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Wait, I already said that last time this came up.
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Jan 21, 2019 13:22
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Kai Tave posted:lol I checked out The Larpening and one of the first things on their timeline is a shoutout by Doug TenNapel. I mean, if you're getting support from Doub TenNapel you're probably awful, so.
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Jan 21, 2019 13:59
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Mors Rattus posted:I mean, if you're getting support from Doub TenNapel you're probably awful, so. And the whole #WarCampaign is Ethan Van Sciver's thing. I feel dumber for knowing the exact specifications of it.
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Jan 21, 2019 14:17
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https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/41294/roleplaying-games/justin-atlas-games Justin Alexander replaced Cam Banks and is now the RPG Producer for Atlas Games, taking charge of Feng Shui, Over the Edge, Unknown Armies, and Ars Magica.
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Jan 24, 2019 19:56
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CitizenKeen posted:https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/41294/roleplaying-games/justin-atlas-games Oh cool, more good games getting ruined. 
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Jan 24, 2019 19:58
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Lemon-Lime posted:Oh cool, more good games getting ruined. By "more games" I infer you think he's already ruined one. Which one? Or are you just knee-jerking based on your own personal dislike?
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Jan 24, 2019 20:06
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At least Ars Magica was already over so any trouble this person, whoever they are, causes won't ruin my game.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:06
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Ars Magica is a game? I thought it was a thought provoking show piece.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:09
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CitizenKeen posted:By "more games" I infer you think he's already ruined one. Which one? He/Dream Machine Productions acquired Technoir back in December, and have already released three new products in that line. I can't speak to their quality compared to OG Technoir, but someone else might be able to.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:18
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Lord_Hambrose posted:At least Ars Magica was already over so any trouble this person, whoever they are, causes won't ruin my game.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:24
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CitizenKeen posted:By "more games" I infer you think he's already ruined one. Which one? Or are you just knee-jerking based on your own personal dislike? Dude was a batshit crazy grog during the rise and fall of D&D 4e who would rant about stuff like how the games rules have to be written to be the settings' physics.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:29
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Basically none of those games are really going concerns, and if more stuff comes out for them at some point as long as the same people keep working on them they'll be fine I mean, if anything, they're already games where the rules are written according to the settings' physics
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Jan 24, 2019 20:39
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ProfessorCirno posted:Dude was a batshit crazy grog during the rise and fall of D&D 4e who would rant about stuff like how the games rules have to be written to be the settings' physics. COMBAT AS SPORTS COMBAT AS SPORTS
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Jan 24, 2019 20:40
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CitizenKeen posted:https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/41294/roleplaying-games/justin-atlas-games That dude is terrible.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:44
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ProfessorCirno posted:Dude was a batshit crazy grog during the rise and fall of D&D 4e who would rant about stuff like how the games rules have to be written to be the settings' physics.
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Jan 24, 2019 20:45
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Yes he wrapped himself in a lot of twisted logic loops to jusify how his hatred of 4e was academic and not an emotional reaction to the shift towards balancing player classes and providing clear delineation between game rules and flavor text
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Jan 24, 2019 20:49
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Honestly I think there actually is something to the idea of "dissociated mechanics" and y'all are too quick to dismiss it just because it's being used by an idiot who uses it as a negative term. To me it pretty clearly implies the opposite of "rules as physics" which is both a useful thing to have a word for, and also a very good thing. Something like "tacit recognition that game rules have to function as a game first and only loosely correspond to the fiction."
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Jan 24, 2019 21:07
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Mechanics that simulate logical cause-and-effect, mechanics that direct the narrative, mechanics that guide gameplay all have strengths and weaknesses, they're different tools for different jobs. I don't think "disassociated mechanics" is a useful term because it implies that mechanics have to be associated with logical cause-and-effect, and that's just not the case.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:19
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Honestly I think there actually is something to the idea of "dissociated mechanics" and y'all are too quick to dismiss it just because it's being used by an idiot who uses it as a negative term.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:21
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It's also a bad faith argument from the start, and even the explanatory analogy the essay that defines the idea only works if you don't understand sports.quote:For example, consider a football game in which a character has the One-Handed Catch ability: Once per game they can make an amazing one-handed catch, granting them a +4 bonus to that catch attempt. Players routinely get substituted in and out after they run certain kinds of plays - receivers who run long post routes pretty regularly come out the next play because it takes so much energy that they need to take a short break to get their breath back. There's also the concept of "gadget" plays - high risk trick plays that only get used in extreme circumstances because if you know your opponent is going to try it, it's trivially easy to counter. Teams basically never use the same gadget play in a season, let alone in a game, because of that. Basically the whole argument only holds together so long as you stick to a narrow, inaccurate view of how the world works, because once you expand outside of that, it becomes immediately apparent there's no difference between acceptable abstractions and disassociated mechanics.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:35
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The other problem with it for me is that the base D&D combat system is massively 'disassociated' - the choices you make in combat in an attack-roll-based / hp system are a mile away from the decisions you'd make in a real fight. Nobody decides 'now i will hit the ogre for 1d8 damage, i know there is absolutely no way i can kill it with this swing but i need to whittle its 4 hit dice down' since hit points are such an abstraction. It's an interesting concept to toy with but it's a really bad way of criticising 4e.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:44
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Funny enough that particular example really sounds like he's taking the piss out of Pathfinder design and bad 3.5 prestige classes more than it does talking about 4th edition. I mean I know he was talking about 4th edition but it is way more applicable to pathfinder, which is littered with abilities with dumb arbitrary restrictions and nonsensical limits per day.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:49
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Comrade Gorbash posted:It's also a bad faith argument from the start, and even the explanatory analogy the essay that defines the idea only works if you don't understand sports. In fairness, his analogy is correctly identifying cases in 4e where characters have encounters and dailies that supposedly correspond to things the characters themselves would not directly identify as something they can only use exactly one time during this fight or this day. Some of those abilities are more analagous to the one-handed-catch thing. Where he goes wrong is claiming that all encounters/dailies fall into that category, and where the entire argument is misplaced is that it presents game mechanics as necessarily aligned with the real world of abilities real people have or can do. Worse, it misses the point of 4e powers, which is that their mechanical descriptions are not strongly tied to their flavor text; if you don't like a particular encounter or daily's description (as being too much like an athlete making a one-handed catch, for example) it's trivial and encouraged to replace it with something that makes more sense to you or fits your character or the flavor of the campaign better. And I agree that it's a bad-faith argument, but mostly because it starts with the conclusion that one-off powers are bad, even though wizards already get to have them, and then attempts to rationalize that conclusion. That's not a good-faith approach to analysis, ever.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:52
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xiw posted:The other problem with it for me is that the base D&D combat system is massively 'disassociated' - the choices you make in combat in an attack-roll-based / hp system are a mile away from the decisions you'd make in a real fight. Nobody decides 'now i will hit the ogre for 1d8 damage, i know there is absolutely no way i can kill it with this swing but i need to whittle its 4 hit dice down' since hit points are such an abstraction. The author doesn't even necessarily condemn the use of "disassociated mechanics", he just weights very specific ones as hugely negative, while ignoring others. The ones he doesn't like are going to disrupt or harm players' ability to roleplay because the character couldn't make decisions based on in-universe information. "How would a paladin and a fighter even know how marks work, let alone be able to make decisions about whose mark is more useful? This takes the player completely out of their roleplaying." The ones he does like or doesn't care about, he then hand-waves away as acceptable. "Well of course, character creation and advancement are disassociated and have always been there as part of RPGs". It's just a transparent "these are abstractions that I don't like, or abstractions that happen at times that I don't want them to happen". Which is fine, but it's dressed up as some kind of academic and "objective" reason that 4E BAD.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:59
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dwarf74 posted:Not as it's been framed, though. It was framed as an alignment of character and player knowledge about how their abilities work, and how they make decisions. (So a D&D Wizard knows he can only cast Fireball once, but who the hell knows what a Fate Point is?) That's at best a marginally useful distinction. Ah, yeah, it's been mutated and misused and I let that seep into my brain, thanks. Ultimately you run into the issue where you can go down that rabbit hole practically infinitely with any aspect of a character - would your character really use a greatsword, or are you just picking it because it's got the biggest damage? Would your flighty wizard really have learned Concentrate instead of Craft (brewing)? Do you really know that sleep won't work against a drow warrior, or does just your player know that? And so on. Granted, I think the proper answer is "who cares?", or at the very least, "if you want that sort of decision-making, craft a game that incentivizes it".
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Jan 24, 2019 21:59
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It's critical to understand that all game mechanics are an abstraction away from pure, rules-less roleplaying. The question is what balance of gamey rules vs. playing unrestricted make-believe you want to strike, and then, for each mechanic individually, each interacting set of mechanics, and all of the mechanics as a whole, are you creating a game experience that you find enhances or detracts from the experience you're trying to create? There's very real and reasonable critiques to be had for 4e along those lines, and others. But if you approach your critique from a standpoint that abstractions are bad, you have already failed.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:09
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Leperflesh posted:In fairness, his analogy is correctly identifying cases in 4e where characters have encounters and dailies that supposedly correspond to things the characters themselves would not directly identify as something they can only use exactly one time during this fight or this day. Some of those abilities are more analagous to the one-handed-catch thing. Where he goes wrong is thinking he should have written that thing he wrote. It is bad, and dumb, and he shouldn't have.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:11
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homullus posted:Where he goes wrong is thinking he should have written that thing he wrote. It is bad, and dumb, and he shouldn't have. Yeah well put. I guess I'm trying to extract a useful message out of it, beyond just "yeah that guy's dumb." When we think about RPGs, we are thinking about inventing imperfect mechanics to mediate our imaginary elf stories and try to turn them into an actual game. From the moment you introduce your first mechanic, you have taken a step back from the absolute freedom of choice this guy seems to be advocating.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:13
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Wasn't this dude's main issue he was focusing his air quotes theory on 4E? Like it was the only system that had such a problem?
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Jan 24, 2019 22:14
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Dude was trying to take down 4e while still loving 3e, and his target was metagaming. If that doesn't scream illness...
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Jan 24, 2019 22:18
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:"How would a paladin and a fighter even know how marks work, let alone be able to make decisions about whose mark is more useful? This takes the player completely out of their roleplaying." Here's a whole video about of different styles and approaches to defending (easily abstracted to different forms of marks and mark punishment).
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Jan 24, 2019 22:23
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we never had an issue with marks in my games. usually when the player would mark, i would ask what that looks like and they'd tell me they were insulting the enemy or goading it in some way
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Jan 24, 2019 22:26
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Serf posted:we never had an issue with marks in my games. usually when the player would mark, i would ask what that looks like and they'd tell me they were insulting the enemy or goading it in some way That's because you're a sane person with a functioning brain stem
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Jan 24, 2019 22:29
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I like to refer to the throne room scene in Return of the Jedi. The Emps marks Luke, and then Vader intercedes, and the Emperor is in Luke's head throughout the fight. He only beats Vader when the mark expires. Or alternatively, Luke wants to kill the Emperor, but Vader marks him, and Luke will probably die if he tries to hit the Emperor while ignoring Vader, and he knows it.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:31
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I mean, the question is nonsensical to begin with because, as others have said, D&D has always had this abstraction everywhere. What 4e actually broke was the assumption that metagaming was actually roleplaying. The problem is that 3e was so goddamn heavy with mechanical widgets and metagaming that fans eventually just assumed the metagaming was the point. Like the entirety of D&D was secretly always meant to be run like a bad joke web comic made of stick figures calling out their own D&D mechanics, and that this was True Roleplaying. Like, the best roleplaying was a wizard staring at a wall being summoned and using the in-game mechanics to learn the exact level of the enemy wizard by asking what the wall's thickness and length was. And yeah, most fans didn't take it to the extreme that places like the Gaming Den did, but that's because most fans stopped playing 3e real early on and just did a freeform game with 3e trappings, but still saw themselves as 3e loyalists.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:32
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As people have noted, the definition doesn't really work, at least not how he intended it. So I think it's really him just looking for an explanation for why he didn't like it. And I think I might have a better explanation. There are a few things that are all sort of connected that seem like they have something to do with what he was talking about. 1. Immersive reading experience If you want to learn to play a game, a rulebook that reads like a rulebook is fine. Lists of powers in well-organized statblocks that are functional and clear but boring to read are also fine. If your hobby is playing RPGs, that's all fine. But for lots of people, particularly people who post about RPGs online, reading RPG books is a hobby on its own (in addition to playing them, hopefully - I'm not trying to accuse people of not being real roleplayers). And books laid out like I described above are not really fun to read! The fact that this level 5 power is the same as this level 3 power except with one extra easy-to-miss keyword might mean that it's a much cooler and better power in play. But if you're not playing and you're just trying to get in that imaginative headspace of thinking about cool rogues while reading the rogue chapter of the book, then that sort of book is not really very good for that. 2. Immersive chargen experience After reading Burning Wheel, I made several characters just for fun because character creation in that game is itself a fun and immersive activity that generates the skeleton of a backstory as you do it. Making 4e characters is fun if you're into optimization, and I spent lots of time doing that, too, but it's an analytical activity, not an immersive one. Not everyone has fun doing mental math like I do. 3. Tone of writing In 4e the tone of the writing is technical with blobs of generic-bad-fantasy-author flavor text. It's an inconsistent tone (which is not necessarily a bad thing). Other books keep a more consistent tone throughout. Some books are more conversational. Some books are written with a tone that is almost in-character for the setting (Apocalypse World). People have all kinds of different preferences here that are often hard to pin down.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:34
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At any rate, however you slice it, I'm hard-pressed to see how Justin Alexander is a step up from Cam Banks. Even if you don't give a poo poo about 4E or the edition warriors thereof, I'm not seeing how that's an improvement.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:36
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Kai Tave posted:At any rate, however you slice it, I'm hard-pressed to see how Justin Alexander is a step up from Cam Banks. Even if you don't give a poo poo about 4E or the edition warriors thereof, I'm not seeing how that's an improvement. What has Alexander actually published or developed? Banks has worked on some really good stuff.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:47
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Serf posted:we never had an issue with marks in my games. usually when the player would mark, i would ask what that looks like and they'd tell me they were insulting the enemy or goading it in some way Sampatrick posted:That's because you're a sane person with a functioning brain stem He even addresses this, and has such a galaxy brain response: quote:The argument can be made that such explanations can be trivially made up: A ruby beam of light shoots out of the war devil’s head and strikes their target, afflicting them with a black blight. The war devil shouts horrific commands in demonic tongues to his allies, unnaturally spurring them into a frenzied bloodlust. The war devil utters a primeval curse.
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Jan 24, 2019 22:49
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:He even addresses this, and has such a galaxy brain response: Ahh yes, Let us abandon 4e and all of it's various house rules for noted houseruleless game 5e. Oh wait.
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Jan 24, 2019 23:06
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