Academic Plague in gaming

[Mallus]

In other words, mental onanism of the worst kind.

You mean even worse than this thread?

Nisarg, if you don't like The Forge... don't read it. Some people enjoy whatever it is they do there. Making fun of another persons unusual hobbies is something that RPG'ers should avoid, unless their in training for the Ironu Olympics...

If you don't like the very specific brand of "story-based game" embodied by White Wolf... don't buy them.

If your hackles raise at discussions of "Deconstruction and Dragons" or "The Culture-Logic of Late Capitalism: D20", don't participate, do something else. Perhaps a nice game of chess... or a walk.

 

[Nisarg]

Huh. I loved the Amber books (the first series more than the second, and the knockoffs not at all) and hated the game system, which boiled down to "convince the GM that even if your number is lower, you should win".

The mental image of a spastic Benedict constantly parrying attacks from invisible people that might be there just served to emphasize what was wrong with the system. (If you haven't read the RPG, there's an example of play where an invisible PC surprise attacks Benedict, the best warrior ever. The DM says that he fails, because Benedict is so good that he's constantly thinking about how to parry attacks from invisible attackers.)

Takes all kinds, though.

J

I should clarify for the non-Amber players out there, that Amber works as a kind of "toolkit". There are varying levels of power and ability that you can use for your campaign, everything from a game where Amberites are only a little better than humans, to games where Amberites are godlike superheros. In the book itself there are at least three versions of each Amberite to facilitate this, and the rules are all very loosely defined specifically to facilitate DM mods.
Erick Wujcik's particular view of the elder Amberites tends toward the "superbeing" end of the spectrum, that doesn't mean that you have to run it that way.

Likewise, the system is considerably more complex than "best attribute wins", its actually a system that requires high levels of descriptive play as in any conflict the real struggle is to be able to use your terrain and other circumstances to your advantages, and to "switch the battle" to your stronger attributes or away from your enemy's strengths. It is highly possible for a weaker character to beat a stronger one, if they play smart.

Finally, I would say you're in the minority as far as Amber fans go, most love the RPG, and the number of fan support online and real-world Cons is a pretty clear sign of that.

Nisarg

 

[hexgrid]

Yea, but look at the design notes for it on their forums.

They'll make a game like "schoolgirls chasing kittens the RPG", but only after spending 200 pages talking about how it should fit "GNS theory", whether it fits with Ron Edwards' divine laws of acceptable games, and what kind of sociopolitical implications exist in a metaphorical game world or schoolgirls chasing kittens.
Then after the game is done, they'll bicker with each other about whether the game is a perfect narrativist model or if it has "simulationist undertones".

...

Sounds interesting- I'll have to check it out.

 

[francisca]

Seems to me that the "Academic Plague in gaming" has invaded message boards moreso than the actual games.

Some people want and demand very complex/flexible/elegant systems, others want simplicty at the cost of granularity, most of the unwashed masses want something in the middle, of vary degrees of course. Both camps look at each other, shake their heads -- as the other guys just doesn't get it --, and then walk around with puffed chests proclaiming they play the "one true way." Whatever....

While you guys are debating the more esoteric points of RPG design, academic masturbation masquerading as game theory, dumbing down the game to attract teen-agers, hack jockeys vs. amateur thespians, and the egos of game designers and online forum denizens alike, I'm going to get out my battlemat, DM screen, and grab my dice.

T-minus 4 hours, 19 minutes until gamenight, baby.

 

[Nisarg]

Here we get to the heart of the problem, which isn't WW or any trend in gaming, but rather that none of you were decent DMs. With any game, it's usually not the system, its the DM. If you didn't like what they were givign you, why didn't you simply create your own stuff? Hell, with D&D, I've been making my own dungeons since 7th grade. With WW, i too hate most of the metalot changes, and you know what? I didn't use all of them. Lodin is still up and alive, the Asian vampires didn't overrun LA, there are till tremere in the Sabbat and Gangrel in the Camarilla. My games been going on for the past ten years and I've never run one of their adventures. I haven't even used their city books except for NPCs. It's my goal to get the PCs to Chicago at some point so I can finally use the second V:tM book I ever bought. I do the same thing I D&D. Unless running a purposly cheezy "classic hack and slash' game, I don't use the standard modules much. I make my own. If the material you were getting wasn't to your tastes, then all you had to do was make your own. That most of you decided to quit rather than take the mantle of responsibility upon yourself says more about yourselves than the game publishers.

On the contrary, my friends were all very good gamers (only a few of us being DMs though, myself included). But the reality is that you can only deal with having to edit books to weed out metaplot for so long before you burn out from the effort.
The alternative is to stop buying new books at all, of course, and just keep playing the old games you enjoy. But when one gets to that point the possibility of just dropping out of gaming altogether increases substantially, and for all practical purposes any gamer who does that is effectively no longer part of the active gaming market anyways.
There could be a million people out there still playing 1e D&D, who haven't bought a book since 1983. That doesn't mean they can be counted as part of the gaming community for the purposes of considering the survivability of the hobby as a viable market.

Nisarg

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Yes, the use of common terms in uncommon ways is another surefire sign of academic plague. This is a problem that's found often on the Forge and in GNS theory, where terms like "narrativist" or "gamist" don't really mean what one would intuitively take them to mean. Ron Edwards does this almost constantly.

Nisarg

Actually it is a mark of 'ignoramous plague', nearly the exact opposite - one who decided that the academics had nothing wothwhile to say, so not bothering to learn the jargon or vocabulary. (I prefer the term 'vocaubulary' to jargon - jargon indicates an informal rather than practiced set of terms, and at root means 'nonsense' (M. English jarjoun.) Of someone remaining willfully ignorant rather than finding out what others have to say. He thought that he had created something new when what he had done is reinvent the wheel.

Creationists who do not bother learning anything about evolution, and wish it banned from the books.

One last thing to remember is 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof'
Which is to say that if you are making an extrodinary claim 'Academic Plague is Killing RPGs!' for example, then the burden of proof is born by the claimant. So like a 'creationist' you are demanding that the same level of credibility be given to your arguments as to someone who makes more reasonable claims, such as that 'RPG sales go in cycles' must bear.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof was coined by Carl Sagan, and is more than fitting for this occassion. I just wish that I had remembered it earlier.

The Auld Grump

 

[Nisarg]

One last thing to remember is 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof'
Which is to say that if you are making an extrodinary claim 'Academic Plague is Killing RPGs!' for example, then the burden of proof is born by the claimant.

How fortunate for me that I didn't make any such claim.

Unfortunately, that means that either you have completely failed to grasp my posts on this thread, or you are willfully choosing to misrepresent them as a cheap way to further your own side of the argument.

Nisarg

 

[Faraer]

It's arbitrary to define 'story-based gaming' as 'running PCs through a predefined story'. While this happens, and is even occasionally recommended, it's certainly not how most games that talk a lot about story work. (Gary Gygax himself has used this straw man.)

It's rhetoric to call the Forge posters pseudointellectuals. At least some of them are genuine intellectuals.

If you say GNS is a load of garbage, how do you account for when people find it useful, other than by making unsubstantiatable ad hominem accusations of self-deception? But you also say it's just fine to say there are three kinds of gaming, and one could as easily have two, or four. But GNS is just a model, and has never claimed to be the only model.

RPG culture is full of jargon. Is there really more in indie games than in D&D?

Actually, I think 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' is nonsense. For some practical purposes, yes: I would want to look carefully at an alleged unicorn in someone's garden, whereas I might take it on trust they had a dog. But scientifically, if I wanted to be really sure it was a dog, I'd need as much proof as with the unicorn. But Nisarg hasn't provided any proof. It may or may not be his responsibility to do so, but he'd be more likely to convince people if he did.

 

[drnuncheon]

Erick Wujcik's particular view of the elder Amberites tends toward the "superbeing" end of the spectrum, that doesn't mean that you have to run it that way.

True. I don't see that as being particularly innovative, though - I can do the same thing with D&D by setting the DCs for tasks at appropriate levels, or making the 'average person' higher or lower level in relation to the PCs.

Likewise, the system is considerably more complex than "best attribute wins", its actually a system that requires high levels of descriptive play as in any conflict the real struggle is to be able to use your terrain and other circumstances to your advantages, and to "switch the battle" to your stronger attributes or away from your enemy's strengths.

All of which depends on your ability to convince the GM that your explanation for why the battle should go your way is better than your opponent's.

The books would have gone quite differently if Corwin's player had said (for example) during the duel with Benedict, "I lure him into the tangling grass that I know about and he doesn't" and Benedict had said "Wait, I'm the mack daddy master warrior. I should be able to tell when he's leading me into a trap, because I study the same battle with minor variations thousands of times, and I know what a trap looks like. I turn it around and force him into the grass."

It's all a matter of sounding plausible to the GM.

It is highly possible for a weaker character to beat a stronger one, if they play smart.

If and only if the GM wants you to be able to. Otherwise, he can just say "Well, I see that you're attacking invisibly and from surprise, but that's really not enough to shift the odds in your favor."

Finally, I would say you're in the minority as far as Amber fans go, most love the RPG, and the number of fan support online and real-world Cons is a pretty clear sign of that.

I don't know where you get your numbers of how many people have read Amber vs. how many people even know about the game, let alone play it. I am sure that, for example, far more people have read Lord of the Rings and/or watched the films than have played the RPG (either version). The same goes for other popular genre books and films like Star Wars or Star Trek.

In any case, that's sort of summed up in "it takes all kinds", because clearly some players do enjoy it.


Has it occurred to you, though, that your post to me was uncomfortably close to the same ones you complain about? I posted my opinion of Amber and its flaws, and you rushed in to correct me, as much as saying that "I don't get it"...

J

 

[drnuncheon]

...the post so nice I posted it twice...