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="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5620690" data-attributes="member: 54877">Agreed. There is also, however, something illogical about saying, "X exists and impedes my enjoyment of the game, therefore, when I characterize X, I have it exactly right."  There is also nothing illogical about the reply being "Because it doesn't impede my enjoyment of Y, I have reason to suspect you are a bit off on X, because X the way you describe it would impede my enjoyment." And then it is highly illogical for the original guy to start claiming that "X does not exist" is said, when the reply was actually "X is not exactly of the nature you have claimed." From my perspective, the essay is of this nature. It is as if the author was at a party and admitted he wasn't wild about your dip recipe, and then theorized it was how you mixed things, or some secret ingredient, or maybe what you served with it. And in the course of the conversation, it game out that he liked neither celery nor dill. So you think to yourself, "Ah ha, that's it. It's got celery and dill. Of course he doesn't like it." But he isn't buying that reason at all, and wants to insist that your celery and dill are part of some kind of special combination that mucks it all up for him.  And then he goes and writes blog entries saying why your dip is a Sign of the Beast, and has moved beyond what dip is allowed to do, less the elder gods be upon us. And then you get evangelist that go out and spread this message to the benighted peasants, every time they dare contemplate said dip. I remember a guy on another board who came around every few months or so, for many years running, and would froth at the mouth at the very existence of hit points--usually right in the middle of some otherwise innocuous D&D conversation. But even he was a one-man shop, and infrequent. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I mean, people have been heavily bashing D&D (any version) for years because they don't like abstractions, or certain abstractions, or abstractions used in certain parts of the ruleset, or because the abstraction covered enough ground that they got confused about what it was trying to do. And then I doubt it has quite the same pedigree, but some people get fairly exercised about metagaming, at different places and different times.  And certainly some people have strong simulation preferences.  and some people don't like players exercising narrative control. So if a ruleset mixes these heavily, I can see why it could easily move off the old enjoyment scale for more than a few people. It's the scale and scope of the reaction that leaves me nonplussed. Well, that and the (I think) deliberate choice of "disassociation" as the term, so as to invoke <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder" target="_blank">Dissociative disorder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a>. That said, I really appreciate the thoughtful conversation in this topic, for which I'm sure no such "brain damage" slur is even considered, much less intended. But if you want to know why people feel like their replies have been reasonably measured from the first spread of the idea, consider how we were provoked.</blockquote>

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