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Kai Tave posted:It's true that people use "storygame" these days to describe various subsets of RPGs in a much less derogatory fashion than used to be the case back in the day, it's also true that Justin Alexander is a huge dumb rear end in a top hat who I would not actually trust to use the divide in a non-derogatory fashion. If I recall the actual example Justin Alexander posted of this was: The PCs have spent a substantial portion of the campaign looking for a legendary treasure vault whose contents are a mystery. After struggling to find clues as to both the location and the contents, piece together its location, and defeat its guardians, the PCs are finally ready to open the vault. The vault doors creak open, and the GM asks the players: "Ok. What is in the vault?" The argument is that storygame players would love the opportunity to come up with a resolution or new direction for the story or their characters. On the other hand, "non--storygame" players would feel incredibly cheated and conned that the mystery they were engaging with and had been looking forward to had no answer. And the argument that it's not "role-playing" (which I don't agree with, btw) comes from the idea that none of the characters have the power to determine what is in the vault, so the GM is asking the players to make a decision which is not in-character and thus cannot be decided by playing a role. While I think the distinction is understandable and that asking "what's in the vault?" could really annoy some groups, I don't think it's as cut and dry as "game" or "system". Heck, I literally used the "what is in the vault?" with the ending of the Ruby Phoenix campaign for Pathfinder 2e, hardly a story game, but it didn't cause anger or disappointment because what the prize for the tournament was was less important than they fact they won it. (They picked a fantasy Voltron, which since the AP is already full of anime and video game references, wasn't too jarring.)
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May 31, 2022 01:46
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Toshimo posted:Because they are part of The Brand.
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May 31, 2022 01:47
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Piell posted:There's very little difference between 5e and 3.X design style, basically all the same assumptions and goals I wouldn't say that, as somebody that's been going back to look at D20 and playing in a 5e game at the same time. 3.X was, at least initially, still very close to AD&D 2e in terms of heritage, which you can see in a lot of the complex, Sage Advice-influenced spell descriptions and magic items. All versions of D&D beyond the first essentially have the same goal: to bring in more players, but have different ideas on how to do that. 3.X was largely an attempt to appeal to a wider audience by make AD&D more consistent and clear, whereas 5e focuses a lot on trimming the fat. Of course, where 5e can fall down is when that fat served a purpose. An example would be heat metal, which takes a long time in 3.X to build up and involves a whole chart regarding how long it takes to do so. But in 5e, heat metal immediately starts doing high damage from the outset. The 5e version is a lot easier to use and fun for casters who want to annihilate armored fores, but, of course, is absolutely murderous in the hands of monsters. So by trimming it, it make it a much simpler spell, but also much more of a potential problem. So it goes. Dawgstar posted:That's the progenitor of the extremely cursed term "disassociated mechanics" right? Yes. potatocubed posted:He's blocked me as well, and the only interaction I ever had with him was a very polite argument over why he wanted to reclassify RPGs into 'RPGs' and 'storygames'. The answer of course is that he wants to redefine the games he personally dislikes as lesser, because he's the worst kind of nerd pseudointellectual, but like hell would he admit it. Essentially this; whether or not others use or think of storygames as pejorative, to him it is framed implicitly as something that's best sitting off in its corner and not a part of "real" role-playing games. To be clear: he doesn't come out and say "storygames" are inferior, but it's implied in that how treats them more as toys or gimmicks compared to "true" role-playing games. In any case, maybe if he thinks hard enough on role-playing games, someday, he'll get around to writing one.
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May 31, 2022 03:05
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Why did you go for the archive.org link? Trying to make him come off worse by not linking to the current page where Alexander admits his argument was poorly phrased and he revisits it more clearly? There's like a five minute hate-on going on here for a guy whose crime is having different opinions about elfgames than you all.
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May 31, 2022 03:41
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Arivia posted:Why did you go for the archive.org link? Trying to make him come off worse by not linking to the current page where Alexander admits his argument was poorly phrased and he revisits it more clearly? There's like a five minute hate-on going on here for a guy whose crime is having different opinions about elfgames than you all.
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May 31, 2022 03:55
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Arivia posted:Why did you go for the archive.org link? Trying to make him come off worse by not linking to the current page where Alexander admits his argument was poorly phrased and he revisits it more clearly? There's like a five minute hate-on going on here for a guy whose crime is having different opinions about elfgames than you all. It's literally the same text as on the current page according to a text comparison I did, aside from two minor spelling changes and one change of "always" to "almost always" Piell fucked around with this message at 04:01 on May 31, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 03:57
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NGDBSS posted:The current version of the page is identical but doubtless ARB kept the archive.org version around for easy linking and for historical purposes. Seriously, why are you tying yourself in knots to defend a guy with a decade of gatekeeping behavior and whose response on being called out is to just gatekeep differently? Go ahead, provide some links to when he's gatekeeping people*. Alexander does a lot, a lot of good work to make games not suck, by actually getting into the guts of play models and modes and putting out tons of examinations of published content to help people do better. He's had some mistakes like his insistence on keeping Jaquays' deadname on the essay, but when I think of people gatekeeping or being bigots in the industry he's not even on the list. *gatekeeping doesn't mean disagreeing with you about game mechanics, it means actually acting to keep people out of games by saying they shouldn't be playing for one reason or another.
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May 31, 2022 04:04
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Arivia posted:Why did you go for the archive.org link? Trying to make him come off worse by not linking to the current page where Alexander admits his argument was poorly phrased and he revisits it more clearly? There's like a five minute hate-on going on here for a guy whose crime is having different opinions about elfgames than you all. This is the dumbest possible misrepresentation. The archive.org link is to that article and has that very explanation you're talking about.
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May 31, 2022 04:23
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Arivia posted:Go ahead, provide some links to when he's gatekeeping people*. Alexander does a lot, a lot of good work to make games not suck, by actually getting into the guts of play models and modes and putting out tons of examinations of published content to help people do better. He's had some mistakes like his insistence on keeping Jaquays' deadname on the essay, but when I think of people gatekeeping or being bigots in the industry he's not even on the list. The guy was Ben Shapiro but for elfgame mechanics. He made the entire hobby worse through his weird pseudo-intellectual screeds.
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May 31, 2022 04:24
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That's who he is! The guy that made a big stick about dead naming Jacqays, all "correctness of speech outweighs your preferences." Now if I could just remember the racism incident.
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May 31, 2022 04:26
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dwarf74 posted:I guess if you just go and define your terms extremely specifically, you can just glide over how this dude was at the beating, glowing heart of those 2010ish edition wars. that same line of thinking has had people posting here that paizo is responsible for gamergate and alt-right fandom instead of scrambling to save their company after wotc hosed them over, and said much the same thing of goodman games after wotc did the same to them many of you are just carrying very old wounds about people disliking a version of D&D you like when wotc was being absolute poo poo about it and are not looking at anything from the last ten years and to be honest, there's nothing wrong with alexander's idea of disassociated mechanics. it might not be how everyone thinks of games but yeah, he's got a good point about something worth thinking about for rpgs and how 4e hosed it up. and same as i offered to the other person, you're welcome to link me some "screed" where he argued players of 4e were less than or deserved to be removed from the community.
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May 31, 2022 04:28
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I have never once encountered a disassociated mechanics nerd that didn't have a nice fat list of exceptions for the things they're just used to or like. It's almost always been an even thinner veneer over "stuff I like is x, stuff I don't like is the hated y" than GNS ever was.
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May 31, 2022 04:31
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I think Paizo instigating TRPG Russiagate for the purposes of corporate survival instead of being merely about spite or taste-in-gaming adds context, but doesn't make the behavior any more excusable.
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May 31, 2022 04:35
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theironjef posted:I have never once encountered a disassociated mechanics nerd that didn't have a nice fat list of exceptions for the things they're just used to or like. It's almost always been an even thinner veneer over "stuff I like is x, stuff I don't like is the hated y" than GNS ever was. quote:2020 ADDENDUM: TABLETOP NARRATIVE GAMES
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May 31, 2022 04:38
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The thing about the "dissociated mechanics" essay is that it's wildly, flagrantly dishonest. PHB1 plainly explains that per-encounter and daily powers, martial or otherwise, are those so physically and mentally taxing that you need a rest after attempting them. Instead, this guy spends paragraph after paragraph shadow boxing against an alternate-universe 4E that runs on Fate Points or whatever.
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May 31, 2022 04:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think Paizo instigating TRPG Russiagate for the purposes of corporate survival instead of being merely about spite or taste-in-gaming adds context, but doesn't make the behavior any more excusable. What was the behaviour? Hey, here is an audience of people who like this older edition of D&D and are buying our products for that edition, and we're going to say it thrives and we can keep it going? That's not anything that remotely needs excusing even by personal standards, let alone corporate ones. Unless I missed something where Paizo said "we're keeping 3.5 because it doesn't have any of that SJW poo poo" or equivalents, there's really nothing to be mad at there.
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May 31, 2022 04:45
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Arivia posted:What was the behaviour? making false claims about what D&D 4e was like in order to make it appear worse/more different than it actually was, in order to drive people to Pathfinder as a form of continuity with 3.5e
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May 31, 2022 04:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:making false claims about what D&D 4e was like in order to make it appear worse/more different than it actually was, in order to drive people to Pathfinder as a form of continuity with 3.5e 
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May 31, 2022 04:50
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gradenko_2000 posted:making false claims about what D&D 4e was like in order to make it appear worse/more different than it actually was, in order to drive people to Pathfinder as a form of continuity with 3.5e Do you have a source for this? Was it company policy? Or was it just James Jacobs/Erik Mona/others talking about having bad experiences with the playtests and core rulebooks like I did myself and many other people did, to the point where even the most ardent 4e fans here encourage replacing the first set of core rulebooks and also strongly discourage playing KotS? This is the point - we're now what, 15 years on from this stuff and people are still treating it like actual crimes or bigotry when the underlying issues are "wow, this person didn't like 4e's game mechanics the same way I did a decade ago?" Like holy poo poo, there is so much worse out there in just RPGs alone, let alone tabletop games in general, to be still This Mad about a difference in game opinions. Not inclusion, not someone losing their livelihood or even a side job, just some opinions about mechanics. NGDBSS posted:She's seen that one before and went "nuh-uh", good luck convincing her otherwise. [citation needed]
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May 31, 2022 04:52
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Arivia posted:Why did you go for the archive.org link? Trying to make him come off worse by not linking to the current page where Alexander admits his argument was poorly phrased and he revisits it more clearly? There's like a five minute hate-on going on here for a guy whose crime is having different opinions about elfgames than you all. So your opening gambit was to claim that creators tagging their RPGs as storygames is the same as this dickhead claiming that they're not RPGs at all, and then your follow up is this accusation that was trivially proven false, but I guess you're just going to keep posting through it. Oh, and saying that a whole raft of RPGs aren't actually RPGs is 100% gatekeeping. I guess if you're playing those games you're just not a real roleplayer
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May 31, 2022 05:10
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This is a game of Werewolf, but we've got to puzzle out who Justin Alexander bit when he transformed into his most feral and pedantic form at the last full moon.
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May 31, 2022 05:34
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Nuns with Guns posted:This is a game of Werewolf, but we've got to puzzle out who Justin Alexander bit when he transformed into his most feral and pedantic form at the last full moon.
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May 31, 2022 06:04
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Arivia posted:Do you have a source for this? https://thegamedesignroundtable.com/2014/04/01/episode-73-mmos-rpgs-and-pathfinder/ Ryan Dancey was on the Game Design Roundtable podcast in April 2014: quote:4th edition is radically different from 3rd edition quote:the problem with 4th edition isn't that it's a bad game - I think the problem with 4th edition is that it's just not similar enough to the pre-existing Dungeons & Dragons rules quote:Starting with EverQuest and accelerating with the release of World of Warcraft, a lot of people playing who were playing in tabletop roleplaying groups stopped playing their tabletop roleplaying game, and started playing MMOs... Wizards of the Coast made these radical changes with 4th edition, they realized that they had a problem, that there was something else in the world which was acting as an attractant and pulling people away from the tabletop. They tried to make a game for the tabletop to bring those people back, or hold them and cause them to stop leaving. quote:Soren Johnson: I haven't played 4th edition but what I've always heard is that, y'know, they were trying to make it feel like an MMO which always seemed kind of strange to me because video games are very good at specific things than a tabletop game... now, okay, we can quibble about whether this was "official company policy" or it was just Dancey expressing his opinions as a private individual while working for Paizo, and I'll grant you that it probably wasn't this one specific podcast that influenced the zeitgeist of the times, but I'm citing this because it does point to how all the grognardy arguments about how 4e was tabletop WoW and how 4e was just too different, man was a talking point that a Paizo employee both believed in, and was peddling around and spreading. It wasn't just something that The Community came up with by themselves, and those seeds were being planted by the same guys who were making and selling Pathfinder.
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May 31, 2022 06:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:now, okay, we can quibble about whether this was "official company policy" or it was just Dancey expressing his opinions as a private individual while working for Paizo, and I'll grant you that it probably wasn't this one specific podcast that influenced the zeitgeist of the times, but I'm citing this because it does point to how all the grognardy arguments about how 4e was tabletop WoW and how 4e was just too different, man was a talking point that a Paizo employee both believed in, and was peddling around and spreading. It's also six years after the release of the 4e core rulebooks and five years after the release of the pathfinder core rulebook. Dancey is absolutely doing press as a paizo employee, I won't disagree with that, but that's not contemporaneous with anything (except how crappy PFO turned out to be). But it's not some smoking gun that goes "Paizo or Paizo employees created edition wars years previously!" e: and frankly none of those quotes except the last one is remotely upsetting, imo. and we've already talked at length about the 4e's roles being based on the holy trinity of MMO party design + the mez/control role that got lost in WoW. Arivia fucked around with this message at 07:01 on May 31, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 06:54
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This is what gaslighting looks like, btw. Paizo was absolutely fanning the edition war flames, holy poo poo.
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May 31, 2022 07:14
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moths posted:This is what gaslighting looks like, btw. It is not gaslighting to go “there is a six year difference between the incident you are alleging and your evidence in support of that allegation”, come on.
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May 31, 2022 07:42
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I don't know what you're trying to accomplish with your alternate history, but I don't like it because it feels manipulative and weird.
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May 31, 2022 07:47
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Arivia posted:Go ahead, provide some links to when he's gatekeeping people*. Alexander does a lot, a lot of good work to make games not suck, by actually getting into the guts of play models and modes and putting out tons of examinations of published content to help people do better. He's had some mistakes like his insistence on keeping Jaquays' deadname on the essay, but when I think of people gatekeeping or being bigots in the industry he's not even on the list. Gatekeeping means keeping or forcing people out of the hobby. When someone is claiming that something is not an RPG they are saying it doesn't belong in the hobby. That is textbook gatekeeping. Justin Alexander's bullshit claims that Storygames are not RPGs not only ignore the way the term is used but are trying to pretend that things aren't RPGs. But sure, claim that the person responsible for the "disassociated mechanics" bullshit, who grandfathers in hit points through utter nonsense is not gatekeeping. And then claim that despite the fact that this tangent started with his gatekeeping behaviour of pretending games aren't RPGs because he doesn't like them much (and by the way he is Humpty-Dumpty style inventing his own meanings of terms that already existed then insisting that other people use them with his personal definition of Storygames) that there has been no evidence of his gatekeeping.
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May 31, 2022 09:02
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I don't really think it's all that wrong to make a distinction between, say, D&D and Blades in the Dark in what they're trying to do. Some people really do just not go for controlling things outside their character's actions and mentality. A guy in a game I RP with compared playing GURPS to Blades in the Dark as something akin to playing Captain Kirk vs Captain Kirk's director.
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May 31, 2022 09:27
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Panzeh posted:I don't really think it's all that wrong to make a distinction between, say, D&D and Blades in the Dark in what they're trying to do. Some people really do just not go for controlling things outside their character's actions and mentality. A guy in a game I RP with compared playing GURPS to Blades in the Dark as something akin to playing Captain Kirk vs Captain Kirk's director. Of course there are differences between games. But would you also say that Blades in the Dark is not a real RPG, instead being some different kind of tabletop game entirely?
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May 31, 2022 09:58
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Panzeh posted:I don't really think it's all that wrong to make a distinction between, say, D&D and Blades in the Dark in what they're trying to do. Some people really do just not go for controlling things outside their character's actions and mentality. A guy in a game I RP with compared playing GURPS to Blades in the Dark as something akin to playing Captain Kirk vs Captain Kirk's director. ...what? What do you control in Blades in the Dark that isn't your character's actions and mentality? I mean, yeah, you can also control your character's actions in the past, but that's basically heist movie 101.
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May 31, 2022 10:44
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Alien Rope Burn posted:In any case, maybe if he thinks hard enough on role-playing games, someday, he'll get around to writing one. He did: Infinity RPG.
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May 31, 2022 10:53
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I'm not sure how paizo going "our product is better than the competitor's product" is a particularly egregious thing
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May 31, 2022 10:59
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Outside of their possible negative influence on the community, I find "dissociated mechanics" and "ohh it's like a mmorpg" incredibly pedantic and irritating arguments. They're almost thought-terminating clichés at this point, that don't really explain anything about how the game plays. So I'm happy calling their proponents dumbasses.
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May 31, 2022 11:46
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Panzeh posted:I don't really think it's all that wrong to make a distinction between, say, D&D and Blades in the Dark in what they're trying to do. no definitely, one of them is trying to be a well designed game, for example
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May 31, 2022 13:48
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Arivia posted:many of you are just carrying very old wounds about people disliking a version of D&D you like when wotc was being absolute poo poo about it and are not looking at anything from the last ten years
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May 31, 2022 13:50
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neonchameleon posted:(and by the way he is Humpty-Dumpty style inventing his own meanings of terms that already existed then insisting that other people use them with his personal definition of Storygames) This is what really gets me about that argument. He's describing actor stance vs author/director stance, a thing that Ron Edwards wrote about on the forge in 2001, but then applying those definitions to "RPGs" and "storygames," which already had definitions! (They were synonyms.) You might as well say "RPGs and storygames are both narrative tabletop games, but in RPGs you eat Cool Ranch Doritos and in storygames you don't." For evidence that they were synonyms, story-games.com in 2006 described itself this way: "This site is a place to loosely describe Role Playing Games. Specifically, new ways to play RPGs and new ways of approaching the hobby. This site is meant to be a relaxed, non-threatening, non-confrontational environment to discuss the above." Looking for other early definitions (before grogs and dickheads who call people "swine" got hold of it), I found "a game wherein the players collaborate to create a new story together." That clearly defines a category that includes almost all RPGs, but could potentially include some non-RPG games. And that matches my memory of when I first encountered the term - it wasn't as a subset of RPGs, but as a hypothetical superset (I say hypothetical because in practice, all of the membership overlapped). I found other people from around the same time defining it as "an RPG designed by people from story-games.com or the forge." Like, I think it's clear that those terms were just synonyms until some people got hold of them and tried to use them to say that certain people weren't actually roleplaying. And Arivia, I don't think anyone's doing a 2-minutes hate or saying he's on a level with Pundit or other people who make bigotry their whole deal. I just see a bunch of people trying to remember who he is and saying "oh yeah, wasn't he the guy with X lovely take?" And it turns out he's had a lot of lovely takes over the years, so we all remember different ones. (Including at least one which is actually bigoted.)
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May 31, 2022 14:35
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"Dissociated mechanics" is exactly what I was talking about when I said that most of what passes for RPG theory is hobbyists pushing a petty agenda.
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May 31, 2022 14:41
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Edition War history aside, I don't really like or care for Justin Alexander because I do think he dishonestly dresses up personal preferences he has as objective academic facts. And that feeds into another issue I have with him where if he's presented as having made a mistake, he'd rather write a self-aggrandizing think piece about how he's logically right than admit fault. As far as the original starting point of this argument, where he said sponsoring Actual Plays didn't work, I think on a practical level it makes sense that you need a massive return on investment and giving money for one on its own isn't enough to do that. I am also curious which Actual Plays they sponsored? Was it only this one for Over The Edge? https://www.tablestory.tv/the-jamais-view/ Because I think you have to factor in if any of your games are actually good streaming or podcasting content when you're promoting them. Over the Edge is a fine game but I think both it and Unknown Armies are pretty high concept and would need an experienced group to hook into the games well. The whole "every conspiracy theory is true" angle of Over the Edge has kind of lost its charm thanks to our IRL recent history, too. An Ars Magica AP is sounds like it'd be the driest experience in the world. Personally, I think Feng Shui could swing it best out of the big Atlas Games, and I think it has the most distinct genre niche. It also doesn't look like much promotion was done for that AP as it was running. There was an initial announcement of the trailer on the Atlas Games website blog and the Over The Edge Kickstarter page, then I don't see any follow ups. Maybe they sent reminders out on the massive email list Justin says they have with thousands of subscribers? But if they weren't sending out reminders when the streams happened or VODs were uploaded to youtube, it seems unlikely they did much with their email list. Like they could have also invested in some other sorts of marketing, but that seems fairly free and easy to leverage their established audience on. I do get it's a tricky situation, trying to promote a more obscure RPG with a more obscure AP group though. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 15:13 on May 31, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 15:09
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moths posted:I don't know what you're trying to accomplish with your alternate history, but I don't like it because it feels manipulative and weird. Thing is, I can't remember exactly, but I do "remember" that Paizo was fanning. But without evidence, I'm not sure, since it was over ten years ago and I can't find it. There's a non-zero chance there were just a ton of shills who hated 4e pushing the game everywhere and Paizo just kind of enjoying the free ads. And that's not the same as making GBS threads on the previous edition to sell the game though this is the internet. Without hard evidence of "buy Pathfinder, the TRVE DND" coming from the mouths of Paizo employees/executives/advertisement campaigns then it's hard to say whether the 'feeling' of them actually doing it is true.
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May 31, 2022 15:51
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