Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 345024" data-attributes="member: 4937">Teifling: In and of itself, tolerence is not a bad thing, but in and of itself neither is it a good thing.  It is too closely related to apathy for me to make it a primary virtue.  Too often, people who practice 'tolerence' are merely leaving when they are uncomfortable for all their claims of tolerence and respect they mean 'when you are comfortably over there'.  And, PC is too often a means of deriding people who you feel superior too.  At its heart PC is simply a new set of 'common sense' principals.  At one time, it was politically correct to be a racist.  I don't want to base my morals on something as vacillating as public opinion.               Certainly, being a recreation, RPG's are foremost about having fun.  It's worth noting that among the most munchkin groups I've seen, the group had become so disfunctional that it ceased to be fun and players spent more time arguing and manipulating each other than they did playing the game.                   "Being 14, I've been rejected by several prospective groups because I was too young for them."Which is exactly my point.  I've never rejected a player because of age or immaturity.  While some of my groups have been fairly closed in the sense that we weren't advertising, that doesn't mean that we'd tell some 'kid' who was friends of someone in the group (pardon the experession) 'go away and grow up'.  Older members tend to grow out of the top of groups as responcibilities accumulate, and they need to be replaced.  To each his own is fine, but too often it is used to mean 'go away'.  "I would agree that some behaviors in gaming are immature, but to me that generally means a proliferation of naked elf babes or a pressing need to always be in the spotlight. Power-gaming isn't part of it."Someone has already touched on this but in my experience power gaming is often done precisely to capture and stay in the spotlight, and power gamers are most likely to enjoy 'naked elf babes' and gratutious violence.  It is an attempt, usually a childish attempt, to garner respect for oneself via making a character who is powerful.  "See how cool I am because my character is so cool."  The problem is that new players don't realize that sterotypes, derivitive copies of literary figures, and min/maxed characters without substantial (or any) personality depth aren't considered 'cool', and are frustrated when they aren't recieved well.  In some groups this leads to an escalation of 'well if my character was more powerful, then they'd respect me' which leads to arguement, wheedling, whining, cheating, searching for shortcuts and so forth, all of which leads to more frustration.  In better groups, someone shows the young player how to be cool, and the problem is solved.I think that there is a distinction that needs to be made when we say 'power gaming' between types of destructive Ego based gaming, and simply trying to create a character that can contribute meaningfully to party health.  You don't have to create a weak character.  You SHOULD give more serious thought to the ROLE than you do to the stats (unless this a tournament or something). The stats should reflect the role, not the other way around."..and while I'm happy when 'munchkins' of any age have fun, I do hope (and encourage) that they out grow it."Because a role player can engage in the full range of play that RPG's provide.  A munchkin is locked into a single type of relatively uncreative play which doesn't contribute to the health of the RPG industry beyond increasing its customer base.  I've yet to meet a munchkin that makes a good DM.  Either there Ego gets in the way (my NPC's have to be better than your PC's), and even there fellow munchkins are unhappy, or else they give in and let thier players run the game Monty Haul style.  Any one want to spend money to buy some munchkins 'setting'?"What do you mean, 'played well'"Maybe you've yet to encounter it at your age, but sometime you need to just sit back and watch an experienced group of serious (about having fun) players play the game. I think it will blow you away and you'll never play the same way again. I was lucky enough to have this experience when a college aged DM took on us 12 year olds for a few sessions and brought NPC's to life with a vibrancy and immediatecy that our (enjoyable) dice rolling combat filled sessions had never known.  We never played the same way again. Our PC's started talking to each other in character.  We started thinking about motivations, histories, backgrounds, or place in the world, and my DMing went from 'There is an Ogre in a Hole.. roll initiative', 'There is a haunted castle full of undead...roll initiative', to somewhere on the road to where it is today when I put my full effort into it.Brought into the right group, even a person with Asperger's Syndrome (and there are more than a few in gaming) can achieve sociableness, and that is I think one of the most extraordinary things about gaming.</blockquote>

Verification