experience, online message boards are nothing like the gaming community as a whole, it's a special sub-set of gamers. In 13+ years of regularly gaming, across a half-dozen states and knowing hundreds of gamers, the picture I get of the RPG community isn't much like the picture I get from any one online community. I like ENWorld, a lot. I've been posting here for 8 years and had been a regular lurker since it was Eric Noah's 3rd Edition News & Rumors, and over the years I've spent time at a number of other gaming message boards as well, but I am coming to realize that the online message board communities are not the same as physical gaming communities in many ways.
ENWorld is a forum, first and foremost, for relatively hardcore D&D 3e, 4e and d20 fans. Most D&D players don't spend a lot of time on RPG message boards on the internet, they don't obsess over obscure derivative d20 games, and they don't play versions of D&D predating August 2000. Most gamers that I know in the real world, regularly play either 4e, 3.5e, or World of Darkness, with the rest playing GURPS, various Star Wars editions or maybe Savage Worlds. Before 3e came out, all the various D&D groups I knew played 2e. . .but almost all the groups I knew house-ruled it so heavily that no two games were remotely the same, and I knew a lot of gamers and groups that had given up on AD&D as outdated, mechanically obsolete and generally poorly written by the standards of the late '90's. (Why do I roll high for a to-hit but low for a saving throw? Why do I roll percentile dice to try to climb a wall, but a d20 to try to swim? Why can't my Bard be Chaotic Good? Why can't my Elf be a Druid? Why can't I level up to 12th level Druid without defeating a 12th level Druid in a duel? If my 1st level Fighter wants to learn to read and write after character creation, why must he wait until 6th level to do so? ect.) Many groups had fixed those questions with various house rules. . . but no two groups used the same fixes. Going from D&D game to D&D game meant re-learning all the various changes that were implemented at each table to make AD&D palatable. Some groups had re-written the game to only vaguely resemble AD&D, but still would say they were playing AD&D 2e if anybody asked.
On this forum, you'll see people who still play OD&D, something that I've never met IRL outside of meeting some ENWorlders at Gen Con. I've known a few gamers that played OD&D back in the 70's, and they switched over to AD&D when it came out. I've known of one 1e AD&D group (it had the OD&D gamers I know). . .that migrated to 3.5e in 2005. I know a single 2e AD&D grognard, and he can't get a game of it together because no gamer he knows will play AD&D, just 3.x (or reluctantly 4e, but he hates 4e more than he hates 3e): he reluctantly plays 3.5, but always borrows other people's PHB's instead of buying his own just as a protest.
Nowadays, when I meet new gamers and they say they play D&D, the inevitable question that comes up is "3e or 4e", they will ask it or I will. I'll hear both answers and both of them strong answers. Some will play either, some will refuse to play 4e, some will refuse to play 3.5. I NEVER heard that kind of division before 4e, I never heard "2e or 3e" or "3e or 3.5e", and when I became active in the gaming community in '97 I didn't hear "1e or 2e". Whatever 1e/2e or Basic/AD&D schism had happened had long since faded to old "back in the day" stories by then as the consensus had long since slowly shifted to 2e.
I had never seen Basic D&D grognards who refused to play 3.x. . .despite what some people online say. I know a single Basic D&D fan, of the RC edition, and we ran a one-shot of it 10 years ago to humor him. For a long time on ENWorld after the release of 4e, I heard people insisting that "edition wars" was an online-only phenomenon and that in the real world virtually everybody had switched over to 4e except a very small, very vocal minority. . .as I saw arguments and disagreements happen IRL at the time, and gaming groups split over which side they were on.
On ENWorld, a few years ago we had a thread where the key question was whether or not Castles and Crusades was such a big product that it was making a significant dent in D&D 3.5e sales. Away from ENWorld, C&C was just a book on the shelf at the largest FLGS in town. I didn't know anybody who played it, if anybody I knew owned it they never mentioned it or tried to run a game of it, and most FLGS I knew didn't stock it. Years later, I still have yet to meet an actual "meatspace" group that plays C&C regularly. Going by ENWorld postings, I would think it was a smash hit that had WotC execs worried about losing major market share.
It's not just limited to ENWorld either, if my experiences on the Wizards.com message boards were typical of my experiences in the physical world I would think most D&D games were about optimizing characters through elaborate "builds" drawing from various obscure sourcebooks, where the creation of the character was as much of a challenge or more than the actual RPG. I've known ONE player like that in real life, and he was annoying about it because he tried to force that attitude on every game he was in and every other player at the table (lecturing us on the right "build" we should use, griping at us for "inefficiency" if we took character choices for roleplaying reasons or anything but optimum power), but he was an outlier in my experience.
Going by online forums I would also think that Forgotten Realms campaigns were full of people who had memorized the Gospel of Ed Greenwood and are fully capable of citing obscure statements he wrote on an e-mail list to back up claims about Faerunian polyamorous social norms and knew every detail from old Dragon articles and archaic supplements from well over a decade ago and be waiting to call-out a DM who strayed from canon by even one detail, but even the big Realms fans I know in real life are nothing like that and way more casual and understanding about "canon". I would also think that people were not satisfied with d20 Future because it had rules for relativistic spaceflight instead of autodynamics (a discredited fringe-science replacement for relativity), like one very vocal poster were calling for a boycott of that book saying WotC was part of "the conspiracy" to convince people Relativity is real. I stopped posting there in large part because I got fed up with min-maxers, canon lawyers, and various cranks who adhered to discredited pseudoscience and bizarre conspiracy theories (like one very vehement poster who insisted that the Necronomicon was an actual ancient occult text discovered by HP Lovecraft and that he wrote the Cthulhu Mythos stories to deflect the public from the truth that Cthulhu et al is real).
Internet message boards let people come together across the world with no regard to physical limitations, and on boards that aren't as civilized and polite as ENWorld people will say things with far more vitriol than they ever would face-to-face. If there are several hundred die-hard fans of an obscure product, they might never meet each other in real life (aside from maybe Gen Con) and have to be lone evangelists in the physical world, but on the internet they can form an active community and give each other the illusion that this product is very common and highly popular. One insistent and prolific poster (especially with alts) can even create the illusion by himself that a fringe product or position has at least a modest following.
In 2000, when 3e came out, from my perspective of the offline world, it came out to save D&D from dying slowly, from being perceived as an esoteric mish-mash of disparate rules from the '70's that showed its age in an era of unified and consistent systems. From what I saw, away from the internet, it brought a renaissance into the gaming world where people had drifted away from D&D and put just about everybody on the same page with regards to editions. It brought new people to D&D unlike any era before except maybe the big boom of the early 80's, it brought people from other games to play or at least try D&D, it put just about everybody on the same page with regard to editions/rules, and it got casual gamers who might not own a single other gaming book to buy a 3e PHB. . .and 10 years later that unity is shattered and more fragmented than ever it seems.
I'm kinda curious if other people see the same kind of disconnect between the physical gaming community and online gaming communities.
In my experience, online message boards are nothing like the gaming community as a whole, it's a special sub-set of gamers. In 13+ years of regularly gaming, across a half-dozen states and knowing hundreds of gamers, the picture I get of the RPG community isn't much like the picture I get from any one online community. I like ENWorld, a lot. I've been posting here for 8 years and had been a regular lurker since it was Eric Noah's 3rd Edition News & Rumors, and over the years I've spent time at a number of other gaming message boards as well, but I am coming to realize that the online message board communities are not the same as physical gaming communities in many ways.
ENWorld is a forum, first and foremost, for relatively hardcore D&D 3e, 4e and d20 fans. Most D&D players don't spend a lot of time on RPG message boards on the internet, they don't obsess over obscure derivative d20 games, and they don't play versions of D&D predating August 2000. Most gamers that I know in the real world, regularly play either 4e, 3.5e, or World of Darkness, with the rest playing GURPS, various Star Wars editions or maybe Savage Worlds. Before 3e came out, all the various D&D groups I knew played 2e. . .but almost all the groups I knew house-ruled it so heavily that no two games were remotely the same, and I knew a lot of gamers and groups that had given up on AD&D as outdated, mechanically obsolete and generally poorly written by the standards of the late '90's. (Why do I roll high for a to-hit but low for a saving throw? Why do I roll percentile dice to try to climb a wall, but a d20 to try to swim? Why can't my Bard be Chaotic Good? Why can't my Elf be a Druid? Why can't I level up to 12th level Druid without defeating a 12th level Druid in a duel? If my 1st level Fighter wants to learn to read and write after character creation, why must he wait until 6th level to do so? ect.) Many groups had fixed those questions with various house rules. . . but no two groups used the same fixes. Going from D&D game to D&D game meant re-learning all the various changes that were implemented at each table to make AD&D palatable. Some groups had re-written the game to only vaguely resemble AD&D, but still would say they were playing AD&D 2e if anybody asked.
On this forum, you'll see people who still play OD&D, something that I've never met IRL outside of meeting some ENWorlders at Gen Con. I've known a few gamers that played OD&D back in the 70's, and they switched over to AD&D when it came out. I've known of one 1e AD&D group (it had the OD&D gamers I know). . .that migrated to 3.5e in 2005. I know a single 2e AD&D grognard, and he can't get a game of it together because no gamer he knows will play AD&D, just 3.x (or reluctantly 4e, but he hates 4e more than he hates 3e): he reluctantly plays 3.5, but always borrows other people's PHB's instead of buying his own just as a protest.
Nowadays, when I meet new gamers and they say they play D&D, the inevitable question that comes up is "3e or 4e", they will ask it or I will. I'll hear both answers and both of them strong answers. Some will play either, some will refuse to play 4e, some will refuse to play 3.5. I NEVER heard that kind of division before 4e, I never heard "2e or 3e" or "3e or 3.5e", and when I became active in the gaming community in '97 I didn't hear "1e or 2e". Whatever 1e/2e or Basic/AD&D schism had happened had long since faded to old "back in the day" stories by then as the consensus had long since slowly shifted to 2e.
I had never seen Basic D&D grognards who refused to play 3.x. . .despite what some people online say. I know a single Basic D&D fan, of the RC edition, and we ran a one-shot of it 10 years ago to humor him. For a long time on ENWorld after the release of 4e, I heard people insisting that "edition wars" was an online-only phenomenon and that in the real world virtually everybody had switched over to 4e except a very small, very vocal minority. . .as I saw arguments and disagreements happen IRL at the time, and gaming groups split over which side they were on.
On ENWorld, a few years ago we had a thread where the key question was whether or not Castles and Crusades was such a big product that it was making a significant dent in D&D 3.5e sales. Away from ENWorld, C&C was just a book on the shelf at the largest FLGS in town. I didn't know anybody who played it, if anybody I knew owned it they never mentioned it or tried to run a game of it, and most FLGS I knew didn't stock it. Years later, I still have yet to meet an actual "meatspace" group that plays C&C regularly. Going by ENWorld postings, I would think it was a smash hit that had WotC execs worried about losing major market share.
It's not just limited to ENWorld either, if my experiences on the Wizards.com message boards were typical of my experiences in the physical world I would think most D&D games were about optimizing characters through elaborate "builds" drawing from various obscure sourcebooks, where the creation of the character was as much of a challenge or more than the actual RPG. I've known ONE player like that in real life, and he was annoying about it because he tried to force that attitude on every game he was in and every other player at the table (lecturing us on the right "build" we should use, griping at us for "inefficiency" if we took character choices for roleplaying reasons or anything but optimum power), but he was an outlier in my experience.
Going by online forums I would also think that Forgotten Realms campaigns were full of people who had memorized the Gospel of Ed Greenwood and are fully capable of citing obscure statements he wrote on an e-mail list to back up claims about Faerunian polyamorous social norms and knew every detail from old Dragon articles and archaic supplements from well over a decade ago and be waiting to call-out a DM who strayed from canon by even one detail, but even the big Realms fans I know in real life are nothing like that and way more casual and understanding about "canon". I would also think that people were not satisfied with d20 Future because it had rules for relativistic spaceflight instead of autodynamics (a discredited fringe-science replacement for relativity), like one very vocal poster were calling for a boycott of that book saying WotC was part of "the conspiracy" to convince people Relativity is real. I stopped posting there in large part because I got fed up with min-maxers, canon lawyers, and various cranks who adhered to discredited pseudoscience and bizarre conspiracy theories (like one very vehement poster who insisted that the Necronomicon was an actual ancient occult text discovered by HP Lovecraft and that he wrote the Cthulhu Mythos stories to deflect the public from the truth that Cthulhu et al is real).
Internet message boards let people come together across the world with no regard to physical limitations, and on boards that aren't as civilized and polite as ENWorld people will say things with far more vitriol than they ever would face-to-face. If there are several hundred die-hard fans of an obscure product, they might never meet each other in real life (aside from maybe Gen Con) and have to be lone evangelists in the physical world, but on the internet they can form an active community and give each other the illusion that this product is very common and highly popular. One insistent and prolific poster (especially with alts) can even create the illusion by himself that a fringe product or position has at least a modest following.
In 2000, when 3e came out, from my perspective of the offline world, it came out to save D&D from dying slowly, from being perceived as an esoteric mish-mash of disparate rules from the '70's that showed its age in an era of unified and consistent systems. From what I saw, away from the internet, it brought a renaissance into the gaming world where people had drifted away from D&D and put just about everybody on the same page with regards to editions. It brought new people to D&D unlike any era before except maybe the big boom of the early 80's, it brought people from other games to play or at least try D&D, it put just about everybody on the same page with regard to editions/rules, and it got casual gamers who might not own a single other gaming book to buy a 3e PHB. . .and 10 years later that unity is shattered and more fragmented than ever it seems.
I'm kinda curious if other people see the same kind of disconnect between the physical gaming community and online gaming communities.
