Badwrongfun & unintentional elitism...

[Li Shenron]

Anyways, like I said, I have a point. At least... I thought I did. I seem to have lost it. Oh, right, there it is. My point is, I've been an elitist snob. For all that I've read about how people could improve their games and make it more fun for themselves and for their players, I've completely forgotten the most important thing:

The game is supposed to be fun. As long as the players and DM are enjoying themselves, they're doing absolutely nothing wrong. It might irk me when they play fast and loose with the rules, but I'm the aberration here.

I had the chance to play in a game tonight, because it so happened that only one other person wasn't going to be playing D&D, and as I sat through the combats (which frankly bored me), all I could think was how the DM was doing everything wrong. But the other people were having fun. And you know what, when I just turned off my brain and went with the flow, I started having fun too.

Just because you have some pet peeves, it doesn't make you an elitist snob

Everyone agrees that fun is the point of gaming, and that the DM should be open about changing the game if people are not having fun... But it's important also to realize that the DM is there to play the game too, and her fun is just as important as the players'. Furthermore, just as the good DM is open to change things that aren't fun for the players, the good player is open to accept some things that he doesn't like but the others do. What you did in the game shows that you're a good player... sometimes the best way to have fun is focusing on what the DM and gaming group is offering rather that what it's missing.

 

[Asmor]

After putting some more thought into it, I've come up with a better explanation of why I think I was being snobbish...

See, it's not just a matter of my having preferences, but in my mind I didn't consider them preferences; I considered them the right way to play, and people that didn't meet my expectations were playing incorrectly. Hence, badwrongfun.

I think that badwrongfun is the good kind of hyperbole. When I realized that's what I was actually feeling about how people were playing, the sheer audacity of the concept of badwrongfun made me stop in my tracks and really think about what I was doing.

So ultimately, I guess my real epiphany here was realizing that my preferences were just that, and not "the one true way."

 

[SavageRobby]

Thats a good epiphany. I wish more folks had that kind of gaming humility.


I don't think there are wrong ways to play ... but there are sure a helluva lot of ways that I don't enjoy being part of, at least long term. I've found I can play any game once, and probably have fun, but for longer term enjoyment the game has to be fairly close to my "gaming alignment". Luckily I have a group that is similar, and live in a community that seems to have a lot of like-minded folks.


Also, you should definitely read through the Savage Worlds rules. The game is very different from D&D (at least 3x - sounds like 4x is going to steal some pages from it, though), runs quickly ... and handles fumbles and successes differently.

 

[WayneLigon]

I've just picked up the Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition, and I'm wanting to run a game of that... I really like the 50 Fathoms and Necropolis settings. But I digress...

If you have a lot of people new to roleplaying there, I'd suggest doing exactly that. When I was running stuff at the FLGS, I had three people who were fairly new to RPGs - they had played two or three sessions of D&D. They liked Savage Worlds a great deal more in many ways. A friend of mine whose son is running his first campaigns; he and his friends prefer using Savage Worlds over d20 because of the complexity issues though they like playing d20.

They described the characters they wanted and I built them. I successfully built a 'Ranger' with animal speech and control, an experienced mage, a neophyte mage, a barbarian, a holy warrior, and a rogue using the same rules.

 

[Desdichado]

Its not "elitism", its just well developed personal taste.

Yes, it is elitism if it's "they're playing wrong," "they're bad DM's" etc. Not matching you in taste is not wrong or bad. It's just different. If you can recognize that (which it sounds like the epiphany story is all about) then that's when it migrates from elitism to well developed personal taste.

For what it's worth, I'd probably rather play with the guys the OP is describing than the OP himself. That's my well developed personal taste. Strict adherence to the rules is not fun to me.

 

[fusangite]

You can have fun playing a game wrong. And you can fail to have fun playing a game right.

"Wrong" is not the opposite of fun; it's orthogonal to fun.

My definition of right and wrong has to do with how closely one's play conforms to the design of the game. I have a great time playing D&D wrong, a better time than I do playing D&D right. But I think it's a real mistake to make right and wrong completely subjective -- if we make right and wrong personal and subjective, it becomes difficult to playtest, debug and evaluate rules.

I always play Scrabble wrong; if I had to play Scrabble correctly I would never play.

 

[Asmor]

I always play Scrabble wrong; if I had to play Scrabble correctly I would never play.

Play Scrabble wrong?

Oh, you mean Up-Words!

Sorry... What can I say, I'm a board game snob too.

 

[d20Dwarf]

Play Scrabble wrong?

Oh, you mean Up-Words!

Sorry... What can I say, I'm a board game snob too.

He means they allouw you to spell wourds with "u" when they don't have any.

 

[Desdichado]

My definition of right and wrong has to do with how closely one's play conforms to the design of the game. I have a great time playing D&D wrong, a better time than I do playing D&D right. But I think it's a real mistake to make right and wrong completely subjective -- if we make right and wrong personal and subjective, it becomes difficult to playtest, debug and evaluate rules.

That depends on your take on D&D, though. I've always seen it as less of a game and more of a framework for a joint creative outlet between all the players (and the DM). Or, to quote the first issue of Ray Winninger's famous "Dungeoncraft" series of articles in Dragon Magazine, "The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) game is a game of the imagination. It's this characteristic more than any other that sets AD&D apart from chess, checkers, charades, poker, Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, Space Invaders, and just about any other game that comes to mind. All of these other games are defined by their rules-pass 'Go' to collect $200, a flush beats a straight, and so forth. The AD&D game, on the other hand, doesn't really have any rules. The Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide aren't full of rules in the conventional sense-they're more like suggestions. AD&D players are expected to take these suggestions and use them to create their own games ideally suited to their own tastes."

Taken literally, and if you believe it, then you actually can't play D&D wrong... unless you're playing it in such a way that you're not having fun.

 

[fusangite]

That depends on your take on D&D, though. I've always seen it as less of a game and more of a framework for a joint creative outlet between all the players (and the DM).

Back when the RPG market was a lot smaller and people had spent a lot less time thinking about and categorizing RPG styles, I think this was probably truer.

But today if people want to have a more freeform joint creative outlet, they have a lot of systems to choose from that deliver this better than D&D does. As the RPG market has developed up to the present, my experience is that D&D out of all the available RPGs offers the most structured, rules-bound, carefully circumscribed RPG experience currently on the market.

Or, to quote the first issue of Ray Winninger's famous "Dungeoncraft" series of articles in Dragon Magazine, "The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) game is a game of the imagination. It's this characteristic more than any other that sets AD&D apart from chess, checkers, charades, poker, Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, Space Invaders, and just about any other game that comes to mind. All of these other games are defined by their rules-pass 'Go' to collect $200, a flush beats a straight, and so forth. The AD&D game, on the other hand, doesn't really have any rules. The Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide aren't full of rules in the conventional sense-they're more like suggestions. AD&D players are expected to take these suggestions and use them to create their own games ideally suited to their own tastes."

Or, to quote the 1E Players' Handbook "a high armor class like -10, unlike a high armor class like 10..." AD&D was a beautiful self-contradictory mass of statements.

I currently play in a campaign that has taken this a little too far. It is really nothing more than a negotiation with the GM; no die rolls we make have any meaning because if the GM doesn't want us to succeed, we don't and if he wants us to succeed we do. What we roll on the dice has absolutely no bearing on events that take place.

Taken literally, and if you believe it, then you actually can't play D&D wrong... unless you're playing it in such a way that you're not having fun.

I'm getting old here because I know I said something very like this in an ENW post about four years ago but I think everyone can agree that sitting down with a bunch of D&D books, cannisters of nitrous oxide, pinking shears, polyhedral and finger paint, people could have a rollicking good time cutting up the core books and smearing them with finger paint based on ad hoc interpretations of various die rolls while taking copious hits of nitrous. It would be fun but there is no way it could be defined as playing D&D right.