Academic Plague in gaming

[Doug McCrae]

Well I think Dungeons & Dragons is pretentious. Look at the spell names. They could've called it 'Rainbow Spray' instead of 'Prismatic Spray'. It would've been a lot clearer. And what the hell does 'lucubration' mean anyway?

Looks to the heavens, shaking fist....

VAAAAANCE!

 

[Turjan]

Well I think Dungeons & Dragons is pretentious. Look at the spell names. They could've called it 'Rainbow Spray' instead of 'Prismatic Spray'. It would've been a lot clearer. And what the hell does 'lucubration' mean anyway?

Looks to the heavens, shaking fist....

VAAAAANCE!

That's the "Excellent Prismatic Spray" for you, Sir !
Did Jack Vance die recently?

 

[Nisarg]

I think you overestimate the importance of Amber. In a recent poll here on EN World regarding our favorite non-d20 games it was not mentioned even once. It's still a game that is fairly well known, but whatever happens to Amber won't really interest many people.

Well, for a start, Amber is played by probably five to ten times as many people as play Nobilis. There's nearing a half-dozen Ambercons (gaming cons dedicated specifically to Amber) per year.

But in the long run, you're right, Amber certainly isn't important in the bigger scheme of things.
I mention it because its a good smaller-case example of how academic plague can be harmful to RPGs (Amber's very existence being threatened by Nobilis fanboys who bought into the idea that Nobilis is a "smarter" diceless game because its trendy and pretentious); because its one step in a process of momentum for these people, and finally because its very personally important to me (having been an Amber DM since it was first published).

Its also a clear example of a TRULY smart RPG, in contrast to rpgs that are big on flowery words and jargon and very very small on actual ideas.

Nisarg

 

[fusangite]

I think it can . The reason is that the "self-appointed cultural elite" lost most its influence on society quite some time ago. The times when academics were looked up to are long gone. Today's "cultural elite" plays in movie theaters and TV shows.

I see where you are coming from but I'm reaching the opposite conclusion with the identical data. The postmodernism that continues to define academia is strongly linked to how TV and movies work today. Intertextuality, the questioning and rejection of narrative and the proliferation of new types of identity are what TV and movies are all about these days. The rise of Seinfeld in the 1990s was not disconnected from what went on in academia in the 80s and 90s.

Now that's not to say that the academic elite of a culture control and define the culture. I'm just positing a real and complex relationship between a culture's intellectual elite and where the culture as a whole is heading.

D&D is a phenomenon on its own. Although it covers only half of the RPG market, for many people it is still "the RPG". Nobilis has a completely different target market. I don't think there's a cross section between both markets.

Every single person I've played Nobilis with, I've also played D&D with. Does that count?

 

[Darkness]

No one in 1990 would have thought that a white wolf game about vampires by a guy with a dot in his name with lots of pretentious words would unseat AD&D and end up causing everyone to (unsuccessfully) mimick its formula, either.

Nor did Vampire ever 'unseat' AD&D.
AFAIK, all WoD games taken together outsold AD&D exactly once, in a month at the height of TSR's crisis - and at no other time in RPG history. Vampire by itself never did.

I have trouble with thinking that the kind of people who hang out at the forge or even the nobilis and exalted fanboys on RPGnet are the "gaming cultural elite"..

I don't know who's our "cultural elite", but Exalted players aren't it, nor do any but the most deluded think so. Most Exalted 'fanboys' (of which I am one) aren't much different from many D&D players, wanting little more than to kill stuff and have adventures in a fantasy world that happens to look a bit different than a typical Tolkien-inspired setting.

... Today [the supposedly pretentious people] take over the GoO Amber boards and destroy Amber to promote their pet game.

Has GoO listened to them or not? Do we know yet? If not, it's a little premature to say they've destroyed Amber.

Tomorrow one of the vociferous exalted-nuts from RPGnet gets a seat judging the Ennies.

And what's the huge difference between them and a D&D 'nut', exactly? Apart from killing stuff in a fantasy world that looks different from yours, that is.

The day after that someone from the Forge gets a job at Wizards and convinces confused marketing guys that his revolutionary RPG about zombie housewives buying groceries is going to be the next big thing, and they all listen to him because he speaks with big words.

If WotC manage to become this incompetent, they will fail without needing to hire an Indie RPG designer with delusions of grandeur. Also, I think most Indie RPG designers know full well what sells and create their games not solely out of commercial interest...

... Every other company on the market (just about) copies TSR or WW, the latter of whom have now stolen the industry leader position without so much as a single shot fired.

Unless I missed something, WW is not the industry leader; WotC is.

... the new story-based games turn people off gaming by the thousands (in both numbers who leave, and those who simply never join) ...

You're saying the existence of WoD games turns off people who would otherwise be playing (say) D&D? That doesn't even make sense.

 

[Nisarg]

Nor did Vampire ever 'unseat' AD&D.
AFAIK, all WoD games taken together outsold AD&D exactly once, in a month at the height of TSR's crisis - and at no other time in RPG history. Vampire by itself never did.

Correct. However, in the mid-90s they had clearly won the war of ideas with TSR.. being that TSR had none, and chose to copy all of WW's (flawed) theories of game design instead of coming up with their own.

I don't know who's our "cultural elite", but Exalted players aren't it, nor do any but the most deluded think so. Most Exalted 'fanboys' (of which I am one) aren't much different from many D&D players, wanting little more than to kill stuff and have adventures in a fantasy world that happens to look a bit different than a typical Tolkien-inspired setting.

Really? the Exalted fans on RPGnet would probably beg to differ with you, as they're pretty well constantly claiming that Exalted is about so much more than D&D, its actually about deep social issues and "dealing with the consequences of massive power" (secret code for "i'm a munchkin but can't admit it, so i'll make up a pseudo-intellectual justification for my munchkinism").
I'm pretty sure that if you posted a thread there saying that Exalted is pretty much the same as D&D and its basically about killing things and taking their stuff in a slightly different world, you would have four to eight pages of thread within 24 hours of people claiming it isn't that at all, denouncing you for attacks, and reporting you to the mods.

Has GoO listened to them or not? Do we know yet? If not, it's a little premature to say they've destroyed Amber.

Thankfully it is premature, and I continue to struggle on the GoO boards to make sure that GoO doesn't commit such a catastrophic error. I think in the end they won't.

Nisarg

 

[Nisarg]

Unless I missed something, WW is not the industry leader; WotC is. You're saying the existence of WoD games turns off people who would otherwise be playing (say) D&D? That doesn't even make sense.

The quotes you were referring to there were part of my little history lesson, I was saying what happened back then, not now.

And yes, in the mid-late nineties, the existence of WoD game design theory (ie. story-based gaming) turned off thousands of players, who would have been into D&D if D&D had not been hijacked by those very same theories.

In other words, anyone who didn't like story-based gaming pretty much had nowhere to turn, so they either kept playing their older systems, or quit playing RPGs altogether.
Most of those who left, never came back.

Nisarg

 

[Doc_Klueless]

And yes, in the mid-late nineties, the existence of WoD game design theory (ie. story-based gaming) turned off thousands of players, who would have been into D&D if D&D had not been hijacked by those very same theories.

You keep saying things like this. Not just in this thread, but others here and on RPG.net. Could you supply somekind of backing for these statements other than "because I said so?"

I'm honestly not saying this to be confrontational. I'm genuinely curious about actual facts about trends like this.

 

[Nisarg]

You keep saying things like this. Not just in this thread, but others here and on RPG.net. Could you supply somekind of backing for these statements other than "because I said so?"

I'm honestly not saying this to be confrontational. I'm genuinely curious about actual facts about trends like this.

Well, I don't see it as my duty to bring the data I've seen to you on a silver platter, but I will point you in the right direction. There have been a number of reports about the state of gaming and gaming trends (everything from marketing reports to essays) about the hobby.
All agree that in the mid to late nineties two simultaneous phenomena occured:
1. many many people who were playing RPGs stopped.
2. there were way way less younger teens starting to play.

Those two circumstances led to a crisis we are still facing today in gaming.

Now, there are different people who argue different things about the cause of this decline. Many of those who support story-based gaming would like to claim that it was the CCG craze, not their takeover of the RPG industry, that caused this flight. "It was magic cards!"..

..which is a bit like saying that no one dies of AIDS, just of AIDS-related pneumonia. Had the RPG industry been strong, and been producing products that younger teens and old-time gamers enjoyed and wanted to pay for, the RPG industry would have been far more ready to weather the CCG fad.
But instead, the intellectual bankruptcy of most gaming companies (especially WW) and their lack of vision in following trendy models of game design that seemed successful but were really only ever successful in ONE case (Vampire), and there only because it was specifically oriented to PEOPLE WHO WEREN'T GAMERS AND WOULDN'T LIKELY PLAY ANYTHING ELSE EVER, led to a crippling weakness in the RPG market that made a minor problem (CCGs) into a disaster.

so:

pretentious academic plague = Bad game design = weak gaming industry

but only IF people allow the pseudointellectuals out there to take over and push their bad design over what works.

Hopefully Wizards won't get to that same point of weakness TSR was at.. nevertheless, one must be vigilant.

Nisarg

 

[Doug McCrae]

A more story-based gaming started at TSR no later than 1984 with the first Dragonlance module. So I don't think WW can shoulder all the blame.

Anyway some folk seem to like that sort of stuff, though I'm not one of them.