Wandering Adventure Party

I’m fairly convinced now that it’s entirely about trying to shrug off responsibility and liability for harm done. We’re already seeing “the AI fucked up” as an excuse for killing Iranian school kids. We’ll see it used again in legal tests of corporate enviornmental disasters soon.

Charnock

I think there’s a lot of virtual country club politics going on there too. I’ve seen people really push for a style of gaming so they can control the agenda. What I have never understood is why.

I had someone reply to me on a YouTube comment once that made this click for me.

They’re all playing on Start Playing Games, and they want to ensure they don’t have to think about anything, just run their RPGBOT-optimized build and flex on the other players.

Moreau Vazh

Like, the other say some lunatic was screaming that there is no fiction in RPGs, there is only what is explicitly covered by the rules. And like… Fine… The industry has explicitly chased and encouraged such views but why so angry?

This is literally every discussion I’ve had in the PF2e community. It’s beyond maddening. And suggesting that you can use published rulesets as a baseline, a scaffold, or even just as examples of what you could do to support and empower the fiction at the table, rather than restrict or remove it, just gets you buried by passive-aggressive downvotes and comments treating you like you’re an idiot.

The hobby expanded on the back of boardgame and video game players, and both of those communities often do not care about the fiction, just about optimizing the meta and winning. And that’s what we see here now.

Moreau Vazh It seems to be about knowwing every problem is solvable with their favourite paper buttons, that they get to push those buttons to solve whatever problems come their way, even if it doesn’t make sense, and that they never gave to think about anything during the session, only during chargen, level up, and daily resets.

It’s about ensuring they can win the game, and avoid engaging with the world.

It’s about playing on SPG without having to read anything or assess their options in any way.

Oh, and it’s probably about their particular brand of autistic inflexibility being focused on rules and navigating, rather than manipulatung, systems. But mostly, I think it’s about the new brand of munchkinism and rules lawyering that petends it’s neither of those things.

Charnock Yes. It’s moving from board-games and MMORPGs into TTRPGs and expecting there to be a button on your character sheet that you can press.

Moreau Vazh I like games with feats, and skills lists, and numbers that present a framework for differentiating a character’s skills and learning from the players’. I kind of hate paper buttons, though, and it’s exactly because of players seeing them as signals that it’s a board game experience.

I prefer a high trust environment with a… a physics engine, as it were. A consistent and internally consistent set of tools and progression systems. The vast majority of people who talk about such games essentially demand low trust environments where they are entitled to not just have a say in how their choices are adjudicated, but also in what everyone else’s choices can be.

I once had someone reply to one of my YouTube comments on this saying that they believed that all tables should run strictly RAW, because then they didn’t have to vet the GM before dropping into the game, and it’s like… No wonder I can’t stand talking to these people.

* Finger templing intensifies *

Charnock

One of the structured things I’ve noticed is people’s inability to see gaming as a tool kit.

This. This is the thing that drives me crazy.

Already have your own established toolbox? OSR isn’t for you, because that’s now for people who don’t want any rules (besides, apparently, Advantage/Disadvantage).

Like a fully kitted out toolbox? Well, congratulations, you’re now apparently soul-bound to every single part of it! Ignoring, modifying, or using your own rules is the equivalent of being a terrorist.

Only 5e GMs are allowed to make choices about the system. Everyone else just gets to choose which system to use.

The Pathfinder 2e subreddit is up to their usual nonsense again, and I just don’t have the patience for it today. This time they’re loudly and clumsily declaring that the rules state that thr world should not have encounters that are not level appropriate for the PCs in it.

This isn’t even video game logic anymore. It’s just self-important cirxle jerking.

Imagine having such a vast toolbox for emulating a world and believing it should only be used to fluff the players.

#pathfinder2e #pf2e #dnd #ttrpg #reddit

I will never understand commodity collecting as a form of “investment”. I have a lot of things that have no functional real value, but which at one point or another had some significant market value (baseball cards, mostly). I’ve never bought them with the expectation that the price tomorrow will be as high as or higher than the price yesterday.

I bought them because I wanted to have that thing. And I did. And I still do, because I don’t sell my things, and I especially don’t sell the things in my collections.

I seemingly can’t avoid hearing about ShadowDark, Nimble, and various Borgs.

Man, I ain’t ever be recordin’ no music off the radio. The sound quality was terrible!

I had family with duel cassette deck setups. I copied the music from other cassettes.

Null This is a space with a large oversampling of people who have suffered abuse on centralized platforms both want to be able to speak publicly but also have total control over who can hear them.

The lack of emotional maturity is systemic.

Well, that’s frigging amazing. I love this kind of creative usage of character tools!

Indeed. “If you build it, they will come” still demands that you build it, first. And it’s not the technology that needs to be built. It’s not the technology that got people onto Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram in the first place.

S. John Ross Indeed. There is, of course, a relevant XKCD for this.

Games People Play Not really. It was a rejection of 4e and a desire to return to something that felt like a TSR product, which basically meant resetting the clock. There really isn’t anything inherently opposed to continuing to evolve from that point.

But it seems like a lot of modern OSR have abandoned the design principles of B/X/AD&D/2Dungeons2Dragons to slap mechanics and systems that clearly follow from modern, standardized and systematized games.

Moreau Vazh There is something of a… contradiction doesn’t feel quite rifght… disconnect, maybe? in many of these “old school” revival “innovations”.

So many of them do not feel like natural evolutions of B/X or AD&D. There’s something remarkably 2020s feeling about them. As if the only thing that draws the designers to OSR is the grotesque aesthetic.

🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦 If only Marg Delahunty would pop out and beat them with her sword.

Starhawk I am neck deep in job applications, and have cringefully written out “cross-functional dozzywoozles” so many times that it both started to gain and then lost all meaning to me, and this post just shattered my brain.

Frank Heijkamp “I need to be where the audience is!” they say, oblivious to the fact that the audience is on the Internet, and if they can be found on Twitter, they can be found elsewhere.

“But there’s friction elsewhere!” they cry, oblivious to the fact that friction is the force that moves people.