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The unique nature of TTRPGs, D&D and traps
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<blockquote data-quote="loverdrive" data-source="post: 8458638" data-attributes="member: 7027139"><p>Not that long ago I’ve participated in an interesting discussion with plenty of smart people here on enworld, and after some time I realized that couple of the things I said there were actually pretty smart. So I decided to write this.</p><p></p><p>Your intelligentsia folks would call it “un essai”, but I have only nine grades of education and learned French only because I wanted to bang a Godard fanboy, so I’ll just call it a post.</p><p></p><p></p><p>So.</p><p></p><p>People like what they like. Sounds obvious, right? When someone says that they like, say, Michael Bay flicks or Call of Duty or modern Russian hip-hop, they probably mean it. You may think of them as uneducated peasants, but it doesn’t really matter. They like what they like. Specifically.</p><p></p><p>I don’t think there’s anyone out there who really ####ing wishes for a thoughtful and psychological Michael Bay film with no explosions and spinning camera, yet still continues to chew on the same cactus. Of course not. This makes no sense.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Yet, there are people who play one specific fantasy tabletop role-playing game with heavy emphasis on exploration and ascension to a ruler in earlier editions and shifted to beating the naughty word out of monsters with time, treat it as an important part of their identity, wear weird polyhedral necklaces and then excitedly tell their friends over a pint, how they were solving a murder mystery in the last campaign and how there was no single combat and how much they liked it!</p><p></p><p>We all know such people. Truth to be told, we all were such people. Yes, even you in the back, your hipster beard doesn’t fool me.</p><p></p><p></p><p>No, I’m not going to try and convert you into my favourite system, not this time, even if I firmly believe that a large portion of D&D players actually enjoy playing TTRPGs and not D&D specifically.</p><p></p><p>Now, let’s discuss reasons, reasons unique to tabletop RPGs. I can think of two.</p><p></p><p></p><h2>The only limit is your imagination!</h2><p>...is the pitch people use to lure sweet summer children into their vile satanic cults of twisted dice that can’t be used for craps and elves that aren’t slaves to that bearded dude from the Coca-Cola advertisement.</p><p></p><p></p><p>So, you get into this vile cult. And you love it here. Really ####ing love it. What’s not to love about being a mighty wizard who has healthy sleep habits and possesses knowledge so vast and powerful that these dumb handsome athletic blockheads tremble in horror before her?</p><p></p><p>But you don’t care about mindless violence and robbing poor kobolds of their hard-earned money. You didn’t spend your childhood playing 7.62 or even Counter-Strike 1.6, no. You were playing Мор: Утопия, Sublustrum and in Fallout, you always started with Good Natured trait.</p><p></p><p>You look at this newly discovered thing and scream into the void “Oh my ugliest fattest cannibal gods, it has so much potential!”</p><p></p><p>And you set out to fulfil that potential. You decide to run a game about people actually talking and mysteries and plot and themes!</p><p></p><p>You still use D&D, though. You’ve heard somewhere that there’s a game just like it, that was about detectives, was it something lovecraftian? Doesn’t matter. You have the golden rule at your side, and you’ve already spent so much time learning the rules of 3.5E, picking classes and subclasses that would fit your grand idea, and expanding on the lore of Greyhawk. You don’t have time to read any other crap.</p><p></p><p>The players keep trying to turn your games into hack&slash fests, seduce your dragons and solve your mysteries with one spell. It’s your fault, though. You should’ve anticipated that.</p><p></p><p>You persist. Over time, you expand your horizons. You rise your gaze to the night sky, and pick a place for your next campaign. Coruscant sounds nice, doesn’t it?</p><p></p><p>Your name is Alice Loverdrive.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Now, a bit less flowery: there’s a perceived ease of modification. In, say, videogames, when one “oh my God I love Call of Duty so much, what if it was like Star Wars, with blasters and stuff?”, modding the game to be Star Wars is not really an option. You can do that, sure, but for an average gamer, it's an insurmountable task — it's obviously easier to look for a Star Wars first-person shooter than it is to mod stormtroopers into Call of Duty.</p><p></p><p>In tabletop role-playing, on the other hand, you don’t need to spend hours learning weird scripting languages or watching 3DS Max 2009 ####ING CRASH! or learning brushes in a counterintuitive editor made for space-monkeys with brains the size of a bulldozer.</p><p></p><p>Nah, it’s the other way around — it seems easier to write a couple of houserules than it is to learn another ruleset, especially given that after the bloated behemoth of D&D (I started with 3.5E, but 5E isn’t that much better, honestly), it’s reasonable to assume that other games to be as damn complex.</p><p></p><p></p><h2>The normie word</h2><p>You get into another satanic cult, one backed by the bottomless pockets of military-industrial complex. And you love it here. Really ####ing love it. You even wear a Call of Duty T-Shirt.</p><p></p><p>You’ve never heard of any other videogames. What even is “videogame”? Like, game that tries to mimic Call of Duty?</p><p></p><p>Your name is an empty string and your birthplace is <code>null</code>. You don’t exist.</p><p></p><p></p><p>There's no “normie” word for videogames or films or hip-hop music. My mother can’t tell Mario from Team Fortress or Eminem from Chali 2na, but she knows the broad term.</p><p></p><p>Call of Duty, however big, way damn bigger than D&D will ever be, is still a videogame. Other games, however small, ain’t CoD-likes.</p><p></p><p>There's a “normie” word for TTRPGs — it's "D&D". Dungeons and Dragons is the tabletop role-playing game. Other are D&D-likes, will forever be, and I don’t think there’s much we can do about that.</p><p></p><p></p><p>So, that’s how I think D&D traps people in. I don’t know nor care if its an intentional marketing ploy, and I also don’t think that everyone who plays D&D is some kind of trapped idiot. No, you can’t trap someone who doesn’t want to get out. I believe there are plenty of people who actually enjoy D&D for what D&D is, hell, I’m one of them, despite whatever you might think.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Такие дела.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="loverdrive, post: 8458638, member: 7027139"] Not that long ago I’ve participated in an interesting discussion with plenty of smart people here on enworld, and after some time I realized that couple of the things I said there were actually pretty smart. So I decided to write this. Your intelligentsia folks would call it “un essai”, but I have only nine grades of education and learned French only because I wanted to bang a Godard fanboy, so I’ll just call it a post. So. People like what they like. Sounds obvious, right? When someone says that they like, say, Michael Bay flicks or Call of Duty or modern Russian hip-hop, they probably mean it. You may think of them as uneducated peasants, but it doesn’t really matter. They like what they like. Specifically. I don’t think there’s anyone out there who really ####ing wishes for a thoughtful and psychological Michael Bay film with no explosions and spinning camera, yet still continues to chew on the same cactus. Of course not. This makes no sense. Yet, there are people who play one specific fantasy tabletop role-playing game with heavy emphasis on exploration and ascension to a ruler in earlier editions and shifted to beating the naughty word out of monsters with time, treat it as an important part of their identity, wear weird polyhedral necklaces and then excitedly tell their friends over a pint, how they were solving a murder mystery in the last campaign and how there was no single combat and how much they liked it! We all know such people. Truth to be told, we all were such people. Yes, even you in the back, your hipster beard doesn’t fool me. No, I’m not going to try and convert you into my favourite system, not this time, even if I firmly believe that a large portion of D&D players actually enjoy playing TTRPGs and not D&D specifically. Now, let’s discuss reasons, reasons unique to tabletop RPGs. I can think of two. [HEADING=1]The only limit is your imagination![/HEADING] ...is the pitch people use to lure sweet summer children into their vile satanic cults of twisted dice that can’t be used for craps and elves that aren’t slaves to that bearded dude from the Coca-Cola advertisement. So, you get into this vile cult. And you love it here. Really ####ing love it. What’s not to love about being a mighty wizard who has healthy sleep habits and possesses knowledge so vast and powerful that these dumb handsome athletic blockheads tremble in horror before her? But you don’t care about mindless violence and robbing poor kobolds of their hard-earned money. You didn’t spend your childhood playing 7.62 or even Counter-Strike 1.6, no. You were playing Мор: Утопия, Sublustrum and in Fallout, you always started with Good Natured trait. You look at this newly discovered thing and scream into the void “Oh my ugliest fattest cannibal gods, it has so much potential!” And you set out to fulfil that potential. You decide to run a game about people actually talking and mysteries and plot and themes! You still use D&D, though. You’ve heard somewhere that there’s a game just like it, that was about detectives, was it something lovecraftian? Doesn’t matter. You have the golden rule at your side, and you’ve already spent so much time learning the rules of 3.5E, picking classes and subclasses that would fit your grand idea, and expanding on the lore of Greyhawk. You don’t have time to read any other crap. The players keep trying to turn your games into hack&slash fests, seduce your dragons and solve your mysteries with one spell. It’s your fault, though. You should’ve anticipated that. You persist. Over time, you expand your horizons. You rise your gaze to the night sky, and pick a place for your next campaign. Coruscant sounds nice, doesn’t it? Your name is Alice Loverdrive. Now, a bit less flowery: there’s a perceived ease of modification. In, say, videogames, when one “oh my God I love Call of Duty so much, what if it was like Star Wars, with blasters and stuff?”, modding the game to be Star Wars is not really an option. You can do that, sure, but for an average gamer, it's an insurmountable task — it's obviously easier to look for a Star Wars first-person shooter than it is to mod stormtroopers into Call of Duty. In tabletop role-playing, on the other hand, you don’t need to spend hours learning weird scripting languages or watching 3DS Max 2009 ####ING CRASH! or learning brushes in a counterintuitive editor made for space-monkeys with brains the size of a bulldozer. Nah, it’s the other way around — it seems easier to write a couple of houserules than it is to learn another ruleset, especially given that after the bloated behemoth of D&D (I started with 3.5E, but 5E isn’t that much better, honestly), it’s reasonable to assume that other games to be as damn complex. [HEADING=1]The normie word[/HEADING] You get into another satanic cult, one backed by the bottomless pockets of military-industrial complex. And you love it here. Really ####ing love it. You even wear a Call of Duty T-Shirt. You’ve never heard of any other videogames. What even is “videogame”? Like, game that tries to mimic Call of Duty? Your name is an empty string and your birthplace is [ICODE]null[/ICODE]. You don’t exist. There's no “normie” word for videogames or films or hip-hop music. My mother can’t tell Mario from Team Fortress or Eminem from Chali 2na, but she knows the broad term. Call of Duty, however big, way damn bigger than D&D will ever be, is still a videogame. Other games, however small, ain’t CoD-likes. There's a “normie” word for TTRPGs — it's "D&D". Dungeons and Dragons is the tabletop role-playing game. Other are D&D-likes, will forever be, and I don’t think there’s much we can do about that. So, that’s how I think D&D traps people in. I don’t know nor care if its an intentional marketing ploy, and I also don’t think that everyone who plays D&D is some kind of trapped idiot. No, you can’t trap someone who doesn’t want to get out. I believe there are plenty of people who actually enjoy D&D for what D&D is, hell, I’m one of them, despite whatever you might think. Такие дела. [/QUOTE]
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