D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Faolyn]

But achieving a goal when it's not a goal I want means I don't value it. I can say that a Ford F-150 pickup truck is good at hauling, it doesn't mean that it's a better vehicle than my Honda Accord. They have different goals, it doesn't mean one is better than the other.

Cars are also physical objects that have limitations due to the physical materials used to build them.

There's no literal RPG machine. The rules only exist on paper and our minds, neither of which are going to literally fall apart or explode if we "misuse" them by, say, using a game "built" for tactical combat in order to play courtly intrigue and torrid romances.

 

[Micah Sweet]

People regularly say their system is "better" because it works differently and I don't see what point they're trying to make.

As far as I can tell, the only point is telling other people about what you like, perhaps in the hopeful service of getting agreement (most people derive comfort from knowing others share their opinion, after all).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Okay....?

That is still passing off agreement that X is good/fast at making omelettes as somehow a rejection of the argument. Hussar has been quite clear that all he is saying is "X is good/fast at making omelettes" and people keep responding with, "You aren't allowed to say that. Nothing can be better/faster at making omelettes."

It isn't a defense of "nothing can be better/faster at making omelettes" to say "sure, that's better/faster at making omelettes, I don't want omelettes so it doesn't matter to me".

Like I just can't see any way that this isn't agreeing with the fundamental point, but trying to extract a refutation from that agreement by saying, effectively, you're having a different conversation than the one we've been having up to this point.

I really think we should separate "better" and "faster". I certainly see them as different things, so why assume they're the same?

 

[Faolyn]

I really think we should separate "better" and "faster". I certainly see them as different things, so why assume they're the same?

This. Take combat. There are people for whom "detailed, lots of options, multiple things to do on a turn" is better. There are people for whom "one attack, lets get it over with" is better.

 

[mamba]

That is still passing off agreement that X is good/fast at making omelettes as somehow a rejection of the argument. Hussar has been quite clear that all he is saying is "X is good/fast at making omelettes"

the ‘problem’ is that both the steak and the omelette in my analogy are called a sandbox in this thread, so to stick with the analogy he in effect was saying ‘dish’ when he meant ‘omelette’ and others were thinking ‘steak’

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, I would argue that "I just want to do it my way and anything which prevents me from doing it my way is The Worst Thing Ever" is fundamentally a rejection of the concept of game design in the first place. IMO, such people do not want to play games. They want to do the thing they want to do, the game is just a convenient guise for doing what they want to do.

And...so?

I fail to see a problem with any of this, other than the part saying "such people do not want to play games". The fact is, they still want to play, but want to play a game rather than multiple games.

You're reading someone who embraces and sticks with one game design (positive) as someone who rejects all other game designs (negative) and even rejects the very concept of game design (somewhat ludicrous).

 

[Alzrius]

Hussar has been quite clear that all he is saying is "X is good/fast at making omelettes"

No, that is not all he's been saying. As @Faolyn has already pointed out, Hussar has made several comments that were much more judgmental than that:

I'm saying that D&D is not a very good sandbox game.

There are other systems that work better for creating sandboxes than D&D.

 

[The Firebird]

This sounds to me like "Yes, but I don't care", not "No." Yet it is being presented as though it were "No, you're just wrong."

The problem is there is lot of subjectivity about the topic it is "good" at. Is it easier to make a sandbox in Ironsworn than D&D? For me, no, because Ironsworn isn't creating something that I consider (for me) to be a sandbox. It's a storytelling game, it constructs an emergent narrative.

But I'm certainly not going to go and say "you're not playing a real sandbox" or "you can't have a sandbox without X", because these are kind of vague definitions that mean different things to different people. There is no need for me to enforce my view of sandbox on others.

Because this whole conversation is predicated on those fuzzy definitions, appealing to the absolute, Platonic idea of a "sandbox" to make a point is not fruitful.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't think we need to keep holding @Hussar 's feet to the fire on the phrasing. I reacted pretty negatively to the original framing of the conversation myself, but since then Hussar has taken the position that it is just easier to prep using a little-to-no prep method like the one available in Ironsworn. I might quibble to a degree, but that seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. I think our initial phrasing in these threads is sometimes casual, and we may throw in a word like better, either not literally meaning it or just not having thought through all the implications of the statement. If the poster is basically agreeing with you at this point, not much to be gained by hashing over their words like it is a courtroom (I think forum discussions are more like live conversations, where people say things but also walk things back and arrive at a final position after back and forth)

 

[pemerton]

Which is, functionally, what Hussar is arguing. That D&D was not actually designed to support a sandbox experience

But this is obviously false, at least for classic D&D.