EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
I wasn't so much responding to you, in the sense of "why did YOU say this thing," but rather speaking to the thread in general, taking what you had said as an accepted baseline.I apologize for not addressing this earlier, but I wanted to discuss this very briefly before (hopefully) exiting the thread. I am not sure how you got this from what you responded to? Here's what I wrote-
This really gets down to the core of the issue; the greatest strength, and weakness, of SP is the referee (DM).
Everything else I wrote was building on that. That's not "comparing" SP to other modalities of play and assuming they have bad DMs! Far from it. Instead, I was emphasizing something different- that traditional SP (as others define it, and as I use in the OP) has a notable strength, and weakness- the DM (GM). It requires a good to excellent DM to function properly, to have those heuristics that I have previously discussed. In the absence of a good DM, the game can be a mediocre, or even a terrible experience (the dreaded killer DM, or "respect mah authoritah").
Other modalities of play try to cabin this issue in different ways- 3e, for example, provided more player-facing rules and skills. Other games will change the division of authority between players and DM. There are strengths and weaknesses to these other approaches as well. Arguably, 5e moved (at least slightly) back in the direction of the SP model with the 'rulings, not rules' model; I would say that this, although to a lesser extent than OD&D, creates the same DM-centric issue.
But I was not trying to compare a game run well with a game run poorly, and I am not sure how you managed to get that from what I wrote.
That is: given I accept what you've said, why do we get what has happened in this thread (just from other people, rather than strictly yourself), and in the Quick Primer, and in so many other places and discussions? Why is it that, in order to extol the virtues of this style, so many resort to comparing it with bad versions of other styles? And, if there is no answer (or no more answer than "because people aren't great at discussing things," which is sort of a given), could we try actually doing the good-vs-good, or at least mixing "here's what's great about this!" with "...and here's what's often not-so-great, and tools for addressing it"?
The Quick Primer aimed explicitly to explain to others why this style of gaming was enjoyable, not merely for nostalgia's sake, but as an end in and of itself. It is very much about defining what "SP" is and why anyone should care. And it continues to be referenced as an allegedly good and useful tool for this purpose. But it does so with exactly the sniffing, dismissive, compare-good-SP-to-bad-NS metric I'm so frustrated by. It's hard to take a discussion about the virtues of a thing seriously when it becomes just as much about how the things I already like can suck.
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