Discussing problems with D&D/d20 rules...

[Mobius]

RPG's would not even be as popular as they are now if not for capitalism. Don't be an idiot. I guarantee that communist and socialist nations wouldn't have spent their time and money creating something as non-essential as RPG's.

Your first logical mistake is equating greed and capitalism.

Capitalism is a system of supply and demand that mostly runs itself without intervention and which relies on the investment of capital to kickstart functioning businesses.

Greed is an unhealthy desire to acquire, the implication being that there is a healthy level of acquisition and an unhealthy level. Capitalists exhibit both types. I am only against those who take it too far.

Your second logical mistake is in concluding that because Communism failed as a theoretical model for a country's finances, that anything that even smells like Communism is a non-functioning mess. Get out of your country for a while and travel the world. There are RPGs in Germany (90% unionization rate), Sweden, Finland, France and a whole host of other nations that are nominally 'socialist'. There are even RPGs in such a socialist bastion as South America. In fact, if it weren't for the Internet, many of the games you enjoy here in the States wouldn't even be known in Europe.

Your third logical mistake is in assuming that Capitalism is 'better' than either Communism or Socialism. Capitalism survived and Communism essentially didn't, but that doesn't mean that one is 'better' than the other. Both are rather extreme theories on how to arrange a country, if you really look at them. Can a communist theory that advocates the government own 100% of everything work? 100% of anything is a pretty extreme number by definition. By the same token, a theory that takes an idea of limited utility - the market - and overapplies it to every single aspect of human interaction is going to show its weaknesses, too. People aren't so comfortable with starving to death in the land of plenty or with being told that they are 'commodities'.

Your fourth logical mistake is that assuming that because I do not like greedy people, that I am somehow lacking in mental acuity. Greed has its place, but I reserve the title of 'idiot' for those people who worship greed like it is some sort of virtue.

 

[derverdammte]

You must not work with the public - You would know without a doubt that they are morons. Many are not but I am constantly amazed at the stupidity of seemingly normal people.

I work with the public (sort of). Not only are our callers often morons, they frequently blame *me* for their condition. I just want to tell them, "Look, it's not *my* fault you're stupid."

 

[LokiDR]

I am going to respond to this post, since it seems to be where all arguing started over this topic.

Who cares? *I* do. Not all of us out here are so apathetic in our buying decisions as you seem to be.

I have found that there two types of people in this world:

Type A:

Gives a rat's ass about how and why things are done. They pick up garbage, picket Wal-Mart, invest ethically, buy from other human beings, reward good people with their custom, buy quality products that last, etc. because there are good, long-term reasons to do these things.

Type B:

Don't give a rat's ass about how and why things are done. They drop garbage on the ground, shop at Wal-Mart, invest indiscriminately, buy from machines, reward greedy jerks with their custom, buy ty products that they replace every month or so, etc. because they don't care about anyone else but themselves.

My credo is that substandard people subscribe to the cult of the substandard. WotC fails on both counts. They are substandard people because they care more about the money in our collective wallets than they do about the people that own the wallets. They also purposefully put out a substandard product they knew could have been better.

Maybe you are OK with half-assed treatment and a half-assed product, but it takes more than that to get my money.

Mobius, I'm sure you could be called a lot of less civilized names like "liberal", "left wing" and even "hippy". I don't think these names apply to you. I think you are a Utopian.

You seem to want a company put all possible effort into a perfect product, uncompromising. If they had to drop garbage on the ground to make the perfect game, it isn't perfect. You want utopia, or near as you can get. Hey, if you find a way, let me know.

Let me tell you why I don't think it has never happened and never will: perfection is impossible. You call WotC "They are substandard people because they care more about the money in our collective wallets than they do about the people that own the wallets". If they tried to make the game up to your standards they wouldn't make money and no game would have been made. You call WotC "also purposefully put out a substandard product they knew could have been better." It can always be better, always.

The reality is that dime store shlock fiction is aimed at a lower audience. Is George R. R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" sub standard, or the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan? The reality is that movies are not seen as "intellectual", so they are not aimed at that crowd. I like the occasional action movie, with pretty special effects, bad action, and predictable plots because sometimes it is fun to turn your brain off.

In order to get the kind of high standards you want, every one would have to agree not to put out shlock. Some one will always put out shlock if they think they can make money. Take away money and you get socialism. Karl Marx was an inteliget guy, but humans corrupt systems, and socialism on a large scale has never proven feasible.

Honestly, I think you just need to relax and realize the world isn't perfect and never will be. WotC really did listen to their players, and really did try to make something for them. They tried to make something that every one would enjoy. If you say the making something for everyone is bad, then you are just being elitist.

 

[Patrick-S&S]

Re: Ok. Now this will probably get me in trouble, but...

If you guys are trying to sell Harn to ENWorld, you're going about it in a piss-poor manner.

Hey, please do bag all Hârn gamers to be like the very few anti-d20 people at the Hârn forum. KK is doing this thing by himself and although perhaps a worthy effort only a few Hârnfans are pissing on the d20 system. I do not like it as much as I do HârnMaster, and I find it to be anything but my cup of tea, but I do not say that those who do are worthless and childish. Taste varies and that is a good thing.

Oh, and KK, your statement of "Without these posts, no one at ENWorld (the internet's largest D&D/d20 fan site) would ever have heard of Harn," is quite wrong. Arrogant, but wrong. Luckily, I knew how great Harn was before you started posting here about it and badmouthing ENWorlders in general over on HarnForum, otherwise I would have never given it a look.

Yes indeed and I am a bit sorry that it has come to this. People on the EnWorld boards usually know what Hârn was before KK's posts. I have myself been vocalizing the Hârn game for a while here but in a more subtle approach. I see no point in showing it down peoples' throats. But KK is not meaning anything bad by all this I am sure. He should only have been more subtle IMO.

Well, yet another forum that I see no point in visiting. I see plenty of the "geeks calling geeks geeks" phenomenon on the forums I visit already; I don't need to expand my depth of experience in that regard.

I would urge you to reconsider. The Hârn Forum is usually an extremely polite forum normally and I have yet to find a forum with so much meaty content. True you have a bitch section (named Pamesani Arena) where you can bitch about all things you do not like, and believe me some of the posts there are from Hârnfans who are bitching about the HârnMaster system (they use some other system when gaming Hârn). As you should be aware by now the setting and the system are not the same.

I am quite concerned that so many think the Hârn people are all a bunch of snobs looking down on the rest of the gaming world. True many are extremely dedicated but only a few vocal ones are dissing the rest of the community. RPGs are all about having fun. I have seen hostility on these boards against other games besides d20 so the anti-d20 posts on the Hârn Forum does not stretch too far from the tone on these boards. And I have seen some pretty heavy flaming here that would never appear on the Hârn Forum. Good thing the moderators here are doing a great job.

I think it all have to do with the fact that we defend what we like.

I have quite a bit of Harn product and it would be a great system if the production values went up. I am not sure what happened with Auran but it looks like Harn missed the boat.

Well considering how much traffic the Hârn Forum has compared to Auran's I am beginning to think it is the other way around. Hârn is still popular with its small crowd who usually buys all stuff Hârnic, even it is has low sales compared to d20/D&D. It is slowly growing but since it has been active since 1983 without faltering, I see no immidiate threat to its current state. True it could have been more popular but I hardly think it would have been the same game if it was.

This was the last post on these boards that I will ever write. I am going back ot the Hârn forum and a few other forums where I am active. It has been kinda fun even though the few last posts have been about defending Hârn and the use of d20 in it.

 

[Mark]

Re: Re: Ok. Now this will probably get me in trouble, but...

HârnMaster

Could you please explain that pre-game doc you have on your site. It seemed to be a two hour gaming session, one-on-one, with the soul purpose of railroading the player into a background in which they had little to no input. I was surprised that someone would take so much time to give so few choices during character generation.

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

Re: Re: Re: Ok. Now this will probably get me in trouble, but...

Could you please explain that pre-game doc you have on your site. It seemed to be a two hour gaming session, one-on-one, with the soul purpose of railroading the player into a background in which they had little to no input. I was surprised that someone would take so much time to give so few choices during character generation.

The pre-game is an *optional* tool for a GM and player to get together and work up a viable background for a character. People in realistic societies are restricted in their choices by family, law, societal approval, friends, education, social status, etc.

If you are referring to the pyrokinetic serf girl in one of the pregame examples I've seen online, those are all realistic choices the player was presented with. How many choices did you have at 14? 15? 16? 17? 18? You would have even less if you were a female serf living in poverty with little to no education and bound to the land with no hope of ever (legally) leaving. Your default options are to get married young, pop out some babies and live the rest of your life working the land with your family, never seeing much past the area you were born in. Now, if you want to change that destiny, a whole bunch of problems present themselves rather quickly. You can probably never earn enough money to buy your freedom. Your family and friends will call you crazy and tell you to settle down and be realistic about your options. The lord will caution you against running away or will send armed men after you to drag you back and be whipped and humiliated in front of everyone you know, plus your family will be fined 100 pence, which is a fortune for a serf, like most of their yearly income, so you must think of the hardship your actions will have on your family (who will be fined whether you are caught or not). Your best chances are to run away, or petition to join a nunnery (which the lord may approve to garner good will with the church). Harn's default setting is sexist, as historical earth was at the time, but of course that is easily changed if you wish it. Anyway, I'm trying to point out that the pregame scenario was realistic. A character of a higher social class (not a slave or serf) would have many more options available.

Keep in mind the pregame starts out around 14 and stops when you get to 18 or finish your training in your occupation. It generates friends, family and geographical data for a character so they have a real feeling for where they come from and who they are, and why they are the way they are. I think it is a valuable tool.

Characters--and this is a major problem I have with D&D--do not spring forth from whole cloth as born adventurers, yet the D&D rules basically assume this to be the case and offer little background aid. Harn generates everything for you by choice or random die rolls as your GM prefers, in or out of a pregame; in fact, generating a character's background and family are all required and done before anything else, they are deemed so important.

The pregame is not even in the HarnMaster rules except as a brief blurb in HM 1e. I don't think it appears at all in HM Core (2e). Every pregame is therefore different, as each GM will gave a different way of doing it. And again, it is merely an optional tool to help players fit into the game world in a realistic manner. This can be done without a pregame, of course, and will work fine that way as well, so long as the GM (and possibly player) are willing to do the work ahead of time to flesh out the PC's past history.

HarnMaster is about individuals, not cookie cutter archetypes, though you can play them if you wish... why you would want to (and this conformity is stressed in every edition of D&D, though much less so in 3e) is beyond me, but to each their own. HarnMaster has no classes, no levels and if you want to do something, you tell the GM, he thinks about it, consults the rules for advice perhaps, and then makes a ruling on the fly as to whether it is possible or not. Things are much less set in stone in HM, giving the GM complete creative control without being castrated by rules lawyers, munchkins and power gamers questioning his every move. So players and GMs are both free to try new and unexpected ways to do things.

Imagine a player saying, I want my PC to use this psionic power against this target. And the GM asks, "What effect are you trying to achieve?" The player suddenly realizes he has more than one option (even options not covered in the rules) and maybe should think up something new and creative rather than use what he thought was the only way he could do something. The Charm psionic talent in the rules allows you to overload a target's senses, "freezing" them in place, but I've houseruled that it can be used to subtly influence the target to regard you more favorably instead (by providing a bonus to Communication skills against that target). If a player had another idea that sounded reasonable, I'd be happy to come up with a ruling on the spot, favoring fun more than anything. The HM rules enccourage this and provide extra options and advice in sidebars to assist with expanding the game in any direction you choose.

 

[Celtavian]

Re

Your second logical mistake is in concluding that because Communism failed as a theoretical model for a country's finances, that anything that even smells like Communism is a non-functioning mess. Get out of your country for a while and travel the world. There are RPGs in Germany (90% unionization rate), Sweden, Finland, France and a whole host of other nations that are nominally 'socialist'. There are even RPGs in such a socialist bastion as South America. In fact, if it weren't for the Internet, many of the games you enjoy here in the States wouldn't even be known in Europe.

You are making a hypothetical assumption that RPG games would be mass marketed, and thus accessible to so many people were it not for Capitalism. I don't make that assumption. If America had decided to take the same socialist path Europe has taken, the world would look very different right now.

I don't think RPG games and whole lot of other entertainment activities would exist in any way, shape, or form. Let's just say that a world without American Capitalism looks a little more like what you would read in George Orwell's "1984" novel.

Your third logical mistake is in assuming that Capitalism is 'better' than either Communism or Socialism. Capitalism survived and Communism essentially didn't, but that doesn't mean that one is 'better' than the other. Both are rather extreme theories on how to arrange a country, if you really look at them. Can a communist theory that advocates the government own 100% of everything work? 100% of anything is a pretty extreme number by definition. By the same token, a theory that takes an idea of limited utility - the market - and overapplies it to every single aspect of human interaction is going to show its weaknesses, too. People aren't so comfortable with starving to death in the land of plenty or with being told that they are 'commodities'.

Now you are being a relativist. Capitalism has proven to be a better base economic system than either Socialism or Communism. Economic systems are designed to distribute scarce resources. Capitalism does this better than either of the other two. Thus, Capitalism is better. It does what an economic system should do in the most productive and efficient manner, though it may not seem so on the surface with its strong emphasis on creative use of resources.



For example, in Capitalism, you can make a squirt gun, a stupid little water squirting toy gun. If you, the entrepreneur, enjoy doing this and you can find someone to buy it, then you can make a business from selling squirt guns that would otherwise not be made in a Communist or Socialist society where efficient use of resources is paramount over creative use of resources. We still use our resources efficiently, but that just means we make sure to make our squirt guns in the most profitable manner possible.

Should any economic system go unregulated? No, it shouldn't. Even Capitalism needs some regulation, just nowhere near what a Socialist or Communist system needs.

 

[rounser]

Europe lost over a generation in WWII, which gave America a significant head start these decades, if you will.

How much of U.S.A.'s prosperity can be traced to having Europe having millions less people than it should is anyone's guess, but I severely doubt that all of the U.S. advantage is cultural, as you seem to be suggesting.

EDIT: The part of the above post that this was referring to has been edited out, so this post will make less sense now...

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

Doc Klueless, you are quoting me out of context with "based on the initial lame-o responses from ENWorlders". That post referred to the first two posts by Mark and ByronD which derided Harn and/or myself in a joking manner without adding anything of import to the thread. I considered them lame-o responses and stand by my remark. The other comments I will explain here:

I do feel that D&D does not treat its adult players with respect by providing enough mature content (must not aliennate the kiddies and/or their parents, heavens no!), and that many (certainly not all) D&D players and writers are preoccupied with IMO "childish things" like battling hordes of red dragons (D&D movie, anyone?), levitating war ships or killer flumphs (well, you get the idea) in order to save the world every week.

Due to what I perceive as its preoccupation with childish "video game" concepts, D&D cares little for character development and everything about character power-ramping. The entire system breaks down around level 10-15 as characters become uber-powerful would-be gods that are all but unstoppable unless challenged by dozens of mind-flayers and hezrou demons in a room they can't escape from by teleporting out... The game simply falls apart under the weight of its own ludicrousness and becomes a self-parody at high levels. Players are often more obsessed with XP, HP, Multi-Classing, Prestige Classing, etc., than their character's personal and emotional development.

It becomes like, "If I could just get enough XP to go up a level my guy would be so tyte!" or "If I can just get feat X, Y, and Z, I can morph into the Super-Mega-Axe-Chopper Doomguard PrC!" instead of a Harn player's "Aha! If I can just get to the next town and visit my old chum, Squire Baenlyn, he can help me decipher this damned map and then I can finally organize my expedition to the lost temple of the forbidden one---where I hope to discover the secret resting place of the Staff of Fanon---if that blasted Lord Maldan doesn't get there first!"

Players in my Harn game talk about their PC's personal goals that they are trying to achieve, not how much treasure they've won or how many monsters they've fought... in fact, the one monster they met was so horrifying, they rarely if ever mention it and shudder when they do. They never want to meet another monster of any type!

I have never liked dragons, elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings or other high fantasy elements in my D&D game and quite frankly, resented their "obligatory" inclusion in every damn product that seems to be put out, third party or not. That's what I like about Harn, which presents its demihumans, dragons and monsters in an intelligent, believable and most importantly, optional way. Don't like 'em? They don't exist, or did once but are all dead or gone now and just fairy tales. Or they were never really there to begin with, because they were just something else (like a bunch of dirty midgets in a cave). The few such races or critters that are there are out of the way and not part of the everyday experience of Harnians, so much so that the average person does not believe in elves, dwarves or orcs (gargun). They are stuffed out of the way so that everything is humanocentric and these things can be ignored or removed with little to no consequence. Or, if you want, you can expand upon them, but it's a choice. You don't start out with them forced upon you.

D&D rams the things I don't like down my throat---sure I can remove 'em, but it is a lot of work and a pain in the butt. I want to scream every time I open up a book and see that this or that NPC is a @#$% tinker gnome, 1/2 medusa or polymorphed dragon. It insults my intelligence. Things like that should be placed by the DM not by someone else who doesn't understand the DM's campaign. Better IMO to give a more realistic picture (like humans only) and then provide options for bringing in other races, monsters, powerful magics, etc., so the DM can judge for himself what's right without having to tear a setting or module apart. The problem with D&D, IMO, is that it enforces the high fantasy, illogical stereotype and imprints this on generations of gamers who then don't even consider that fantasy could be done a different way.

 

[Celtavian]

I am suggesting that the acceptance of Capitalism as a base economic system has given us a sufficient advantage because it encourages the more creative, as well as efficient, use of resources.

Europe is loosening up quite a bit in recent years, but back when it was ultra-Socialist, it did not prosper as much as it is now.

I do not believe in superior or inferior cultures, I believe that certain economic and political systems limit the potential of their people more than others. I think both Socialism and Communism are not conducive to entrepreneurs and economic growth.

I believe in cultural freedom, which goes hand in hand with political and economic freedom. You really can't have one without the others.

And, as an American, I am a promoter of the common man. I despise the idea of classism or racism. All people free and able to pursue their dreams is how the entire world should be, and no cost is to great to have it so. Capitalism and Democracy encourage freedom economically and politically. I think every country should somehow integrate both into their culture, which seems to be happening.