Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

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If lex doesn't do this in the new superman movie,it's ruined

 

[TiQuinn]

Once again someone does a fantastic job of pushing me farther away from ever trying out a new game because they want to prove its superiority over other games rather talk about how fun it is.

 

[CleverNickName]

Once again someone does a fantastic job of pushing me farther away from ever trying out a new game because they want to prove its superiority over other games rather talk about how fun it is.

Ugh, I know right? Getting people to talk about their new TTRPG without also dunking on someone else's game is next to impossible. It always seems to go like this for me:

Me: "Hey your new game looks cool! Tell me all about it!"

Them: "Okay so you know how D&D is terrible and everybody hates it?"

Me: "What? No. I'm asking you about your new game. What can you tell me about it?"

Them: "Well, in D&D you can't do This or That, and you just have to cope with This Other Thing. And also--"

Me: "I already know about D&D. Tell me about YOUR game."

Them: "Okay, okay. So in D&D, there is a problem with--"

Me, walking away: "Never mind."

 

[Autumnal]

Doing sustained advocacy for a game one loves without a bunch of dissing others can be surprisingly hard. I had to rewrite and re-rewrite so many posts in my days of unofficial net repping for White Wolf, and I’m temperamentally not a grudge holder or enthusiastic hater. This isn’t to excuse those who indulge, but constructive advocacy is a skill one needs to practice.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Doing sustained advocacy for a game one loves without a bunch of dissing others can be surprisingly hard. I had to rewrite and re-rewrite so many posts in my days of unofficial net repping for White Wolf, and I’m temperamentally not a grudge holder or enthusiastic hater. This isn’t to excuse those who indulge, but constructive advocacy is a skill one needs to practice.

Yeah. Its very easy to drop into comparisons, especially if the benign element of the comparison (from your point of view) is part of what attracted you to the game.

I mean, back in my heavy-duty RuneQuest days, I could have said that its intuitive quality mechanically and naturalistic feel was part of what was attractive about it--but it would have been very easy to do comparisons to (the detriment of) D&D while doing those. I'd probably have kept slipping into it even if I wasn't trying (ignoring the fact that I was hostile enough to D&D at that point that trying not to wouldn't even have occurred to me).

 

[TiQuinn]

Doing sustained advocacy for a game one loves without a bunch of dissing others can be surprisingly hard. I had to rewrite and re-rewrite so many posts in my days of unofficial net repping for White Wolf, and I’m temperamentally not a grudge holder or enthusiastic hater. This isn’t to excuse those who indulge, but constructive advocacy is a skill one needs to practice.

The other part of that is know your audience and the space that you're in. If an OSR bro is talking about how much Cairn is easier to run a particular style of game than 5e in front of a bunch of other OSR bros in an OSR space, that negative comparison seems fair to me - the audience is in a place to talk about OSR games. They're not actively walking into a forum of D&D players.

 

[Autumnal]

That’s a good point too! I would talk differently about QuestWorlds to an audience that’s all fans of story-oriented play than to a more general one. Knowing where you are is a skill that takes practice, too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That’s a good point too! I would talk differently about QuestWorlds to an audience that’s all fans of story-oriented play than to a more general one. Knowing where you are is a skill that takes practice, too.

It can also make entering a dedicated space to talk about even the game there--fraught. I'm very aware of this because even games I quite like, the things I often want to talk about are problem areas--and its really easy for people who are fans of a game to get very defensive about talking about problems with a game; it can quickly turn into a defense of one's own character as people try to suggest any problems are with your implementation, not the game (this tends to be particularly visible even if its a problem commonly addressed by people heavily within that game's community. I used to see it all the time when I was on the M&M board "The Atomic Think Tank" where new players would sometimes just get swarmed by people who were very heavy proponents of the game because they had questions that implied criticism)>

 

[overgeeked]

A lot of people also can't handle even the possibility of an implied criticism of a game they like. So even comparing it without criticizing is seen as a line too far by a lot of people.

"It's like D&D only deadlier and with pirates."

"D&D has pirates and can be deadly! How dare you!"

 

[Gradine]

A lot of people also can't handle even the possibility of an implied criticism of a game they like. So even comparing it without criticizing is seen as a line too far by a lot of people.

"It's like D&D only deadlier and with pirates."

"D&D has pirates and can be deadly! How dare you!"

Don't forget the other side of that, too

"<deadly pirate game> is nothing like D&D! How dare you!"