@Taskerland It’s OK to not watch RPG YouTube, you know!

I follow RPG stuff closer than anyone in my two groups, read multiple forums, hang out on dice.camp, and read a bunch of subreddits, and nearly all of the dumbest discourse about RPGs comes from YouTube engagement-bait. Second place is probably Bluesky. Both are extremely peripheral.

Nobody in my groups ever hears about the latest controversy du jour unless I tell them, and none of it affects our games in the slightest.

@Ashigaru I don't watch RPG YouTube, I am talking about places like reddit and bluesky.

@Taskerland My point stands, though. Arguing and theorizing about RPGs online is an adjacent but separate hobby from actually playing roleplaying games. It’s what people do to kill time when they’re not playing. Lots of these people don’t even have groups. They don’t represent the hobby.

@Ashigaru As I said, I am struggling to find a way to co-exist with the broader hobby. At the moment I find it discouraging and upsetting rather than energising or inspirational.

You *have* the soul of the hobby - Every year sees at least a couple of 7-figure crowd-funding initiatives that produces a 500-page hardback book filled with incredibly detailed rules on monster-killing and you are still ranting and screaming about idiots who don't see the hobby the way you do.

I get that I am a tiny minority in a niche hobby but I am reaching the point where I am no longer attending to it at all.

@Taskerland How is an imaginary field about pigpogoblins, flaming vision, and initiative as an incarnate force, not fiction. Are they arguing it's a religion? Or some sort of Scotsman? I'm confused.

@Printdevil @Taskerland My guess is that it's the opposite of my view, which is that there is _first_ an imaginary world, and the rules only give us a view of it through a clouded window. To the people of the world, there is no class or level or alignment or skill rating.

@RogerBW That is how I see it too... the game is about everyone inflating a bubble of fiction that floats above the table. The rules are there to manage disputes but they're abstractions from the fiction.

@Printdevil

@Printdevil I spent a while engaging in good faith only to realise that had been a mistake.

I've always thought the GM (with the help of the rules) is the lens through which players interact and view a fiction. All the showmanship, all the props, the voices, the acting, the writing, the narratives, and notes, are all just a user interface to allow the players to become part of a fiction. Shared certainly, but assuredly a fiction. The Dice as well exist to pander a little to Eris, and I think to make the GM smile as their own NPCs plans "Gang aft agley"

@Taskerland @RogerBW

I've always thought the GM (with the help of the rules) is the lens through which players interact and view a fiction. All the showmanship, all the props, the voices, the acting, the writing, the narratives, and notes, are all just a user interface to allow the players to become part of a fiction. Shared certainly, but assuredly a fiction. The Dice as well exist to pander a little to Eris, and I think to make the GM smile as their own NPCs plans "Gang aft agley"

@Taskerland @RogerBW

@Printdevil Nah, that's just the reality. We should ignore the reality in favour of seeing the world as a reality, and everything else as a lense.

Basically, Knightmare, but with more people in helmets and one poor sod shouting at them that something's about to eat them.
@Taskerland @RogerBW

@Taskerland I think that "statblocks" "the game is in the numbers crowd" have always existed. There's a very significant crowd of frothing "I've been playing with the white books" crowd who reject utterly the game as fiction played. They have a whole post hoc ergo propter hoc thing going on, where they mythologise the games they have been in afterwards and sit telling stories *about the games*

That's one of the reasons I think they seek to reinstate what it was like when they were 14 again.

Plato's Dystopian Cave Network.

@malin @Taskerland @RogerBW

@Printdevil Back in the day, I used to associate that mindset with a kind of narrow blustering masculinity...

Forget feelings and telling stories, that's all a bit poofy: Give me piles of corpses and magical swords with spikes on them.

What's interesting is that while the incipient misogyny and homophobia have mostly dropped out of sight, there is still a profound resistance to the idea of RPGs being something creative and arty.

@Taskerland I have had this argument over and over with people regarding any break from the proscribed D&D rotes as "forcing authorial proxies by the GM"

These people run terrible games, so I don't really care.

@Printdevil It's a similar mindset to the people who are most vocally against photography being an art-form: No no no... it's all about refractive indexes and hyperfocal distances.

@Taskerland Yes. Everything has rules, and you can find the rule, and reduce it a system you can replicate. Everyone is a behaviour engine. Aesthetics are programmable, and wine tasters make it up.

@Printdevil Now that's just crying out to be an OSR megadungeon.

"the people carrying objects along the wall casting shadows fight as ogre-mages"

@malin @RogerBW

I think there's definitely a fierce crowd of gamers who want it to be about an abstracted table based game at which you can win reward loops through aggressive exploitation of the rules and tactical use of increasing character power. I don't perceive that as roleplaying. It's stat grooming onanism.

@Taskerland @RogerBW