Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[delericho]

The problem with RPG discussion isn't RPG theory at all. It's about general devolution through social media into a positions over interest culture. Folks want to win, they want to be right, and they want these things above a good discussion. It is also accentuated by gamers propensity for being anal retentive and overly pedantic.

There's a lot of truth in this. People can't bear to give the other side an inch, which means that when their favoured producer puts out a sucky product they still feel the need to laud it to the high heavens - often with some form of "if you don't like it, you clearly don't understand it argument".

Or, less often, the opposite - when the other side has a hit, they need to find some spurious grounds to tear it down. (That one is less common simply due to exposure - once you've checked out of 5e/PF/whatever you're unlikely to see the 'hit'.)

Another fundamental issue is the competing demands of relevance vs depth - most RPG materials can only really be properly judged based on actual use, but actual use takes time. Meanwhile, for a review to be of any great interest, it needs to come out close to the release of the product. Which means, unless you happen to get very early access, the best the reviewer can afford to do is a review based on a read-through. (And many reviews don't even seem to manage that.)

And, of course, there's the biggest fundamental issue of all: there's no consensus on what constitutes a good RPG adventure/setting/system anyway. What I'm looking for is almost certainly not what you're looking for. So the best we can probably hope for is to find a reviewer that we mostly agree with, and trust them for recommendations.

 

[schneeland]

Another problem --- the Venn diagram of humans who have played enough variety of RPGs, for a long enough time to meaningfully digest the scope of intent and realization of intent of each creative work; who also have enough background in doing academically rigorous and meaningful analysis of those games; who also hold enough standing in the gaming community to have their theories (once produced) actually take hold and become culturally meaningful; is a sliver so small as to basically be a null value.

This is one problem, but even if we ignore the element of propagation in the community for a second, I still see a need for a lot of field work/thorough observation from which to build any sort of meaningful categories that still hold for a variety of different games, but not a lot of people who would do that (well-designed questionnaires might help to a certain extent, but always suffer from the problem that distributing them only gives you a skewed perspective on the gaming population).

That's not to say it doesn't make sense to discuss about useful terms and categories to describe experiences people encounter when playing RPGs, but it's still quite step from there to solid RPG theory.

 

[amethal]

1. The Lack of a Single Unified Language of Criticism Hampers Serious Analysis
The chaos and dislocation of the OGL fiasco were so great that people had stopped paying attention to celebrity dogs on twitter.

Isn't that what the Forge tried to do?

Once upon a time on EnWorld you couldn't even complain about sorcerers being underpowered, or have an important discussion about whether you can use a lance two-handed from horseback, without someone re-phrasing into Forge-ite terms that no one else understood, or (even worse) into terms that other people thought they understood but actually didn't.

Yet how many of those terms have stuck with us?

I do find "Fiction First" quite useful as an explanation for how we are playing our first ever game of Fate wrong - our players can't get out of the habit of saying "Can I make an x check to do y?", and that's even after me pre-emptively removing the Notice / Perception skill (which is responsible for 75% of such conversations in our Pathfinder games). However, nobody else in our group knows what Fiction First means, and I'm not even sure I'm using it correctly myself.

It wasn't due to lack of effort on the Forge's part. Did they get stuck in their own echo-chamber, or was the task impossible in the first place?

I had a quick look at Board Game Geek and, from an extremely unscientific sample of 1 review, came across "a 1-4 player campaign game about adventures, exploration and fierce battles with giant monsters. It’s a co-operative, choice-driven boardgame experience played over multiple sessions" (emphasis mine).

I don't know much about board games, but that seems like a great, jargon-free summary to me.

No one is going to complain that the game can't be finished in one session, and forces the players to co-operate in order to succeed; if that's not what they are looking for then they'll simply play something else instead. And the entire (admittedly short) review never once referenced any other board games.

Can you summarise 5th edition D&D in the same way? "A 2-6 player plus 1 neutral GM, long-form campaign game about heroic adventures; involving the frequent risk of combat but also with exploration, puzzle-solving and role-playing. It's co-operative, driven by the choices of the players, the GM or both, but with a strong random element determining the outcome of conflicts. It is intended to be played for many sessions, with characters growing significantly in power as they face ever-escalating threats."

I have never seen D&D formally described in this way. It's something that "everybody knows", yet paradoxically as soon as you write it down someone will come along to remark "that's not how we play D&D". It's also useless as a definition, since it applies to pretty much any edition of D&D and so doesn't allow you to demonstrate why <Your Favourite Edition> is the best edition.

 

[JAMUMU]

This is such an interesting, thought-provoking thread. I come down on the side of the RPG hobby being a very difficult beast to critique, for all the reasons given up-thread. To sum up my immediate thoughts, we can all agree on what a film "is" in terms of the medium of delivery (moving images and possibly sound) and the circumstances of consumption (you watch and listen), and so it's possible to deploy appropriate critical language. But simply defining what constitutes an RPG is still something that leads to heated discussion.

To strain the analogy further, how people consume a film (cinema, home cinema, 24" B&W television, on a phone, displayed on the back of a car headrest) may give rise to arguments of preference, but there's no doubt that a moving image is being viewed. Different critical approaches can be deployed (formalist, psychoanalytic etc), but they're all agreed on the fact that a film is being analysed.

On the other hand, four groups of RPG hobbyists playing the same game might be consuming the product/exploring the experience in radically different ways (e.g. wargame-adjacent miniature activity, strictly RAW with no IC dialogue, as improv theatre, homebrewed beyond recognition). These groups might be "playing the same game", but the process in each case is radically different for each group.

So my rambling point is that I think that a) the processes around playing a game are grounds for theoretical analysis, especially where different processes emerge from the same set of rules, b) the RPG text itself is a separate area for criticism, both in terms of rules and procedures and any implications arising from the setting and that finally c) unifying jargon is perhaps of lesser importance, as it constitutes a space where people get into all sorts of arguments.

 

[Anon Adderlan]

The only way this moves forward is if participants are able to separate results and procedures from values and worth, and everyone stops fighting over who gets to decide definitions. Theory needs to focus on how an end is achieved, not whether it's worth achieving. And definitions change even between discussions, and you don't lose anything by adopting someone else's when engaging them.

D&D is good at what it does. If I were doing exactly the same thing, what would be the point?

Political advocacy, which is exactly what we're seeing with the OGL fallout.

I used to hang out at the True20 forums quite a bit. For those who don't know, True20 uses a "Toughness save" in place of hit points, and a feat-based magic system. And it was astounding how often people would come in and say, "I want to play True20, but I want to put hp, damage rolls, and Vancian magic back in. How can I do that?"

At that point one wants to say, "There's this game called D&D, maybe you've heard of it?"

I find this state of affairs deeply depressing.

 

[Staffan]

I think a large part of why it's hard to describe and critique RPGs is that they are essentially unfinished products. A movie or a book is a finished work that is passively consumed by the viewer/reader, but an RPG is a tool or a framework for creating something more or less unique. This means that the background of the reader/player colors their impression of an RPG much more than a movie or a book.

 

[kenada]

Political advocacy, which is exactly what we're seeing with the OGL fallout.

I can see how that makes sense for a publisher, but for a homebrew game? It’s a lot of work, and it wouldn’t be worth it if it were just duplicating another game.

Anyway, that part was preemptive self-defense. I have dealt with people who got upset I did not want to use their favorite system or felt it would not do what I want, so when discussing things, I try to make it as anodyne as possible.

Like, one time I said I wanted to run Pathfinder 2e over D&D 5e because the former has item creation rules in the core rules, and they got upset I wasn’t willing to homebrew an item crafting system for 5e. PF2 already did what I wanted (plus some other things), so why not just use that? Sigh.

One of the things that makes critically discussing tabletop RPGs difficult is the lack of consensus on what kind of boundaries there are between different types of play or what is even appropriate to discuss about them. It’s why I try to use euphemisms and reassure the reader that the thing I have identified as something I want to do is not a value judgment on how they play.

If I say I am making a sandbox MMO without PvP, no reasonable person would take that as an attack on PvP MMOs unless I also said something about gankboxes. If I say I want to systemically constrain the referee’s decision-making in a tabletop RPG? Someone might take that as an attack on how they run games.

 

[JAMUMU]

I think a large part of why it's hard to describe and critique RPGs is that they are essentially unfinished products. A movie or a book is a finished work that is passively consumed by the viewer/reader, but an RPG is a tool or a framework for creating something more or less unique. This means that the background of the reader/player colors their impression of an RPG much more than a movie or a book.

I think your point here alludes to the ways RPGs might reinforce/create/undermine interpassivity, which is a theoretical area of the RPG space I think would be worth exploring.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Generally, though, we see the same thing playing out- RPG criticism and theory is almost never neutral, but is instead used to advance particular gaming systems; because it is almost always tied to advocacy, it often fails in its explanatory power.

You can probably think of this in a lot of different areas; regardless of how you felt about Scorsese's statements regarding superhero movies, it certainly didn't elicit a very favorable reaction from the popular audience; no one enjoys either being talked down to, or being told that their preferences are wrong.

I think these two points do more to show just how lost we are, collectively, in trying to talk about this topic. The assumption is that criticism is, should be, or ever has been neutral. I couldn't disagree more. I think a lot of people have some imagined, platonic ideal of what critics and criticism used to be like, in the good old days, but just like most writing is packed with the writer's preferences and beliefs (or their employer's), criticism is absolutely about laying bare the critic's interests, and championing certain works and attacking others. The best critics are interesting to read (or watch, listen to, etc.) even when you personally disagree with them.

To that end, presenting Scorsese's take on the MCU as some sort of gaffe or misfire on his part, because he expressed a preference that rubbed some people the wrong way...that's a feature, not a bug. The guy is among the most passionate fans of movies that have ever lived, and he was stating his deeply held opinion about a medium he's helped define. That he elicited the response he did is absolutely the point. He got the conversation going, including getting a whole lot of people to reveal themselves as dunces about movies. The idea that he or anyone else should engage in criticism from a neutral perspective, just telling it like it is without bias or personal preference, as though that's at all humanly possible, is, to me, an example of one of many poison pills for this whole discussion. Scorsese didn't use jargon or high-minded theory to talk down to anyone. He made his points as plainly as possible, and fandom did what fandom often does, and lashed out defensively. The narrative around him talking down to fans was entirely fabricated, and lead to the same reaction that fanbase has to anyone criticizing the MCU. When it comes to critiques of whatever's most popular in a given medium—whether that's the MCU or D&D—that defensive backlash is inevitable.

Which is all to say that in the world of indie games, I've seen game criticism as healthy and interesting and often enlightening, and these notions of people being terribly appalled by someone using jargon (imagine the horror of having to Google an unfamiliar term once in your life) are really not a problem. It's only when people start doing any of that in relation to D&D that things go haywire.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I think a large part of why it's hard to describe and critique RPGs is that they are essentially unfinished products. A movie or a book is a finished work that is passively consumed by the viewer/reader, but an RPG is a tool or a framework for creating something more or less unique. This means that the background of the reader/player colors their impression of an RPG much more than a movie or a book.

On this, and it might be worth a complete followup post ... I can't agree. I think that there is a difference between the polite rules that we use in our conversations (no badwrongfun, recognizing that different tables play differently) as opposed to simply throwing up our hands and saying, "In the vast endeavor that is human creativity, RPGs are the one thing that we cannot describe and critique."

The reason that I use films and literature as examples is because they are common and easy-to-understand analogies that are unlikely to draw serious pushback because people are generally familiar with them and the vocabulary (I also use music for this reason). But all sorts of creative endeavors have vocabularies for critique and theory. For example, a person could write a play. You could critique that play based simply on the words on the page. But the way that the play is performed- the choices that are made, the set designs, the acting, the blocking, the omission or addition of additional characters and dialogue, the choice of the period of time (or the choice to make it time agnostic) ... these are also part of live theater- which has a rich history of critique and theory as well.

For that matter, while we think of films as finished products, they are only finished products in the same way that a completed session of an RPG is a finished product. We are critiquing the end result- all of the choices that led from the original idea to the multiple iterations of the screenplay to the casting of the characters to the choices that went into the cinematography to the final product.

....and so on. Whether it's relatively simple things (why do people generally like the advantage/disadvantage mechanic in D&D?) or more complex things (what are ways in which players can interact to make games more compelling, and what mechanics enhance or inhibit those interactions?), there are ways to make things better.

Maybe. Then again, based on prior experience ... maybe not.