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moths posted:My read was that he wants PbtA to be a community over which he has veto power. no, it's the right read. it's just veto power which he hasn't exercised and nobody expects him to misuse. plus it only extends so far as his and his wife's own logo, which normally you have to pay money or agree to restrictive terms in order to use.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:29
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moths posted:My read was that he wants PbtA to be a community over which he has veto power. But apparently that's a crazy-coo-coo psychotic read, so who even cares anymore? Not me! If you actually read the statement he wrote, most pertinently the last bit, it's pretty clear that Baker went to the trouble of writing all this out in large part because other people are trying to police the "PbtA community" in ways he views as harmful both to the community and his interests as a game designer and publisher. It takes a real skewed interpretation to read that and then come away with the conclusion that Vince Baker wants to set himself up as grand dictator for life of PbtAdonia.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:34
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Peas and Rice posted:Well nuts. I guess I'll file OSR away with the Gadsden flag as something that the garbage have ruined for the rest of us. Even some of the more problematic labels (LotFP) have generated some brilliant content through freelancers (Veins of the Earth). It's mostly just the communities you've got to avoid.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:35
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admanb posted:Even some of the more problematic labels (LotFP) have generated some brilliant content through freelancers (Veins of the Earth). It's mostly just the communities you've got to avoid. Well poo poo I've got that covered already. SA is the only gaming community I can remotely tolerate.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:36
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Kai Tave posted:It takes a real skewed interpretation to read that and then come away with the conclusion that Vince Baker wants to set himself up as grand dictator for life of PbtAdonia. You're inferring that I'm seeing this as a bad thing?
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Sep 12, 2017 23:38
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DCC is one of those things I kinda regret writing off but also that oath is the most embarrassing goddamn thing.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:40
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moths posted:You're inferring that I'm seeing this as a bad thing? People don't use the term "gatekeeping" in a positive context, no.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:40
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Is there a better word for "Keeping out elements I don't want?"
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Sep 12, 2017 23:41
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Moderating? Curating?
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Sep 12, 2017 23:41
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moths posted:You're inferring that I'm seeing this as a bad thing? moths posted:It's also absurdly picky about what is or is not OSR, the "influence pedigree" of games, and seemingly more interested in tribalism than fun. To read Baker's statement as anything other than not wanting to gatekeep the community requires twisting things around to the point of incoherence. They've had to specifically word the statement to retain the right to knock people for outright plagiarism and disassociate from truly objectionable poo poo because the hobby has a lot of terrible people in it. Those rights should be assumed but we all know that some rear end in a top hat could very well write some lovely racist game and copy/paste half of AW doing it and argue it's kosher if they didn't spell things out. We know it because people have done that before with other open systems. And even that isn't really curating or moderating - they aren't going to try and stop someone from making whatever game, they're just making room to disassociate from it.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:51
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"Licensing" also works considering that's what it boils down to, an extremely simple and informal licensing process where the cost of the license is "ask me permission please" and the terms of the agreement probably boil down to "don't ask me to let you put my logo on extremely heinous poo poo, thanks." Otherwise you don't need to have a PbtA logo on something that's inspired by Apocalypse World of you don't want it so there's nothing Vince Baker could do to prevent someone from making RaHoWa 2E with blatantly PbtA derived mechanics, but he doesn't have to give them permission to use the logo associated with himself, Vince Baker, on their game.
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Sep 12, 2017 23:56
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Kai Tave posted:"Licensing" also works considering that's what it boils down to, an extremely simple and informal licensing process where the cost of the license is "ask me permission please" and the terms of the agreement probably boil down to "don't ask me to let you put my logo on extremely heinous poo poo, thanks." Otherwise you don't need to have a PbtA logo on something that's inspired by Apocalypse World of you don't want it so there's nothing Vince Baker could do to prevent someone from making RaHoWa 2E with blatantly PbtA derived mechanics, but he doesn't have to give them permission to use the logo associated with himself, Vince Baker, on their game. That, and "yo if you literally copy/paste our words without attribution that's still plagiarism thanks." EDIT: On a broader industry note, this is one of the big issues with copyright, and a place where copyleft and creative commons alternatives often fall short. Copyright is all or nothing. CL and CC are more flexible, but neither really has a "with permission" option. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 23:57
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Copyright is all or nothing. Before I jump all over this, could you elaborate or clarify on what you mean?
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Sep 13, 2017 01:23
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CC, like open source software licenses, relies on copyright to have any force. I don't think "copyright is all or nothing" is really what you wanted to say.
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Sep 13, 2017 01:25
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Sorry, I was firing that off in too much of a hurry. The issue was that traditional copyright laws are very limited in how you can pre-assign permission for use, and generally don't allow for parsing in ways that are friendly to creators. Namely, it's really tricky to set up a blanket permission for use that can be rescinded in specific cases. Obviously one of the issues is that that sort of arrangement could be used maliciously, but there's an existing framework to prevent that in the concept of protected classes. I was thinking about how strictly speaking streaming video games is actually illegal, but everyone looks the other way. There's not a good legal framework for a creator to carve out pre-approved exceptions for things like that, without putting the work under licensing that allows other forms of use as well.
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Sep 13, 2017 02:33
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Cease to Hope posted:no, it's the right read. it's just veto power which he hasn't exercised and nobody expects him to misuse. plus it only extends so far as his and his wife's own logo, which normally you have to pay money or agree to restrictive terms in order to use. Yeah, it's only 'veto power' so far as ability to control verbatim use of his content or trade dress.
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Sep 13, 2017 03:40
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Der Waffle Mous posted:DCC is one of those things I kinda regret writing off but also that oath is the most embarrassing goddamn thing. That oath and Goodman's rabble-rousing about 4e aside, DCC still has a problem with it requiring all these "odd" dice, which makes it unpleasant to run in a face-to-face setting unless you decide to use a digital dice roller. There's also an abject lack of DM-facing support, such as bestiaries and treasure tables, which pushes you to run their pre-written modules instead (granted, there are a lot of those). When you get right down to it, DCC was really a vehicle for Goodman Games to continue publishing their "Dungeon Crawl Classics" line of old-school-flavored 3.x dungeon crawl modules, much in the same way that Pathfinder was a vehicle for Paizo to continue publishing adventure paths. But you could almost recreate DCC by playing D&D 3.5, ripping out the skill system and only using ability checks, and using only the generic classes from Unearthed Arcana (or the NPC classes from the DMG). And use a massively overwrought critical hit system*. And we know this to be true because that's what the 3.x Dungeon Crawl Classics modules suggested that you use. * this isn't exactly meant to be a dig, as massively overwrought critical hit systems are a personal guilty pleasure of mine.
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Sep 13, 2017 05:58
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Peas and Rice posted:Side-note: can someone explain to me what exactly OSR means? I thought it was a general movement to go back to 1st ed D&D and "Appendix N" type of adventures, and questionably-drawn black and white art (like DCC, which I find fun to play). And why has it attracted the dregs of the hobby? Halloween Jack posted:If someone prefers their hobby as it was decades ago, it's more likely that they have decades-old attitudes about other things. If they're vocal about their belief that everything was better back then, it's almost assured that attitude isn't strictly confined to their hobby. Comrade Gorbash posted:Unfortunately, like Jack said, a lot of OSR participants are very reactionary in general. The loudest people in the room didn't just want to share the old games - they wanted to prove that they were objectively better than the new ones. And that very quickly got tied up with defending the worst OSR products, many of which were catching shade not because of their mechanics, but their racist, sexist, and otherwise awful content. It only took a couple cycles of people washing their hands of one lovely product or another before OSR became totally dominated by the toxic elements. And that attracted more toxic elements who were feeling (the most minor of) pressure from more progressive designers, and created a standard where they had to defend every OSR product to the death. And that then brought in even more people who were either already or well on their way to becoming pariahs, because putting any piece of garbage that could be labeled OSR was a way to get a crop of apologists for any other dumb poo poo they were up to. Now that I'm back from work I kinda wanted to add my own two cents to this even though the main points have already been covered, but the best summation I could offer is that the OSR is inexorably bound up with a strong underpinning of identity politics and the foundation for that was laid before there was even an OSR by name, back in the days when you had fringe whacknuts like The RPG Pundit making hay by railing against Blue Rose and its gay magic deer agenda. You also started to see a lot more public acknowledgement of the shittier aspects of geek culture around this time as well, slowly but steadily, articles about the "fake geek girl" phenomenon and gatekeeping in various nerdy hobbies and hey maybe not every piece of fantasy art depicting women needs to involve chainmail bikinis or boobplate, and even before terms like "SJW" were in the popular parlance somehow along the way this sort of "insidious homofascist narrativist social justice warriors want to TAKE OVER YOUR HOBBY" got conflated with games that tried using systems that pushed further away from the bog standard "roll 1d20 +X against target number Y to do a thing" framework. Does that all sound stupid? Well guess what, it's incredibly fuckin stupid. People making games with FATE or using fail-forward mechanics are "waging war" on the hobby the same way people who say "happy holidays" are waging war on Christmas. Nonetheless though, and I couldn't really tell you precisely when it happened or who was the principal champion of this, but cleaving to old-school D&D wound up being the sad, lovely, infinitely nerdier version of grumpy conservatives on Facebook complaining about entitled millennials and their participation trophies. The whole brouhaha around 4E D&D added further fuel to this fire as Paizo was only too happy to play the "not my D&D card!" to help sell more copies of their own game, and from there identifying as a loud and proud OSR adherent wasn't just about playing games as St. Gygax intended but also a statement about your personal outlook on life filtered through the lens of elfgames. And this is the sort of environment where it's very, very easy for dumb and lovely people to drape themselves in the metaphorical flag and be welcomed because it's Us versus Them and these guys over here are with Us. Is everybody who makes OSR stuff a big dumb rear end in a top hat? No, of course not. There are people like Kevin Crawford and the guys who made Beyond the Wall who as far as I know just want to make RPGs based off OD&D framework for some reason. Personally I don't see the attraction but they aren't really hurting anything and Crawford in particular has had a lot of interesting and insightful advice to give about things like the process of running a Kickstarter campaign for self-publishers. But plenty enough of what I would call the bigger names in the OSR circles are some kind of dumb rear end in a top hat to the point that I can't really bring myself to care about generalizing the OSR as a whole because of them. On the tamer end of the spectrum you have Joseph Goodman who decides to post an unsolicited essay in his DCC Kickstarter about how he really, really wanted to commission someone to draw him a picture of D&D4E books being burned, then you've got James Raggi who thinks the RPG equivalent of a Cannibal Corpse album is super transgressive, there's Zak S who's a broke-brained serial harasser who posts on Reddit under the names of people he dislikes and uses his G+ followers as a cudgel, and then at the far end you've got Alexander Macris, the author of Adventurer Conqueror King which was one of the first real prominent OSR games that I recall hearing a lot of talk about, who's a gamergating piece of poo poo that has invited insane racist Vox Day to contribute material to his latest Kickstarters, including a piece of art of "vile minions" devouring SJWs.
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Sep 13, 2017 06:35
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While Castles & Crusades, released in 2004, was almost assuredly "just" a product of the OGL and Troll Lord wanting to genuinely cash-in on it + the desire for a "reprinted" AD&D, I don't think it's any sort of coincidence that OSRIC (2006) and Labyrinth Lord (2007) were made/released just as D&D 3rd Edition was winding down and the marketing for D&D 4th Edition was starting up. You've got Death Frost Doom releasing the same year as Pathfinder, Basic Fantasy was in 2007, and Swords and Wizardry was in 2008. And while as far as I know Chris Gonnerman (of Basic Fantasy) isn't a reactionary shithead, I think it's absolutely the case that the OSR is another facet of the "4e isn't REALLY D&D" rabble-rousing. Paizo/Pathfinder headlined it, but the OSR carved out its own niche.
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Sep 13, 2017 07:04
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Didn't the whole "4e is no true
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Sep 13, 2017 07:16
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Zereth posted:Didn't the whole "4e is no true Yes. In general, people were decrying 4e immediately because it was going to "kill" 3e, and Paizo specifically was decrying it because they were going to lose their publishing license. And that was "bad" no matter what 4e was going to turn out to be. EDIT: I wanted to expound a bit more on this. If you were an AD&D 1e player (insofar as D&D in those days was an odd jumble of different rules spread out over a dozen books) and you were transitioning into AD&D 2e, there really weren't a lot of changes. 99% of all the material was (deliberately) compatible. If you were an AD&D 2e player that was transitioning into 3rd Edition, the game was different enough that you probably couldn't port over your character easily, but that was okay, because TSR died in the 90s, so you couldn't blame WOTC for AD&D having died with it (never mind the fact that WOTC tried to publish a "conversion guide" anyway that was real bad). 4th Edition was then kind of special in that it was the first transition where there was so little compatibility between editions as to be non-existent, but this was being done as a deliberate decision, both so that WOTC could kill off the OGL pipeline, but also because of legitimate changes in the design. Now, I don't believe in the idea of having a campaign running for so long that you need to play it in a new edition, but for the people who did, this didn't sit well with them. Further, once WOTC did tell players what the new edition was going to be like, it was framed in a way that sort of pointed out all of these flaws in 3rd Edition, that 4th Edition was going to fix. If you were already playing and enjoying 3rd Edition, this felt like your game getting trashed and bad-mouthed! And finally, there also exists that type of player that has already "mastered" 3rd Edition, and didn't relish the idea of having to "relearn" the game ... especially when the previews of 4th Edition were towards closing off a lot of the balance issues that let the lord over their other fellow players! Now, this doesn't make those criticisms right, but it did open up an avenue for Paizo (and the OSR) to exploit these attitudes, create a wedge issue and drive people away from D&D and into Pathfinder (and the OSR). You maybe wouldn't have had The Alexandrian making so many disingenuous arguments about "disassociated mechanics" and "combat as sport" if WOTC was maybe a little more sympathetic in how they tried to portray the transition, and/or if WOTC didn't give Paizo such a heavy incentive to poo poo on them lest they be run out of business. [The other other thing that WOTC could have done was to not make 4e as different as it was, but I don't believe in that at all - it would have been silly to "hold back" on good design and good ideas just because people are going to bitch and moan about it, especially when the assertion that 4e is "too different" was part of the anti-4e marketing in the first place and largely isn't true.] Ironically, Paizo kind of finds itself in a similar dilemma nowadays, where any significant deviation from Pathfinder is going to risk the "compatibility" of all the stuff that came before it. They managed to dodge a bullet by expanding into Starfinder, which can be forgiven for its incompatibilities due to the entirely different setting and the fact that SF didn't really change that much in the overall d20 chassis, but it's something that they'll have to deal with eventually if they ever decide to make a Second Edition Pathfinder. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 07:22
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I was always surprised by the number of people who came out of the woodwork to defend 3.x's grappling rules after WOTC's build up to 4th ed included them basically going "So yeah, those were kind of hosed up and we all know it, right?"
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Sep 13, 2017 10:58
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Peas and Rice posted:Well nuts. I guess I'll file OSR away with the Gadsden flag as something that the garbage have ruined for the rest of us. As long as you stay away from ACKS and Zak S, and G+ (everyone should stay way from G+ anyway) the OSR is basically harmless. DCC is a super fun game with no inherent dangerous ideology.
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Sep 13, 2017 11:17
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gradenko_2000 posted:That oath and Goodman's rabble-rousing about 4e aside, DCC still has a problem with it requiring all these "odd" dice, which makes it unpleasant to run in a face-to-face setting unless you decide to use a digital dice roller. The DCC game I'm running is actually 5e with simpler skills, slightly changed classes (though this is more work than it's worth), and borrowing the magic and tactics dice systems wholesale from DCC. I also fudge the funky dice to be on size higher or lower, though I still use them for DM rolls. Edit: There are a lot of cool resources produced under the "OSR" name but I think it's so dumb that this is a label for a "movement" or "community" rather than an approach to game design. Why in the world would you define yourself by one tool in your toolbox? Nickoten fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 13:00
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alg posted:As long as you stay away from ACKS and Zak S, and G+ (everyone should stay way from G+ anyway) the OSR is basically harmless. DCC is a super fun game with no inherent dangerous ideology. And anything Kevin Crawford (Sine Nomine) publishes is fantastic.
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Sep 13, 2017 16:15
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Zereth posted:Didn't the whole "4e is no true
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Sep 13, 2017 16:49
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Ewen Cluney posted:Also, while 4e was a high watermark in D&D edition warring, it's still amazing that people forget just how dumb and bad the discourse around 3rd Edition was. There was a ton of poo poo talking about 3e's systems/design well before 4e ever got announced, and the edition warring back then was still both hilarious and sad
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Sep 13, 2017 17:10
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S.J. posted:There was a ton of poo poo talking about 3e's systems/design well before 4e ever got announced, and the edition warring back then was still both hilarious and sad I prefer the 1E vs 2E edition warring, mostly because it was waged by regular mail to the Dragon Magazine letters section. 
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Sep 13, 2017 17:24
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Ewen Cluney posted:Also, while 4e was a high watermark in D&D edition warring, it's still amazing that people forget just how dumb and bad the discourse around 3rd Edition was. Now I'm trying to think of the most bitter non-D20 flamewars. The New World of Darkness was very controversial, but I hear that the Mage 2nd Edition vs. Mage Revised edition war was somehow more bitter than the rebooting of the entire WoD. I hear Traveller edition wars are legendarily vicious.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:29
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Comrade Koba posted:I prefer the 1E vs 2E edition warring, mostly because it was waged by regular mail to the Dragon Magazine letters section. Both hilarious and sad.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:31
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If you have access to newsgroup archives from way back when, you can see some original online grog.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:36
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Halloween Jack posted:Now I'm trying to think of the most bitter non-D20 flamewars. The New World of Darkness was very controversial, but I hear that the Mage 2nd Edition vs. Mage Revised edition war was somehow more bitter than the rebooting of the entire WoD. I hear Traveller edition wars are legendarily vicious. Some people were really miffed at CoC 7th Edition ditching the Resistance table
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Sep 13, 2017 17:44
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Jesus, really? I just got into Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, and Ken sticks up for some frankly stupid poo poo in the old editions, and even he says he doesn't like or use the resistance table.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:49
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Halloween Jack posted:Now I'm trying to think of the most bitter non-D20 flamewars. The New World of Darkness was very controversial, but I hear that the Mage 2nd Edition vs. Mage Revised edition war was somehow more bitter than the rebooting of the entire WoD. I hear Traveller edition wars are legendarily vicious. That Mage 2nd vs. Mage Revised edition war was bitter as gently caress, but also involved a relatively small segment of gamers, so it was pretty missable. But man, it got pretty ugly, at least in my recollection.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:50
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gradenko_2000 posted:Some people were really miffed at CoC 7th Edition ditching the Resistance table And yeah, Traveller edition wars were vicious and neverending. i firmly believe that Traveller grogs are the groggiest grogs in the world.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:52
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gradenko_2000 posted:Some people were really miffed at CoC 7th Edition ditching the Resistance table People will rail against any change in the games they love, even if it's a mechanic that does nothing or is ignored by 99.9% of the game's fanbase.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:54
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:That Mage 2nd vs. Mage Revised edition war was bitter as gently caress, but also involved a relatively small segment of gamers, so it was pretty missable. But man, it got pretty ugly, at least in my recollection. Seriously, any time someone would ask a question or try to have discussion about Mage or the WoD, the same handful of usual suspects would without fail show up and start screaming about how WW is intentionally nerfing all the other game lines because they're all Vampire superfans who hate all the other game lines and their precious vamps have to be better at everything and you're all morons for not seeing this. Every single goddamn time. And they did it for years. IIRC they did their level best to make the designers'/developers' lives a living hell, too (with doxxing and harassment).
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Sep 13, 2017 17:58
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JohnnyCanuck posted:If you have access to newsgroup archives from way back when, you can see some original online grog. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.games.frp.dnd Go hog wild! here lemme help some more: a search on "second edition sucks" e. lol here's a good result https://groups.google.com/forum/#!s...a8/_4IKxNC8veUJ Posted april 22, 1998. I wonder if William L. Leary, Jr. would stand by his steadfast defense of 1st edition, even today? e2. oh god someone save me before I fall even deeper into this archived pit quote:Aristotle@Threshold Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 18:00
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Leperflesh posted:https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.games.frp.dnd Oh man, that's the good stuff.
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Sep 13, 2017 18:05
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I mean, if you want to have a vicious argument over whether 1e is better than 2e, you can go to Dragonsfoot right now. If you also want to argue about whether or not a game counts as OSR, you can go to theRPGsite. But don't come crying to me when they ask you if you're a commie jewboy.
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Sep 13, 2017 18:10
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