but I'm just tired of trying to fight for something resembling standards for acceptable levels of providing what you claim to offer in the RPG industry
I feel, strongly, that D&D/Pathfinder massively miss the mark, in terms of supporting that which they claim to support
and I got shut down really, really hard for trying to show people that they're not getting what they were supposedly paying for
KRyan's not wrong here as well. There's been a feeling of censorship to some of the mod behaviors that's increased over time, especially in the evident defense of pet systems.
Unfortunately, your meta defence of that kind of answer totally sidesteps the issue at hand. Perhaps partly it's because of the meta's original title, and partly because you're used to people objecting to your thesis rather than the way it's presented?
@BESW when it was you/your answer that was the highest-rated, but mine and doppelgreener's were well-regarded, I was comfortable with the notion that clarity and backing were necessary
but with Thales and mxyzplk's answers
I feel strongly that I am being told that I cannot criticize anyone's favorite system
@KRyan Wat. From Thales: "If you want to say that D&D is a bad system to out-of-combat stuff, go ahead. That is perfectly possible to say without using such words."
@KRyan But 'D&D lies to you' is at best an explanation of why this problem exists. Your actual answer to the question was 2 paragraphs down, and it was great.
@Miniman I felt it an important introduction as to why I was suggesting such heavy abstraction of such issues was warranted and why I felt those who hadn't wasted money on such things were getting it right
the really sad thing is
immediately after writing that answer
I came in here and asked for criticism/feedback
everyone present responded to it very favorably
then the question-asker responded to it very favorably
@Tritium21 It really really is about finding a way to be analytical and critical without being needlessly aggressive. There's a happy spot between "sugar-coating" and "abrasive."
@KRyan As I said earlier today, after I'd thought about it a while I realised that my positive reaction to it was based on things I knew, and you knew, but which we couldn't assume other people knew.
@BraddSzonye see, no; D&D is a product, and the value that product offers is in detailing and defining a way to play a game without you having to design and define how everything works
@Tritium21 no, you are not; most people I game with play 3.5 and find Pathfinder anywhere from mediocre to outright insulting
@KRyan Yes, and that product included B2 Keep on the Borderlands, and S1 Tomb of Horrors, and The Dragon, and so on. You seem to exclude all of those things from the “system” because they are not “rules,” and I don’t understand why.
@BraddSzonye published supplements, I feel like, strengthen my point more than not; they relied on setting specific expectations that the game could actually support
@Tritium21 My college RPG group moved to PF after I left because they wanted a "living system," but I stayed in 3.5 for several more years before I moved to 4e.
@BraddSzonye Because D&D promises that you don't need those things, by offering you all of the tools and guidelines to create them for yourself and presenting those adventures, explicitly, as optional ways to run your game.
Reading this gaming industry retrospective I ran into a few phrases which confused me.
The d20 bust caused by 3.5e (2003) and the over-saturation of d20 products ran right into the Great Recession.
What's "the d20 bust"? I came into RPGs shortly after 3.5's release, so I can't compare befor...
@Tritium21 I'm still on 3.5e. I only moved to 3.0 because my friend wanted to DM it, and I only updated to 3.5 because another friend wanted to DM that. If others hadn't poked me, I'd probably still be playing AD&D 2e...
@KRyan Yes, but at the time of its release, I was sceptical... it looked like just a money-grab, after how long 2e lasted, to issue a "half version" relatively soon after 3.
One thing I wish the answers to that question discussed a little more, is the bit where some people want all that random gear in D&D for realism, and some want it for puzzle-solving, and some don’t want it at all. Seven’s answer touches on that, but it would be nice to see it actually laid out.
I was thinking about writing up something about it, but I didn’t want to further muddy the answers with a competing one, and I don’t really have time.
@KRyan The idea of metagaming being bad is relatively modern, though. It's hard to understand but there was a long time in which roleplaying was not present in RPGs.
@Lord_Gareth loot: n. Collective noun to describe a collection or group of expensive objects. "A loot of alabaster figurines." Sometimes used for non-tangible things. "A loot of resurrections."
I remember in my first RPG, which was red-box D&D, the paragraph about separation of player knowledge vs. character knowledge. Looking back, I see how this was added to BECMI (and perhaps earlier) as an explicit move to change the Gygaxian player-first model.
Gygax founding the RPG community was a lot like Freud founding psychology. "Thanks for inventing this cool thing but did you have to screw it up on every level before you left?"
@BraddSzonye 4e was not, though. It still treated characters as roles you slip into and represent, still treated player and character knowledge as separate and its rulebooks defined the idea of metagaming as a bad habit to be avoided.
4e mostly just said "go, freeform your roleplaying, don't let our rules stop you!" and people hated that, even though D&D's rules never really did much but get in the way
@KRyan Not entirely unfairly. 4e has definite elements of explicitly letting players know details, including tactical details, that their characters wouldn't necessarily know, because that's the only way to properly handle tactical battles.
@KRyan I mean that in every edition of D&D, you always know the location of party members. Even the invisible, noiseless thief is somehow exactly pinpointed to his allies.
@BraddSzonye I think the fact that the Gygaxian mode is player-driven may make it seem similar to the Author stance, but it's still deep in Actor stance, I think.
Just that, generally speaking, in Ye Olden Days, most groups had a preferred author/actor/player/token stance, and thought that everyone who did it differently was an abomination.
@KRyan Possibly. Then again, there are people under the impression that asking designers to engage in halfway decent math is the equivalent of summoning Satan, so...
@BESW But this, too, is a new concept to the RPG community. The old-school attitude was that it's the DM's game and you could go stuff it if you didn't like it.
I believe we've spoken at length as to DM empowerment.
Ironic thing is, lately I’ve been working as a referee (the sports kind) and I’m starting to see now that my consensus-based DMing is maybe not the best way to do it.
I came from an attitude of benevolent godhood myself, not least because I started running RPGs as a way to hang out with my friends in an environment I had full control over.
In any event, for the specific thing of a survival-type game; D&D offers rules to model a survival scenario (starvation, survival tools and equipment, tracking mechanics) but then fails to deliver on creating the tropes and themes that survival demands without heavy modification.
Like, I have always wanted to push responsibility for decisionmaking, style, etc. onto the group as a whole, and my players have resisted it, even the newbies.
@Lord_Gareth I was talking a bit about this earlier in the dedicated chatroom.
@Lord_Gareth I don’t think oldschool folks treated it much as a survival game, but instead just assumed that you would buy realistic equipment and amounts of food, to go along with your ten foot poles and candles and mapping parchment.
And most players, being reasonable people, went along with it and bought bedrolls and so it just wasn’t an issue.
You can see system artifacts here and there from the few people who didn’t play along.
Question in title.
Seems odd that an animal isn't naturally inclined to get bonuses to Survival, which typically involves dealing with the wilds and it's associated difficulties (an animal's natural home).
This is mainly in respect to Pathfinder, but I believe DnD 3.5e also lists some animals w...
@BraddSzonye But that's not a feature of the system, is the thing. Culture is not a feature. If anything, culture is a bug, because it makes people gain impressions of what's in the book that are not actually true.
That's part of why I usually bring discussions back down to RAW to ground them, then talk about how to modify RAW to get what you want.
Because RAW provides a reference point anyone can check.
Like, (made up example) once one of Gygax’s players was a jerkass and insisted that obviously bedrolls were useless because there were no rules for them. And Gygax being Gygax invented the Bed Bug monster which ate players who slept on bare ground.
And then people said “too silly” so eventually detailed rules for bedrolls appeared in Unearthed Arcana.
@BraddSzonye Except what Gygax actually invented were monsters that hid as swords and then stung you with lethal poison when you touched them. He invented cloakers to be disguised as cloaks, mimics for fake treasure, and a sapient floor that eats you.
Gygax was a sadistic power-monger and people justified his cruelty post-hoc
@Lord_Gareth Because there have always been people who’ve said if it’s not RAW it doesn’t count, where others have always said, “it’s obvious dummy, we don’t need rules for that,” while others have said “rocks fall, everyone dies”
@Lord_Gareth I always got the impression that he just had a huge sense of wonder and loved to play pranks.
@Miniman I Wanna Be the Guy is up front. Like consensual BDSM, it informs you that it offers nothing but pain, and lets you make the choice for yourself.
@Lord_Gareth I was actually thinking of something else, but that's fine. My point is that something like a mimic is an awesome surprise to spring on someone, far more so than a simple trap or ambush.
@BESW Not necessarily. It's a social site with a specific focus and orientation. But it's still definitely social. People interact, memes arise, people get to know each other. It's through a specific prism, but it's still social.
@BESW - I think in conclusion to the earlier thing is that we need to, as a community, look for where the acceptable line actually is so we can direct people at it.
We can see from this and past instances that the community isn't of one mind about behaviour, and that it changes over time, and that sometimes the meta mind just doesn't match the community's main-site actions (see: research questions about non-RPG settings, where meta liked 'em but the community shuts 'em down).
@Lord_Gareth Not really. There's a common tendency to want to be inclusive and permissive when talking about theoretical questions, but when an actual question shows up on the table it gets evaluated by more realistic merits. Not something meta can fix.
It's not that meta decides something and others act differently.
It's that the same people who felt one way about a broad policy changed their minds when the theoretical became practical and a specific question was being looked at.
but I still manually type out "d20pfsrd.org" by mistake regularly
but I'm saying oh no because other people are going to make the same mistake and fall for the scam survey thinking they're in the right place but the d20pfsrd is doing some fun survey thing for them
@BESW Ok. Also, even though english is my native language, I do suck at it :D
PCs are intelligence analysts. Not agents. The goal, in a very cold war feel, is to avert war. Very much a tom clancy feeling, but the situations will be origional
Their tools should be politics more than brute force
Reading this gaming industry retrospective I ran into a few phrases which confused me.
The d20 bust caused by 3.5e (2003) and the over-saturation of d20 products ran right into the Great Recession.
What's "the d20 bust"? I came into RPGs shortly after 3.5's release, so I can't compare befor...
