I prefer "4vengers" myself.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;728455I prefer "4vengers" myself.

That's way too nice! Much nicer than 3tard!

To me edition warrior is more than just someone who says i like x or i hate y, it is someone who says you have to like what i like or you have to hate what i hate.

It's all about superiority, control, and marketing. Or smarm, if you prefer a pejorative term.

If you have a subjective opinion that someone doesn't like, they can do one of three things:

• Ignore it. This is unacceptable for some people because someone is wrong on the internet.
  
• Address it directly. This means they have to make an actual argument disputing it, and this is work, and hard to do because it's ultimately subjective taste.
• Attack the idea that they have the opinion at all and dared express it.

Naturally, the 3rd option is pretty popular, because rather than actually disputing the point, you can simply sidestep debate altogether by demonizing debate itself.  You get to feel superior, and they can't dispute you because they're just haters bringing down the vibe, man.

Of course, this call for tact, decency, and non-partisanship always conveniently disappears when it's something THEY don't like on the chopping block ...

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;728463To me edition warrior is more than just someone who says i like x or i hate y, it is someone who says you have to like what i like or you have to hate what i hate.

Along these lines, to me an edition warrior is one who argues that their version is objectively better than another.  "I like version X", "I think verson X is better" doesn't bother me.  It's the "Version X fixed all these issues so it's better" or "I can't see why anyone would play any other version because they are broken/bad/dumb" stuff that irritates me.

Edition warring is pretty much an internet forum pissing-match thing. It's about tribalism and the wellsprings of resentment that inspire some obsessives to attack people who like things they don't like. Ninety percent of the people actually playing D&D don't give a shit about edition warring. Or are even aware of it. It's just a game. And with a game as popular as D&D, the online forum wonks and obsessives matter a lot less than they like to think. Half of them don't even play.

Quote from: J Arcane;728467. . . [R]ather than actually disputing the point, you can simply sidestep debate altogether by demonizing debate itself.  You get to feel superior, and they can't dispute you because they're just haters bringing down the vibe, man.

I think you just described three-quarters of Emperor Norton's posts.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;728490I think you just described three-quarters of Emperor Norton's posts.

I don't demonize debate. I demonize the tribalistic bullshit. I participate in debate regularly. I also demonize jumping to fucking conclusions based on the most spurious of connections, like the players optional thread in which the whole thread was a pile of stupidity based on a missing 'd' in a sentence. I also demonize witchhunting and paranoid conspiracy theories.

Its not my fault that a lot of people on this board seem to think witch hunts, paranoid conspiracies, strawmen, and tribalistic bullshit are actual debate.

Quote from: Zak S;728347If somebody says or thinks their game is objectively better, you say you ignore the comment.

I ignore them, and encourage everybody else to do so, because that one crazy belief is evidence that the entire tree of everything they think is crazy. If someone holds irrational beliefs, they can't be trusted when they make recommendations or float ideas or invent stuff that's supposed to work in a game.

The problem with that is that I'd like to know what they mean by "objectively better". The most likely explanation for a seemingly crazy statement like that is that they've left something important out of their statement, such as "given my subjective aesthetic preferences, I'm looking for something with these objectively measurable traits, and Game X meets it, while other games that I am familiar with at this time do not meet it." In other words, it's objectively better within a given context, but they forgot to tell you the context, or were lazy.

You could dismiss everyone that fails to provide full qualifications for every claim, but then you've dismissed everyone on the planet, except maybe the last two or three people left who give a damn about General Semantics. But good luck finding one of those; I haven't met them.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;728463To me edition warrior is more than just someone who says i like x or i hate y, it is someone who says you have to like what i like or you have to hate what i hate.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;728470Along these lines, to me an edition warrior is one who argues that their version is objectively better than another.

Nah, I still say merely expressing an opinion, even an intrusive opinion about what *you* should or should not do, or a demonstrably false claim about objectivity, is not a "warrior". To be a warrior, you have to wage war. You have to regularly seek out places to insert your opinion and derail discussions. You have to, basically, be a narcissist, turning every discussion into a discussion about your opinions or feelings.

Like I said above, someone saying "X is objectively better!" is probably just mistaken, or sloppy, or something. You can diffuse that kind of person by ignoring the "objective" part and rephrasing it in your response as something subjective, like asking "Why do you feel X is better?" And then they tell you stuff about a robust skill system or unified mechanics or whatever and you can say "Oh, you like robust skill systems/unified mechanics" and that's that.

Or, if someone says "you have to like this game", you can either skip over that as meaningless noise or say "I don't, really, because it has Feature X. I like this other game instead." And then you move on to more important things.

It's only when the person can't move on and keeps hammering away at you and everyone else that you can truly consider him a "warrior" of any kind. But what I'm getting at is that I've only seen a few true "edition warriors", but lots of other "warriors", the ones who constantly hammer away at all the supposed "edition warriors". THESE are the people disrupting conversations. THESE are the people to shun.

Healing Surges ARE objectively bad. *








* The above statement is intended as humor

Humor is objectively bad.

But Bad is subjectively good according to my playstyle.

Quote from: Haffrung;728480Edition warring is pretty much an internet forum pissing-match thing. It's about tribalism and the wellsprings of resentment that inspire some obsessives to attack people who like things they don't like. Ninety percent of the people actually playing D&D don't give a shit about edition warring. Or are even aware of it. It's just a game. And with a game as popular as D&D, the online forum wonks and obsessives matter a lot less than they like to think. Half of them don't even play.

You can tell it's about tribalism when the argument ceases to matter. All that matters is who says it.

FREX:

Person 1: 4e did away with a lot of the things in old D&D, that's why it's awesome!

Person 2: 4e did away with a lot of the things in old D&D, that's why it sucks.

Person 1: OMG, EDITION WARRIOR!!!1!!11!

If an idea, regardless of source or merit, is expressed by 'the enemy' it and them must be attacked.

The thing that annoys me the most is that a lot of posters seem incapable of seeing a difference between "X is not Y" and "X is better than Y".

QuoteLike I said above, someone saying "X is objectively better!" is probably just mistaken, or sloppy, or something. You can diffuse that kind of person by ignoring the "objective" part and rephrasing it in your response as something subjective,

I'm not interested in modifying their behavior, I'm interest in judging their fitness to be listened to.

Quote from: talysman;728505You could dismiss everyone that fails to provide full qualifications for every claim, but then you've dismissed everyone on the planet,

Do I dismiss everyone who doesn't qualify their claims? No. But I dismiss everyone who won't provide qualifications if someone asks. (And that's an edition warrior--because they will maintain their objection is objective til the end.)

That leaves enough people left over that I still see useful RPG stuff every week, run into unlike-minded people constantly and have enough RPG traffic that I have trouble keeping up with it, so however arbitrary that metric may be, it keeps life manageable.