D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[hawkeyefan]

I believe in all gaming, some limitations are necessary. I think very few of them need to be set in stone (certainly fewer than you and some others seem to), but I do believe the ones that aren't are just as important. I don't believe in the blanket statement "constraints are good", because sometimes I think they're not.

Constraints are necessary. You clearly agree based on your opening “some limitations are necessary”. It’s not “rhetoric”… it’s just a simple truth.

No one said “all constraints are good”, so there’s no need for you to disagree based on that.

I'd love to have a casual conversation about game design, playstyles and preferences. But it seems like everything I see is a demand for deeper analysis with more hard lines, coupled with a refusal to accept answers that aren't couched in the asker's terms. All I can do is repeat how I feel.

So why not go seek out threads that you think will result in a casual conversation? Why continue to post in a thread like this one which is clearly not that?

Now… to be clear, I’m not asking in order to get you to stop posting. You can post in this thread or any other. But based on your own comments, it seems odd for you to stick around in this thread.

And conversation has to begin somewhere, with some terms people can agree on. I don't want to assume the Forge (for example) any more than you to don't want to assume traditional modes of play.

it depends on the context, doesn’t it? If we’re talking about a specific game, then we should approach it with assumptions about that game. If we’re talking about all of RPGs as a whole, then we should consider all possibilities, no?

And if a thread is about D&D and challenging the conservative nature of its design, then I’d expect exactly that… challenging the way it does things. And I would expect people to mention the way other games work as one of the possible alternatives to handle things.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Constraints are necessary. You clearly agree based on your opening “some limitations are necessary”. It’s not “rhetoric”… it’s just a simple truth.

No one said “all constraints are good”, so there’s no need for you to disagree based on that.



So why not go seek out threads that you think will result in a casual conversation? Why continue to post in a thread like this one which is clearly not that?

Now… to be clear, I’m not asking in order to get you to stop posting. You can post in this thread or any other. But based on your own comments, it seems odd for you to stick around in this thread.



it depends on the context, doesn’t it? If we’re talking about a specific game, then we should approach it with assumptions about that game. If we’re talking about all of RPGs as a whole, then we should consider all possibilities, no?

And if a thread is about D&D and challenging the conservative nature of its design, then I’d expect exactly that… challenging the way it does things. And I would expect people to mention the way other games work as one of the possible alternatives to handle things.

And that's fine. What I did not expect and do not want is to have to continuously defend my gaming preferences as if I were defending my dissertation proposal. I shouldn't have to pretend to be a doctoral candidate to have a discussion about different playstyles on an RPG site.

 

[Pedantic]

I will note that gamist games did used to get the same treatment, albeit not quite as aggressive, but that faded out entirely over the last 15-odd years.

I'd argue that's more because gamist games have largely faded out entirely over the same period, or shrunk in scope to narrowly defined chunks of gameplay. Mostly I think those players have drifted off to board games.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The /rpg subreddit absolutely has a sizeable subsect that is anti-D&D. They're cool with PF, but 5e is beyond the pale.

The subreddit overall isn't nasty to D&D-related discussions nor sneers on people saying they play D&D or the like so I can't see it as overall "hostile to D&D", even if some individual posters dislike it (and they often get downvoted if they're particularly sassy, I will note). I will say that there's a marked difference in how D&D is discussed there pre-and-post OGL 2.0 debacle. A lot more people were keen to discuss D&D (rather than other fantasy RPGs) on that subreddit pre-OGL 2.0. Seems like an awful lot of people aware of other RPGs enough to be posting there drifted away from D&D after that.

Discord and certain subreddits, mostly.

Presumably mostly specific to certain systems or approaches? In those cases I think you always see certain peccadillos and preferences, and most "hostility" to 5E comes simply from the fact that it would be odd to bring it up in those contexts.

 

[hawkeyefan]

And that's fine. What I did not expect and do not want is to have to continuously defend my gaming preferences as if I were defending my dissertation proposal. I shouldn't have to pretend to be a doctoral candidate to have a discussion about different playstyles on an RPG site.

Micah, is there anyone involved in this thread at this point that you really feel has any doubt about your preferences? You point them out routinely.

No one is attacking you. That your thinking aligns so closely with a specific approach to play doesn’t mean that criticism of that form of play is a criticism of you.

Now, having said that… if you want to have discussions about different playstyles, then be ready to hear different ideas about RPGs and how they work. Be ready for criticism not of you, but of the style that you may prefer.

And you don’t need to be a doctoral candidate… but it helps if maybe your research into other types of play went a little further than relying on second hand knowledge. I don’t know if that’s something you’ve done or not, but after taking part in many, many discussions here about this stuff, and after tons of resources have been suggested (many of them absolutely free) it seems like maybe something worth considering.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'd argue that's more because gamist games have largely faded out entirely over the same period, or shrunk in scope to narrowly defined chunks of gameplay. Mostly I think those players have drifted off to board games.

I'd disagree quite strongly with that.

I think the exact opposite has happened - gamism has become so completely normalized, particularly as all WotC editions of D&D have been primarily gamist in their design approach (albeit three different ways of doing gamism), contrary to the clumsy mixture of simulationist and gamist elements in AD&D. So people don't even really note that a game is gamist anymore unless it goes the extremes 4E does (and not even always then!).

I mean, just look at Outgunned and its relatives - the primary mode of the game is pretty extremely gamist, with the dice-arranging and heavily abstracted and very game-ified mechanics, but the narrativist elements tend to attract more discussion as a GNS thing, even though they're kind of secondary and mixed with a kind of genre-based simulationism.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And that's fine. What I did not expect and do not want is to have to continuously defend my gaming preferences as if I were defending my dissertation proposal. I shouldn't have to pretend to be a doctoral candidate to have a discussion about different playstyles on an RPG site.

Mate with love - and I do like your posts, let's be clear - you sometimes seem to actively butt into conversations to tell people how you don't like narrative stuff, when like, no-one is saying you can't or shouldn't. I mean, I know, I know but you don't have to kick every ball, and I say that as someone who kicks too many balls, so I know! But even I know it's my decision to kick them, no-one is forcing me, it's very rare for someone to say "@Ruin Explorer get in here and defend your viewpoint!!!" about something (it has happened at least twice though and that's kind of funny!)

 

[TwoSix]

In a tabletop game, if a player said, “I go over to the wall and lean on it while keeping an eye on everyone else,” that’s where I’d roll. I’d drop a die in the tower, check the result, and describe them noticing the scroll, if the roll succeeded.

Curious to hear your thoughts on that.

For situations like that, I used to make the players do a Perception check, or whatever the system equivalent was. (Spot, for example, in 3e).

Now if there's a scroll there, I just tell them.

 

[Faolyn]

The RPG subreddit on Reddit isn't hostile to D&D,

Ohhh, yes it is. Particularly 5e. Heck, a couple of weeks ago there was a post titled something like “Are we too mean to D&D on this sub?” and probably a third of the replies said “we’re not mean enough.”

But there are tons of very active D&D-specific subreddits, so it’s not like D&D players are being squeezed off the site. Half the animosity comes from D&D being treated as the norm everywhere, leaving people who want to talk about other games with few places to do so. You’ll even see it here, where general RPG discussions almost inevitably either use D&D as the baseline or turn into D&D discussions.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Ohhh, yes it is. Particularly 5e. Heck, a couple of weeks ago there was a post titled something like “Are we too mean to D&D on this sub?” and probably a third of the replies said “we’re not mean enough.”

I'm sorry I don't buy it. I've seen discussions involving D&D there and they're almost all harmless, and just mentioning D&D doesn't get people leaping on you unless you're proposing it as a "good generic system" or something equally absolutely demented.