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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8942079" data-attributes="member: 5142">These discussions have been going on for years. Many past discussions often involved the same basic appeals with the some of the same people: "please read, experience, and discover playing these other games yourself." At the very least, these people would be working with primary sources and talking with actual play experience.Do I need actual play experience to talk about other games? Not always. However, I would knowingly be operating from a position of ignorance. It's likely that my discussion would involve asking people with actual knowledge and experience about these games. I would definitely think myself at a disadvantage when it comes to arguing with people who have actual play experience about how the game plays, which would probably get more pronounced with that experience gap.And yet here we are years later, and some of these same people who show up in these discussions but nothing has changed. They have not even bothered reading these other games. They have not bothered trying to play these other games. And yet they still think that their opinions about these other games that they mostly know through hearsay is just as valuable and insightful, if not moreso, as opinions formed by people with actual play experience of these games?We may all very well be wrong with our various assertions, analyses, and opinions. They could be right. I'm open to that possibility. I am super happy that these people enjoy playing whatever version of the Dragon Game that they love most. There is nothing wrong with choosing to play only one game. The number of tabletop games we play does not determine our worth, virtue, or integrity as human beings or tabletop gamers. But this is not what the discussion is really about. This is a red herring. This particular judgment of virtue is not being made against them on this basis.The fundamental issue is the absence of firsthand knowledge/experience about these games for the purposes of talking substantially about these games. It's difficult to take any argumentative claims about other games seriously when those claims persistently operate with half-baked knowledge of these games that is mostly informed by hearsay and a sense of insecurity that the Dragon Game is being slighted and/or threatened through the existence of non-traditional games or that the Dragon Game may have play limitations.There have been a fair number of us who were "on the other side of the fence," so to speak. We only had experience with trad games. We thought that there was little to no difference between these other games in terms of what they invovled. Or maybe we never even thought about it. Games are games, so how different could they be? Then we played things on the boundaries or outside of traditional gaming's "big tent," and it was pretty eye-opening, at least for me. I know that I am not unique in my journey. I recall Ovinomancer and [USER=85870]@innerdude[/USER] recounting similar experiences as well.Is it gatekeeping to ask for people to try playing these games so they can form their own informed opinions about these games for themselves? Possibly, but I also trust the insight of someone who read the complete works of Tolkien and watched the Hobbit & LotR movies as opposed to someone who only read a review or heard what other people were saying about the LotR movies. I may have differing readings and opinions with the former person, but I at least know that they are working with experiential working knowledge of the primary sources. But I am utterly uninterested in the opinions of the latter person when it comes to discussing the written works of Tolkien.Or whose opinions into Karl Marx's philosophy should I find more engaging and insightful when we are talking about Marxism? The person who actually read the major works of Karl Marx for themselves or the person whose knowledge and opinions were entirely formed around some variation of the syllogism "Communism is bad; Karl Marx is a Communist; ergo, Karl Marx is bad"?</blockquote>

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