Quote from: Spinachcat;1111676This thread is extra weird, even for us!

False Flags! Dark Money! Forum Drama! OSR Retroclone! Milo! Hate Speech!

Who knew one thread would score theRPGsite bingo?

Keep up the good work! And keep those awesome quotes from the Denners coming! What a bunch of nutty bitches!



It's the perfect cover!

Lol.

I'm new but I'll share my thoughts... the gaming den is absolutely the most bizarre forum I have ever visited. It's like an RPG forum for people who REALLY REALLY hate role playing games.

Quote from: fixable;1111674Ok. Damnit. I was being childish. I apologize. I went too far.

Np, lots of folks come into a new place fists swinging.

And yeah, the Den is the embodiment of the worst aspects of Progressive hypocrisy, seeping into the simple pastime of sitting around a table, rolling dice...they loathe what they say they enjoy.

Quote from: Doom;1111687Np, lots of folks come into a new place fists swinging.

And yeah, the Den is the embodiment of the worst aspects of Progressive hypocrisy, seeping into the simple pastime of sitting around a table, rolling dice...they loathe what they say they enjoy.

I'd say that the Den is more about creating a game where there can not be any possible input from a human being into the execution of the game. Like 100% rules over all. It's about totalitarianism of the rules and any game that requires a human judgement is an invalid game. They take the fallible principles of 3E and 4E to their illogical conclusion.

Quote from: Doom;1111687Np, lots of folks come into a new place fists swinging.

And yeah, the Den is the embodiment of the worst aspects of Progressive hypocrisy, seeping into the simple pastime of sitting around a table, rolling dice...they loathe what they say they enjoy.

And thanks for the np. I appreciate it.

Quote from: fixable;1111693I'd say that the Den is more about creating a game where there can not be any possible input from a human being into the execution of the game. Like 100% rules over all. It's about totalitarianism of the rules and any game that requires a human judgement is an invalid game. They take the fallible principles of 3E and 4E to their illogical conclusion.

Yeah, we've noticed that here ages ago. They are like the Event Horizon Red Shift of 20th Cen. fads of Behavioralism or Structuralism.

Quote from: fixable;1111693I'd say that the Den is more about creating a game where there can not be any possible input from a human being into the execution of the game. Like 100% rules over all. It's about totalitarianism of the rules and any game that requires a human judgement is an invalid game. They take the fallible principles of 3E and 4E to their illogical conclusion.

This is incorrect.  The Den accepts, admits and EMBRACES the idea that the rules cannot be exhaustive and that sometimes stepping away from the rules and just choosing reasonable outputs is the only way to play.  In fact, they consider that the baseline of gaming - there's not a person here that can't take dice, their imagination and good friends and not come away with a good gaming session.  But most GMs and Players are looking for something more - often some consistency and the ability to know and predict what their character can do and ought to be able to do as well as what they can never do.  The rules are supposed to provide this.  If the rules are no better than the GM rolling dice and picking reasonable outputs, they're not adding anything.  In a nutshell: actual rules paid for with actual money should be better than the GM making things up as they go as a minimum standard.

That's hardly controversial.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1111712This is incorrect.  The Den accepts, admits and EMBRACES the idea that the rules cannot be exhaustive and that sometimes stepping away from the rules and just choosing reasonable outputs is the only way to play.  In fact, they consider that the baseline of gaming - there's not a person here that can't take dice, their imagination and good friends and not come away with a good gaming session.  But most GMs and Players are looking for something more - often some consistency and the ability to know and predict what their character can do and ought to be able to do as well as what they can never do.  The rules are supposed to provide this.  If the rules are no better than the GM rolling dice and picking reasonable outputs, they're not adding anything.  In a nutshell: actual rules paid for with actual money should be better than the GM making things up as they go as a minimum standard.

That's hardly controversial.

This reads like a mirror universe Chick tract.

Quote from: jeff37923;1111714This reads like a mirror universe Chick tract.

I know you'd think that, but I'll chalk it up to poor reading comprehension.  The reason some people here get such a skewed view of the type of discussion is because the discussion hinges on the places where the rules exist.  Claiming that 'ignoring the rules is fine because Magic Tea Party works better' isn't a defense of the rules.  Building rules that are better than Magic Tea Party is really hard, but rules that just are magic tea party with some layer of obfuscation are easy (see any thread at the Den about DungeonWorld and related games).  Reasonable outputs for how easy it is to seduce the barmaid or be seduced by the barmaid are really tricky and so are so many areas where the player and the GM might disagree.  The rules are the place where those types of disputes are handled.  Since the GM makes the world, it's totally possible for them to have barmaids that are extremely resistant to seduction (or whatever), but there's some benefit to a player to be able to know whether they MIGHT succeed and how it will be determined.  Because it might end up being the right strategy for dealing with the Succubus Queen, too.  

In most areas of the game, the rules are accepted by both players and GMs and people don't think about them.  As a player I know what I need to roll to hit AC 25.  It's the DMs call whether the monster has an AC of 25 or 35 (but there are rules that help constrain that number - just pulling an AC out of thin air isn't really using the rules) and there's really nobody at the Den that argues otherwise.  Figuring out how the rules ought to work in more difficult cases (like with stealth, or influence) gets talked about a lot because a rule that is better than DM Fiat is 1) really hard and 2) desirable in the same way that knowing what you need to do to hit an opponent is helpful.

Quote from: fixable;1111693I'd say that the Den is more about creating a game where there can not be any possible input from a human being into the execution of the game. Like 100% rules over all. It's about totalitarianism of the rules and any game that requires a human judgement is an invalid game. They take the fallible principles of 3E and 4E to their illogical conclusion.

To which you responded this:

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1111712This is incorrect.  The Den accepts, admits and EMBRACES the idea that the rules cannot be exhaustive and that sometimes stepping away from the rules and just choosing reasonable outputs is the only way to play.  In fact, they consider that the baseline of gaming - there's not a person here that can't take dice, their imagination and good friends and not come away with a good gaming session.  But most GMs and Players are looking for something more - often some consistency and the ability to know and predict what their character can do and ought to be able to do as well as what they can never do.  The rules are supposed to provide this.  If the rules are no better than the GM rolling dice and picking reasonable outputs, they're not adding anything.  In a nutshell: actual rules paid for with actual money should be better than the GM making things up as they go as a minimum standard.

That's hardly controversial.

Lets unpack that in some concise principles shall we?

1.- The rules cannot be exhaustive
Agreed

2.- Most GM's and players look for consistency
Agreed but this has more to do with the world the GM created than the rules on a book

3.- GM's & Players want the ability to know and predict what their character can do
Agreed but again this has more to do with the world than the rules in a book, and with another caveat: There has to be room for the unexpected.

4.- The rules are supposed to provide this
Are they? Says who?

5.- The rules should be better than a GM making things up
The rules can be better than a fledgling GM (Maybe)
The rules can be better than a shitty GM (Almost always)
The rules can be better than a mediocre GM (Sometimes)
The rules can't be better than a good GM (Almost never)
The rules can never be better than a great GM

Now lets see, if 1, 2 & 3 are true then 4 & 5 can't be true.

Why? Because the rules can't be exhaustive, because each session is different, not even if you're playing the same written module, not even if you're playing RAW, because the different players will have different characters and will get different rolls and will take different decisions, to which the different GM's will react different and the loop is complete.

What players want is consistent rules and for the world to make sense internally, what the GM wants is consistent rules and the ability to create his own worlds.

Since your rules cannot be exhaustive you can't have rules that are better than the GM because you can't take into account all the infinite variations possible.

My guess is that what the den wants is a very shitty CRPG.

You can take sound concepts and go too far with them, become too stubborn with them, and find yourself in an absurd level of extreme caricature of where you started. That's what the Gaming Den has done, on many many topics. For example, the ongoing "5e is vaporware" thread, where most Den users continue to engage in the ridiculous myth that the slower release schedule of 5e means it's a real RPG but just a sort of Hasbro placeholder to keep the IP going using a skeleton crew. That sort of insane level of denialism of reality is rampant on the Den.

Quote from: Mistwell;1111731You can take sound concepts and go too far with them, become too stubborn with them, and find yourself in an absurd level of extreme caricature or where you started.

Yes.  Furthermore, if you manage to avoid all of that, and are left with only the good stuff, pushed only enough to get most of the usefulness out it--it's still not limited enough. You'll have 12 really good things in a game that can reasonably support 8.  Or more likely, 40+ good things in a game that can reasonably support 8 with trace amounts of some of the others carefully selected from the rest of the pile.

Complexity budget is a thing on each sub system, and it's a thing on the the game as a whole. The 80/20 rule is usually merciless where plans intersects with reality.

what does "5e is vaporware" even mean

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1111712This is incorrect.  The Den accepts, admits and EMBRACES the idea that the rules cannot be exhaustive and that sometimes stepping away from the rules and just choosing reasonable outputs is the only way to play.  In fact, they consider that the baseline of gaming - there's not a person here that can't take dice, their imagination and good friends and not come away with a good gaming session.  But most GMs and Players are looking for something more - often some consistency and the ability to know and predict what their character can do and ought to be able to do as well as what they can never do.  The rules are supposed to provide this.  If the rules are no better than the GM rolling dice and picking reasonable outputs, they're not adding anything.  In a nutshell: actual rules paid for with actual money should be better than the GM making things up as they go as a minimum standard.

That's hardly controversial.

This sounds awful, and terrible.  Why can't you people just have fun playing RPGs?  Why must it be this way for you?  How sad.  RPGs are supposed to be fun games.  I feel bad for you.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1111738what does "5e is vaporware" even mean

At first it meant "They will never come out with 5e". Then when it came out, the argument (without any glimmer of an admission or even acknowledgement that they were previously wrong) morphed into "It's just a bare skeleton crew at WOTC pretending to produce D&D but really it's just a few books as a placeholder so they maintain the intellectual property and brand rights but D&D is really dead."

And then when it started to sell extraordinarily well, the deep denial set in. Any way to spin good sales news as neutral or bad was taken. And if it was undeniable evidence, they just called it outright a lie. A lot of "Yeah they said 4e was selling well too, which was a lie, so obviously this must be a lie as well" type responses.  When you point to FIVE YEARS of the PHB being in the top 100 best seller list on Amazon you hear claims like "That's just one book" and "That's just discounted books on line and not game stores, and they wouldn't be blowing it out at discount online if it were really selling well" (as if that's how Amazon works).

And then the conversation turns back to slower release schedule, and the amount of fluff being higher than the amount of crunch in some books, and the decrease in the number of expansion books. And all this, in their warped conspiracy-laden minds, is "proof" 5e is just a placeholder edition and somehow not a real edition of D&D which at this point is just a brand and not a real game anymore.

It's a level of genuine insanity. It's rare you see this kind of denial of reality in this day and age.

Quote from: Mistwell;1111743It's a level of genuine insanity. It's rare you see this kind of denial of reality in this day and age.

I was all with you until that last sentence.  What is your definition of "rare"?