What Hill Will You Die On?

[Jack Daniel]

Oh, I've got a few hills. Perhaps I'll just keep it to the extra spicy for today. My top two:

2) Rules engines are always separable from game settings, and it's only the setting that does any real work emulating a genre of fiction. Rules engines do modes of gameplay. In the same way that you can have a sci-fi shooter, platformer, or action-RPG among video games (say, Gradius vs. Metroid vs. Mass Effect), you can have a sci-fi dungeon-crawler or a sci-fi tacti-trad game or a sci-fi storytelling game on the tabletop.

Thematically, the genre and the mode can reinforce the other, but that doesn't always have to be the case. There can also be productive dissonance. Horror offers a good example. Call of Cthulhu is a game whose genre is cosmic horror, and the mode of gameplay is thematically consonant: investigation. If you play a Ravenloft game with AD&D 1e, on the other hand, the genre will be a mix of Gothic horror and high fantasy, but that doesn't really alter the dungeon-crawler mode of play.

Even if you come up with a rules engine that seems so inextricably bound to its setting that it must, in your mind, be doing work to produce a genre-appropriate "feel," I guarantee you that I could pressgang it into working beautifully for an entirely different setting associated with an entirely different genre, with trivial or no alterations to the rules engine itself.

1) Roleplaying is nothing more or less than controlling an avatar in a game that we've all collectively decided is a roleplaying game.

Roleplaying is not performative thespianism, affecting a voice or an accent, improvising dialog, or any other kind of playacting. Nor is RP making decisions that you, the player would not make: it isn't making choices based on the internal motivation/psychology of the character as distinct from the player, it isn't avoiding metagaming, it isn't "getting into character." It's just controlling the character, i.e. making decisions, any decisions, regardless of how you, the player, justify them.

It does not matter if (to use some old Forge terminology) you're taking an actor stance, a pawn stance, an authorial stance, or a directorial stance; what matters is that you're controlling a character in a roleplaying game, which as far as I can tell is any game where the player can try anything in spite of whatever game mechanics are present, and those attempts—those decisions—can impact both the mechanical game-state and the fictional universe. In other words, roleplaying games are games that have both fictional positioning and tactical infinity, and roleplaying must be construed as every single game-impacting decision that we make while playing such a game.

To privilege, e.g., a motivated actor stance as "real" roleplaying is untenable anyway, because players are constantly shifting between stances as they play. It's entirely possible to make a decision based purely on character psychology one moment, and then make a tactically sound metagame decision in the next, and there can never be any way for another player (let alone an NPC) to meaningfully tell the difference.

It is nonsensical to tie roleplaying to "what the character would do," since doing anything in game de facto makes whatever was done exactly what the character would do. Even if we're rationalizing it post hoc, it doesn't matter. The player made the character do it; so, whatever it is, it's what the character would do. And even if that seems to defy reason or previously established patterns, it doesn't matter. The PC is by definition "possessed" by the player; constraining oneself to consistency with previously established patterns is not a requirement.

 

[Umbran]

We all have one: that subject that you just dig your heals in on, no mattter what.

I will give the ironic:

We are talking about how we pretend to be elves. There are no hills in this topic important enough to die on.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I will give the ironic:

We are talking about how we pretend to be elves. There are no hills in this topic important enough to die on.

Why are the arguments about roleplaying games so vicious and bitter?

....because the stakes are so small.

 

[Umbran]

Why are the argument about roleplaying games so vicious and bitter?

....because the stakes are so small.

Definitely.

And, because this is the internet - discussion dynamics here are skewed by a sort of emotional distancing, so we don't self-moderate in the way we would during an in-person discussion with someone within our social circles.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Prosaic observations of online discussion are the least interesting aspect of online discussion, especially when they're repeated ad nauseam.

I'm always viscerally repulsed by the "elfgames" angle. It never comes off as a neutral reminder to stay chill. Instead, it always reads as trivializing something hobbyists love, and it always feels gross.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The concept of "balance" - mechanical or narrative - is really overrated. I didn't really see discussion of this until c. 2000 and, prior to that, it was an afterthought in most game groups that I played with. The DM/GM usually just set up encounters that made sense for a given environment or narrative set piece. This meant that sometimes (often) the PCs had to retreat and come up with a better plan or simply return when we were more powerful and better suited to deal with a given threat.

While avoiding comment on the rest, I was seeing as early as the late 80's.

 

[Umbran]

I'm always viscerally repulsed by the "elfgames" angle. It never comes off as a neutral reminder to stay chill. Instead, it always reads as trivializing something hobbyists love, and it always feels gross.

If your love of an inanimate thing leads to loss of perspective and treating living beings poorly, the grossness isn't in the "elfgames angle".

Love it as you will - it is a hobby entertainment, and fandom can only go so far in excusing problematic behavior towards real, living people.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Prosaic observations of online discussion are the least interesting aspect of online discussion, especially when they're repeated ad nauseam.

I'm always viscerally repulsed by the "elfgames" angle. It never comes off as a neutral reminder to stay chill. Instead, it always reads as trivializing something hobbyists love, and it always feels gross.

Look, I can take the hobby as seriously as the best of them, to the point where I've written multi-part essays on the adoption of two-weapon fighting in AD&D and how that reflects design choices by Zeb Cook.

But I think that it is helpful, as a matter of perspective, to remember why we started playing these games ... and they are games. To have fun! If you find that your blood is getting all angry, and you're throwing around "burden of persuasion" and "logical fallacies" and the like, it can be helpful to have this dose of perspective.

In the end, we are hobbyists discussing a game. Usually a fantasy game. That is played for fun. If someone, somewhere, says something wrong about the game we play, life will go on- and my game will remain unchanged.

 

[J.Quondam]

If your love of an inanimate thing leads to loss of perspective and treating living beings poorly, the grossness isn't in the "elfgames angle".

Love it as you will - it is a hobby entertainment, and fandom can only go so far in excusing problematic behavior towards real, living people.

Look, I can take the hobby as seriously as the best of them, to the point where I've written multi-part essays on the adoption of two-weapon fighting in AD&D and how that reflects design choices by Zeb Cook.

But I think that it is helpful, as a matter of perspective, to remember why we started playing these games ... and they are games. To have fun! If you find that your blood is getting all angry, and you're throwing around "burden of persuasion" and "logical fallacies" and the like, it can be helpful to have this dose of perspective.

In the end, we are hobbyists discussing a game. Usually a fantasy game. That is played for fun. If someone, somewhere, says something wrong about the game we play, life will go on- and my game will remain unchanged.

Yes, but there are better ways and worse ways to say that than to say "it's just an elf-game." That's just as belittling as saying "man up!" or "don't play with dolls" or "sticks and stones" or whatever.

Because for some small fraction of readers out there their enjoyment is more than "just for fun." Their gaming might be their only social outlet, or their sole escape from drudge work or near poverty. They might be bullied teens or have learning disabilities or social anxiety. And when those few readers see commenters call it "just an elf-game", it could prompt them to think maybe there is something wrong with their own enjoyment. Which is obviously not true.

Fact is, I don't really know how or why any other particular person engages the game, or what it really means to them. To my mind, that's the perspective to take: to remember that each reader has a different perspective and to be mindful of them.

Say the thing, just say it carefully. Nothing is ever lost by being considerate toward real living people, including some unknown handful of quiet passive readers who don't make themselves known but might still feel the insult.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Yes, but there are better ways and worse ways to say that than to say "it's just an elf-game." That's just as belittling as saying "man up!" or "don't play with dolls" or "sticks and stones" or whatever.

Because for some small fraction of readers out there their enjoyment is more than "just for fun." Their gaming might be their only social outlet, or their sole escape from drudge work or near poverty. They might be bullied teens or have learning disabilities or social anxiety. And when those few readers see commenters call it "just an elf-game", it could prompt them to think maybe there is something wrong with their own enjoyment. Which is obviously not true.

Fact is, I don't really know how or why any other particular person engages the game, or what it really means to them. To my mind, that's the perspective to take: to remember that each reader has a different perspective and to be mindful of them.

Say the thing, just say it carefully. Nothing is ever lost by being considerate toward real living people, including some unknown handful of quiet passive readers who don't make themselves known but might still feel the insult.

Git gud.