Thomas Shey
Legend
There can be multiple reasons for this, but sometimes its just that the number of people willing to publicly acknowledge an unpopular position is limited, so the one that does is going to collect a lot of fire.
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Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?
- Thread starter Snarf Zagyg
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There can be multiple reasons for this, but sometimes its just that the number of people willing to publicly acknowledge an unpopular position is limited, so the one that does is going to collect a lot of fire.
Mmmm... not exactly.
I was the one who first started the drumbeat of, "It works in practice, but how can it work in theory?"
And that's what you usually see. People literally will argue forever about the implications (the theory) about other ways of designing RPGs, while having no basis in experience for them.
Which is why my usual answer is that if they actually want to understand it, they should just try playing it. Because there are so many one-shot rules lite games, and it's probably a lot more productive in terms of time to just try playing it once than to endlessly argue about theoretical concerns that don't arise in play.
Now, if someone doesn't want to play them, or has played them and doesn't like them, that's totally cool! That's a preference. But I do not particularly enjoy engaging with people that refuse to play them and also rubbish them because they don't actually understand how they are played.
TLDR; There is a big difference between "Try it, you'll like it," and "Try it so you can understand if you like it, instead of arguing endlessly over something you will never try at all."
Thomas Shey
Legend
The problem is that people are often unwilling to assume someone can do reasonable extrapolation from past experiences. I acknowledge that you can't always tell how something will play out simply from reading it (let alone from getting it described), but if 90% of the rules at hand seem similar to those in games you've had experience with in the past, I don't think you need to play it to make some degree of evaluation. At worst, perhaps there's some element you're missing, but then, in discussion, someone should be able to mention and describe that element and why it makes a difference.
As such, I don't consider "try it, you'll like it in play" as good a piece of advice as I think some people do, at least unless they can explain why my prior experience doesn't apply.
If someone is curious about playing a rules-lite or FKR game, I am more than happy to discuss any and all things with them!
But as I have repeatedly seen, a lot of people (including a lot of specific repeat customers, so to speak) aren't approaching this from a position of curiosity. They are approaching this from a position of "I am going to forumsplain to you why something you enjoy can't possibly work despite the fact that I have never tried it and have no interest in doing so."
I don't feel the need to engage with those individuals. As someone who enjoys a variety of RPGs, I think the whole "¿Quién es más macho?" isn't a fun discussion when it comes to discussing preferences of games that we play for fun.
RealAlHazred
Frumious Flumph (Your Grace/Your Eminence)
I've run rules-light (FATE, and before that, Fudge; actually an even better example might be the short campaign I ran in TWERPS, an RPG with one stat) and rules- heavy (while I regularly run Hero System, I don't consider that truly heavy; instead, I'm thinking of RoleMaster Standard System or Living Steel, or even a very kludgey AD&D 1st edition with all of the core rules as well as scads of additions and houserules). As time goes by, I find myself more drawn to rules-light just because it takes less time to set up and I don't have all that much free time anymore.
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LIVING STEEL!
Oh boy. I wanted to love that game so much. I still remember buying it just on the cover art on the box, and reading it ...
But those rules (IIRC, they were modded from Phoenix Command?) .... they were so complex that Gygax took a break from creating more tables to glance over and say, "You've gone too far."
Thomas Shey
Legend
Well, I think its pretty important whether they are, in practice saying "can't possibly work for me" or "can't possibly work for most people/everyone". The former can be a perfectly legitimate response to a game system as-described; the latter is a massive overreach at best (though "most people" turns on everyone involved having the same perception of what the majority of gamers need, which is often far from the case)..
Thomas Shey
Legend
I can sympathize with the latter; I'm running 13th Age right now, and though it doesn't suit my tastes in some ways, its hard to argue it isn't faster to put together and run. But as I've noted before, I'm not one of those people who considers speed an overwhelming virtue, so...
(I've made the argument myself that in many ways, Hero is actually an easier system to learn and remember than a lot of D&D variations, because the amount of one-off design bits you have to keep track of is smaller, but that argument rarely goes over well).
But the truth still is I find having to make a lot of ad-hoc decisions unpleasant as a GM and dubious as a player, so there's only so light you can get the rules before I'll take a pass.
Thomas Shey
Legend
If I recall correctly (its been many a year) part of the problem with those two games were they really, really got into the weeds on detail in some areas that almost no one cared about; they weren't just complex, they were complex in a way that yielded no obvious benefit to the vast majority of potential users, even among people tolerant of complex rules.
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