What's really at stake in the Edition Wars

[UniversalMonster]

So, in my humble opinion, that's what's at stake with the edition war. The entrance of new people to continue the hobby we all love.

It probably doesn't help that a good chunk of edition warring is specifically resentment of new/younger players, ie "stupid kids". I do agree that it has a lot to do with feeling left out and identity. (for example, around New Years I noted a couple of posts on blogs that said things like "it was another year removed from the game we used to play, the game that we supported and held a central place in our gaming landscape...") Those are poignant laments! I'm not trying to be funny here.

But in the end, whatever you play, 1) it's just a game(don't forget, right?) , and 2) it's a choice. I recall not playing D&D for almost the entirety of 2nd edition myself. I CHOSE that, I wish people were more cognizant of that no matter what, it isn't the end of the world.

The other thing is some people can't seem to untangle a whole host of feelings about corporations and (for lack of a better term) under-dogism, and the various sizes of the companies involved in producing these games--from the games themselves. In my experience, the guy who says "he's in it for the hobby, but not the industry" that then spends a lot of time posting the transcripts of the Hasbro quarterly earnings conference call.. that guy is probably never really going to be able to discuss the way you can cast magic missile as an at-will in a rational manner. You'll be all like "now my magic user has the ability to fight.. and it works with Wizards fury, and my wizard is totally awesome.." and he's going to be come back with "So THIS is what the CORPORATE OVERLORDS of HASBRO have decreed!"

Ok, that's an exaggeration. But often the edition war talk is like both sides are having two different conversations.

 

[MacMathan]

So, in my humble opinion, that's what's at stake with the edition war. The entrance of new people to continue the hobby we all love.

This exactly.

 

[Dannager]

Beyond the home front, the root cause of the overall edition wars is blindingly obvious but very few seem willing to stand up and say it: what should be a hobby has long ago turned into an industry. Industry by its very nature has an insatiable thirst for money, leading to unnecessary bloat in edition x requiring the release of edition x+1 to clean up the mess...until the cycle starts again; and with every new edition comes another army into the war.

This is, I believe, a short-sighted way of looking at things.

In order for a hobby to continue to flourish - at least, any hobby that requires some kind of material to participate in - an industry is required to back it up. Just because an industry exists that keeps the D&D game in print doesn't mean that D&D is no longer a hobby. It absolutely is.

You could certainly avoid having an industry behind the hobby. You could have some company set up to do nothing but keep the current state of the game in print. Of course, that game would stagnate, die, and be replaced by some other game that was actually willing to put effort into the maintenance of a hobby.

As an edition warrior, what am I thinking? That I've long ago been left behind by the "official" game, so I might as well do my own thing anyway. That the industry doesn't care about me as a player or consumer, evidenced by ongoing refusal to support editions earlier than the current one at any given time.

See, I don't get this either. You can't take their refusal to continue to support earlier editions as evidence that they don't care about you. That's just silly. Of course they care about you. They'd really prefer it if they had you as a customer, in fact. But there's only so far they can go. Supporting previous editions means a) dividing their resources, and b) dividing their audience. If it made good business sense for them to do these things, I'm sure they would, but as it stands it's already extremely difficult for tabletop gaming companies to get by. I imagine WotC has it a great deal easier than the other guys, but based on the layoffs and project cutbacks we've witnessed it's clear that they're feeling the pressure too. I'm sure they'd like to give you what you want, if they could; after all, your dollars are just as good as anyone else's dollars. It's simply an unfortunate reality that what you want just isn't feasible.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

So, in my humble opinion, that's what's at stake with the edition war. The entrance of new people to continue the hobby we all love.

That is, for some, the SAME hobby WE love. Not the hobby of the same name that others play.

While not a meaningful difference for all, this might be a meaningful difference for some.

What I mean here is that, yes, I want more people to play the D&D I love. I have very big plans to introduce my son to it (and any future children...and No..I won't force it on them lest this get derailed).

BUT...This is the D&D I love. It might be 4e, 3e, 2e, Pathfinder, Castles and Crusades, OSRIC, Trailblazer, or anything else. The degree of difference from the game I play will be the degree of difference between our connection over a wonderful game.



Can you, a 1e grognard, bond with a child or grandchild playing 4e? Can you play "the same game"?

I don't doubt you could compromise, or come to some happy medium...but either you'd invent a new game of houserules, or one of you would bend to essentially play the game of the other.



We should all play what we like. The edition wars fight over not what I like, but what I want OTHERS to like, including strangers, offionados, my children, my friends and so on.

I want my kids to play D&D with me.

And I want it to feel like D&D.



So much parsing of meanings when things get complicated....

 

[jdrakeh]

That being said, I will say that I think we (the ENW moderating staff) were not exactly prepared for how things turned out. We simply lacked experience with such things. If we knew then what we knew now, we would probably have handled the time from 4e's announcement through... perhaps the a year from the release... a bit differently.

If it makes you feel any better, I feel that the edition warring here was far worse when this was Eric Noah's 3e News Site and 3rd Edition was in its infancy (i.e., when 3rd Edition was less than one year old). I posted here then (albeit under a different name) and vividly recall real screaming, knock down, drag out, arguments (frex, another poster and myself went for pages at a time comparing each other to squealing pigs).

I've rarely (if ever) seen the 3e/4e split here produce the seemingly endless stream of colorful pejoratives that the 2e/3e split did. There were pages upon pages of bile-filled, profanity-laden, screeds here back in the day. And, to be clear, this isn't meant to criticize Eric Noah's moderation — what was moderated was moderated well; I think it was simply hard for the relatively small staff to keep up with all of the nastiness.

And to be honest, there was also a time after that when edition warring seemed to be more prevalent here, as well. This would have been about three or four years ago. . . there was another online community planning incursions to ENWorld for the purpose of trolling. They actually had a whole forum dedicated to such efforts. I had over one-hundred posters on my Ignore List during that period of time.

So, all things considered, this past two years has been comparatively quiet and I think that is due in no small part to the mods.

 

[FireLance]

So, in my humble opinion, that's what's at stake with the edition war. The entrance of new people to continue the hobby we all love.

I think the entrance of new people is one aspect of it. Another related aspect is the entrance of new material, and when you get down to it, the real issue is the type of new people and new material coming into the hobby.

Think about it: if you don't want new material that supports your favored way to play the game, and you don't need an influx of new players who want to play the game the same way you like, then you don't really have many pragmatic reasons to engage in an edition war (you might have plenty of emotional reasons, though - but this has been well covered in previous posts in this thread).

Hence, the pragmatic edition warrior probably has a number of objectives: communicating his wants to influence the producers of new game material, persuading existing players and new entrants into the hobby to adopt his preferred game style, and (in some extreme cases) driving or keeping those with incompatible game styles out of the hobby.

 

[Cadfan]

Quite possibly. I do think that edition wars are an unintended side effect of the way ENW is moderated, though.

I mean, I know that ENW is what it is, and most of the time that's a good thing, so I'm not trying to knock it. But other forums that are more self-moderated in style tend to have little patience for the worst aspects of edition warriors, and tend to eliminate them (not literally!) through more naturalistic social cues.

I dunno; maybe I'm being naive, but in my experience, edition wars, and the reaction to them as well, are a specifically ENW phenomena. Other places, they tend not to rage nearly as hotly nor as long, nor do they simmer in a "cold war" state like they do here.

I disagree. While I am highly critical of certain ENW moderation policies, I do not think they are responsible for the edition war here.

I do think they were and are responsible for the style and strategies utilized in the edition war, and that they are responsible for a complete vulnerability to certain styles of trolling.

But they were not responsible for the edition war itself.

To give quick examples, on ENW its forbidden to directly insult someone. But you can indirectly insult indistinct groups of people. So calling someone immature is against the rules, but responding to a fan of a game by saying that his favored game game was designed to appeal to 14 year old narcissists is literally moderator approved discourse (I checked). This results in a forum in which trolls, through Darwinian selection, are highly skilled manipulators of language who avoid technical violations of the rules while provoking less sophisticated forum members into anger and three day bans.

On the WOTC forum, by contrast, trolls tend to just shout abuse, and the regulars have learned how to abuse them back without committing their own rules violations. This is no less of an edition war, but its a very different experience.

As for the overall issue, I adamantly maintain that any analysis of edition wars is lacking if it doesn't take into account the fact that many edition warriors are just trolling, and therefore have no discernible motives other than to make others suffer.

 

[Desdichado]

Based on that statement, I honestly have to wonder how many other RP forums you frequent. The phenomena of edition wars certainly isn't isolated to ENWorld nor, IME, do they burn as brightly here as they do elsewhere. I visit a lot of RP forums on a regular basis and, frankly, edition warring as it exists here is incredibly tame by comparison.

rpg.net, therpgsite.com, circvsmaximvs.com, mostly.

Granted, my appearances at a lot of those locales is hit or miss.

I can understand what you mean. That is great for smaller places - kind of the equivalent of the small town, where everyone knows everyone. Peer and social pressures work well there, where you probably have a personal relationship with (or at least know the reputation of) whoever chastises you. Or, in fairly homogeneous communities, where those who disagree can just be expected to leave. But such systems tend to fail pretty dramatically for larger communities that want to support multiple views at once.

So, we weren't perfect about it, but I don't think the moderation style you're talking about would have worked here.

I don't disagree. I didn't bring that up by way of complaint or suggestion that you do something differently.

 

[Desdichado]

I disagree. While I am highly critical of certain ENW moderation policies, I do not think they are responsible for the edition war here.

I do think they were and are responsible for the style and strategies utilized in the edition war, and that they are responsible for a complete vulnerability to certain styles of trolling.

But they were not responsible for the edition war itself.

Fair enough. I'll accept that correction and clarification of my stance.

To give quick examples, on ENW its forbidden to directly insult someone. But you can indirectly insult indistinct groups of people. So calling someone immature is against the rules, but responding to a fan of a game by saying that his favored game game was designed to appeal to 14 year old narcissists is literally moderator approved discourse (I checked). This results in a forum in which trolls, through Darwinian selection, are highly skilled manipulators of language who avoid technical violations of the rules while provoking less sophisticated forum members into anger and three day bans.

Indeed. The edition wars at ENWorld are characterized by a quick smackdown of any overt discussion, but in my opinion, that kind of loud, angry response is a quick-burning flame, and when it dies down, it's over. The ENW style response tends to favor the passive aggressive smarmy type of edition warriors, while punishing those who lose patience with the passive-aggressive jibes... which leads to a longer, dirtier, nastier, lingering edition war, in my opinion. And that's what I mean when I say that the moderation style unintentionally promoted the edition war, or at least the format in which it happened.

At circvsmaximvs, on the other hand, all attempted edition wars, and some were deliberately provoked, ended up stillborn. Those few who proved unable to hold a rational discussion about the issue were quickly marginalized by everyone on both sides of the discussion. Perhaps surprisingly, what ended up happening is that the discussions quickly evolved into fruitful and interesting discussions.

I'm not for a second advocating a circvsmaximvs style moderation (i.e., no moderation) for ENW; as Umbran says, it's two different populations in many ways, and requires a different touch. It is, however, and unfortunate side-effect of the ENW basic rules that it becomes, unintentionally, a haven for a particularly virulent and dirty version of edition wars that I haven't really seen anywhere else.

 

[jdrakeh]

rpg.net, therpgsite.com, circvsmaximvs.com, mostly.

D&D Edition wars aren't too frequent at RPGNet or TheRPGSite, but that's mainly because those aren't D&D-centric sites — the latter of those two sites, however, wages a war of sorts against "The Swine." And Circvs, as much as I love it, it's only tangentially a RPG site. If you start digging into other D&D fan sites, however, you'll find some absolutely insane levels of edition intolerance.