Quote from: Venka on October 31, 2023, 12:08:10 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 31, 2023, 11:44:11 AM
I despise the edition treadmill because it just pointlessly repackages old books and forces you to buy the same thing again with minor changes. We live in the age of wikis now. It's absolutely idiotic to keep designing books the way they were designed in the 80s.

I mean if you make a change like 3.0 was to prior games, you need to rewrite everything.  Similar with 4e and 5e.  Each edition is made with the goal of doing this, of course, because that's how they make money.  A hypothetical 6e will probably be launched with a huge push to attack all competitors- 5e has forumites complaining about martial / caster imbalance and all players complaining about not providing enough guidance for a DM, so promising to fix that could be an attack on 5e, but they would probably also attack other groups- OSR, of course, could be attacked politically. I actually suspect that was an idea taken seriously as recently as a year ago over at Hasbro, based on the strange lefty crap they were doing at the time.

But yes, in general, there's no need to continue recreating base handbooks- but I think we'll see no end of that.  After all, if YOU wanted to make your OWN project based in OSR stuff, a core rulebook would be your FIRST priority, right?  You wouldn't want, say, Stars Without Number, which in its first edition was B/X compatible pretty strictly (and remains so with some basic conversions), to be printed as a series of diffs, right?

QuoteSpeaking of alchemy, my favorite ttrpg alchemy rules are the ones from Chaosium's Enlighted Magic book. They're the best alchemy rules ever written, hands down. Fight me.

Maybe but I'm not giving money to them.  Redlist and all.

In general ttrpg rules are just absurdly convoluted. They could stand to be a lot simpler.

Additionally, fluff should really be kept separate from rules. Like, put that in a separate book that doesn't need to be reprinted every edition unless you're making deliberate retcons. Likewise, removing all the fluff scattered haphazardly everywhere keeps the crunch clean and easily understandable.

Quote from: jhkim on October 31, 2023, 12:31:31 AM

Quote from: Krazz on October 30, 2023, 06:37:22 PM
That seems cleverly worded to sound as though no science magazines accepted these articles, without actually stating it. There were four articles published under the Grievance Studies Affair:

1. "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon". This was published by Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. Geography is indeed a science.
2. "Who Are They to Judge? Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding". This was published by Fat Studies. I'm not sure why you think that Fat Studies isn't part of the social sciences.
3. "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use". This was published by Sexuality & Culture. Not a science magazine.
4. "An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant". This was published by the science magazine Sex Roles.

I don't want to get too much into semantics here. If you want to argue that "Fat Studies" is technically science, fine. But just about anyone can see an obvious difference between Fat Studies and a more typical discipline like Sociology.

We're getting far from Oriental Adventures, but the semantics are important, and was the purpose of the "studies". I remember creation "science" trying to pass itself off as science. They had to set up their own universities, because proper ones wouldn't let them in. There were court cases to keep their teachings out of schools, as real scientists defended the meaning of the word. But the grievance studies groups are already in the real universities. The subjects are already being taught in schools to children too young to understand what science is. They're calling themselves sciences. To most children raised in this environment, what's the difference in how scientific fat studies and physics are?

Quote from: jhkim on October 31, 2023, 12:31:31 AM
In the claim you quote, part of the paper took one-quarter of one chapter of the book, that was completely rewritten, and self-admittedly diverged significantly from the original.

Based on what you've put in italics, it sounds as though the only valid experiment would have been to submit all 704 pages of Mein Kampf, unedited, in the original German, without any mention of feminism, and not even with a forward to make it look remotely like an academic paper.

Quote from: jhkim on October 31, 2023, 12:31:31 AM
That is not a minor misremembered detail, and it shows nothing. One can trivially take a 3600 word snippet of Mein Kampf in which Jews aren't even mentioned. Within Vol 1 Ch 12, points #6 through #12 have no mention of Jews, and that is 4034 words. I could trivially take ideas from Hitler's anti-union arguments, for example, and get modern anti-union people to agree with them.

But that's nothing like what they did. They worked from a part of the book that did talk about the Jews.

Quote from: Krazz on October 31, 2023, 05:38:13 PM

Quote from: jhkim on October 31, 2023, 12:31:31 AM
If you want to argue that "Fat Studies" is technically science, fine. But just about anyone can see an obvious difference between Fat Studies and a more typical discipline like Sociology.

I remember creation "science" trying to pass itself off as science. They had to set up their own universities, because proper ones wouldn't let them in. There were court cases to keep their teachings out of schools, as real scientists defended the meaning of the word. But the grievance studies groups are already in the real universities. The subjects are already being taught in schools to children too young to understand what science is. They're calling themselves sciences. To most children raised in this environment, what's the difference in how scientific fat studies and physics are?

Even today, there are hundreds of universities that have Creation Science studies. Here's a list of 208 creationist colleges, for example:

https://christiananswers.net/q-eden/creationist-schools.html

Note that a majority of private colleges in the U.S. have a religious affiliation. My nephew went to a Lutheran college, for example. Most religious schools are still opposed to Creation Science, but creationists have largely worked with existing religious schools. I suspect there are less than 208 colleges that have a Fat Studies department.

The point is, academia has never been proof against a minority of fringe science and pseudo-science. In the past, there was phrenology, eugenics, parapsychology, and so forth. And by free speech, people who advocate those have a right to be heard. What we can do, though, is not lump these together.

Quote from: Krazz on October 31, 2023, 05:38:13 PM

Quote from: jhkim on October 31, 2023, 12:31:31 AM
That is not a minor misremembered detail, and it shows nothing. One can trivially take a 3600 word snippet of Mein Kampf in which Jews aren't even mentioned. Within Vol 1 Ch 12, points #6 through #12 have no mention of Jews, and that is 4034 words. I could trivially take ideas from Hitler's anti-union arguments, for example, and get modern anti-union people to agree with them.

But that's nothing like what they did. They worked from a part of the book that did talk about the Jews.

They self-admittedly took a 3600-word section from Vol 1, Ch 12 -- but they don't specify which 3600 word section. That chapter in general is about the organization and process of the Nazi party, like the split between intellectuals and laborers among its supporters. It is dominated by the 14 numbered points about how the movement should be organized. There are some mention of Jews in scattered sections, but it is not the topic of the chapter.

The hoax paper parallels this with its contrast of mainstream "neoliberal feminism" versus "allyship feminism". As I read it now, I can see where they adapted. For example, Hitler's point #1 (of 14) parallels the paper's point #2 (of -- talking about sacrifices that must be made for the movement's interest. And Hitler's point #3 parallels the paper's point #5 -- speaking against half-measures and the need for focus in the movement. But the feminist paper has no parallel to Hitler's point #5 where he talks about race as central.

They could easily have put in there that feminism needs to remain female, but they deleted it instead.

So what they did was take some bits of Hitler's advice about how to craft a popular movement, took out the parts about race, and then completely rewrote and reorganized it. I would submit that Hitler was extremely successful at organizing a mass popular movement. If one deletes the stuff about race, there is probably some useful information in there.

While this thread is in a lame spot right now, I will say that I find jhkim's argument to be compelling because he references the parts of the book used.  I think the only way to go deeper would be to actually find the document that they submitted (which may or may not be available), and then point-by-point compare with Mein Kamph.  Lol.

Anyway here's my two current beliefs on this sub-point:
1- The authors did this to attack the academic leftwing political industry.  It uses the false idea that "Hitler equal antisemitism" (versus "Hitler was antisemitic", which is correct), and refuting this requires digging into a reasonably uncomfortable source document, and the IMPLICATION is what the original conservative writers were relying on when they did this.  You could have a pretty sizable corpus from fascists without any racism, after all, were you to go look for that.  It was used for headline power, though they had several other papers.
2- Said leftwing political industry really does deal in hate-adjacent topics though, and will print things that would not be tolerated if said about women, or non-white groups, etc.  While this particular talking point is a bad-faith attack, there's no shortage of quotes from published documents and people that all but demand government force be applied to groups like "all men" in exchange for some promised social advancement.

I feel anyone could defend (2) pretty easily- just google up incendiary quotes by famous and/or powerful anti-establishment people from decades past, or any random tweets by ludicrous postmodern posters.

Finally, the idea of "we got a journal or group to agree with our stupid position" is an old attack, and it is somewhat valuable for showing that a group is not as serious as their grants and titles would show.  It's been used by many who are trying to improve the standards of papers, or point out that the entire industry is a bit too much smoke-and-mirrors.
Here's one about computer stuff:
https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414

Generally the three people who did this though really did meet with some success at getting ridiculous stuff through a variety of review processes.

QuoteThe team explained their motivations and methodology: "We set out with three basic rules: (1) we'll focus almost exclusively upon ranked peer-reviewed journals in the field, the higher the better and at the top of their subdisciplines whenever possible; (2) we will not pay to publish any paper; and (3) if we are asked at any point by a journal editor or reviewer (but not a journalist!) if any paper we wrote is an attempted hoax, we will admit it."

Like yes, this was ultimately a troll project, but if you subtract the silly headline it does have some value I think.

The point was that those journals are based on opinions and politics not repeatable scientific facts.  They should not be taken into account for citation or scientific in the least bit.  It was an attack on the leftist attack on objective truth.  Next, the best way to destroy something is to make fun of it, pillory it, and diminish it.  Its the one thing that truly terrifies the left.  It's why the hoax was so effective at shaking leftists to the bone.  They did everything they could to punish the academics, which then bought more attention to the hoax in the first place.  It was a nice cycle of negative propaganda towards the left.