occam
Adventurer
I appreciate your desire to interpret SupergeekMike's arguments charitably. And I don't have a problem with a lot of the video. If he had kept it to, "Hey, I found this rule that existed in old versions of D&D which don't appear in later editions, but I think it'd be interesting to explore the consequences of using such a rule", I don't think there would've been any pushback. But that's not what he did.I think people are reading him very uncharitably. I’m 100% sure he knows that not everyone did it. He probably overestimated how common it was, maybe by a lot. I think that’s a far cry from “telling old-school gamers how they played.”
First of all, the YouTube video is entitled "How A Forgotten D&D Rule Shaped the Entire Old-School Gaming Culture" (emphasis mine). He's clearly expressing the notion, before one even watches the video, that this one rule defined all old-school gaming. He then goes on to describe what sounds like a universal play style, lacking any qualifiers such as "some", "perhaps", etc.
Around 8:39, he literally says "This is like the Rosetta Stone for early D&D games."Obviously old school play isn’t just one thing. Different people play in different ways, so no, this rule or guideline or whatever you want to call it is not some Rosetta Stone to old-school play.
A little aside the topic, but I don't think this is necessarily the case. At least, given how rarely this rule was followed IME and in the experience of other older gamers who've posted to this thread, I don't think it's qualitatively more unwieldy or irrelevant now than it was then.But it is pretty much completely incompatible with modern play.
Let's say that I posted something in which I claimed that after watching a TikTok video or two, I suddenly realized that GenZ-ers were mining Bitcoin to pay for online concerts featuring their favorite K-pop groups, and that this fundamentally changes our understanding of future political and economic trends due to Bitcoin-funded K-pop shaping the entire youth culture. Would you say that people annoyed by my observation with claims that I was grossly over-generalizing should just take into account that I was excited by finding out about Bitcoin and the popularity of Korean music in western youth culture? Wouldn't it have been better if I had just said, "Hey, did you know a lot of teens and twenty-somethings like K-pop these days? Let's talk about K-pop!"He does seem to conflate different elements of different styles of play into one nebulous idea of “old-school play” that doesn’t accurately describe how many people played at all, let alone most. But I don’t get the impression that the point of the video was ever to educate people on how the game was played in “ye olden dayes.” Rather, he was sharing excitement about this type of location-focused exploratory play that this rule had made him consider for the first time, and in doing so may have jumped to some dubious conclusions.