Quote from: Seanchai;413460While I do appreciate what freedoms we have here, they're not because Pundit has a thicker skin. Look how quickly he jumped on folks disagreeing with his assessment about his victory and the language, etc., he used in those posts. Does that really strike you as the reaction of someone with a thick skin?

No, we have what freedom we do because that was the best way Pundit could think to stick to the Man - in this case, the Big Purple. It isn't so much about having freedom of speech here as much as it is showing their mods that we have freedom of speech (within proscribed limits).

I'm more deontological than teleological, so...

Seanchai

This is so untrue its hilarious.  This place has free speech because I believe in it. Both as a principle and because I believe that the best debate comes out of having it.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Seanchai;413468I would agree that Pundit doesn't edit posts and uses threats of bans and the mod voice much, much, much, much, much less often that on TBP. But, again, I'm not sure that's because he actually has a thicker skin...

Seanchai

The more accurate thing to say is that the other guys don't have a fascist moderator-heavy site because they have thinner skin necessarily than I do.  Its because what they want is NOT a free and open area to foster debate. They have totally different goals; they want to create their own little ideological bubble run by and for the people they like (namely, themselves and cronies).

Whether or not I have a thick skin is not the issue, the issue is that my ideals are thicker than my opinion of myself (which is saying a lot).

RPGpundit

Quote from: Cylonophile;413525Damn, maybe coal tar will go there and stay there, it sounds like his kind of place.

You've been fucking warned about this over and over again. Free Speech does NOT extend to harassing other members of this site in this way. You're THIS fucking close to being the next poster boy for all the pundit-haters to make absurd comparisons to rpg.net about.

The other mods are on notice about this as of now. One more insulting reference to Koltar, and you get banned, no debate about it.

RPGPundit

Quote from: CRKrueger;413484Tubgirl, goatse.cx and 2 girls 1 cup have contributed to the "creative culture" as well.  Not sure any of those qualify as public service, maybe Stile Project.

The goatseing days of SA have been over for a long-long time, maybe close to seven or eight years. Today, it is basically a huge general interest forum. There are still designated shitposting areas, but that's done mostly tongue in cheek. Of course, if we are looking for general cultural relevance, SA hasn't contributed much in the last few years, but neither has roleplaying on any forum, so...

Quote from: Hackmastergeneral;413295Ha.  Oh man.  The guy who has fought a ficticious war for years with a guy he never met, and who likely never even had any idea, who has ranted and insulted a guy on the internet, built an entire cult of personality around his illusionary war against other people playing GAMES in a way he didn't like

Are you talking about Pundit or Uncle Ronny?

Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Though as DarkDungeons notes, it was never that big a deal, anyway.

Greg Stolze's idea that it took Edwards to get people writing and publishing their own games instead of leaving it up to large corporations is... wacky. Did Edwards time travel with a mimeograph to Gygax's basement? People were publishing their own crappy rpgs for a long, long time before him. Hell, they were writing depressingly and self-indulgently before him, too.

Side note: conversations on rpg.net have really become stifled. Saying that the person you're debating is "moving the goalposts" is a personal attack? Fuuuuuuu...

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;413562Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Though as DarkDungeons notes, it was never that big a deal, anyway.

I like Dr. Jest/Dark Dungeons... I was a fan of his podcast on Radio Free Satan. I wish he'd come over here and post.

Quote from: Simlasa;413408Here it is in black and white UTUBE LINK.

So I guess that is my punishment for not being one of the illuminated.  I can't even make heads or tails of RPGpundits definition of swine since it makes use of the same sort of coded phrases as here.  I need a concrete example,but it looks like no one's gonna give me one . . .

Lets see how the swine survive without their figurehead.
 
It will be interesting to see if the story-game crowd re-invent themselves and rename their movement in the same way Creationists re-branded their wacky theories as Intelligent Design.

Quote from: Lawbag;413569Lets see how the swine survive without their figurehead.
 
It will be interesting to see if the story-game crowd re-invent themselves and rename their movement in the same way Creationists re-branded their wacky theories as Intelligent Design.

Love the post, dearie, but when someone *Coff*coal tar*Coff* snivels about it being a political comment he'll have a point.

This thread is more fun than cats on catnip and laser pointers.

Quote from: RPGPundit;413553This place has free speech because I believe in it. Both as a principle and because I believe that the best debate comes out of having it.

Utter tripe, of course, and hypocritical to boot, but this site is considerably freer than any comparable forum site, for which Pundit deserves applause.

Quote from: Cylonophile;413575Love the post, dearie, but when someone *Coff*coal tar*Coff* snivels about it being a political comment he'll have a point.

Ok, you're done here.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Hairfoot;413580Utter tripe, of course, and hypocritical to boot, but this site is considerably freer than any comparable forum site, for which Pundit deserves applause.

Yes, because I deleted your INSANE choice of linking to fucking Stormfront, my position on free speech is "utter tripe".  

You have the freedom here to talk about RPGs. Not to endlessly harass another user across multiple forums (like Cylonophile was doing), nor to promote a legally dubious neo-nazi website (like you were doing).

RPGPundit

OK, since no one seems to have bothered answering the "Who the fuck is Ron Edwards and why should I care?" question, and it's pretty damn relevant, let's go:

Ron Edwards ran an RPG theory message board you've probably never heard of called "The Forge". He also came up with two RPG manifestos entitled "GNS" and "The Big Model" that people sometimes make references to, usually in an extremely vague manner that doesn't really explain anything. And finally, he personally wrote some games that he self published that you've really never heard of like Sorcerer and Spione.

Ron Edwards is personally a drama queen ruled by what appears to be delusions of grandeur and bipolarism. He has shut down discussion on his forum for some amount of time more than once on the grounds that there was no longer anything to discuss in the field of RPG theory. Needless to say, his bold pronouncements about history ending never really seem to materialize, so even this latest closing of the site will probably be temporary.

His theory that ha garnered the most attention is "GNS" - which stands for "Gamism, Narrativism, Simulationism" and is a three-part model for discussing the relationship between games and the gamers who play them. It is important to say up front that the number of people who say they subscribe to this theory is about fifty gajillion times larger than the number of people who actually do, because while those three terms sound like the mean something and lots of people are willing to bob their heads and say something like "Gamism... yeah... like playing the game like a game..." or some similar freshman horse shit, the reality is that in "actual" GNS Theory the terms don't really man anything at all, and certainly don't mean anything you would understand or agree with. See, Ron Edwards is a pseudo-intellectual with keyboard diarrhea, and is incapable of discussing any term at all without writing a short story about it in which he pulls a Humpty Dumpty and redefines not only that word to mean something that is nothing even tangentially related to its actual Natural English definition, but also several other words that he needs to redefine in order to further confuse the redefinition of the word he is theoretically talking about.

That's not an exaggeration, his definition of Narrativism alone is twenty three thousand words long. And within that he contradicts himself in direct A + ~A style more than a dozen times. While GNS theory has its nominal proponents, none of them can agree with each other over what it means because it is an eighty thousand word morass of contradictions, redefinitions, and reredefinitions. But that doesn't mean that you can't find common ground. Certainly, the Forgeites in general and Ron Edwards in particular have written actual material, so you can in fact make generalities about what they mean even though it is in fact a stop-error to try to parse what they actually say.

Here is the rundown of their "core" beliefs so that you don't have to try to wade through their incomprehensible gibberish about how a "Theme" is a distinct object in the game that provokes an emotional response from the players and is brought to the game by a player without regard for system or genre during narrativist play. That is an actual part of the theory, by the way, that's not just me making fun of them:

• An individual player is either Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, and not some mix of the three.
  
• A game should, and indeed needs to appeal to just one of those things at a time.
  
• A game attempting to appeal on multiple levels makes it worse at appealing to whatever level it is actually appealing on, making the game experience worse.
• Playing games is SERIOUS BUSINESS.
• Individual Players have specific questions they want answered by participating in the game.

And that's all fascinating. But why should you care?

You should care because Mike Mearls is one of the people who claims to subscribe to at least part of GNS theory. When they were trotting out 4th edition D&D, they really used Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism as real terms in their actual puff pieces without a trace of irony or derision. And while they did not use those terms in a manner consistent with having done more than the most cursory skimming of Ron Edwards' actual material, they did nonetheless use enough of the terminology that it seems likely that they were influenced in some way by Forge thought. And indeed, they really did make a game that went out of its way to not appeal on multiple levels, exactly as Forge theory would suggest.

And the result was that a year before they published 4th edition D&D, they announced that they had 6 million D&D players, and this year they announced that they had 1.5 million players. Meaning that over the course of three years, 75% of D&D players jumped ship, and it is entirely possible that Ron Edwards bears partial responsibility for that trend line.

-Frank

Quote from: RPGPundit;413582Yes, because I deleted your INSANE choice of linking to fucking Stormfront, my position on free speech is "utter tripe".  

You have the freedom here to talk about RPGs. Not to endlessly harass another user across multiple forums (like Cylonophile was doing), nor to promote a legally dubious neo-nazi website (like you were doing).

Why insane?  It was specifically and directly related to RPGs, and fits even your narrow definition of free speech.  If by "free speech" you mean "speech that Pundit approves", then say so.  You're already a hypocrite at least one, two, three times over, so there's little to lose.

Your record speaks for itself so, you only stand to look slightly less ridiculous by dropping the defence-of-free-speech charade.