[Rant] Is Grim n Gritty anything more than prejuidice?

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Wayside, excuse me for a moment as I'm not going to have a good time to respond to this over the next couple of days, but I will get a good response down by Wednesday. If it's not a problem with the rest of the folks joining this conversation I will continue the discussion in the format you have used, as long as I can figure it out.

And I will get that analysis of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 out eventually as well.

Sadly, tonight is probably going to be a bad night for me to put out responses in general, though there's a lot I'd like to respond to, particularly Joshua Dyal's first post and Wulf Ratbane's prior post.

For now let me just provide what will hopefully be clarification of what I mean by prejuidice.

Allow me to posit three forms of articulation: argument, opinion, and prejuidice. I'll start with a very very simply dynamic for how I see these three categories working together but I reserve the right to change that dynamic drastically as the argument develops and as I develop a better idea of what I need to illustrate. And I'd also like to point out that I certainly don't want to exclude the possibility that my own idea of how this works might be changed by reading things in this thread.

Now this scheme is simply to provide a very large context for what I'm trying to say. Now, both argument and prejuidice are forms of opinion. There are forms of opinion that are neither argument nor prejuidice and you might posit forms of argument or prejuidice which aren't opinion either though I don't think any of them are germane to the discussion at hand. Now all three of these categories can be evaluated both in terms of themselves and in terms of the end context of morality. That is that there are both good and bad opinions but opinions may also be good or evil. So I am not arguing that an opinion that is a prejuidice is necessarilly evil and I am not necessarilly arguing that it is a bad prejuidice.

I would argue that, on the whole and all else being equal, a prejuidice is an inferior opinion to an argument, further that prejuidices make very poor arguments.

So my point here is that I am not trying to say that GnG is evil, that it is bad, or that it has to be absolutely pinned down to little things as those are things that I don't think are inherent in either an opinion which I know GnG to be or a prejuidice which I suspect GnG is.

In fact I would specifically say that where an opinion or prejuidice might be evil or bad, I don't think GnG is those things in either category. It might have evil or bad fruits, but that's true of the very best arguments and opinions as well as the very worst prejuidices.

If GnG is in fact a prejuidice, then the worst I think I could accuse it of is being snobbish, that is being disdainful of others while lacking any great level of self-awareness or modularity, but there's no doubt that GnG gets its name attached to a lot of very good work and I'd like to know both it and how to deal with it better.

There's certainly a great deal more one could discuss on the issue of prejuidice and this post only has so much to do with the specific subject at hand, but I hope this provides some helpful direction to the conversation as it seemed that clarification was demanded on the one hand and that I might have been seen as making some sort of group attack on the other. I hope I have defended myself in the latter and made some small progress in the former.

I really like the thread thus far and I'm grateful for everyone who has participated and kept the tone delightful, curious, engaged, and civil. This is the sort of thing I really appreciate ENWorld for.

 

[Malic]

Hi Dr Strangemonkey, this thread is covering some interesting ground so thanks for kicking it off.

I'd just like to know why you insist on using a loaded word like 'prejudice' for this GnG concept. Whether you insist that there can be good and bad prejudice or not, it clearly implies that anyone who likes GnG is not giving something else a fair go - presumably 'vanilla' DnD. It also obviously carries overtones of being less than valid.

I'm also a bit unclear whether you mean 'it's a prejudice, not a genre', or 'liking GnG is a prejudice, not an opinion'.

Finally, I don't really understand whether you are arguing that the term itself should not be used because it is not unanimously defined (which seems to be the case for most RPG terms not straight out of the SRD, and even some from there), or whether you are arguing that this is not a valid choice as a gaming style. Or something else that I have missed?

Surely you are not saying that if everyone understood heroic vanilla D&D properly, everyone would like it.

Would you mind explaining a bit more clearly? I would really like to understand better where you are going with this.

Cheers,
Malic

 

[Desdichado]

I really like the thread thus far and I'm grateful for everyone who has participated and kept the tone delightful, curious, engaged, and civil. This is the sort of thing I really appreciate ENWorld for.

Indeed, it's been an enjoyable thread to read (even when wandering far afield of where it started) but like Malic, I still don't see why you use the word prejudice to describe what GnG is, and after your latest post, I'm not any clearer. Prejudice certainly implies, even if that's not exactly what you meant, that GnG folks are making judgements that are based on preconceived notions that in turn are not based on just grounds or sufficient knowledge.

If I'm very familiar with D&D 3.x, having played (and run) it for many years since it's release, in several different campaigns, I can hardly be prejudiced against it, because my knowledge is most certainly sufficient.

The only way I think you can make a tenuous case for "prejudice" is that my tastes naturally run counter to the high level wahoo of D&D as written, so I was unlikely to like it despite how well it works (and personally, I think how well the game works at high level is debatable, but that's a completely different thread) just because I'm predisposed by my taste to not like it.

But that's still not prejudice, that's just a question of taste, and how D&D isn't necessarily a good match for that.

 

[Plane Sailing]

While I generally prefer running & playing non-g&g D&D, I have to say that the most memorable combats I've seen were in g&g systems like Runequest - having one leg crippled by an enemy javelin, pinned to the floor and throwing my spear from prone to slay the enemy broo champion, that kind of thing.

This ties in so nicely with what I was going to say that I thought I'd quote S'mon as my introduction.

My friends an I abandoned 1e in the early 80's for Runequest. We had got tired with the very things that have already been mentioned on this thread - mid level characters who could ignore threats (the levelled crossbow), environmental issues, falls - which were serious matters for 1st-3rd level characters.

In Runequest2, where the mechanics gave you basically static hit points but with defences (parry and armour) which gradually improved as you got more experienced, we found a game where even weapon masters could get into difficulty if they were attacked by two or three opponents at a time, where a 20ft fall was bad news for anybody, where you could have a limb severed in combat.

Now RQ2 wasn't a low magic game - everyone cast battlemagic spells and eventually had access to rune spells from one means or another. Divine intervention could bring dead PCs back to life, severed limbs could be repaired. Yet amongst all that it always maintained its grim and gritty feel - the Rune Priest-Lords were still worried about a 30ft fall, or being outnumbered by half-competent opponents.

The RQ2 system was easily translatable - I did an entire Sci-Fi RPG based upon it, we also had Empire of the Petal Throne and Dark Sun conversions for which it fitted admirably.

So no. Grim and Gritty isn't "anything more than a prejudice". It can be used to encompass a range of possibilities, not least that of having a consistent level of threat which remains within the realm of easy believability. Some people are able to easily rationalise a levelled crossbow bolt only nicking the high level Ftr, but the point remains that the high level D&D Ftr just doesn't have any reason to fear a single crossbow wielded by a watchman. Grim n Gritty allows this to be a believable threat. Some non-D&D systems do this admirably (RQ2 certainly did), some D&D systems do so too, AFAICS.

To my mind hit points are the main problem facing grim and gritty in D&D, and it is interesting that d20/OGL means of getting grim and gritty normally have to find some way of bypassing them (lowered Massive Damage Threshold, replaced hp etc).

Cheers

 

[S'mon]

This thread has convinced me to institute "double-20 crit forces a Massive Damage Check", BTW.

I've certainly found GMing low-level 3e recently to be far more fun than the high-level stuff I was doing last year. It's not exactly g&g, or even the wahoo - I'm comfy running 18th level PCs as ruling mighty empires and battling gods. What I hate is 18th (or 15th) PCs doing "just some dungeon".

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Well, among other reasons I'm using a loaded term like prejuidice and then lightening the load because it stands a good chance of attracting people to the thread and then investing them enough to argue but defusing the situation enough to keep the arguments intelligent.

Plus, among the broad range of meanings you can attach to or derive from prejuidice are ones that pretty much mean exactly what I mean. And among those is that I am using the term prejuidice to be critical, in so much as I am being critical, of the idea of GnG itself not its adherents or its products. Just as in the title Pride and Prejuidice it refers to a quality of sentiment or thought without really casting aspersions on the characters, though the use of the word Prejuidice in that title may be confusing in other ways.

I can, however, provide a short response to the idea that I think GnG players aren't familiar with DnD as I think it may be very illustrative.

There is a sense in which prejuidice can come from experience. If you worked in a neighborhood and it had a certain style and a lot of crimes and you said that style is a criminal style, well that would be both derived from your experience, in that you wouldn't otherwise know that this style was criminal style, and a prejuidice, in that someone else wouldn't otherwise know that it's a criminal style.

So it's not that I think GnG has no experience of DnD, or that the above case is really the manner in which prejuidice applies to GnG. Indeed I think that GnG may have too much experience of DnD. It's an aesthetic criticism I rarely hear outside of D20 circles, though I do hear echoes of it when people are approaching certain fantasy genres and certainly within the discussion of GnG other media and genres are mentioned so I wouldn't deny it has roots and manifestations in other areas.

I'm probably going to keep any further explanation of what I mean by prejuidice fairly weak until I can come up with something that expresses it really well in terms of the argument thus far. I think the definitions that have been used previously are pretty functional, and I don't want to limit the arguments by setting the term in the wrong sort of stone. And part of that is that in my heart there are two images of GnG and one is of GnG as a sort of snobbish and insubstantial but not bad pseudo- or semi- aesthetic. One that further action could transform into something that would be easier to deal with. The other is of GnG as something that is in fact very strong and new, but that needs to be twisted in some way I and most of its adherents are not seeing in order to make it really functional and interesting. And when I say twist I mean that it's very possible that I'm simply seeing it from the wrong side of things and that enlightening me could solve much of the problem all together.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Indeed, it's been an enjoyable thread to read (even when wandering far afield of where it started) but like Malic, I still don't see why you use the word prejudice to describe what GnG is, and after your latest post, I'm not any clearer. Prejudice certainly implies, even if that's not exactly what you meant, that GnG folks are making judgements that are based on preconceived notions that in turn are not based on just grounds or sufficient knowledge.

Actually, I could have answered this much more simply, I'm sorry.

It's not that I'm saying you are prejudiced against DnD. It's that I'm saying GnG may be nothing more than a prejuidice. The former is an accusation of character, the latter is a quality or category of opinion.

I'm certainly not implying, as I said above, that I think people who like GnG have not played DnD enough.

The question of how well high level works might very well be highly germane to this thread. I certainly think that it's interesting that you would distinguish between your opinion of the quality of the action in terms of wahoo and your opinion of the action in terms of its overall quality.

It could be that GnG makes judgements based on unjust grounds. I'm not certain about that yet, there are portions of the GnG based arguments I've seen that have made a lot of sense to me, and there are other portions that I've found highly questionable. That's a lot of the reason I'd call it a prejuidice, but not because it has anything to do with injustice, just that the quality of the argument seems lacking. Is that helpful?

 

[The Shaman]

Well, among other reasons I'm using a loaded term like prejuidice and then lightening the load because it stands a good chance of attracting people to the thread and then investing them enough to argue but defusing the situation enough to keep the arguments intelligent.

While it may not be your intent, that's highly manipulative and, to my mind, deeply wrong.

Bad call.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Hi Dr Strangemonkey, this thread is covering some interesting ground so thanks for kicking it off.

Finally, I don't really understand whether you are arguing that the term itself should not be used because it is not unanimously defined (which seems to be the case for most RPG terms not straight out of the SRD, and even some from there), or whether you are arguing that this is not a valid choice as a gaming style. Or something else that I have missed?

In my mind, there's certainly a validity question.

Again, I don't want to limit the argument too much, but to put it simply I'd say:

Very valid play style. Most of what I like about GnG comes out of this aspect of it, including people. There are probably things I hate about it or things that could be legitimately criticized. And I think that's what I like about it best, that at the level of play style GnG is a lot more specific.

I personally have a lot less faith in its validity as a critical criteria or aesthetic system. Now this obviously does have some affect on its validity as a play style, but I think only in a really general sense. And, possibly, specifically on the issue of high level play.

I'm not here to say that people who play GnG are nerks are anything. That would make my use of the term prejudice a little too reflexive and ironic this early in the morning. Give me a few days and something really flamboyant argument wise and we'll probably get there though, and hopefully in an amusing fashion.

It may be that I'm trying to force GnG into the play style level entirely and that that's impossible, but I don't think that's my goal.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

While it may not be your intent, that's highly manipulative and, to my mind, deeply wrong.

Bad call.

Oh no! I certainly hope not. As I said, I used the term because it meant what I wanted to say. I considered using a term that did not and decided to stick with prejudice because it could be made to serve a better rhetorical purpose.

I always consider purpose as well as meaning in my speech. I specifically chose it because I thought it would lead to the politest and most engaged level of conversation, which, to my mind, is the opposite of manipulative because it prevents people from being tricked into aggreeing with me too easilly.

I'll happilly delete that paragraph if that helps to restore the harmony of the thread. I don't know that I can change the title of the thread or I would offer to do that as well.