ESPN Calls Role-playing "Bad Fantasy"

The parallels between fantasy sports and fantasy role-playing games have long been noted by both geeks and jocks (mostly geeks). So it may come as a surprise to some that ESPN decided to draw a sharp distinction between the two with a commercial that casts fantasy role-play in a negative light.

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[h=3]Can't We All Just Get Along?[/h]Tabletop gaming and fantasy sports have a lot in common. The Times Union explains just how much:

1. You develop a fantasy world, one you’re a sports coach, the other an elf or whatever. Sure one’s a little more fantastic than the other but it’s still an alternate reality with it’s own set of rules. FFers name their teams, D&Ders name their characters. This is a big similarity!

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2. You can’t play by yourself, you need to have a bunch of your friends willing to help you create your fantasy world. One smells like beer, cigars and testosterone, the other like candle wax, red bull and acne cream but it’s still a little group of campaigners that you play with regularly

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3. Very few chicks. I’d bet there are actually more women playing D&D than fantasy football. Sure it’s a rarity in D&D but it happens. You look at a group at a fantasy football and it’s pretty clear- no skirts!

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4. You’re trying to accomplish something in your fantasy world that you could never do in real life. Whether it’s playing football with Tom Brady or slaying a dragon, unless you develop delusions, this is as close as you’re going to get.

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The Jockitch delves deeper into what they have in common, by making comparisons between a draft and character creation, draft order and initiative, and even a commissioner ("commish") and a dungeon master. And yet, the parallels end there. You don't actually role-play sports personalities:

If it did, you’d have people pretending to be Adrian Peterson and Peyton Manning, or maybe made-up analogs of the same, sporting names like Brick Runfast and Meyton Panning, cooperating on the same team as the Football Master led them through a championship season against the evil team from Mordor (aka the Oakland Raiders, but back when they weren’t hilariously incompetent). No, fantasy football meticulously tracks the real-world abilities of athletes, translates them into an arbitrary statistical hash that bears only a passing resemblance to the actual sport, and uses the resulting scores to let hardcore sports nerds compete head to head to illustrate who knows the most about the game, and also who is the luckiest guesser about who will or will not get injured.

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A more apt comparison? Historical wargaming:

There’s your real comparison — the weirdos who spend months researching the capabilities and performance of Napoleonic era artillery and cavalry, then painstakingly recreate it all on a giant tabletop battlefield with tin soldiers...

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The comparison is rooted in history. Before Dungeons & Dragons ever laid claim to the d20, there was Strat-O-Matic.
[h=3]Like a Baseball, Only Tinier[/h]Strat-O-Matic was popular in the 1960s, attempting to recreate the excitement of baseball using cards and dice, specifically 2d6 and a 20-sided die. There were later versions created for football, hockey, boxing, and other sports. Matt Barton explains in Dungeons & Desktops:

We can clearly see how this type of game has much in common with D&D and CRPGs. First, there is the effort to use dice and statistics to move realistically model fantasies, whether these are imaginary sporting events or battles with fantastic creatures. Rather than just watch sports and discuss them with their friends, Strat-O-Matic and APBA players feel more directly involved in the sport, even though many no doubt play the games from their armchairs (no doubt, many such gamers haven't played baseball in years, if not decades). Later on, we'll see the same sort of trend among D&D players, when Tolkien-obsessed fans want to do more than simply read about fantastic battles with orcs and dangerous treks into dank, dark corridors.

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Jon Peterson in Playing at the World makes the formal connection to D&D:

Finally, one cannot entirely discount the possibility that baseball statistics influenced the quantification of human ability in wargames. Games such as Strat-o-Matic Baseball (1962) applied the statistical information beloved of all collectors of baseball cards to the simulation of entire fictional seasons of baseball; in the mature incarnation of the game, a card enumerating the statistics of each player— their batting averages, success in the field, and so forth— determined the outcome of simulated games in concert with die rolls, a 3d6 for each at-bat determining whether a pitch is hit and what base if any the batter reaches. In late 1968, Scott Duncan wrote up a review of this system for the IFW’s monthly, and in 1970 Gygax briefly maintained a column on wargaming for the All Sports Digest, the house organ of the Strat-o-Matic company. Surely, Gygax knew well the operation of this and other similar sports simulation systems; Avalon Hill produced several athletics-themed games themselves.

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And yet despite what they might have in common, Barton points out one stark difference between the two simulations:

In some ways, games like Strat-O-Matic were the most socially acceptable of the games we've identified as precursors to the CRPG. The reason for this blind eye was probably the close association with professional sports, a traditionally manly activity and thus an appropriate interest for men and boys of all ages (indeed, it was frequently played by fathers and sons)...it's one thing to walk past a group of boys obsessively discussing baseball and the statistics of their favorite pitchers and batters...however, it's quite another matter when people are displaying the same sort of passion for sorcery and dragons...

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Unfortunately, not much has changed since Barton's book came out nearly a decade ago. Which brings us to ESPN's ad.
[h=3]Seriously, ESPN?[/h]You can see the video on ESPN's Twitter feed:

There's good fantasy and there's bad fantasy. Make the right choice here.

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ESPN's short ad begins with a live action role-player dressed in a cloak and armor addressing a mixed group of other men at attention. Elsewhere Nightly picks up the thread:

In your commercial, a regiment of fantasy-clad LARPers stand in a line wielding boffer weapons. The king, dressed in armor and furs, walks down the line and spots one of the soldiers with a sword whose cover is falling off. The king, who is apparently also a safety marshal (as many veteran players are), notices this and tells him that it is not suitable for play in its condition by declaring “You cannot go into battle without the proper weapon.” Good on you, king-guy! Keeping people safe. Especially good since the person with the defective weapon, Steve, appears to be a new player (you can tell from his football-gear armor)...“MALACHI!” The king shouts, and his squire appears in a moment’s notice (And look at his helmet, man. And the chainmail. Hhhhhnnngggg I want it). Retaining complete immersion, the king demands that Brother Malachi get a suitable replacement boffer for the new guy from his car. Malachi agrees and then runs to his car while his boffer flail hangs over his shoulder.

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That letter chooses to focus on the positive aspects the commercial unintentionally highlighted:

ESPN, you have clearly done a great deal of research here. You’ve displayed the LARP tenets of Safety, Immersion, and Costuming*, which are all important in any LARP setting. In just two lines, you’ve basically explained field marshalling, character, equipment and armor, and showed how helpful and welcoming the LARP community can be. We were all Steve once, and the world of LARP was unfamiliar, scary, and a little ridiculous. That’s how most communities are.

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The irony is that it's highly unlikely LARPing is a threat to fantasy sports. The parallel of sitting down to look at an iPad is more akin to tabletop gaming than LARPing. It's more likely ESPN was trying to distinguish itself from the common roots it has with tabletop role-playing games like D&D, and using a caricature of LARPs to make its point. Judging by the reaction to the ad on their Facebook feed, ESPN badly underestimated their audience.

It doesn't matter. There are plenty of role-players who like fantasy sports without accusing fans of one or the other of #BadFantasy. The fact that ESPN even feels it needs to distinguish between the two is yet another indicator of the increasing popularity of fantasy gaming.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.

 

[MechaPilot]

On its own, I'd tend to agree with you, but the sketch is in context -- that context being set up by the terrible narrator about 30 seconds earlier in the clip "The rules were deep and sometimes... involved!"

The "sometimes . . . involved," to me, refers to the three hurdle BS I mentioned in my edit. A grapple, like an attack, should just be a single check. Putting three hurdles in front of it like that just ensures that it's going to be a lesser used option, which is probably the reason the DM had to look up the grapple rules in that sketch to begin with.

I played under a DM who, when I wanted to attempt an improvised action, required me to make four separate skill and ability checks to do it, and failing any one of those checks would make the action fail. I chose not to do it. That DM treated improvised actions in that way consistently. It reached a point where I realized I was better off not trying anything creative in combat, and I completely checked out of combat because of it. I entirely stopped paying attention during fights and stopped creatively describing my attacks. If you want to turn a roleplayer into an "I swing at the Troll" player, that's a fantastic way to do it.

 

[Nagol]

The "sometimes . . . involved," to me, refers to the three hurdle BS I mentioned in my edit. A grapple, like an attack, should just be a single check. Putting three hurdles in front of it like that just ensures that it's going to be a lesser used option, which is probably the reason the DM had to look up the grapple rules in that sketch to begin with.

I played under a DM who, when I wanted to attempt an improvised action, required me to make four separate skill and ability checks to do it, and failing any one of those checks would make the action fail. I chose not to do it. That DM treated improvised actions in that way consistently. It reached a point where I realized I was better off not trying anything creative in combat, and I completely checked out of combat because of it. I entirely stopped paying attention during fights and stopped creatively describing my attacks. If you want to turn a roleplayer into an "I swing at the Troll" player, that's a fantastic way to do it.

Whereas I infer the deep and involved refers to the 30-second rule lookup combined with the player bailing as soon as he heard "4 step procedure". You think that's deep and involved? Try 1e's unarmed combat, you pikers!

 

[MechaPilot]

Whereas I infer the deep and involved refers to the 30-second rule lookup. . .

That's a huge stretch. Time required to grab a book, open it, and find a rule you don't have memorized has nothing to do with how deep or involved the rule itself is.

. . . combined with the player bailing as soon as he heard "4 step procedure". You think that's deep and involved? Try 1e's unarmed combat, you pikers!

I started with BECMI, so I don't know too much about how 1e worked. I will say that as long as I've been playing I've never seen anyone choose unarmed combat unless it was the only kind available to them.

 

[Nagol]

That's a huge stretch. Time required to grab a book, open it, and find a rule you don't have memorized has nothing to do with how deep or involved the rule itself is.

Not really. Look, the sketch is the exemplar of the narrator's lead in. The grapple attempt declaration followed by the fumbling with the book -- most of the short sketch is dedicated to verbal tap dancing --, then followed by the player aborting his choice when he learns the are *gasp* steps. That's the example of how deep and involved the rules are. Even the current players didn't know and couldn't tolerate their use!

I started with BECMI, so I don't know too much about how 1e worked. I will say that as long as I've been playing I've never seen anyone choose unarmed combat unless it was the only kind available to them

At one point on the board, I posted a process flow for 1e grappling to show that it was workable, if clunky. There were substantially more than 4 steps to resolve the attempt. I went looking for it, but it appears to have gone the way of all things, probably in the great crash of 2006. In 1e, low-level characters should almost always choose pummeling over attacking with a weapon -- it hits more frequently and causes considerably more damage than a simple weapon strike!

 

[MechaPilot]

Not really. Look, the sketch is the exemplar of the narrator's lead in. The grapple attempt declaration followed by the fumbling with the book -- most of the short sketch is dedicated to verbal tap dancing --, then followed by the player aborting his choice when he learns the are *gasp* steps. That's the example of how deep and involved the rules are. Even the current players didn't know and couldn't tolerate their use!

I'm sorry but I just can't agree to that. The time it takes to find a rule in a book has no relation to how deep, involved, or otherwise complicated that rule is. Equating the time required to find the rule with the complexity of the rule would be like saying turning a computer on would be insanely complicated if "press the power button" were buried in the book and took five minutes to search for. To me, it's a nonsensical assertion that crumbles under the wispiest of scrutiny.

As for the player aborting the choice when he learned the steps, what's wrong with that? A 3e grapple has three hurdles in front of it, and failing any one of those hurdles results in the whole thing failing. That means it has a chance of succeeding that's FAR lower than a choice that requires a single roll. I love doing creative things in combat, but if a DM or a system makes doing those things substantially harder than just basically attacking (especially if there is no increased benefit for succeeding at the more difficult to achieve task) then I'm going to take the simple option every time.

Except for characters that were specifically built to be grapplers, with a full tree of grappling-related feats, it's something I've never seen anyone do more than once in 3e, and that's explicitly because of all the hoops you have to jump through to do it. From my experience, and in my opinion, the 3e grappling rules were bad rules that actively disincentivized players from choosing to have their characters grapple their enemies (unless they specifically built their characters for that purpose).

At one point on the board, I posted a process flow for 1e grappling to show that it was workable, if clunky. There were substantially more than 4 steps to resolve the attempt. I went looking for it, but it appears to have gone the way of all things, probably in the great crash of 2006. In 1e, low-level characters should almost always choose pummeling over attacking with a weapon -- it hits more frequently and causes considerably more damage than a simple weapon strike!

Neat.

 

[Jhaelen]

The impression that WotC were trying to show 3e in a bad light to sell 4e was fairly wide-spread. Personally, I felt their marketing campaign was a bit iffy - except for the cartoons - I loved those!

When they were trying to sell 5e they took a slightly different approach, basically behaving as if 4e had never existed, and blabbed a lot about how it was supposed to being back together fans of all previous editions - yeah, right...

 

[Nagol]

I'm sorry but I just can't agree to that. The time it takes to find a rule in a book has no relation to how deep, involved, or otherwise complicated that rule is. Equating the time required to find the rule with the complexity of the rule would be like saying turning a computer on would be insanely complicated if "press the power button" were buried in the book and took five minutes to search for. To me, it's a nonsensical assertion that crumbles under the wispiest of scrutiny.

As for the player aborting the choice when he learned the steps, what's wrong with that? A 3e grapple has three hurdles in front of it, and failing any one of those hurdles results in the whole thing failing. That means it has a chance of succeeding that's FAR lower than a choice that requires a single roll. I love doing creative things in combat, but if a DM or a system makes doing those things substantially harder than just basically attacking (especially if there is no increased benefit for succeeding at the more difficult to achieve task) then I'm going to take the simple option every time.

I agree that assertion crumbles under scrutiny -- that part of the reason the sketch is so terrible IMO.

He didn't learn the steps - he bailed when he learned there were steps. Remember the piece's conceit revolved around giving the history of the game to an audience that is not expected to know the fiddly details of every edition. He bailed because he heard there were 4 steps before finding out what they were. The steps and their implications to success aren't presented.

So the narrator presents the fact that 3e rule set is deep and involved and the sketch to illustrate that has a player choosing a non-standard attack (cue dramatic shot/sound) followed by 30+ seconds of verbal tap-dancing by DM as he checks for the rule because none at the table could possibly remember it, followed by the rule being found and the original player changing his declaration to the simple "I attack" upon learning there are steps involved (not what they are mind you, just that 4 steps exist) rather than deal with this deep and involved rule.

Except for characters that were specifically built to be grapplers, with a full tree of grappling-related feats, it's something I've never seen anyone do more than once in 3e, and that's explicitly because of all the hoops you have to jump through to do it. From my experience, and in my opinion, the 3e grappling rules were bad rules that actively disincentivized players from choosing to have their characters grapple their enemies (unless they specifically built their characters for that purpose).

<snip>

Which makes a much better critique for 3e. Heck it isn't even tough to find a section of the 3e ruleset that is deep and involved to use as it is a valid critique of the system!

The sketch shows the players and playstyle in a poor light mainly because the example they chose to illustrate the critique was so poor. If the players felt that was deep and involved then the players are playing in the shallow end of the pool and finding it too deep.

 

[MagicSN]

Have to admit never heard of Fantasy Football (might be though that I am pretty uninterested in anything "Football"). Is it an American Thing? Heard a lot about classic Fantasy RPGing though and doing it since several decades. Guess it's clear what the "bad Fantasy" is from my Point of view ;-)