@Printdevil @viktorTheBoar "Matt Colville, come fix my toilet!"

@Printdevil We have much to learn from venerable men who mutter into their beards while compulsively touching their faces.

@Taskerland @Printdevil

I feel seen.

@Taskerland I think there's a lot (and I say this incredibly rarely) to be learned from the Eddie "Babes" De Bono here, in his tool kit approach to thinking strategies, you could swap out his intro to six-hat-thinking or whatever and replace it with gaming tools and the advice of "use what works abandon what doesn't" is sage.

"keep your hands off your face while I'm etching"

@BOOKHOUSE @Taskerland

@Taskerland I'm glad. But also, I'm not going to upsell you on Premium Whartson or whatever.
I think my history helps here - largely playing in one extended group, White Dwarf, saw occasional issues of Dragon some years later, but that was all "here's what other people are doing, I'll take this and leave that". Gary was already a bit of a joke by the time I became aware of him as having a distinct style of gaming; I went along to Reading Games Fairs, and there were Official! tournaments, but they seemed to be a completely separate group of people from the ones I was playing with in the open gaming.

Oddly the number of additional search terms required to get a picture of "man with beard and books" was quite whacky, when what I really should have been able to use there was "not Ai"

but noooooooooooo

@BOOKHOUSE @Taskerland

I do actually have "Pre-Ai" as an extension but I never remember to use it and just prefer to complain out the window at seagulls.

@BOOKHOUSE @Taskerland

@Printdevil @Taskerland

Seagulls? Good choice. I favour the mardy jays in the garden.

This is what the Frankfurt school were on about when they talked about fear of freedom and authoritarian personalities.

You have a structurally horizontalist and creatively decentralised hobby, add the Internet, and people immediately sign up for rigid social hierarchies. They *hurl* their freedom and equality away in order to belong on someone else's terms.

@Taskerland I think there's something to be said here about how long people have played. When you're starting something, you're struggling to figure out how the rules work and boxing yourself in with looking it up. As you play more, and find those RAW vs intent discussions, you grow into seeing that RAW isn't the end all be all of the game. Eventually, you've tried enough games or found enough gaps to knock down the walls when you feel like it. We start out rigid, and expand into ease.

#ttrpg

@Taskerland One of the structured things I've noticed is people's inability to see gaming as a tool kit. Doom Clocks, etc etc. Yes, they have a place, but you shouldn't need to design a game around them. If it suits *a scenario* use it, if you want to track inventory because it's a survival precise game, go ahead. I don't get why the "this is a good trick for that one time" has become the cornerstone of whole games. There's a definite authority fear going on with all of that. Lack of agency .

@lichtenstein I think that we went from a state of cultural and economic collapse to thousands of new people piling into the hobby.

So much had been forgotten and so many good people had moved on. The advice being offered was a range of tedious and blinkered nerds who have done very well out of it to the broader detriment of the hobby.

They present running games as something technical that needs to be done *right* rather than something creative where you find your voice.

@Printdevil

@Taskerland @lichtenstein @Printdevil I think you are forgetting too the pernicious impact of capitalism on the hobby. A single book of simple rules that can be easily modified to suit your needs is utter anathema to commercial interest. Why sell you one book once when they can sell you fifty books a hundred times (once "editions" get factored in)?

Much of this ever-narrower specificity of IP in gaming is, I think, the result of capitalism being the ugly stain on humanity that it is.

@lichtenstein I think that we went from a state of cultural and economic collapse to thousands of new people piling into the hobby.

So much had been forgotten and so many good people had moved on. The advice being offered was a range of tedious and blinkered nerds who have done very well out of it to the broader detriment of the hobby.

They present running games as something technical that needs to be done *right* rather than something creative where you find your voice.

@Printdevil

@Taskerland I wrote a single blog post on finding my voice just to show it wasn't useful. Generic advice to storytellers is weak, but specific advice is pointless to most people.

'Speak up'/ 'listen more'
'Plan better'/'improvise more'

The best advice for some is also what most people don't need to hear.
@lichtenstein @Printdevil

I think that's where the crossover with creative thinking/management/PR etc etc becomes more interesting. There are oceans of books written about team building and "how to be heard in a team" and I'm sure at least three of them are good. Those are probably gold mines for gaming advice. I would seriously doubt any of the chinstroking beardlords would ever bother to mine for it though.

Same with textbook design and game layout. Blinding lack of insight there.

@malin @Taskerland @lichtenstein

I think that's where the crossover with creative thinking/management/PR etc etc becomes more interesting. There are oceans of books written about team building and "how to be heard in a team" and I'm sure at least three of them are good. Those are probably gold mines for gaming advice. I would seriously doubt any of the chinstroking beardlords would ever bother to mine for it though.

Same with textbook design and game layout. Blinding lack of insight there.

@malin @Taskerland @lichtenstein

I mean there are really good books about "How to write a history book and lay it out for 12-16 year olds" and the graphics levels to use etc etc. Centuries of work texts and education in fact, and yet for some reason RPGs tend to go "that other RPG looked nice" or "I read this one book about game design that came out specifically about Chess and It seemed relevant"

Gamers have a terrible tendency either to copy wholesale or start from first principles

@malin @Taskerland @lichtenstein

@Printdevil the only layout chat I hear is a) have an index, and b) don't make people use it (e.g. keep statblocks where you use them).

Is there something new in typography? Surely not!
@Taskerland @lichtenstein