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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 247941" data-attributes="member: 4937">"Frankly, this annoys me, Celebrim."Ha!Let me guess, your that latest type of gamer with a sense of superiority: the 'I've matured to the point that I've become tolerent gamer'.Ha!I guess it was only a matter of time.  After all, tolerence has become the ultimate virtue of our society.I don't buy it for a second.Let me get something out of the way.  I had read Monte's essay weeks ago when he first posted it.   I have the greatest respect for Monte or any other published arthur, especially one as prolific and influential as he.  I consider Monte perhaps the best dungeon crafter in the business since Tracy Hickman.  I'm sure that he is a fantastic DM, better and more enjoyable than I, and I would be honored to sit at his table.  But that doesn't mean that upon reading Monte's essay I had this sudden life changing conversion as a light came on in my mind.  It wasn't like this was something I hadn't considered before, and while I agreed with alot of it, I didn't agree with alot of it as well.First of all, if the young gamers were playing "The Orcs Are Threatening the Town", I'd seen them as a flourishing group.   At thirteen, I was playing 'The Orcs Are Threatening the Town' too.  My early adventures often consisted of rooms of monsters with treasure and some simple story as to why the PC's had to go kill the monsters and/or get the treasure.  No matter how sophisticated my story telling has gotten since then, I keep returning to those basic 'Orc and Pie' elements.But lets note a couple of things.  One, as a young player I was fighting Orcs.  Secondly, the character I was playing had a relatively simple array of abilities, and although heroic was clearly not capable of anything.  I'd occasionally run out of hit points, and have to run from Orcs.  It took many encounters with Orcs to build up my array of abilities, and over the course of these encounters I began to master the rules and develop more sophisticated notions of role play, dungeon design, problem solving, etc.So, I find Monte's whole premise flawed, because it assumes this is everyone's starting point.  The problem is, it isn't.  Alot of people seem to miss the whole idea of story, miss that their character should imply characterization, miss that RPG's aren't competitive games, miss that it is fun to play a character of every level, miss essentially everything that could take them along a path to any sort of more sophisticated play of any sort (whether my sort, your sort, or his sort).   These players cheat whenever they can, try to use the rules/emotions/threats/sophistry to overturn DM rulings, are satisfied only when thier character can defeat things without challenge, and when faced with a challenge resort to cheating/whining/etc. in order to overcome the challenge rather than thoughtful play.  They think that a character is better than another when they've bought the latest supplements and figured out a way to eek a few more attack and AC bonuses, and aren't afraid to say so.  I can't honestly believe that Monte is perfectly happy with these sorts of players at his table.  I think Monte lives in a happy world where everyone is basically a mature gamer.I don't.I live in a world where it seems about half of all gamers of any age are nearly autistic and would be perfectly happy all night long rolling a die and announcing how much damage they did, if it was far more than what ever they were fighting was doing to them.  As long as it makes them happy, it's ok, right?I live in a world where a group of gamers who are 20+ have no problems overcoming encounters so long as I restrict them to 'You see a monster with a pie.'   But the minute I make them a little bit more complex, like hiding either the monster or the pie, or making them choose a door to find a monster or a pie, or talk the monster into sharing the pie, they fall apart.  Here are people with like 10 years of experience rolling dice, and almost no experience doing anything like dungeon crawling or role playing.I do my best to help players grow beyond that into strong, mature gamers.  I do so because it is good for the hobby, and because other people took the time to help me mature when I was a young gamer.  I've probably brought 20 people into the hobby in my years as a DM.  If taking the time to game, and laugh, and joke with people six years your junior (heck, more like 15 when I do it now) is lording my maturity over people, then we need more gamers willing to do it.  Because, in my experience, thirteen year old kids have the time of thier lives when an older DM takes the time to run them on a more experienced sort of story.  I know I did.  I was in awe.  This was so much better than what I had imagined and what I was doing, and I wanted to take my play to the same level.For all his pretence of saying that everyone's way of playing is equally good, Monte doesn't believe it and neither do you.  If he did, Monte would believe that the work of a munchkin was equally worthy of publishing as the work of anyone else, and would be the sort of thing he himself would want to buy.  But the fact is, that Monte believes that there are things like creativity, characterization, originality, believablity, play balance, thought provoking challenges, world building, backstory, mythos and mythic references, theme, plot, atmosphere, and so forth which improve game play and that these things are difficult to master but improve the hobby when they are done well.  And I've even arrogant enough to suggest that you probably do to.Finally, if hack-and-slash is what RPG's are all about, then the hobby is dead and we all need to move to the computer, because the CRPG's have had us beat in shear hack-and-slash goodness for years now.</blockquote>

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