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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5264017" data-attributes="member: 42582">NoWayJose, obviously I can't speak for Doug or Mallus, but for my own part I'm not trying to set up a contrast between old and new D&D, or pro- and anti- D&D as it then/now was. To try to give weight to that point - I see fans of 4e calling for more detail on the PoL setting, for example, and it frustrates me about 4e just as much as it frustrates me in relation to other games and systems. (This is why I like the Plane Above better than the Plane Below, and why I like the domain bits of the Plane Above better than the island bits of the Plane Above - the discussions of the gods and the domains give me the most amount of thematically powerful stuff to incorporate into my game, whereas the islands - and a lot of the Plane Below - tend just to give me locations where the potential thematic issues have already been resolved.)That's also why I disagree (at least to some extent, I think) with Doug about the "sim" issue. I think the old vs new D&D has a strong "sim" vs "gamist/narrativst" element to it, but this issue is (in my view) not quite the same as that issue.I agree the image of the nerd engineer is a caricature. But the contrast that Doug draws between attitudes or orientations towards the aesthetic experience isn't, at least in my experience, mere caricature. I feel there is a real difference, and it's one that I bump into from time to time (not all the time) when reading these boards. And even if the engineer is a caricature, I think that at least some of it might turn on where people are coming from as far as their familiarity with various literary and social ideas is concerned.Any examples are likely to be at least a bit controversial, so before I offer up two I want to stress that I'm not trying to provoke. This is an attempt to communicate a type of experience I've had in posting and reading on these boards about FRPGing.Example 1: Is D&D racist in the way it treats PCs races, "monster" humanoid races like orcs, etc? This question comes up from time to time. One of the most common responses I see is that "No, it isn't, because orcs don't really exist and so there is nothing racist about them being objectively worthy of condemnation within the gameworld. And in any event they're a different species, not a different race, from humans." Notice that this response assumes that the framework for answering the question about racism is the framework of the gameworld fiction. Whereas for me, and (I assume) for others who take the worry about racism seriously, the framework for answering the question is the real world, with the gameworld fiction understood as a cultural artefact in the real world. And so the question (for me) is really: is there something problematic about a cultural artefact which appears to promulgate or legitimate tropes of a racist variety? Now the answer to that question may be yes or no - see the Spike Lee film "Bamboozled" for one take on it, though not in the context of RPGing - but it seems to me to make a huge difference to one's take on that question how one approaches the gameworld fiction. At least as I read them, Doug and Mallus are saying it needs to be thought of as a cultural artefact, not a world to be evaluated, imagined and explored on its own terms.Example 2: Love for the Planescape setting. This is often articulated by reference to the setting's detail, and the way that detail (cunning yugoloths, blood war, factions, layers shifting from Nirvana to Arcadia - or vice versa, I can't remember - etc) exemplifies the principle that belief shapes the planes. But nothing in that setting, at least as I've read its materials, is about the beliefs of the players - who are, in this context, the audience for the experience - shaping the planes. Or to put it in a way that steps a bit more outside the language of the setting - Planescape seems to me to be a setting which involves the players spectating on someone else's intricate and even byzantine morality story, rather than actually engaging themselves in the creation of their own morality story. And so discussions tend to focus on questions about (for example) which plane a certain NPC or PC's soul is most closely attuned to, or what the ingame rationale is for the celestials not trying to wipe out all the fiends in Sigil, rather than on questions about what it would mean for someone's soul to be condemned to the abyss (beyond becoming a manes!) or what it tells us about celestials that they are perfectly happy with shopping in Sigil side by side with all those fiends.I could have put example number 2 more generally in terms of contrasting attitudes towards "exploring the gameworld as if it were a real place", but I think Planescape really makes clear the contrast that I'm trying to draw. "Exploring the gameworld" in the abstract can be all things to all people - the most thematically heavy game of Gloranthan HeroWars still involves exploring the gameworld. It's just that the exploration is a means to a thematic end rather than an end in itself. The thing about Planescape is that in many ways the gameworld is nothing but thematic content, and yet Planescape (or, at least, the feel for it that I get from the books, and the approach to it that I most commonly see on these boards) isn't about thematically engaging play at all, but about exploring the minutiae of a world where all the thematic issues have already been resolved by the setting authors.I'm also now getting a better sense of why Doug is probably right that there's a type of "sim" vs "anti-sim" dimension to this. It's not a purist-for-system sim sensibility that's at issue (wheras this is what's at issue in the objections to 4e's "gamism"). It's an exploring-the-gameworld sim sensibility that's at issue. Is the gameworld an end in itself, or a tool for some other purpose?</blockquote>

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