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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Windjammer" data-source="post: 8035520" data-attributes="member: 60075">Yes it's frequent and I've come to accept it as a given. I would encourage you to not take it too personally though. As Christopher Hitchens once said, "When my opponent moves for the ad hominem in a debate, I know that I have won. Because they have no substantive argument left." That's how I decipher online debates once the name calling starts. The argument is over but one side is too proud to admit it. At other times, the argument is too opaque for certain people to understand, so they attack what they think they do understand. That's what I think happened to you. You made a point that made people very uncomfortable (you even led with "this may sound insulting" so you were aware of it), and most people go for the shortest route to get rid of things they find uncomfortable--attack and dismissal. Haha, ok, funny come-back. Great example. It doesn't hold up to muster, and I hope I can be forgiven for trying to write a serious response. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />(Though again, I did find your reply genuinely funny.)His point was that certain professional activities have lower thresholds to be categorized as a bona fide instances of that activity than others. And that's all his post needed.Consider the difference between these activities: "Swim 100m" versus "Swim 100m at the Olympics." It's safe to say many people like you and me and others can swim 100 meters, given time and occasion, yes? But if you or I showed up at the Olympic games and jumped into the pool, that wouldn't qualify as swimming the 100 at the Olympics. It wouldn't even qualify as attempting to do that. At best, it would be a funny publicity stunt. Why? Because we're not in contention for that activity. We didn't go through the formal qualification to be in contention.If that sounds like Captain Obvious, you need to ask why the point needs to be made in this thread. Apparently because making it is deserving of scorn and ridicule.Now, when it comes to brain surgery or playing Mozart's piano sonatas, the distinction is even clearer. There's no such thing as a botched "attempt" at these activities by someone with no training in surgery or piano playing. All such people are doing is something else altogether--like a monkey at a zoo, they are mimicking the overt physical behavior of someone else.The point you're responding to, and that some in this thread were deriding, is that RPG design is a lot closer to swimming 100 meters at a public swimming pool than being a concert pianist. That's not to say that there can't be people who do the former exceedingly well--they do it so well that we give some of them Olympic gold medals. But it's also to say that for someone to put something forward that qualifies as a bona fide instance of "RPG design" is so minimal that a Capitalist economy does not attach high monetary value to it as such. It's only when, e.g., they have proven in competitions over and over that their ability to perform it at certain levels is literally outstanding. Which is that other activity we were talking about.That's an extremely basic, and not even that value-laden, observation about basic economics. That it should get attacked as severely as it did seems to be something in need of an explanation. My explanation was that the post got mis-read, and the distinction between doing an activity at all and doing it exceedingly well got glossed over. But maybe that was too charitable?</blockquote>

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