Some people chafe against the fact Eureka often contrasts itself with other RPGs within the rules text, but the truth is any RPG is going to be "in conversation" with other RPGs whether you want it to be or not. It's better to give your RPG a voice in that conversation than to let it be talked over.
This is how most art works, but it is perhaps more literally true for TTRPGs than any other medium.
For an easy example, we have to say "this is not a PbtA game and doesnt use PbtA rolling mechanics" to prevent the people that come to Eureka with that assumption and only skim the rolling rules, thinking they already know how they work.
If you don't sometimes say "it isn't meant to be played like [other game]," the large percentage of players who think there is only one best way for RPG rules to work or be approached will bring the rules/assumptions from [other game] into it, in a way that probably won't work well with your game.
D&D had to be in conversation with war games from the beginning.
Then ttrpgs took off as a medium and AD&D had to be in conversation with both war games and a few competitors, even having conversion guides in the back.
D&D 3 had to be in conversation with competitors too, but the Wizards decided to do so in a very backhanded way via both an Open Source document that gave blanket permission for anyone to make their stuff a D&D and a spread marketing strategy of "copy other games directly and shove their skins onto our D&D."
Part of why D&D 5 and 6 sucks so hard is because Wizards decided to actively shut down the conversation. Their entire marketing campaign can be summed up as, "there are no other games. Only D&D. Shut the fuck up, other games! You aren't real!" So D&D is stuck in an echo chamber that can't learn or grow, only stagnate and rot.
people who don’t watch horror movies are SO confident that they know everything there is to know about the genre. like it’s okay to not know things. it’s okay if you don’t like friday the 13th or whatever. i promise you don’t need to make an ass out of yourself on the internet about it
horror is an incredibly diverse genre, because there is potential horror in everything. it’s in nature, it’s in architecture and technology, it’s in human relationships, it’s in folklore, the past, the future, the mundane. there are horror movies from all over the world. it is straight up anti-intellectual to pretend that the handful of B slashers you’ve vaguely heard about comprise the totality of what horror has to offer. If you’re just not interested in horror, or if you dislike certain subgenres of horror, then that’s fine, you’re not obligated to like anything at all. but smugly announcing that you don’t like horror because you dislike a handful of VERY specific non-universal tropes is just as stupid as saying that you hate comedy because you don’t like adam sandler movies.
I have posted before about how sometimes well-meaning attempts at running D&D without some of the more unfortunate dynamics can often backfire but in a way where most people don't even register it backfiring. Because when you take the step of "oh D&D's various 'evil humanoids' don't just exist in a vacuum and given the renfaire colonialism on display it's kind of impossible not to read them as somewhat racialized" many people will then go "okay but we still need some people who player characters should be allowed to kill guilt-free, so let's replace 'orcs' with 'bandits' because killing bad criminal people is perfectly ideologically neutral." At that point it's like "okay so your characters are no longer the racist kill squad, now they're just the Tough on Crime Vigilantes."
But I feel I should make clear that D&D the game itself is not exactly at fault here: like, okay, it is sort of at fault in the sense that it is a game of fantasy killing people with swords and magic. And it is easier for people to accept the killing with people with swords and magic part when they can imagine that their characters are at least to a degree justified. That is sort of just built into the game (and the game has built into its lore varying levels of making the fantasy of killing certain types of guy justifiable).
But D&D is not at fault for making people go "okay so it's bad when you kill orcs simply because they're orcs. It's better when you kill people who are bandits, who are a class of evil criminals where killing them is actually wholesome and sensible." Like, yeah, most people probably don't think about it that deeply, but the reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.
And the ideology is basically "it is bad to be racist but it's good to be a tough on crime vigilante."
I don't disagree with this post but I do think there's an important element being left out here which is that 9 times out of 10 players are engaging in combat primarily as a form of self defense. Most of the time it's less of "we can kill these people because they're criminals and that makes it ideologically neutral" and more "these NPCs are trying to kill us and the most effective way to stop them right now is to reduce their hit points to 0 which, if they fail their death saves, means they will die."
I think "vigilantes tough on crime" is actually kind of a bad descriptor for how most parties operate. This definitely varies wildly from table to table but I think for the *average* table there's honestly a solid chance that either your players are friends with at least one criminal NPC or even that they themselves are criminals. There's even an entire class who's fantasy is "criminal."
I don't think the self defense point actually holds true in a meaningful sense.
In older editions of D&D, which were much clearer on the expected gameplay being "go into the dungeon and steal the stuff," there wasn't really this layer there. The rules for combat were generally quite harsh on player characters so combat was certainly something they didn't want to get into too casually, but ultimately the player characters were just going into the dang monsters' house and stealing their stuff. The monsters were arguably the ones acting in self-defense (but they're evil so who cares).
But in the WotC editions the self-defense justification is still fraught because modern D&D especially is an action game. It's a game where characters mostly have access to various methods of visiting violence upon their environs and where the gameplay itself rewards them for violence, because combat is the main source of experience as written in all WotC editions of the game and characters primarily grow in combat effectiveness.
The self-defense angle I feel is not supported by the game's rules itself, but is more of a narrative contrivance introduced by groups to make their characters feel more heroic.
My friend @tenleaguesbeneath once described it as, and I am paraphrasing, "characters hunting things for sport but the things attack them first so they can claim self-defense." Characters want to get into fights (because that's where the rewards are), characters primarily grow in terms of being able to get into cooler fights, but because getting into fights on purpose isn't heroic there's an angle of "those goblins started it" to make the characters feel more heroic.
I don't think this is a bad thing per se. It is one way to make the power fantasy of D&D feel less like the characters are violent thugs and more like heroes. But like it is basically a group of mercenaries going into a warzone, they can't really say "well we didn't really expect to have to kill anyone on our mission, but sadly, circumstances conspired against us." Fighting is what the game wants them to do and I don't think anyone is wrong for wanting to portray the player characters as engaging in self-defense, but it's only self-defense through a very crooked lens imo.
Linking this to the modern "revenge porn" action movies like John Wick and Nobody.
The self defense/revenge motivation is a fig leaf for indulging in gleeful violence. While modern DnD fictionally positions the party as the righteous castle-doctrine empowered heroes; we should at the very least be critical of why it is doing that. It's functionally identical to the fantasy of "what would I do if a bunch of terrorists/bank robbers burst into the room?" Just because there's an in-universe reason as to why you get have to murder all those people in flashy and fun ways does not mean that it isn't what you (the player) sat down at the table to do.
Yeah this post is horseshit and the ideology behind it is soul poison. If you demand a Maoist struggle session for your D&D campaign for its ideological implications then 387.44 million miles of wafer-thin circuits is not enough to express the extent to which you need to go fuck yourself. The assumptions and demands you make are based in a concept of human experience that only exists to serve your politics. This is not how human beings engage with art, this is not how human beings engage with stories, this is not how human beings engage with games. You are suffering under this monstrous worldview and you are monstrous in attempting to inflict it on others.
You are not revealing a secret pro-vigilantism argument, you unfathomably vast stumblefuck. You are revealing that you have conditioned other people to be afraid of speaking up against you and they're unable to fight your openly malevolent bad-faith attacks, so when you threaten them with Unpersoning for some game mechanic or setting detail you don't understand, instead of standing up for themselves and telling you to fuck off they shuffle to the closest equivalent of it that they think won't get them yelled at.
I'm sure you do. I'm sure this is so natural to you that it does not even register as a coherent or specific thing that you're doing. I'm sure you think this is just the way everyone looks at everything.
But if at any point in your entire life you ever, under any circumstances, believe yourself to have revealed something about someone's moral ideology based on how they engage with a game, you need to go fuck yourself inside-out.
I'm sorry you've gotten that impression from my post but that couldn't be further from what I actually think. However, you seem like a genuinely unpleasant person so I don't think there's any point in keeping up this discussion for either of our sakes. :)
Unfortunately Brazen I think the simple factor here is that your vitriolic reaction gave OP an excuse to absolutely ignore the counterpoint being made.
The classic D&D part being a big example, considering the scenario is 'Dangerous creatures/violent criminals have nested in the (ruins of a fallen town/keep)/(local forest)/(nearby cave system) and are posing a constant and ongoing threat to everyone in the area. And you, as a hero, can gain renown/save people/profit off of dealing with them.'
The concept that everything there is harmless and safe and nobody is doing anything bad until the adventurers show up is a complete fabrication and I can absolutely say this and base this on the over 100 copies of Dragon Magazine I have sitting in a bin amongst the other things I have collected since my mother bought me the original Red Box set when I was NINE.
The need to define a world entirely and utterly divorced from our own by the standards of political theory that even on THIS world are actually rather questionable? Has nothing to do with 'issues in the text' and everything to do with 'if everything does not reflect my politics, my politics have no weight'.
But again, your vitreol si what OP is using to ignore this rather pointed fact.
>Linking this to the modern "revenge porn" action movies like John Wick and Nobody.
In John Wick and Nobody, the revenge fantasy is presented as toxic and harmful to the people engaging in it, and those around them, and occasionally innocent bystanders.
Heck, the villain of the second Wick film uses avengance as an excuse to silence the guy he forced to kill his sister, and it backfires.
>It's functionally identical to the fantasy of "what would I do if a bunch of terrorists/bank robbers burst into the room?"
The stereotypical DND adventurer party are usually the aggressors, not the defenders.
You're stretching extremely far to draw a false equivalence to People You Dislike, without any actual criticism of either.
And I don't think you actually understand either group.
I don't think "how would I react if my life was under serious and immediate threat from assailants?" Says Anything™ about the people asking the question, despite your
Sad reality of this entire post is the fact that DnD is a game meant for the purpose of escapism. What we have from OP is the classic, "If you play videogames and kill people in the game, you are probably actually a bad person. Therefore you need to reflect why you are a bad person and come to the right ideological views. Become enlightened just like me :D.
Thing is, and it will always piss me off, Brazens vitriol here is warranted. OP is the type of person that we in the nerd community call a tourist. A person that comes into a medium and tries to change HOW you are SUPPOSED to enjoy something, or just attempts to cry-bully their way into changing the medium itself. Which with DnD you have seen a lot of over the years. Nope it's not Evil Gods that corrupted beings, they are actually all sad humanoids that just didn't know any better. They are sympathetic you know. :)
Get the hell out of our hobbies. Seriously. Gatekeeping is a good thing and people like OP will always enforce that in me.
Sorry, you're just illiterate actually! I don't think any of the things you ascribe to me! :)
I think D&D as a text has many issues, many of them tracing back to the people who wrote it and the context it was written in. But the fact is, I don't think D&D is a cursed tome that will turn people evil for engaging with it, because I'm not a fucking idiot! It is, in fact, possible for me to engage with things which have ideological underpinnings that I don't personally agree with. The entire point of this post is to say that people shouldn't need to flagellate themselves over finding a way to play D&D in a way that is morally and ideologically pure, because to me such an exercise is ultimately fruitless and doesn't sound like a good time at all.
I am capable of grappling with the fact that D&D as a text is messy but it still deserves to be engaged with on its own terms as a game and a piece of art. You and the other folks in this discussion reacting with vitriol to admittedly hyperbolically and cheekily expressed critical thought about the text is, in my opinion, much worse for engaging with the game as a piece of art than being willing to admit "yeah there's parts of it that suck but it's not the Evil Amulet."
That people like you draw the conclusion that anyone engaging with any form of critical reading of a piece of media must be a tourist or making a claim about the moral standing of the people who engage with it to me simply stands as a testament that you have been wounded by discourse to the point where you jump at shadows at the slightest provocation. This is why I do not, generally, engage with people like you in dialogue. Because there is nothing for me to say other than "Actually I don't think that and the only reason you'd come to that conclusion is by imagining a person to get mad at and not being willing to engage in even a bit of critical thought."
Tired of the nasty political implications of the world-building in D&D as well as the unfortunate racial coding, the enlightened RPG player has decided to branch out into less popular games. What luck that they have stumbled upon Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition,
Having been once again disappointed by urban fantasy they decide to give medieval fantasy another chance, because surely D&D was just an outlier. Sure, the whole bit with "High Men" in Rolemaster Classic is a bit iffy but it's clearly just riffing on Tolkien and it could be remarkably worse. The enlightened roleplayer can't wait to see what new playable races they might find within the pages of Rolemaster Companion 1,
There's something I've repeatedly seen with posts TTRPG blogs like @thydungeongal or @anim-ttrpgs make/reblog - most recently with that "mental gymnastics" meme - where the post will tell people to play another game instead of going through the effort of squeezing D&D's square block into their campaign's round hole, and inevitably, people will comment "or just pirate D&D books!", which just... doesn't make sense? Pirating the books doesn't make the game better! It's like seeing someone eat soup with a fork and instead of telling them to use a spoon, you tell them to shoplift their forks.
But then I realized something. That's just another symptom of D&D players seeing playing TTRPGs as activism. When they see someone saying "play another game", they mentally add "...because WotC is a bad company!" even if the post very explicitly says "...because D&D is a bad game (for this kind of gameplay)!"
I have no real conclusion for this. It's just stupid.
i am begging you people to learn the meanings of genres before u talk about them. do not be the guy who thinks gorillaz is punk and taylor swift is grunge
i think semantic mistakes like this stem from not being very "well read" musically speaking. you listen to a song, you like it or you have strong feelings about it, and you want to talk about it in a way that reflects your enthusiasm. so you have a go at mimicing the language of critics, which means describing the music, putting it in context, trying to make a point about it
the problem is, this is the only band you've heard in this genre. you don't know the parameters, boundaries, and tropes of their genre. so all you can do is fall back on the 4 or 5 genre names you know about. and then you end up as the guy in the screenshot who thinks tally hall is metal
try going on the rateyourmusic or discogs page for the album you're talking about. those will tell you the actual genre or genres, which enables you to have conversations with others about it. those sites also have a little blurb about the nature of genre, its history, and a list of notable artists in that space. maybe listen to some of them for a few minutes, so you know what to listen for when identifying the genre in the wild
doing this will enrich your experience with the music you love
The prokopetz brain worm is reading a source book and thinking "this needs more huge lookup tables"
Most sourcebooks do need more big stupid tables.
(I'll freely grant that my preoccupation is partly an aesthetic thing, but it's not just that. One of my biggest pet peeves with indie tabletop RPGs is how many of them will put the player or GM in a position where they need to Make Something Up in order to render the thing functional, then not provide any worked examples of what that might look like. Like, who exactly is the game designer here, you or me? I strive to always provide at least a dozen worked examples – and more is better – in any situation where one of my games asks the player or GM to Make Something Up, and you know what's an engaging and high-utility way to concisely present a large number of worked examples? A big stupid table.)
Also, this isn't really reader-facing, but as a designer I find that forcing myself to come up with dozens of use cases for a given rule or narrative conceit in order to fill out a big stupid table can be tremendously clarifying. Often I'll come up with a descriptive or mechanical twist that seems wonderfully useful in theory, but when I try to work out actual dice-on-the-table applications for it I'll get stuck after the first three or four, and I realise that I'm about to make some hypothetical GM do all the real work for me. Not cool!
media literacy pop quiz, wiki article for thai "lady boys"
Can we infer anything about the gender, racial, and national demographics of its authors?
This is a living document, it has an edit and a discussion history. In what ways does that history support or contradict the text? If necessary, rely only on the following example:
3. Is the article constructed so as to argue a particular perspective? If so, who would be the primary beneficiary of that argument?
4. Are any other perspectives given credence?
5. Are there any historical parallels to the Western conception of transgender women? if necessary, rely only on the following example:
6. Is entering Thailand with a Western, particularly a US, passport morally neutral? Why or why not?
7. Do the people who are the subject of this piece have incentives to agree, disagree, or abstain from discussing the article's perspective on their gender? Discuss how this relates to questions 1, 3 and 6.
Bonus Points: kill a sex pest in cold blood
(I am not Thai, I'm a white american tgirl, I'm just so fucking tired of hearing this and I'm hearing it a lot lately)
Someone recently pointed out the same thing with Hijra, the Indian equivalent. People will see AMAB people living as women, bedecked in the social markers of womanhood, and getting gender-affirming medical care and bend over backwards to explain how this is totally different from our western ideas of trans women.
it's a transmisogyny into orientalism combo. anyone with half a brain can understand how cultural context would inform conceptions of gender, but the majority of the time people act like we're discussing a different species instead of like. other humans.
I'm far from educated and I certainly know better than to trust this wiki page (second citation is a vice video btw), but I really don't see how "transfem nonbinary" doesn't adequately encompass people who self-identify as kathoey.
Up to and including being gendered by everyone else as either male or female, depending on what use they can get out of you. the only reason we're talking about this is because of sex tourists who want to fuck "lady boys".
Why does the "General Description" begin by explaining they're not women and get worse for the rest of the paragraph? Why is nothing actually described until the second paragraph?
what's our porn category say again? oh, right
Wikipedia image caption: Leather collar stamped with the word tranny, commonly worn by trannies.
Adjacent paragraph: Although tranny is often mistranslated as "transgender woman", don't worry, you don't have to treat them like women. btw did you know that it was originally for intersex people? cool huh. anyway, the proper translation is ladyboy or a special third thing that's even less gay to fuck than a trans woman. cheap too.
It's just so astonishingly tasteless. I have so much in common with these people, now if only I could easily learn more about the parts that don't suck.
"Classic JRPG-style games with inexplicable roguelike modes stapled to the side of them are just chasing modern trends" you apologise to Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (1995) right now.
Also, what’s your advice for neurodivergent people who have trouble letting go of these IPs? /gen
Speaking from my own experience as an autistic person who can get fixated on things for an extremely long time...
Don't plan on quitting cold turkey. If you start missing it, engage with it privately, like watching movies or reading books you already own, or can get without profiting the creator or boosting some algorithm. Keep discussions to private groups and don't post new art, fics, headcanons, whatever, in public spaces.
Put lots of time into developing your own things and turning your favorite characters into OCs in the meantime. You can start with small changes to the characters at first, then follow your whims and your impulses wherever they go, and maybe experiment with bigger changes until you find what resonates with you. Once you get a bunch of OCs and figure out how they connect to each other and what they all get up to in your thing, it's pretty easy to keep yourself engaged thinking up scenarios for them.
Also, keep checking out new media. It can take awhile to find something that clicks as much as the other thing did, or to find something that scratches the exact right itch. (And sometimes, the media that can scratch the itch is in a completely different genre!)
You might start with media that includes the same actors, or media that has a similar aesthetic. You can also try to look into the author's influences. This help you can satisfy the desire to engage with the thing a bit while you explore new things.
Basically, it's all a process of reducing your engagement with the original thing as much as you can while consciously choosing to develop and explore other stuff. And not everything you try is going to resonate, so you just gotta keep going until you find the stuff that sticks.
Thank you. Thank you for the advice, and for understanding. All the people who are like, “why can’t you just stop engaging with it, what the fuck is so hard?” are just shaming me for my emotional pain without actually providing a way out. I want a way out. But it really is that hard.
satanism is so funny it's like ooh I hate Christianity soooo much I'm not going to step outside of it or learn about other religions cuz it's the only religion I care about at all so I'm still going to base my thing around Christianity I'm just gonna be a hardcore contrarian about it
Some mildly annoying people think that the best way to engage with media that has problematic aspects is to pretend that they can fanon their way out of the original text having those aspects instead of actually thinking about why the original text was like that. But on the other hand, some absolutely repugnant people will read any critical reading of a piece of media as a declaration of war and loudly and proudly state that you the person doing the critical reading probably think they're evil for liking the media. So like, as annoying as the people in the former group can be, they at least don't usually do a Hitler transformation sequence upon getting a whiff of critical thought.
whenever the conversation about difficulty and accessibility in games come up i want to slam my head into a wall because noone thats speaking has anything more than a surface level understanding of what "difficulty" even is
your game should have accessibility options, but if your only accessibility options are "turn off central game mechanics" then you have made shit accessibility options.
I don’t know what’s more detrimental to the health of TTRPGs as a medium, D&D5e players who think that TTRPGs are “collaborative storytelling” and that D&D5e does this great if you just ignore all the rules that make it not do that, or non-D&D players who realize that no edition of D&D5e is good for “collaborative storytelling” but still think that the primary purpose of all TTRPGs is to be “collaborative storytelling” and that not being good for “collaborative storytelling” a satisfying narrative is what makes D&D bad. D&D5e is bad for other reasons but you’re complaining that a cheap toothbrush doesn’t keep you warm at night.
An expectation is being placed on all pieces in this artform to do something that the majority of them were never meant to do in the first place.
I've only played solo journaling RPGs with the exception of video solo RPGs so apologies in advance. From what I understood from people who play D&D is that it's a flexible game. While I haven't played D&D so I don't know how different it may be from what I had in mind, if a game is flexible enough with rules defined per playing group (?), wouldn't it make sense that some groups believe collaborative storytelling to be a primary purpsoe? Or is the 5th edition meant to be something different?
Thank you for asking in good faith. There is a whole lot of WotC D&D5e marketing propaganda to scrape away at here so bear with me. It’s a two-part answer, and both parts are long and require a lot of context.
Part 1: Marketing, and How Hasbro Sells You Your GM's/Your Own Labor
D&D5e’s flexibility is a marketing lie. The only people who think D&D5e is relatively flexible are people who have little to no experience with any other TTRPGs besides D&D5e (and sometimes Pathfinder). It is in fact a very specific game (as the vast majority of TTRPGs are). Its rules adjudicate high fantasy heroic warriors and wizards with swords and spells engaging in tactical battles with monsters in a high fantasy world of some kind and becoming stronger and better at battling by doing so. That’s the only kind of game D&D5e can support. This premise is of course somewhat flexible in that it can support high fantasy battles in a variety of contexts with a variety of different types of warriors and wizards and for a variety of different reasons, but as soon as the occupations of the characters in your campaign do not primarily consist of high fantasy battles and preparation for more high fantasy battles, D&D5e is no-longer supporting it. In fact, D&D5e will quickly start to hinder it, at great strain to the GM.
As you can see, D&D5e is actually quite narrow in what campaigns and/or “stories” it supports. This narrowness/specificness is not, however, what makes D&D5e a bad game. Tons of very good TTRPGs are just as narrow or even more narrow. The people who force D&D5e to “flex” despite its relative inflexibility are doing so with a great deal of unnecessary effort, particularly on the GM side of things. This effort is unnecessary because for any given campaign/adventure premise, there are likely dozens of other TTRPGs which are either laserfocused on supporting that exact premise, or something much closer to it such that it takes less effort to “flex” them into it.
Despite it being difficult and unnecessary, they keep straining themselves to bend D&D5e into shapes it was never meant to be (and holds badly) because they don’t know any better. This is where the WotC/Hasbro marketing comes in. There is this marketing tactic called a “walled garden” that basically only monopolies with money to burn can pull off. Rather than competing with your competitors to have the better product, or even just hype up your product, to attract more customers, you build an enclosed ecosystem for your customers by obscuring their view of your competitors’ products entirely. With no frame of reference for what your competitors’ products are actually like, customers will have no reason to be skeptical of anything you say or imply about your product or your competitors’.
D&D5e is actually very narrow, very poorly designed (but again, narrowness is not an element of this poor design), not simple, and not beginner-friendly at all. But WotC’s marketing machine says it is extremely flexible, well-designed, simple, and beginner-friendly. In conjunction with the walled garden, WotC’s customers hear that and think “if a ‘simple,’ ‘beginner-friendly’ TTRPG is this complicated and hard to learn (not to mention expensive), I don’t even wanna know what a complex and advanced TTRPG looks like!” This makes them scared of other TTRPGs without ever having seen them, and makes them very unwilling to step foot outside the walled garden and see for themselves. (This is also somewhat relatable to how the US government keeps US citizens perpetually afraid of foreign nations and alternative economic frameworks, and how cults and abusers keep their victims from just walking out on them.)
“D&D5e/TTRPGs can be whatever you want them to be” is a marketing slogan for WotC and Hasbro, meant to tell you that the TTRPG you pick for your campaign doesn’t matter at all, so why not just settle for the one you’ve seen marketed the most? This is how WotC and Hasbro keep D&D5e players perpetually overpaying for undercooked products or, at the very least even if they pirate all their D&D5e books, not supporting any of the competitors. This facade is propped up by the unpaid labor of hundreds of thousands of overworked GMs, who are the ones tasked by the wretched and insidious “Rule 0” with painstakingly bending D&D5e into all these different crude shapes (that another game would hold better) for the convenience of players.
That last part especially is where the cult comparison comes in. Those who do want to explore the world outside the cult and/or have seen through the lies are often trapped there still by their only relationships being within the cult. If they leave the cult, they can only do so by cutting all of their relationships and support networks off and entering the wider world with nothing. It’s a little less dramatic than that in the context of D&D5e of course, they aren’t literally losing their friends entirely, but they often are losing their gaming group, A.K.A. the big social activity they do with their friends. It is beyond count how many times I have heard someone say “I want to try out other TTRPGs, but my group only wants to do D&D5e because they think learning another game is too hard and also pointless because they think ‘TTRPGs can be whatever you want them to be’.” They try and try, but are eventually worn down until they go “Alright fine we can do a cozy farming game about reconciling with your past trauma in D&D5e. Roll Strength to pull up the carrots, I guess..” Dozens, possibly hundreds, reading this very post will be able to testify to being in this exact situation (and I urge you to do so in the tags or reblog comments).
(Also much like abuse victims and people who grew up in insular cults, many who do leave have great difficulty adjusting to the normal world, because they only know how to behave in the context of the bad situation they just left. This often manifests in TTRPGs as GMs reflexively trying to “fix” the rules of games that are actually well designed and don’t need to be fixed - or, topically, trying to squeeze “collaborative storytelling” out of games that were not meant to support such a thing, because WotC/Hasbro marketing taught them that when D&D5e doesn’t natively give you what you and your group want, it’s your fault because “a good GM could make it work.” The difficulties these maladapted behaviors result in even often lead them to giving up and returning to their bad situations.)
To summarize thus far, WotC/Hasbro marketing obscures other TTRPGs from the vast majority of TTRPG players, which allows them to imply those TTRPGs are not worth exploring by projecting the flaws of their own product onto the imagined conception of the competitors’ products. WotC/Hasbro tells players “TTRPGs are whatever you want them to be” to make their product, the design of which only supports one thing, appeal to customers who want many different things. They keep these customers they’ve lied to by encouraging GMs to do free labor contorting and rebuilding D&D5e on the fly to keep up the illusion as long as possible. People within these spaces who don’t buy into this illusion are shunned and only given the choice between continuing to prop up the lie or abandoning their social activities. People within these spaces who do buy into the illusion are liable to get very defensive-aggressive when the walls of the garden are shaken.
Part 2: “Collaborative Storytelling”
I described way up at the top of this comment that D&D5e has rules that basically only support fantasy warriors and wizards doing battles and getting stronger so they can do more battles. This is not inherently a bad thing, there are many good TTRPGs that support nothing but this same thing. (What makes D&D5e bad as a game is that it does its core premise very poorly. What makes it bad as a cultural force is how its dishonest marketing is choking and killing the industry and culture of TTRPGs.)
The other thing about D&D5e’s design that are important about this discussion is that it is s very “traditional” TTRPG, and thus very much built by the way its rules interact with each other to be a “challenge game.” A “challenge game” in this context is a game that challenges the cleverness and skill of both player and PC alike. The PC must overcome obstacles in their path through their cleverness and skill, and the player must use their cleverness and in-depth understanding of the rules to build a PC who can overcome those challenges and play them accordingly. If either is not up to the challenge, they fail, often with severe consequences to the PC. In video game terms, it is possible to get a “game over” when playing this type of game.
Where this becomes a "problem" is that challenge games are typically very, very bad at producing conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs through the default gameplay that their rules support, which is one of the main points of the original post. When people say they want/like “collaborative storytelling,” they are almost always referring to a desire for conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs.
And if this structure of game is bad at “collaborative storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story, and the point of TTRPGs as an artform is “collaborative storytelling,” then “challenge games” must be bad TTRPGs, right? Well, wrong; but that attitude is what the original post is criticizing.
They are calling a game bad because it fails to do something its rules were never written to support in the first place. D&D5e is lazily designed, but by calling it bad for failure to accomplish something that it was never built to do in the first place, they are completely writing off hundreds of much more effortfully and intentionally designed games which also fail at “collaboratively storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story because they were never meant to. This, indirectly, also only helps WotC and hurts smaller studios and designers, as well as closing the players off to experiences they might end up actually really enjoying.
The reality is “collaborative storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story with a plot and character arcs is not the only reason to play TTRPGs. Like many other artistic mediums, different TTRPGs have different experiences they are trying to present to the audience, and if the audience goes in expecting one and gets another, they will typically not enjoy the experience. It is only in TTRPGs however (due largely to the deceptive marketing described in Part 1) that there is such a pervasive acceptance of going to works within the artform expecting something they were never meant to be, and, instead of going and finding another one that actually is what you want, pushing forward stubbornly, as if trying to squeeze a novel full of twists and turns out of a math textbook.
Playing a challenge game expecting a conventionally satisfying narrative and character arcs will leave you frustrated and disappointed (unless of course the insidious “Rule 0” puts a gun to your GM’s head or brainwashes them and makes them take on the work of pulling thousands of strings behind the scenes to contort the game in real time so that that frustration never touches the players, only them). Likewise, if you play “story games” or similarly structured TTRPGs expecting a challenge, you will be frustrated and disappointed. Even if you put in the effort to "make it work," your experience with the result is significantly worsened and hindered compared to what the experience would be if you had just played a TTRPG that was built from the ground up to give that experience rather than trying to mod the game into something it's not. And here is a link to a post you (general "you," not specifically the person I am replying to, I mean anyone reading this) can click if you interpret the above passages as me saying "nothing should ever be homebrewed ever."
Part 3: I'm Kinda Just Rambling Now
I love “challenge games,” and many others do to, both for the in-the-moment thrill of them and for the unique (not usually conventionally satisfying) stories they produce as a secondary byproduct.
All TTRPGs (that I can think of) produce some kind of story as a byproduct of gameplay. Hell, most games in general do. However, just because it may produce it doesn’t mean the story is the primary purpose. It is the primary purpose of some games, but not others.
Actually I was going to go on, but I remembered I already said what I was about to say much better in a previous thread on this same post, so I am just going to link that here instead. This will explain different purposes I’m talking about.
💬 30 🔁 388 ❤️ 524 · Post by @anim-ttrpgs · 2 images · Yes, TTRPGs are mechanics-driven games, even the ones where the mechanics are actual
I pretty much agree with all of this, and want to add that in discussions I've seen where people claim "5E can be adapted to anything!" once you drill down, what they mean when they say "5E" is "the mechanic of rolling a d20 against a target number, with advantage or disadvantage if the situation warrants."
And, sure, "rolling a die" is indeed a very flexible mechanic that can be applied to a lot of situations, but of course there is a lot more to the D&D5E rules than that, and it's telling that these people have apparently played 5E before and the only rule they've managed to grasp is how to make a skill roll.
A River Is A Liminal Landscape @simpleimple - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
