Quote from: Peregrin;421627Oh...oh my.

What happened here?

:confused:

I tried to stop them. No one listens.

No means yes.

Quote from: Benoist;421634No means yes.

No, perforce, means yes.

Quote from: Koltar;421532While 'Story games' are not normally readily available in most game stores and the same can be said for Forge crap - they have had influence on the designers of the recent 4th edition D&D - that could definitely be a problem.

Yeah. People enjoying different things than you can be a problem. For sure.

QuoteStarting to think that too many game designers and writers are looking at the wrong studies and market research and are just looking on the net for inspiration and reading and consulting each other.

Designers looking to other designers for ideas and inspiration. That is totally unheard of.

Quote from: Aos;421534The originality and insight of the OP is refreshing in my opinion; it's almost as refreshing and invigorating as the sight of a fat, ray gun toting, middle-aged man dressed in bondage gear with a cosmetic vagina on his forehead.

Cosplay, it's not for sissies?

You have won, and raised the score of this thread.

Quote from: John Morrow;421572What I meant was that a lot of the tone and flow of the game comes from the set-up.  But I'm also good with optional rules.

Agreed.

QuoteTreating all rules as optional is one of the reasons Hero and D&D 3.5 run pretty quickly and smoothly for my group.  Optional rules can be a wonderful thing if you understand when to use them and not to use them.

Absolutely. I would even say is the best way of running such games.

QuoteI often wonder if the future of the hobby will be amateur rather than professional for-profit efforts.  

Most game designers are pretty amateurish, IMO, as there is no formal training to be an RPG designer. The only education you get seems to be playing a lot, and getting lots of practice.

Quote from: John Morrow;421575As far as I know, unless he's been lying for years now, Koltar is still role-playing fairly regularly.  I don't see him advocating for some sort of glorious past that no longer exists but what he plays now.  The "false nostalgia" charge is a convenient way to dismiss any defense of the status quote on the basis of misguided motivations rather than flaws in what they are actually saying.  There's that pesky post-modern obsession with motivation leading the discussion down the road to logical fallacies again.  If what he's saying is so off the wall, it should be easy enough to shoot down without resorting to armchair psychology and making fun of the fact he enjoys dressing up as a Klingon at conventions, where that's hardly damningly unusual behavior.

I cannot speak for others, and I don't think you refr to me, but I only discuss the wrong facts in Koltar's OP. By this I mean, the assertion that everyone roleplay the way he likes and that is the "right" way of RPing, when it is clear that people has been experimenting with the hobby since OD&D, which was born as an experiment. This fact only makes all his OP a pile of crap, and as I stated first, the worst part is that is boring, trite, repetitive crap.

At the end of the day, Ed's closed mind is only going to affect him. He's denying himself the chance of finding new games and experiences that could interest him (and of course he will save himself many bad experiences). The hobby will go on growing and evolving, and he will be left behind as many others that simply decided to stick to their favourite game/edition. As long as he can gather people to play the way he likes, it will be no big deal, anyway, and it shouldn't. It is just a qustion of social skills on his part.

His motivations are inmaterial to me, and I don't care about his cosplay habits. He's simply wrong.

QuoteYet the core of the hobby remained what it was for decades despite that.  And for all the Internet bluster surrounding Indie story-games for about a decade, they remain a niche.

I don't think anyone can make an accurate statement about what was the core of the hobby, not because of a post-modern POV, but for lack of objectve data. Simply that. The hobby is too fragmented.

Quote from: Koltar;421601Apparently Aos thinks he score points with crap like that.

And you think that you score points with the Pundit with crap like your OP. At least he's funny.

Quote from: Koltar;421147...Or get your Jalapeno filled chocolate out of my Peanut Butter.

I'm sick of crap like :

 "Well, you'd understand D&D 4/e better if you played MMOs. You do play MMORPGs, don't you?"

 No , I don't - fuck them.

A Table RPG should be just that - Role playing Game meant to be played at a table, with a character sheet and dice.
RPGs should be sold  based on the fact that they ARE DIFFERENT than console or computer game - you got more damn choices than in the damn computer and remote control shit stuff.

No nine poicket card protector sheet full of crappy daily and once-an-encounter power cards so you know what the fuck your character can supposedly do.

To hell with that 'instant superhero' crap.

 I'd rather play a talented amateur who is just starting to be a hero adventurer .

Oh and oh yeah - fuck any and all "DiTV" mechanics being shoved or attempted forcing into real roleplaying games. We don't need the headache or damage to the games and hobby.

Story Games?

 Junk 'em.

 They're not RPGs.


- Ed C.

You know, I'm all for live and let live, but seriously, I agree with Koltar. I fucking hate WoW. I hate playing it. I hate how it ruins people's lives. It facilitates a drug addict life style without any of the good parts of being on drugs. I absolutely hate game balance leading to daily powers for fighters. I hate hearing story time from game masters.

Fuck all that stuff that Koltar mentioned and fuck a bunch more stuff on top of it. Fuck World of Warcraft most of all. That game has no right being fun. It is like Diablo if Diablo took a long time. Its only redeeming quality is that it comes with a chatroom.

This thread got 125 posts? :confused:

Quote from: Melan;421643This thread got 125 posts? :confused:

Sex sells. (There's no saving throw against it when it targets the top notch.)

Quote from: Melan;421643This thread got 125 posts? :confused:

Aside from an outbreak of silliness, Koltar's given a wonderful gift to the martyr-posers and pollyannas who see nothing wrong with this.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;421650Aside from an outbreak of silliness, Koltar's given a wonderful gift to the martyr-posers and pollyannas who see nothing wrong with this.

The only martyr-posers I see around are the people whining because things are not like 1982 anymore, and suffering because other people do different stuff at their tables.

Many people feels that GURPS is a piece of shit designed by and for people with OCD that needs to catalogue everything, and no one says that GURPS is not a real RPG because we didn't have such an amount of rules for vehicles back in the day.

People is designing and playing the games they like, and that's all. Some of them will be more popular than others. I find many indie games absolutely idiotic and uninteresting, and that is wy I am not worried in the least about them driving the hobby in this or that direction. And even if that happened, it would be of zero concern to me. I can play the games I want, wherever and whenever I want, and be a part of communities devoted to those games.

I don't need publishers, and the rallying cry of "they ar subverting our hobby" is a moronic waste of time. The publishers and game designers of the mainstream and indie companies can go fuck themselves and die for all that I  care, new people and new designs will keep appearing.

The medium used to create and foster imaginary wars has rendered this wars meaningless and useless. The 90s are not coming back. I am playing AD&D 1e with a bunch of guys thousands of miles away from me, and it rocks. If WotC now launches a 5th ed of D&D in which you have to rape the GM every session, I won't play it and that's all, I'll keep grokking the games I like.

So I really think that all this shit about the war is just an attemptto get blog hits, attention, and a sense of importance. Technology has made the prophets meaningless, and the Pundit has the same chances of driving the hobby in any direction as Ron Edwards, Ryan Dancey or Ken Hite: zero. Most people will just use the tech to play the games they want, and ignore the rest.

Really, when the best part of a thread like this is Aos talking about forehead-fucking and thedungeondelver posting a series of Batman meme-comics, you should accept that you have a War on Intelligence, and you're rallying under the Banner of Retardation.

I find the comparisons with 70s wargamer thinking quite interesting because after lurking recently and reading yet more screeds about storygames and traditional games and whether they are or not at all related, I thought that they both have far more in common than for instance board wargames and miniature wargames. There you also get the arguments about fantasy and sci-fi vs historical, then whether you're primarily in it for the game/rules and/or the painting & modelling.

Despite the arguments that still arise though, especially on the internet, most wargamers I know tend to accept that wargaming is a very broad term (even paintball gets lumped in there, I suppose the LARP equivalent) and has grown wider still with computer games. Anecdotally most wargamers I know will try a variety of games (I know the US scene can differ) and since the 80s magazines like Miniature Wargames have published Choose Your Own Adventure-type articles, rpg scenarios and games with no maps or figures.

http://www.wargamedevelopments.org/ organises the Conference of Wargamers and whilst their activities are not to everyone's tastes it does cater for adding to the range of approaches.

I think wargaming and role-playing are both enjoying a 'golden age' if you look at what is actually available and the variety is never greater (although board wargaming has taken a hit), but they will also become ever increasingly niche activities. I'd like to think that away from the internet both hobbies will continue to be broad churches but the insistence (on this site and others) that there has to be division and battle lines is profoundly depressing.

Interestingly, a lot of the popular wargames rules and articles I see now have very streamlined rules - almost a return to the 60s and 70s after ever-increasing complexity. It's almost as though wargamers want a return to simpler times (well that and games that finish in a reasonable time).

And now I'm gutted I just posted what I'd typed before bed without reading what I'd missed. I'm with Jeff - I haven't been so amused by a thread in quite some time.

Quote from: Imperator;421653[...]

A giant case of having a huge plank in one's eye.

Quote from: John Morrow;421575As far as I know, unless he's been lying for years now, Koltar is still role-playing fairly regularly. ......

Yet you have no problem dismissing the Tea Party and Koltar with simplistic stereotypes, right?  Yes, life is complicated and people simplify it to talk about it, especially when they are ranting out of frustration.  Why?  For much the same reason as people use pronouns, even though they are less precise than nouns.

Blah blah... I know the thread has moved on to some Anti-Klingon rhetoric (which I am pretty unhappy about from  PC perspective by the way).

Like most people I don't care if Koltar wants to dress up like  Klingon, I mean didn't I just spend the entirity of last weekend dressed like a pirate and talking like Patrick Keilty (I was an Irish pirate, but at least I got paid £1000 for doing it ) and didn't I spend Halloween dressed as Hellboy (Zombie chicks love a red guy with a tail).
I am not even trying to sterotype him, he did that himself in his original post and in every post he submits. From his refusal to read DitV because it insults his religion and his family all the way up to his claiming that he doesn't like hard core trekies then defining hard core as people who refer to a mark 3 phaser as a Pearson because in Original series episode 4 Kirk called his phaser that (okay I made the last bit up but you get the general pitch). So don't call me on sterotyping him cos he did that on his own.

What is the core of the hobby? I guess you mean the TSR of the Midwest? Because what you seem to have missed is that the hobby spawned MUDs and MUDS combined with developments in PCs and so the Core of the hobby has been Computer RPGs for years. MMOs are the core of the hobby. There are more active MMO players then there are table top players. There are more Chinese kids making a living gold farming than there are midwest Koltars working in games stores. MMOs are mainstream,  tabletop roleplaying is the niche.

Some games gather traction, some fall by the wayside, but the process of genesis is continuous. The reason the "D&D core" stayed constant was that new ideas had no outlet to spread. The mouthpiece of the hobby was Dragon there were no internet groups no way of spreading new ideas.

I still play 2e D&D. I didn't like 3 and certainly wouldn't play 4 but I don't for one moment think that WotC should stop producing new games and that those games shouldn't reflect what the kids that buy games actually want to play.

As for the Tea Party.... (not to get political but ... ) you have heard Glen Beck speaking right?
..."Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization...And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did. That's what Al Gore, the U.N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing]."

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;421660A giant case of having a huge plank in one's eye.

Yeah, whatever, like I'm advocating for telling people how they should play and what is a legitimate RPG and looking for enemies of my way of life. Suit yourself.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;421583

Goddamn you, that knocked me to the floor for a few minutes.