Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Umbran]

It would help if there weren’t a presumption of ill-intent. Discourse would be much more functional if people assumed good faith and only reacted once it became clear there was none.

Folks are swimming in a sea of ill-intent. Ill-intent is part of their daily lived experience.

While, if you are of good intent, having folks ignore that fact might be helpful, it does leave them open and exposed to ill intent.

Now, we can ask ourselves - honestly, is our point so valuable to the world that everyone should leave themselves vulnerable to ill-intent for us? If not, it becomes an exercise for an author to make sure they actively separate themselves from those of ill-intent.

 

[Staffan]

There's an argument that all criticism/theoretical analysis comes from a place of ill intent. The sorts of analysis we're using as analogous - art, film, literature, music, that is the analysis of cultural production - were all designed to create a professional language barrier of exclusion around the object of study, alongside creating and then defending/attacking a canon of materal "worthy" of this sort of professionalised attention. It's arguable that The Forge was exactly this.

I don't think exclusion is the intent of professional jargon, but rather an unavoidable side effect. When discussing a niche subject, it helps to have vocabulary that describes the things that are common to that subject. When a chemist talk about titration, other chemists know the procedure used, and you don't have to describe the process. This is very useful because it lets you get to the point right away. When a surgeon asks for a Langenbeck retractor, the nurse knows that they mean the L-shaped stick used to hold a wound open to enable them to get to the stuff they need to perform surgery on, and calling it a Langenbeck retractor is much more convenient than "the L-shaped stick" etc.

The same applies to art. Using "Dutch angle" is much more convenient than "filmed at an angle to make the subject seem distressed." Using "chiaroscuro" is more convenient than "painting in a way that exaggerates the contrast between light and dark". "Slap-chop" is much faster to say than "priming a model in black or dark grey, and then drybrushing it with light grey and further with white, and then using transparent paints on top of that to create highlights and shadows."

Would it shock you to learn that this is exactly the analogy that Ron Edwards uses?

Great minds think alike, I guess. On the other hand, fools rarely differ.

 

[kenada]

Folks are swimming in a sea of ill-intent. Ill-intent is part of their daily lived experience.

While, if you are of good intent, having folks ignore that fact might be helpful, it does leave them open and exposed to ill intent.

Now, we can ask ourselves - honestly, is our point so valuable to the world that everyone should leave themselves vulnerable to ill-intent for us? If not, it becomes an exercise for an author to make sure they actively separate themselves from those of ill-intent.

Given that, should one also assume that responses are made with ill-intent? Do they have a similar duty of civility?

 

[aramis erak]

Isn't that what the Forge tried to do?

Once upon a time on EnWorld you couldn't even complain about sorcerers being underpowered, or have an important discussion about whether you can use a lance two-handed from horseback, without someone re-phrasing into Forge-ite terms that no one else understood, or (even worse) into terms that other people thought they understood but actually didn't.

Yet how many of those terms have stuck with us?

I do find "Fiction First" quite useful as an explanation for how we are playing our first ever game of Fate wrong - our players can't get out of the habit of saying "Can I make an x check to do y?", and that's even after me pre-emptively removing the Notice / Perception skill (which is responsible for 75% of such conversations in our Pathfinder games). However, nobody else in our group knows what Fiction First means, and I'm not even sure I'm using it correctly myself.

It wasn't due to lack of effort on the Forge's part. Did they get stuck in their own echo-chamber, or was the task impossible in the first place?

Echo chamber. Ron Edwards was fond of telling people they didn't actually know what they liked.
Including me.
Ron was wrong, and was in the wrong.
Further, he kept redefining terms in search of "the big model"... Which is why the Forgite Dialect was a problem - it wasn't stable until The Forge shut down.
He drove away, or sometimes even banned, anyone who challenged his every changing view.

This is not to cast shade upon his initial GSN model as initially released in the article, System Matters, and as reprinted in Sorcerer. Sorcerer is a rather brilliant narrowly focused game. The article is also brilliant. But Ron's initial step in movement to the big model was to ignore/deny that there are gradients between the 3 labels, that people could find different balances of the three

I had a quick look at Board Game Geek and, from an extremely unscientific sample of 1 review, came across "a 1-4 player campaign game about adventures, exploration and fierce battles with giant monsters. It’s a co-operative, choice-driven boardgame experience played over multiple sessions" (emphasis mine).

I don't know much about board games, but that seems like a great, jargon-free summary to me.

Every word/phrase you highlighted is jargon. And one of them is jargon best defined with another jargon term. You just don't realize it, probably because the terms have very similar use for RPGs and computer/console games.

• Campaign: multiple scenarios, usually with the outcome of one scenario altering the setup of the next
• Co-operative - in boardgames, this means one of "1 vs many" or "all vs the game"
• Choice Driven - implies that there's little to no randomization. It may also have a knock-on effect of also having low replay value.
• Multiple Sessions - Implies that a given scenario isn't doable in a single 2-3 hour session.
• Scenario - a specific starting condition for the game, (which may or may not be flexible) with specified end, and usually also victory and/or loss conditions.

 

[aramis erak]

Let’s be honest. D&D is good at what it does. If I were doing exactly the same thing, what would be the point? I’d save a lot of time and effort just playing D&D with my group instead of working on my system.

But D&D doesn't do a lot of other desirable playstyles and/or settings as well. Having used D&D 3E/d20 system mechanics for Traveller (Yes, I am listed in the Traveller T20 playtesters), the system doesn't do Traveller all that well without significant modifications. And once we had it running well (note that the listed playtesters also doubled as "additional development by" - my one gripe about the late Hunter Gordon is not crediting us properly). The needed mods comprise over 100 full size pages in fairly small text...
It was, at the end of the day, too far for easy adoption by d20 fans, and too d20 for most traveller fans, with a tone closest to the MegaTraveller rules... at least it covered almost all the same turf, with one notable exception: mass combat.

 

[Digdude]

Too much talk, lets do this. LEEEEEEY ROYYYYYYYYYY JEEEENKINS!

Actually great discussion, but do rpgs in general fall into the same trap we as humans make and that is to feebly attempt to put everything into neat little boxes and then defend them against the other boxes because they are different? Just a thought.

 

[kenada]

But D&D doesn't do a lot of other desirable playstyles and/or settings as well. Having used D&D 3E/d20 system mechanics for Traveller (Yes, I am listed in the Traveller T20 playtesters), the system doesn't do Traveller all that well without significant modifications. And once we had it running well (note that the listed playtesters also doubled as "additional development by" - my one gripe about the late Hunter Gordon is not crediting us properly). The needed mods comprise over 100 full size pages in fairly small text...
It was, at the end of the day, too far for easy adoption by d20 fans, and too d20 for most traveller fans, with a tone closest to the MegaTraveller rules... at least it covered almost all the same turf, with one notable exception: mass combat.

I included that bit as social lubricant because I wanted to avoid “I want my game to do X” being taken as an implicit criticism of “games that do Y (in contrast to X).”. Since I had mentioned D&D, I thought it particularly important to include something to that effect.

 

[JAMUMU]

I don't think exclusion is the intent of professional jargon, but rather an unavoidable side effect. When discussing a niche subject, it helps to have vocabulary that describes the things that are common to that subject. When a chemist talk about titration, other chemists know the procedure used, and you don't have to describe the process. This is very useful because it lets you get to the point right away. When a surgeon asks for a Langenbeck retractor, the nurse knows that they mean the L-shaped stick used to hold a wound open to enable them to get to the stuff they need to perform surgery on, and calling it a Langenbeck retractor is much more convenient than "the L-shaped stick" etc.

The same applies to art. Using "Dutch angle" is much more convenient than "filmed at an angle to make the subject seem distressed." Using "chiaroscuro" is more convenient than "painting in a way that exaggerates the contrast between light and dark". "Slap-chop" is much faster to say than "priming a model in black or dark grey, and then drybrushing it with light grey and further with white, and then using transparent paints on top of that to create highlights and shadows."

There's absolutely a necessary place for professional terminology in criticism. But there's a difference between useful jargon/shorthand in a professional setting and language designed to create an in-group wielding value-laden language to police what are ultimately matters of taste (and heirarchies, but I don't want to turn this any more political than it has to be).

I'd argue that a lot of RPG criticism, Forge-based or otherwise, has a tendency toward the latter definition. And where it doesn't it leans into discussions that manage to be inflammatory, as we're all doing this on the internet now and as Umbran says, ill-intent and reflexive defensiveness are the norm.

 

[FrogReaver]

IMO what is being critiqued in music and movies is not at all related to what gets critiqued in RPGs.

One might could critique critical roll in a similar way to film.

But what people want to ‘critique’ in RPGs most often is systems and techniques and most often this is done so from the perspective that certain techniques produce always bad results and certain systems elements produce undesirable outcomes.

If this is what people want to continue to critique it’s always going to end badly.

 

[gorice]

IMO what is being critiqued in music and movies is not at all related to what gets critiqued in RPGs.

One might could critique critical roll in a similar way to film.

But what people want to ‘critique’ in RPGs most often is systems and techniques and most often this is done so from the perspective that certain techniques produce always bad results and certain systems elements produce undesirable outcomes.

If this is what people want to continue to critique it’s always going to end badly.

Seems like a good reason to keep critique focused on actual play experience. I hinted at this in my previous post, but I think it bears repeating: this hobby badly needs a culture shift, from talking about games as books that we read, to talking about the personal experiences of playing games. I'm tempted to say that we don't really have different play cultures, we have different anti-play cultures.