Agamon
Adventurer
At least she had a smidgin of talent, unlike the other hacks in that "band".
Why The Niches?
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At least she had a smidgin of talent, unlike the other hacks in that "band".
pawsplay
Hero
That could be, but I think that could be a function of memory. It seems to me that a lot of people are playing more than just one game. Edition wars tend to get a little hot around here because of the concentration on a handful of games, but even so I would say it is a basically friendly place. I would allow that both 4e and nostalgia gaming have drawn a little backlash, but I think the overall trend has been for people to look for ways to learn from different games and systems. I think a lot of "what is old school gaming?" threads come about because people are curious. People reacted fairly positively to my blog post about what a 3.5 gamer could learn from 4e.
1. You can't exclude people from your group if you don't have groupings.
2. The reason for the popularityof discussing the various niches differs depending on the niche. The motivation of someone constantly harping on an alleged "old school renaissance" is very different from the motivation of someone constantly harping on the one true (very exclusive) definition of "roleplaying."
3. All RPGs really are a balance between issues like playability and believability, or individual decision making versus collective action, the ability to individually control the story versus the danger that plot by committee will never go anywhere. It is useful to have labels for these different concerns. Unfortunately, too many people (too many loud people?) see these things in black and white rather than as a multi dimensional array of balanced interests. So a game that uses Rule X because it feels that Rule X is easier at the game table that Rule Y even though Rule Y is more believable gets lambasted as a boardgame. Additionally, just as a fish has difficulty perceiving water (that's probably not really true, is it?), gamers who have spent long periods of time playing a given game often cannot accurately perceive the places that game made tradeoffs, causing them to view other games where those tradeoffs are more apparent to their eyes as being adulterated in ways they do not perceive in their chosen game.
4. If I want to troll your thread, its easy to do something like pick up on your use of the word "story" or your focus on mechanical concerns rather than character concerns and proclaim that this secretly reveals some pernicious philosophical position on gaming. Its unfalsifiable, lets me attribute to you things you probably didn't intend, and allows me to turn the entire discussion into a debate on my pet issue with you operating as an unwilling stand in for an opinion you probably don't even hold. Put simply, ENWorld prohibits disrespect but permits concern trolling. These categories are a gift from the heavens to a concern troll.
2. The reason for the popularityof discussing the various niches differs depending on the niche. The motivation of someone constantly harping on an alleged "old school renaissance" is very different from the motivation of someone constantly harping on the one true (very exclusive) definition of "roleplaying."
3. All RPGs really are a balance between issues like playability and believability, or individual decision making versus collective action, the ability to individually control the story versus the danger that plot by committee will never go anywhere. It is useful to have labels for these different concerns. Unfortunately, too many people (too many loud people?) see these things in black and white rather than as a multi dimensional array of balanced interests. So a game that uses Rule X because it feels that Rule X is easier at the game table that Rule Y even though Rule Y is more believable gets lambasted as a boardgame. Additionally, just as a fish has difficulty perceiving water (that's probably not really true, is it?), gamers who have spent long periods of time playing a given game often cannot accurately perceive the places that game made tradeoffs, causing them to view other games where those tradeoffs are more apparent to their eyes as being adulterated in ways they do not perceive in their chosen game.
4. If I want to troll your thread, its easy to do something like pick up on your use of the word "story" or your focus on mechanical concerns rather than character concerns and proclaim that this secretly reveals some pernicious philosophical position on gaming. Its unfalsifiable, lets me attribute to you things you probably didn't intend, and allows me to turn the entire discussion into a debate on my pet issue with you operating as an unwilling stand in for an opinion you probably don't even hold. Put simply, ENWorld prohibits disrespect but permits concern trolling. These categories are a gift from the heavens to a concern troll.
The D&D brand exerts too great a draw.
That's a reason why successive waves of players -- rather than either contenting themselves with making it their own game as per page 36 of the original Volume 3, or choosing RuneQuest or Ars Magica (or whatever) instead -- have insisted that the "official" game must change to fit their vision, however radically different it might be.
That's also a reason why we "outmoded" sorts continue to give a damn. It's hard to shake the notion that at least some of the people drawn to the brand might actually be interested in the games that built it in the first place. I use the plural because with 2e and 3e (especially the gulf between them), we departed from the conventional meaning of "edition".
Besides the people who honestly dislike X with a passion, there are those who don't really even know what it is. Even having played every edition since whichever, one might not have attained a deep understanding of all their aspects. "How we played when we were 12" seems often to inform impressions of what was being played more than the work itself informs engagement with it at a later age.
One need not know much about something to lack interest in it. First impressions can be enough to decide "that's not for me", and the physical constraints of mortal life make that necessary! Much ado about others' closed-mindedness tends to be hypocritical.
However, that kind of lack of interest also results in a lack of knowledge. I don't know much about video games or MMORPGS. If I were to draw comparisons with D&D, maybe similarly naive people would "get" whatever I might say -- but it would doubtless drive the initiated up the wall!
The shoe is on the other foot when I encounter the claim that old D&D is all about "killing things and taking their stuff" or the like.
We've got people trying to communicate about different phenomena just to understand them. We've got people who see the expression of different preferences as attack and lash out. We've got people who launch preemptive strikes against the mere drawing of distinctions.
Fans of different old things at least have in common that we're all "behind the times" and "not with the program". We don't have much vested interest in "boosterism" for WotC. That might help to put partisans of the latest new thing on edge, making them more mindful of the frontier between "us" and "them". I don't know whether this was a feature of the previous disjunction, but the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously claiming to be "better" and "just the same" struck me from the start this time even in WotC's evangelism. There's a love-hate relationship with terms and concepts such as "old school".
That's a reason why successive waves of players -- rather than either contenting themselves with making it their own game as per page 36 of the original Volume 3, or choosing RuneQuest or Ars Magica (or whatever) instead -- have insisted that the "official" game must change to fit their vision, however radically different it might be.
That's also a reason why we "outmoded" sorts continue to give a damn. It's hard to shake the notion that at least some of the people drawn to the brand might actually be interested in the games that built it in the first place. I use the plural because with 2e and 3e (especially the gulf between them), we departed from the conventional meaning of "edition".
Besides the people who honestly dislike X with a passion, there are those who don't really even know what it is. Even having played every edition since whichever, one might not have attained a deep understanding of all their aspects. "How we played when we were 12" seems often to inform impressions of what was being played more than the work itself informs engagement with it at a later age.
One need not know much about something to lack interest in it. First impressions can be enough to decide "that's not for me", and the physical constraints of mortal life make that necessary! Much ado about others' closed-mindedness tends to be hypocritical.
However, that kind of lack of interest also results in a lack of knowledge. I don't know much about video games or MMORPGS. If I were to draw comparisons with D&D, maybe similarly naive people would "get" whatever I might say -- but it would doubtless drive the initiated up the wall!
The shoe is on the other foot when I encounter the claim that old D&D is all about "killing things and taking their stuff" or the like.
We've got people trying to communicate about different phenomena just to understand them. We've got people who see the expression of different preferences as attack and lash out. We've got people who launch preemptive strikes against the mere drawing of distinctions.
Fans of different old things at least have in common that we're all "behind the times" and "not with the program". We don't have much vested interest in "boosterism" for WotC. That might help to put partisans of the latest new thing on edge, making them more mindful of the frontier between "us" and "them". I don't know whether this was a feature of the previous disjunction, but the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously claiming to be "better" and "just the same" struck me from the start this time even in WotC's evangelism. There's a love-hate relationship with terms and concepts such as "old school".
I think you may have just answered your own question.
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