D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Filthy Lucre]

I don't know much about the critical role world but I feel this deserves it's own thread! I've never heard this analysis before

Thats more of a book report than an analysis - I mean that's just stuff that's verbatim in the book as far as I know.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Critique = gate keeping? Seems like a knee jerk reaction/reach.

Not talking about critique.

Blaming media for creating the attitudes and culture that created them or that they were designed to appeal to is not critique, especially when it is used exclusively as a simple insult.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

Not talking about critique.

Blaming media for creating the attitudes and culture that created them or that they were designed to appeal to is not critique, especially when it is used exclusively as a simple insult.

I guess what you're saying is so vague that I don't actually know what you're talking about.

Like, suppose someone said "The inclusion of pizza in our D&D setting is ruining the game! We need to prevent the SPWs, (social pizza warriors), from messing everything up!".

Either the statement is true or false given relevant definitions, regardless of if it's "gatekeeping". I.e.: It could be both a true statement AND gatekeeping unless the charge of gatekeeping precludes true statements in the way that truth is an absolute defense against libel or slander, (the latter precludes the former).

Sometimes when I hear people dismiss things as gate keeping it kinda vaguely reminds me of dismissing something that is true just because it's unpleasant - or as a way to shut down discussion of a given topic. Not always, but sometimes that comes to mind/is something I've seen on the forums.

Maybe I don't understand the concept of 'gate keeping' but I didn't think it was intrinsically/inherently bad? For example, a forum rule that forbids bigotry is a kind of gatekeeping as I understand it. But maybe whatever it is that counts "gatekeeping" is always bad and that no good things can ever fit into the descriptor of "gatekeeping".

 

[Vaalingrade]

I've been very clear and to the point with zero vagueness. We're done here.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

I've been very clear and to the point with zero vagueness. We're done here.

Oooooooooook. Seems pretty curt but you do you.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Edit: But the point isn't to rekindle that old discussion, but to note its still clearly one-way; you'll never see someone criticize the typical MMO by saying it "feels too much like D&D".

But there is probably somewhat of a rationale for this. One, MMOs are huge, they are in no way threatened by D&D. But D&D, at one time, felt very under threat from both MMOs and magic cards. I remember how we were hemorrhaging players when both the MMOs and magic cards started taking off. So I think there is a reason this wouldn't swing both ways as much in terms of what it means to compare them. Also D&D is emulating stuff like fantasy literature and comes out of war-games. Whereas MMOs are, to an extent emulating TTRPGs. So saying an MMO feels too much like D&D is almost like saying D&D feels too much like fantasy literature. Most D&D groups wouldn't bat an eye at that (some might bat an eye to having their preferred edition compared to a war-game I suppose).

Also when people say that what they really mean is the medium of TTRPG, its big strength is this idea that you can do anything, you can imagine anything, you can go beyond the predetermined field of play. Obviously video games have improved a lot since then so this is likely not as much an apt point (I haven't played video games regularly since the game cube so I am extremely out of touch with what is possible now when it comes to MMOs----I am just assuming they've advanced a lot and that it is likely there is some clever way you can get beyond whatever the programers laid down initially). So the statement "This feels like a video game" or this feels like "Wow": I think is a statement that it feels like I am more constrained or I feel like a set of buttons I can push. I can see how some might be insulted by that but I also think it expressed something people genuinely felt about the change (and a sentiment people have about the medium itself). And true, many of us making that comparison were making it quite casually. I was never into WOW and I only played magic a handful of times. So for me at least, I was comparing it to my impression of those things (and on my experience playing video games through the 90s and into the very early 2000s).

 

[Filthy Lucre]

I remember how we were hemorrhaging players when both the MMOs and magic cards started taking off.

Errr... in what way does MTG compete, in any way other than literal time usage, with D&D? They're completely different and I'm willing to bet the vast majority of MTG players are also people who play D&D.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

D&D was first published formally in 1974 so what "roots" were they returning to? Those WERE the roots.

I think he means MODERN OSR people (and that itself is probably a gross generalization) like to simplify the reality of early D&D. My experience, playing in the early days and pretty much continuously through the 90's, was that the 'Left Coast' had its crazy weird ideosyncratic games. There were (and I forget who they were) fairly famous examples of groups that were really into some form of Role Play, etc. OTOH remember, the MODEL OF PLAY that existed back then, and I don't know of anyone prior to the mid-80's really evolving past it, was a completely GM-curated fictional presentation. Characterization was 'frosting' more than anything, though obviously a GM COULD 'go with it', most GMs were not that sophisticated! You only started to see something a bit deeper with games like Top Secret, TSR's Marvel Super Heroes game, and then things like 'Toon' and 'Paranoia' where people started to break down the basic model and create different ways to make an RPG work.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Errr... in what way does MTG compete, in any way other than literal time usage, with D&D? They're completely different and I'm willing to bed the vast majority of MTG players are also people who play D&D.

I think what I am expressing is a very common impression people had at the time. I can only give my perspective. I can't tell you it is 100% the case across the board. When Magic first came out, a lot of the people in our local groups switched to magic. Some did both. But we were definitely losing players to magic. Now I think those markets have sorted themselves out. But at the time, I think a lot of people who played D&D and other RPGs, were potential magic players and didn't know it, and were getting a lot of what they would eventually get from magic, by playing D&D. Once magic got big, a lot of them seemed satisfied playing magic alone. That is fine, they were doing what they wanted to do and what they enjoyed. But from our perspective the hobby felt quite imperiled. Keep in mind this is also around the time TSR was going under, and on the heels of White Wolf give D&D serious competition. So if you played D&D (and we actually played a lot of different games but D&D was the default), things seemed extremely uncertain. This is why when WOTC bought D&D, a lot of people thought it was the end (the idea that the people who made magic, were now in charge of D&D made us very concerned). For that reason, it took me a while to warm up to 3E when it first came out. I eventually loved it. But I was a 2E die-hard for a while because my sense was they were going to 'magic the gathering' D&D.

 

[Bedrockgames]

They're completely different and I'm willing to bet the vast majority of MTG players are also people who play D&D.

I am sure that is the case. I have a lot of players in my groups who play magic and play D&D. At the time though, we had a lot of players realize they didn't need D&D after all once they started playing magic, and a lot of the groups in our area started running magic events instead of D&D. Some of them still played RPGs, but you could feel magic competing for there time. And magic was suprisingly enormous. It just took off and D&D felt so small in comparison at the time.