Quote from: BadApple on October 12, 2023, 10:50:33 AM

Quote from: Abraxus on October 12, 2023, 09:43:45 AM
Not just an labour of hate he came off as an hypocrite when he went back on his comments that only non-whites could play his rpg. Who would have thought that telling one of the largest segments of gamers to not play your rpg due to their skin colour would backfire.

Honestly we are shocked shocked I tell you!

He backtracked on the "no whites" but made it so much worse by telling white people they have to play within a little box of acceptable behavior.  Yeah, I love being bullied by ideologues while trying to enjoy my leisure activities.

Yeah, if I remember right from the one read I did of it, you can play the game as a white person. You "just" can't play some things. That's so much better.

"Women can totally play this game. They just can't play fighters."

"Black people can totally play this game. They just can't play Clerics."

None of those work, do they?

Quote from: jhkim on October 12, 2023, 04:12:29 PM
If it doesn't change the way I play, then why should I care? In particular, why should I care if there's a successful or failed RPG for people with different politics and/or gaming tastes than me?

To be clear - I have political causes, and I care about them. But I don't see RPGs as a way to further my political causes.

I care about how my political opposition vote. But I don't care if they have fun playing RPGs that they enjoy, or whether they play RPGs at all.

You can say, "Hey, it doesn't change the way I play, my group is still rolling around in second edition GURPS, they can't take that away from us!" and that is certainly true, but people who don't have a forever-group camping out in whatever generations-old system they like are going to find themselves harder and harder pressed to find players or GMs.  Take White Wolf for example.  The 90s World of Darkness was my jam back in the day.  The 20th anniversary and 5th edition versions of it are hot garbage that took a dump all over the source material in the name of "sensitivity".  But if I roll into my local game store with my moldy old copy of Werewolf under an arm and say, "Who wants to play?", how many takers do you bet I'd get?

Consumers have the attention spans of gerbils; once a system is old enough that it's not on the front shelves any more it will become progressively more difficult to get a game going with it.  And if the money, resources, and attention are going to shoddy new games, the better stuff of yesteryear will steadily vanish under the pile.  I realize a grognard site like this with people still debating which flavor of 1st edition D&D is best is not a crowd overly susceptible to that phenomenon, but if the fresh blood dries up the hobby will wither.

Quote from: Valatar on October 13, 2023, 02:32:53 AM
The 20th anniversary and 5th edition versions of it are hot garbage that took a dump all over the source material in the name of "sensitivity".

I absolutely agree about the various 5th editions (that are also pure garbage system-wise; holy fuck, I've never seen something so horrible as V5), but unless I'm missing something in terms of supplements, V20 is simply a collection of all the clans, bloodlines and disciplines in existence (with some minor rule adjustment) at the time of publication. Nothing was changed in terms of lore.

Not sure about W20 or M20 since I don't have them, but V20 right now is the best option available to run "classic" Masquerade without any changes.

Quote from: Valatar on October 13, 2023, 02:32:53 AM
Consumers have the attention spans of gerbils... but if the fresh blood dries up the hobby will wither.

I feel what you're saying to some extent, but who really wants to play with newbies that have the attention span of gerbils?

Add to the short attention span a general inability to measure complexity and a tendency to instantly drop anything deemed "too crunchy" and things tend to go to shit fairly quickly.
Just take a look at r/rpg general trends (it's reddit, so the average age of contributors tend to be fairly low compared to other online places) and you'll see a disturbing amount of threads promoting "rules light" games (read: rules simple, which is not the same as light) as the best thing since the invention of dice and an equally disturbing amount of threads against "rules heavy" or "math heavy" games.... disturbing because the general consensus about what "heavy" means is so unbalanced towards "anything beyond single digit additions and single roll resolutions" that I'm starting to suspect that the subreddit is being used as a sort of support group by a special needs class of some high school lost in the middle on nowhere.
I've seen some heavily upvoted threads and posts claiming that Savage Worlds is a "heavy crunch, math heavy system", for fuck's sake...

Quote from: jhkim on October 12, 2023, 04:12:29 PM

If it doesn't change the way I play, then why should I care? In particular, why should I care if there's a successful or failed RPG for people with different politics and/or gaming tastes than me?

To be clear - I have political causes, and I care about them. But I don't see RPGs as a way to further my political causes.

I care about how my political opposition vote. But I don't care if they have fun playing RPGs that they enjoy, or whether they play RPGs at all.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Quote from: Valatar on October 13, 2023, 02:32:53 AM

Quote from: jhkim on October 12, 2023, 04:12:29 PM
If it doesn't change the way I play, then why should I care? In particular, why should I care if there's a successful or failed RPG for people with different politics and/or gaming tastes than me?

To be clear - I have political causes, and I care about them. But I don't see RPGs as a way to further my political causes.

I care about how my political opposition vote. But I don't care if they have fun playing RPGs that they enjoy, or whether they play RPGs at all.

You can say, "Hey, it doesn't change the way I play, my group is still rolling around in second edition GURPS, they can't take that away from us!" and that is certainly true, but people who don't have a forever-group camping out in whatever generations-old system they like are going to find themselves harder and harder pressed to find players or GMs.  Take White Wolf for example.  The 90s World of Darkness was my jam back in the day.  The 20th anniversary and 5th edition versions of it are hot garbage that took a dump all over the source material in the name of "sensitivity".  But if I roll into my local game store with my moldy old copy of Werewolf under an arm and say, "Who wants to play?", how many takers do you bet I'd get?

Consumers have the attention spans of gerbils; once a system is old enough that it's not on the front shelves any more it will become progressively more difficult to get a game going with it.  And if the money, resources, and attention are going to shoddy new games, the better stuff of yesteryear will steadily vanish under the pile.  I realize a grognard site like this with people still debating which flavor of 1st edition D&D is best is not a crowd overly susceptible to that phenomenon, but if the fresh blood dries up the hobby will wither.

This is why I decided to make spiritual successors to old dead IPs I liked and release them into public domain.

Quote from: NotFromAroundHere on October 13, 2023, 04:00:27 AM
Add to the short attention span a general inability to measure complexity and a tendency to instantly drop anything deemed "too crunchy" and things tend to go to shit fairly quickly.
Just take a look at r/rpg general trends (it's reddit, so the average age of contributors tend to be fairly low compared to other online places) and you'll see a disturbing amount of threads promoting "rules light" games (read: rules simple, which is not the same as light) as the best thing since the invention of dice and an equally disturbing amount of threads against "rules heavy" or "math heavy" games.... disturbing because the general consensus about what "heavy" means is so unbalanced towards "anything beyond single digit additions and single roll resolutions" that I'm starting to suspect that the subreddit is being used as a sort of support group by a special needs class of some high school lost in the middle on nowhere.
I've seen some heavily upvoted threads and posts claiming that Savage Worlds is a "heavy crunch, math heavy system", for fuck's sake...

Greetings!

Excellent observations, NotFromAroundHere!

Sadly, I must confess some of my own experience very much lines up with your analysis. Beyond my home groups--I frequently keep a campaign going in my local game store, where there are numerous younger gamers coming and going. I've read about scholars doing studies showing that American's average IQ has dropped like two standard deviations over the last 20 years. Again and again, evidence suggests that the average American really is much *dumber* than in previous generations. Tangential education studies suggest other aspects, such as an alarming decrease not merely in attention span, but also large decreases in functional reading abilities, basic mathematics skills, and essential logic and reasoning abilities. Taking these negative trends and social developments throughout the last 20 to 25 years as seen in fields such as business, education, psychology, and even studies in pediatrics--and overlay those implications over a splinter population, such as gamers.

The result is, I think, yes, gamers are going to be part of, and reflect the same essential trends going on within the context of the larger culture. Thus, we see elements and signs of this intellectual erosion and lack of abilities increasingly throughout the gaming hobby. Many of my friends--also older gamers--have made similar observations. Lamenting how younger gamers haven't read all the literature that we have read when we were kids; they don't have much knowledge of history, certainly not much prior to the 20th Century; they consistently whine about reading, writing, accomplishing basic math, and a host of other ancilliary skills and attributes related to the game hobby as a whole.

It is frustrating, and sad, as well. Many modern gamers, younger gamers, are unfortunately far less intellectually equipped that many of us achieved as a baseline standard by high school. This affects references, jokes, game play, teaching new people to DM and run games, and all kinds of things involved socially and engaging with the game and the gaming hobby. These kinds of things flow into expectations, baseline creativity, their ability at understanding references, and on and on. Nonetheless, yes, ut is frustrating, and sad, as I mentioned. I think these larger social and cultural trends are already having an impact on shaping the hobby--and unfortunately causing a kind of spiraling schism within the hobby. If that makes any sense? On one hand, the hobby of course has expanded and grown like never before, and yet, on the other hand, there seems to be a kind of shrinking silo effect going on.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: jhkim on October 12, 2023, 04:12:29 PM

Quote from: blackstone on October 12, 2023, 07:23:07 AM

Quote from: jhkim on October 12, 2023, 02:34:49 AM
In general, I think RPG players are found all across the population and the political spectrum. There are death row prisoners who play RPGs, and there are political extremists who play RPGs. There are people with opposed values to me who still enjoy RPGs, and it doesn't change how or what I play.

On that last part:

Yes, it doesn't change the way you play, but the majority of SJWs want to change the way you and everyone else plays.

If it doesn't change the way I play, then why should I care? In particular, why should I care if there's a successful or failed RPG for people with different politics and/or gaming tastes than me?

To be clear - I have political causes, and I care about them. But I don't see RPGs as a way to further my political causes.

I care about how my political opposition vote. But I don't care if they have fun playing RPGs that they enjoy, or whether they play RPGs at all.

Because the people who's politics we're talking about aren't here to play their way and let you play yours. They are here to force their way on you or push you out altogether.

Now if you have a static group and play only games from decades past, maybe you think you are fine. But all this shit is creeping into the hobby and you are going to be stuck with it even if that's not how you roll. Want to go to a convention and play, guess what.... it's going to be their way, not yours.

Video games got hit with it during the whole Gamergate saga. Anita and others kept claiming they weren't trying to take our video games away, they just wanted these other things added to the mix. It was all BS. Now the games are full of girl bosses, body type A and body type B, uglified female characters, and double standards. Balder's Gate 3 if full of kinks and sex and raunch and multiple genital types for whatever body but heaven forbid you try to have a anime looking game with that in it.

TV, movies, comics, anime... it's all been hit the same way. They forced their way into every inch of escapist media and took over. It has changed the landscape and the "your way" of storytelling doesn't exist anymore in the mainstream.

We've seen how in TTRPGs race is being weaponized. You can't have evil races in a product or you'll get brigaded. Hell, it's a 50/50 if you can even use the word race. How many games are moving over to something like bloodline or heritage? How many books these days are including sections, not just a mention, but whole sections on inclusion, triggers, safety protocols like X cards, etc? Their way is making it into every product you may want to play. It's all going to be grey goo gaming.

I was reading a game the other day. The setting has the human population in a death spiral. Having kids is a HUGE fucking deal because it's so rare. There isn't enough population to keep the work force going so they came up with a way to reanimate the newly dead. As soon as you die your body becomes property of the state and they do their thing and off to work you go, with no memory of your past life. You know what the book is full of? Gay and lesbian couples! In a world where they need every last possible person, and you've already established an authoritarian government, why isn't it illegal to participate in non-reproductive sex? It could have been a major element to the game world, part of the setting's intrigue and something for the PCs to fight for. But no. Just same sex couples running this store, talking over there, worrying about what will happen when their partner dies. They eschew any sense of interesting world building just to check off the inclusion box.

Quote from: BadApple on October 12, 2023, 09:09:06 PM
It's well worth pointing out that SJW entertainment on all fronts is failing.  Movies, TV, cartoons, comics, books, they are all failing.  They are all failing for the same reason, low quality.  RPGs certainly not the only area where SJWs are proving that they are unable to be successful.

Amen to that.

It's like the people who write or produce such SJW cannot da thin why they failed. Or if they do in denial and blame toxic ( insert buzzword).

I used to be an huge fan of Station 19 then it became unwatchable due to the writers injecting Wokeness into every storyline. One of the main female characters is almost sexual assaulted and she hits her assailant so hard in the neck he falls yo the ground and dies.

Then is shocked that she has to go to court for having killed  her assailant who died of his injuries while of course the writers need to include the character claiming if she was an man it would have never made it to court. No moron your not in court because your a women your in court because while morally justified you injured someone then he died.

Did I mention the character has an habit of doing stupid things like getting drunk and walking off with strangers.

Quote from: SHARK on October 13, 2023, 08:01:39 AM

The result is, I think, yes, gamers are going to be part of, and reflect the same essential trends going on within the context of the larger culture. Thus, we see elements and signs of this intellectual erosion and lack of abilities increasingly throughout the gaming hobby. Many of my friends--also older gamers--have made similar observations. Lamenting how younger gamers haven't read all the literature that we have read when we were kids; they don't have much knowledge of history, certainly not much prior to the 20th Century; they consistently whine about reading, writing, accomplishing basic math, and a host of other ancilliary skills and attributes related to the game hobby as a whole.

There is one silver lining in all of this:  If you can get a young person into your game, get them interested, get them off their cell phone, and engaged--then not only will you have fought back a little against the culture erosion, it will also help that young person.  Because it has been shown that not paying attention and being bad at basic skills is partly bad habits and lack of good practices.  Give someone an outlet where they want to reverse that, it helps.  It's not going to turn a high-school dropout into a mathematics whiz, but it can build some critical basic skills.

What goes around comes around.  I saw the same thing happen in the early '80s with a few kids that had spent the late '70s throwing their lives away and rapidly becoming unemployable, but turned it around.  You can't fix the culture this way, but you can help an individual.

Quote from: NotFromAroundHere on October 13, 2023, 03:22:45 AM
Not sure about W20 or M20 since I don't have them, but V20 right now is the best option available to run "classic" Masquerade without any changes.

M20 was a travesty. They renamed like half of the traditions and made sure to put in sidebars on things like how many mages love changing their genitals regularly.

Quote from: SHARK on October 13, 2023, 08:01:39 AM
Greetings!

Excellent observations, NotFromAroundHere!

Sadly, I must confess some of my own experience very much lines up with your analysis. Beyond my home groups--I frequently keep a campaign going in my local game store, where there are numerous younger gamers coming and going. I've read about scholars doing studies showing that American's average IQ has dropped like two standard deviations over the last 20 years. Again and again, evidence suggests that the average American really is much *dumber* than in previous generations. Tangential education studies suggest other aspects, such as an alarming decrease not merely in attention span, but also large decreases in functional reading abilities, basic mathematics skills, and essential logic and reasoning abilities. Taking these negative trends and social developments throughout the last 20 to 25 years as seen in fields such as business, education, psychology, and even studies in pediatrics--and overlay those implications over a splinter population, such as gamers.

The result is, I think, yes, gamers are going to be part of, and reflect the same essential trends going on within the context of the larger culture. Thus, we see elements and signs of this intellectual erosion and lack of abilities increasingly throughout the gaming hobby. Many of my friends--also older gamers--have made similar observations. Lamenting how younger gamers haven't read all the literature that we have read when we were kids; they don't have much knowledge of history, certainly not much prior to the 20th Century; they consistently whine about reading, writing, accomplishing basic math, and a host of other ancilliary skills and attributes related to the game hobby as a whole.

It is frustrating, and sad, as well. Many modern gamers, younger gamers, are unfortunately far less intellectually equipped that many of us achieved as a baseline standard by high school. This affects references, jokes, game play, teaching new people to DM and run games, and all kinds of things involved socially and engaging with the game and the gaming hobby. These kinds of things flow into expectations, baseline creativity, their ability at understanding references, and on and on. Nonetheless, yes, ut is frustrating, and sad, as I mentioned. I think these larger social and cultural trends are already having an impact on shaping the hobby--and unfortunately causing a kind of spiraling schism within the hobby. If that makes any sense? On one hand, the hobby of course has expanded and grown like never before, and yet, on the other hand, there seems to be a kind of shrinking silo effect going on.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

First, a sidenote: I'm not American (I'm Italian: born, raised and living in Italy).
Having said that, this..... shift, so to speak, in general cognitive attitudes has been happening here, too. My mother worked as a teacher (kindergarden: in the italian school system it more or less works as a preparatory school for children aged 3 to 6, teaching the kids how to behave in the company of others and some very basic concepts useful in "proper" school, like rudimentary reading skills and arithmetics) for more than 40 years, starting in the early seventies and retiring in the early 2010s. She started noticing some issues as soon as the early 90s, with an increasing number of children having much more difficulty than usual to relate with others; this number slowly but gradually increased along the years.
Other relatives and acquaintances (for some reason I'm pretty much surrounded by teachers: wife, in-laws, family friends...), working in elementary, middle and high school pretty much all reported the same thing: from the 90s onward children/teens started to demonstrate more cognitive/learning difficulties than before and a rising decrease in general attention span.
The general idea based on these... field experiences is that the rise of "screen media" like TV, computers and (mainly) smartphones and tablets negatively impacted the ability of children to interact with each other, while relying on image/short video formats instead of writing massively impacted attention spans and concentration.

Yeah, I've noticed that tastes have massively declined. Modern audiences are largely incapable of noticing basic storytelling errors, such as the the plot contradicting how characters would realistically behave in their situations.

E.g. Castlevania suffers from a huge amount of this, with almost everyone making decisions that run directly counter to their own motivations, cares, skillsets, and basic intelligence. But I've chatted with several Zoomers who think it's amazing because it has "representation". My boomer friends found it very boring, uninteresting, and thought the cast acted like idiots. I'm a zillenial myself and I wasn't engaged with it, although I went in after hearing about the controversy so I didn't really pay attention to begin with. But upon thinking about it critically I did find it... not good. In general the Netflix shows suffer hugely from the writers wanting to force ham-fisted and offensive messages on the audience rather than telling good stories, along with doing the game protagonists really dirty. Adi Shankar, a fan of the games who wanted to keep the canon characters faithful, was the only voice of reason and they drowned him out ultimately.

Quote from: rgalex on October 13, 2023, 08:26:02 AM

Quote from: jhkim on October 12, 2023, 04:12:29 PM

Quote from: blackstone on October 12, 2023, 07:23:07 AM

Quote from: jhkim on October 12, 2023, 02:34:49 AM
In general, I think RPG players are found all across the population and the political spectrum. There are death row prisoners who play RPGs, and there are political extremists who play RPGs. There are people with opposed values to me who still enjoy RPGs, and it doesn't change how or what I play.

On that last part:

Yes, it doesn't change the way you play, but the majority of SJWs want to change the way you and everyone else plays.

If it doesn't change the way I play, then why should I care? In particular, why should I care if there's a successful or failed RPG for people with different politics and/or gaming tastes than me?

To be clear - I have political causes, and I care about them. But I don't see RPGs as a way to further my political causes.

I care about how my political opposition vote. But I don't care if they have fun playing RPGs that they enjoy, or whether they play RPGs at all.

Because the people who's politics we're talking about aren't here to play their way and let you play yours. They are here to force their way on you or push you out altogether.

Now if you have a static group and play only games from decades past, maybe you think you are fine. But all this shit is creeping into the hobby and you are going to be stuck with it even if that's not how you roll. Want to go to a convention and play, guess what.... it's going to be their way, not yours.

Video games got hit with it during the whole Gamergate saga. Anita and others kept claiming they weren't trying to take our video games away, they just wanted these other things added to the mix. It was all BS. Now the games are full of girl bosses, body type A and body type B, uglified female characters, and double standards. Balder's Gate 3 if full of kinks and sex and raunch and multiple genital types for whatever body but heaven forbid you try to have a anime looking game with that in it.

TV, movies, comics, anime... it's all been hit the same way. They forced their way into every inch of escapist media and took over. It has changed the landscape and the "your way" of storytelling doesn't exist anymore in the mainstream.

We've seen how in TTRPGs race is being weaponized. You can't have evil races in a product or you'll get brigaded. Hell, it's a 50/50 if you can even use the word race. How many games are moving over to something like bloodline or heritage? How many books these days are including sections, not just a mention, but whole sections on inclusion, triggers, safety protocols like X cards, etc? Their way is making it into every product you may want to play. It's all going to be grey goo gaming.

I was reading a game the other day. The setting has the human population in a death spiral. Having kids is a HUGE fucking deal because it's so rare. There isn't enough population to keep the work force going so they came up with a way to reanimate the newly dead. As soon as you die your body becomes property of the state and they do their thing and off to work you go, with no memory of your past life. You know what the book is full of? Gay and lesbian couples! In a world where they need every last possible person, and you've already established an authoritarian government, why isn't it illegal to participate in non-reproductive sex? It could have been a major element to the game world, part of the setting's intrigue and something for the PCs to fight for. But no. Just same sex couples running this store, talking over there, worrying about what will happen when their partner dies. They eschew any sense of interesting world building just to check off the inclusion box.

Every generation bemoans the idiocy of the next. It is a curse called the circle of life. Eventually humans will become too stupid to even feed themselves and some other species might get a shot. Who knows? The only thing one can hope to accomplish when trying to get everyone else to stop being idiots is going insane. At my age, I will continue to enjoy games with like minded individuals . Eventually the glut of woke virtue signalling games will hit a critical mass in the market. You see, when you seek to exclude the largest segment of the TTRPG market (white males) from your game and the remaining small fraction of the rpg community has to support all these woke trash games to the point where there may be .6 of a gaming group per game that plays a particular game then the market for the garbage games will dry up. Those of us who do not have the attention span of a gnat do not need a new game every 3 months in any event.

No matter who you are, or how you identify chances are you like to play fun games. A game written just to virtue wank that isn't fun can only be put up with by actual gamers for so long. Real gamers will gravitate towards games that they can have fun playing no matter what gibberish they like to spout online. Online communities allow the virtue signaling wankers to appear way more numerous than they are, and gaming companies that alienate their core fans to pander to this tiny crowd with loud voices will realize that when quarterly sales reports start rolling in.