What gets me these days is the "Dungeons and Dragons Adventurer League." It's basically a giant competition that is super strict about rules and tries to get people roleplaying for points, for actual status in the organization. And you pay dues, of course, so this organization pays to monopolize gaming clubs everywhere. They make it so you have to have every session notorized to validate your character's gain in XP, and if the character dies you can't use them ever again. And it is ALWAYS D&D.

So now people are stuck paying actual money on a regular basis just because they didn't see anything wrong with a monoculture.

CC: @Taskerland@dice.camp @pteryx@dice.camp @foolishowl@social.coop

What how did you know have you been spying on me???

@cy @Taskerland @foolishowl @Printdevil
Well, sometimes Pathfinder Society is available too, but that falls into the "that's fine to also call Kleenex" range.

(Really, PFS seems to be worse in that they seem to have more influence over the default rules of the game for everyone else, so, for example, Pathfinder 2nd Edition has absolutely terrible crafting rules simply because PFS hate hate HATES crafting.)

Yeesh, haven't run into that yet.

CC: @Taskerland@dice.camp @foolishowl@social.coop @Printdevil@dice.camp

@cy @Taskerland @Printdevil @pteryx I played in Adventurers League games years ago, a few times on my own, a few with my younger stepchild. We weren't charged for it. A lot of the players were in their thirties and forties and hadn't played TTRPGs since their teens, so I fit in, in that respect. It made sense to have organized play to introduce people to the hobby, but the idea of standardizing the experience was strange -- like the goal was a slow MMO.

@cy @Taskerland @Printdevil @pteryx People started creating computer games based on D&D very early in its history. The first and second waves of MMORPGs were characterized by developers and players trying to support role-playing and organic narrative, but there were too many practical limitations. I also played in Neverwinter Nights "persistent worlds", which were more flexible, but still severely limited by the use of computer graphics and tooling.

@cy @Taskerland @Printdevil @pteryx So I find it strange to try to reproduce the MMO experience at the table. I'm also cautious about VTTs -- the more elaborate the graphics, the greater the constraint on actual play.

@cy @foolishowl @Printdevil @Taskerland
Back when I played Magic, I never went for the whole "buy an entire box of boosters and hope" approach you seem to be referring to here. If I needed specific cards, I bought singles, which weren't particularly hard to come by if you weren't very, very specifically trying to build the "correct" competitive decks. So I still think equating enjoyment of CCGs to gambling addiction is just demonization, because *especially* casually, it's not a requirement.

@cy @Printdevil @Taskerland @foolishowl
There is a key difference between TTRPGs and most board games, though: it's possible to just go through the motions of a board game without dragging down the experience for everyone else. By contrast, a wallflower player in a TTRPG is a ball and chain on the rest of the party, failing to contribute anything to the collaborative effort aside from dice rolls.

As I said, I'd rather that people who want to hang out but not actually play just watch instead.

@foolishowl @cy @Taskerland @Printdevil
One of the key skills of VTT play is knowing when you don't need a map. If the campaign I'm in right now restricted itself to the confines of the kinds of actions and efforts that fit onto a map, it would be a *very* different story and experience, and a considerably less enjoyable one.

There's also an important social contract element to keep in mind when VTTs are involved: announce your characters' plans, so any needed maps can be ready next week.

I suppose there's also the pay-to-win aspect of it. Like what are you even paying for? Either way it's kind of sleazy, and money always crowds out everything else, but it's true if you only buy cards you know then it's not gambling. Though each game is kind of gambly. Taking a gamble on what cards to include in your deck, and all. People see patterns where there are none, and there's money to be made in capitalizing on that illusion.

CC: @foolishowl@social.coop @Printdevil@dice.camp @Taskerland@dice.camp

Pay to win is a big part of the allure

@cy @foolishowl @Taskerland @pteryx

@Taskerland The funniest part of all this is that about half the designers aren't designers in the first place. They're at best adapters: writing Yet Another PbtA Game( but this one is about squirrels in therapy!) or Yet Another D20 Game.

Of the remainder half are writers, not designers, and it shows in their games.

And of the final quarter, you see the usual spectrum of incompetent to sublime.

Fellow players are far more interesting to talk to most times.

@pteryx @Printdevil @strangequark @Taskerland The US was the base for, however, the most influential gaming rag you've never heard of: Alarums & Excursions. It was a giant of a 'zine in a world where most people in the scene had never heard of it, and it was where a whole lot of gaming theory (both design and praxis) was hashed out all the way ...

... get this ...

... to **today**.

I remember it. I don't remember it particularly fondly though. I have masses of pdfs though maybe it's time for a re read. @ZDL @pteryx @strangequark @Taskerland

@cy @foolishowl @Printdevil @Taskerland
See, now we're just cycling back around to "all card playing is gambling and therefore evil". Equating *deckbuilding* to gambling is especially disingenuous. What next, calling every video game in existence "gambling" because you have to buy a computer of some description to play them? Demonizing the use of dice in TTRPGs so Amber is the only one that passes your holiness test?

Please take your crusade to people who are actually hurting themselves.

On the topic of demonizing things, my headmaster in the 80s, banished cards and RPGs, calling them the devil's picture books. Which is a lot more demony than most of our criticism

@pteryx @cy @foolishowl @Taskerland

@Printdevil @pteryx @strangequark @Taskerland When reading it, think of it as a low-tech BBS, not a magazine, and it makes a lot more sense. It was very much a place of **conversation** (at a snail's pace) not bloviation.

@pteryx @cy @Printdevil @Taskerland That seems unnecessarily heated.

Buying cards when you don't know the value of the cards you receive does seem to me to be a kind of low-key gambling.

I just have no fond memories of it and that's unusual for me. @ZDL @pteryx @strangequark @Taskerland