Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Aldarc]

I'm not suggesting you are. But I've absolutely seen people do so (even moreso with Fate in the past) and acting like people don't know their own tastes at all when doing so.

My experience with discussing Fate on this forum (moreso in the past) was people telling me that I was having BadWrongFun playing something that wasn't a true RPG.

 

[pemerton]

IMO - Criticizing a system as ‘bad’ necessarily criticizes the person that likes it as liking ‘bad’ things.

I've read people criticising Rifts and other Palladium RPGs as bad (eg unbalanced; too gonzo). I've read many people criticising 4e D&D as bad. I've read people criticising Rolemaster as bad ("Chartmaster").

Are you seriously saying that these are criticisms of people who enjoy Rifts, or 4e D&D, or RM? To me that's a very strange thing to say.

 

[Pedantic]

All I can say is that is strikes me as rather counterintuitive to characterise a solitary activity in which no one plays a role, and in which the sole participant draws diagrams and writes things down, as playing a roleplaying game.

That's a pretty semantic definition. I have binders of characters I never played back when I was regularly a PC, often sketched out at various levels, occasionally with art, and often with assorted historical snippets.

That's clearly the PC equivalent of the same activity. Worldbuilding and encounter design and all that I don't think is wildly unrelated to the game as not being part of it.

 

[FrogReaver]

I've read people criticising Rifts and other Palladium RPGs as bad (eg unbalanced; too gonzo). I've read many people criticising 4e D&D as bad. I've read people criticising Rolemaster as bad ("Chartmaster").

Are you seriously saying that these are criticisms of people who enjoy Rifts, or 4e D&D, or RM? To me that's a very strange thing to say.

in the way I just described - yes, absolutely yes.

*It seeming strange doesn’t make it incorrect.

 

[pemerton]

That's a pretty semantic definition. I have binders of characters I never played back when I was regularly a PC, often sketched out at various levels, occasionally with art, and often with assorted historical snippets.

That's clearly the PC equivalent of the same activity. Worldbuilding and encounter design and all that I don't think is wildly unrelated to the game as not being part of it.

I don't think that writing up PCs that never see play is RPGing either.

RPGing is paradigmatically a group activity - as Vincent Baker puts it, it's negotiated imagination.

Imagining stuff on your own - whether or not one writes it up in the manner of a particular rules system - isn't negotiating imagination with anyone else. There's no shared fiction.

I mean, when I read through a RPG rulebook I sometimes imagine some particular character or creature in play, or some situation in which a particular rules element might come into play. But that's not RPGing. It's just me enjoying reading my rulebook.

 

[clearstream]

All I can say is that is strikes me as rather counterintuitive to characterise a solitary activity in which no one plays a role, and in which the sole participant draws diagrams and writes things down, as playing a roleplaying game.

To quote Vincent Baker

The act of roleplaying — like, pretending to be someone — is widespread in games, not special to ttrpgs. It’s a technique that games can include, each game for its own purposes, just the same as it might include skill, endurance, memory, pattern recognition, storytelling, randomization, sorting, patience, or anything else.

Elsewhere, we've argued that it is the ongoing authorship of common fiction that is at the heart of RPG. "Ironsworn" is often played solo, and players call it an RPG. Ongoing authorship performed at times solo and at times with other players, particularly when the times it is performed solo it is done in view of and in light of (informed by and responsive to) the group.

Historically, no one has expelled a game from the family of RPGs just because roles are distributed differentiably across participants. Perhaps, as much as it was once time to distribute authorship, it is beyond time to look into greater diversity and distributions of roles.

 

[Imaro]

I think its absolutely relevant to the assumptions trad players usually go in with.

I think there's assumptions and biases all around in these conversations...

 

[Micah Sweet]

I’m sorry but I don’t see guesswork as prejudicial at all. It exactly describes what the players are doing. Left or right fork? Well we don’t have any real information so left it is!

Is it that way all the time? Of course not. But a very large segment of map and key play certainly is.

Or at least far more than in other styles which I believe are somewhat less granular. They fuzz over the left turn right turn, poke for traps with a ten foot pole. Which is honestly why I don’t play them because I like the procedural process of exploring in my game.

But I’m under no illusions that most of those choices are random. Heck I’ve got a player who coin tosses at corners.

Since several people here have functionally told you that they do feel your approach to the issue comes off as prejudicial, don't you think that's an indicator that continuing that approach in despite will not lead to good results?

 

[pemerton]

@clearstream

You quote Vincent Baker referring to roleplaying as pretending to be someone. You also mention "common fiction".

A person writing down their imagined facts about imagined times and places is not pretending to be anyone. And there is no shared fiction.

The same goes for solitaire PC gen. There is no pretending. There is no shared fiction.

I have a copy of Ironsworn but haven't looked at it's solo rules. I don't know much about how they work. Perhaps it's a non-paradigm case (although clearly there is no shared fiction in solitaire play). An obvious difference between solo Ironsworn and what you're describing is that the point of solo Ironsworn is not to prepare material for later use in RPGing, whereas that is what GM prep, or player PC building, is ostensibly all about.

In the past, I and other posters have suggested that one feature of railroad-y play is that the players are essentially an appendix to the GM's authorship, a type of chorus adding a bit of colour and a few suggestions to what the GM has written. I've always regarded this as part of the diagnosis of why railroading is not the best that RPGing can aspire to be. You seem to be agreeing with the analysis but endorsing it as "just another type of RPGing".

But if someone invited me to come and watch their RPGing, and I turned up and got to watch them silently imagining and writing notes, I'd be a bit non-plussed. And if I was asked to join in a RPG and learned that my job was to have someone bounce ideas off me while they write down what they're imagining about their solitaire fiction, again I'd be pretty non-plussed. Where's the shared fiction, the negotiated imagination?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yes but once the jargon has been explained there needs to be some effort to work with it. Insisting that your personal interpretation must be followed and thus telling everyone else who apparently doesn’t have a problem with the terminology that they must not use it is far far more arrogant and disruptive than the jargon itself.

That implies that all jargon is valid, once its meaning has been explained, and disagreeing with the use of a term is meaningless if you are in the minority.

Please explain further if that's not what you mean.