NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wicht" data-source="post: 6585715" data-attributes="member: 221">A hobby is something invest in, with time, money, energy, and emotional attachment. An outright slam on someone's hobby using words which can only be taken as insulting to that hobby are going to enflame opinions.I used the analogy of the wife earlier.... Reword your question, "So if I say that I think all women except the one I married were ugly, and if a man had a wife, he would take that opinion a bit personally, even though I never said anything about him at all?"   The answer is obvious.  The far better expression would be, "I have the best wife in the world." Nobody (mostly) would take offense at that sentiment.  There are right and wrong ways to say something. And its never a good idea to just out and out badmouth the object of another person's affection. You immediately lose that person as a viable partner in a rational conversation.Its not going to help if you try to couch your attacks in assurances of your good intentions either... "I am only telling you your wife is ugly because of tough love. I like her a lot, but you have to admit her teeth have always been crooked, and though I spend most every day with her, and she is one of my favorite people, she has the personality of a wart-hog. She has hurt your marriage ever since you married her..." How does that win friends?Obviously, one would hope that one is more emotionally attached to the spouse than to the game, but for many of us, this is a hobby that we have spent years involved in. Decades even. This is a game that was formative in childhoods, molding people creatively. So, ask yourself... a person gets introduced to a game at the age of nine. Spends most of his/her waking childhood making characters, drawing out dungeons, reading the books. They invest hundreds of dollars a year in it. They plan their vacations around it. They teach it to their children. Maybe they have even written for it and been published and then you come along and say, "Its a bad game. The rules stink. Its egregiously flawed and has hindered the hobby for years... Its an irredeemable albatross..."  What exactly do you think that is going to do? If you take it one step further and then start actually insulting the people who like the game by implying they are stubborn and too stupid to see how bad the game they like actually is, it is only going to get worse from there...There are obviously ways to talk about these things that are better than others. As with the spouse analogy, try playing up what you like about your game without actually discussing what you dislike about someone elses. It can't always be done, but it can mostly be done.  If you don't like Thac0, then its better to talk about how intuitive you find the 10+ AC system that was adopted for 3e then it is to talk about how banal the older system is. The former is expressing a positive opinion that only the most thin skinned will take bad. The latter is making a direct criticism of something that a person might actually have some level of emotional attachment to.</blockquote>

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