wallacepolsom
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
⁂
Xuebing Du
YOU ARE THE REASON
trying on a metaphor
roma★
🪼
Sade Olutola
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
$LAYYYTER
Cosimo Galluzzi
Janaina Medeiros
occasionally subtle
@theartofmadeline
NASA
#extradirty
shark vs the universe
pixel skylines
oozey mess
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Chile
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from T1
seen from United States
@systems-bitch
there should be a high fantasy TTRPG for scantily clad tgirls but not in a fetishy way. good tgirl rep that just happens to be mad sexual. give me the complete opposite of whatever FATAL had going on
oh mein Gott, die Briten dringen in meine verdammten Benachrichtigungen ein
A Most Bloody Devotion
If you like:
Cannibalism
Gender
Claiming power over another, body and soul
Getting bit on the neck
Girls with an 18 in their Fawn Response stat
You might like my new OSR game!
A Most Bloody Devotion First Look by Isabelle Ruebsaat on Patreon. Join Isabelle Ruebsaat's community for exclusive content and updates.
The really funny thing about folks dutifully trotting out the old "well ACTUALLY Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition commercially underperformed because it's just tabletop World of Warcraft" line every single time I discuss the economic realities of 4E's publication is the cyclical nature of those complaints.
When 4E came out in 2008, people complained it was trying to turn D&D into tabletop World of Warcraft because it has explicit class roles.
When 3E came out in 2000, people complained it was trying to turn D&D into tabletop Diablo because it has feat trees and magic item affixes.
When 1E came out in 1977, people unfavourably compared it to the then-nascent medium of computer games because the Dungeon Master's Guide contains too many tables; they probably would have called it a tabletop roguelike if not for the fact that the term "roguelike" did not yet exist, the publication of Rogue being three years in the future.
We have been doing the "[edition of D&D] in some respect vaguely resembles [computer game], and that's bad" thing for fifty goddamn years. We've been doing it since practically the very moment computer games existed for comparison to them to be made.
(For the folks about to well-actually that Rogue was technically only one year in the future on account of the fact that 1E's Dungeon Master's Guide was delayed until 1979: I see you.)
We tried to warn you about the "adult content" bans. Now Kickstarter is starting that shit
"It must have serious value!"
Staight up sounds like obscenity law/Miller Test-type crap.
"Fetishized imagery intended to arouse" well it's a good thing oppressed and vulnerable communities are never fetishized.
One Pager - ERRANT
In ERRANT, one player is a Princess, and the rest are her loyal(?) knights. Violence is encouraged, and the rules exist to evoke feelings, rather than provide randomness.
PDF copy available on request, rules text in alt text.
I think D&D players, even 5e players, who treat the idea of death being on the table in the game as a matter of "mmmmm I don't know I mean it's nice to ask players first what they feel because losing a character can really make them feel bad" are in active denial about the game. This is one of those things where D&D, the game as it exists within all those books, is pretty clear: a character who loses all their hit points is at the risk of dying and combat (the activity these games are the most opinionated about) is a leading cause of losing hit points. This is not an accident of design. Saying that death being on the table in a game of D&D should be something the group needs to discuss beforehand is just rejecting the buy-in of the game.
I swear, if you don't like death as the main failure state in the game there are other games out there. But this attitude is just further indicative of the idea that running the game as written is just seen as dysfunctional by its own players.
This is such a fucking bad faith read of my point, holy shit.
D&D has for ages given players the license to ignore its text: that license doesn't in fact change what kind of the game is. This is exactly the type of attitude I am talking about: that pretending that the game giving you license to ignore its rules text magically changes what kind of game it is about. Instead, if you actually read the games rules you will discover what kind of game it actually is, and if you take those rules in aggregate you will discover that even when some of the rules are bad (because designers aren't perfect) they have often been designed with intention.
The reason I advocate for people looking at different games isn't because I want some people out of D&D, it's because there are hundreds if not thousands of games out there that in fact do the things these people clearly want out of these games better than D&D does, and this attitude in fact does a disservice to those games: if D&D's rules are unopinionated and like that only by a pure accident of design then none of the games that have been designed for other purposes matter at all. All this attitude does is benefit the game that all but has a monopoly on most RPG players imaginations and perspectives on what RPGs can do.
Also fuck right off with the using weasel words to imply that my criticism of D&D player culture and how incurious it is about the purpose of D&D's design is somehow about me being unable to or unwilling to navigate consent or unwilling to accept that the game has changed. I have played D&D for the better part of my life and while I am critical of WotC's pink-washing and extremely cynical appeals to identity in order to market their game as inclusive (while mostly just doing surface level changes or passing the buck to its players) I am in fact very happy that D&D as a game is more open to racialized people, women, and queer folks than it was when I started (partly because I am those latter two categories of people!). You have nothing of value to say here.
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.
Ok. Genuinely, though. What would you say the purpose of D&D5e is? What are the majority of TTRPGs made for?
Because like, a dungeon crawl is a story. So is a complex political negotiation. So is a heist. So is playing out a battle tactically. All of these things are stories, and insofar as each player contributes the actions of their characters and (in a good group) an equal stake in the enjoyment of everyone in the group, it is collaborative.
I don’t see how it isn’t for “collaborative storytelling”, and I don’t even play D&D5e. The relationship between the GM and the players isn’t adversarial. All of them are players trying to have fun, and crucially in a healthy group that doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s fun.
Collaboratively telling a story, in some form playing make believe with rules to simulate and constrain the ways we are playing, that’s. Just what a TTRPG is. Like. Categorically.
I think the rub here with the term "collaborative storytelling" is that it's coming across at odd angles. Like you said, almost everything can lead to a story. And there are multiple people there inputting into the machine and so clearly it's collaboration. But the same can be said of nearly anything, let alone just games.
What a TTRPG is for is, as what amounts to an analog computer, to take a series of inputs and give you an output combined with imaginative interpretations and creative narrative decisions in order to create the emergent property that is roleplay. In much the same that you can roleplay someone specific in a video game, games with immersive sim properties are much better at it because they give you the tools by which to more deeply express the internal agency you're applying to the game world. And even then you will be constrained by the game and its intents if what you are attempting to roleplay is not supported by the game. Deus Ex is much more conducive to roleplay than, say, DOOM. But even then Deus Ex still expects you to be Some Guy Caught Up In Conspiracy Nonsense. Meanwhile horizontal growth games like Ultima Online allow you to express a wide variety of permutations, the only game where my favorite class fantasy can be "real estate scammer" and the game and the way both the world and other players interact with it supports this. The important part about the commentary on ANIM's discussion of collaborative storytelling, which describes a specific attitude about how those stories are produced and not about their presence, is thus:
In a game where the primary analog input-output is the emergent property of semi-randomized mechanical interactions, it is very difficult to even attempt to generate the storybeats of, say, Lord of the Rings naturalistically. So you come expecting that every game produces A Fantasy Novel sort of storytelling and not something more in line with the often chaotic, often hamfisted, and meandering storytelling of, say, a weekly print comic that might have a roadmap or be partially planned but often just kind of jams in whatever needs to happen to keep things moving and ramp the drama. And even that isn't an adequate equivalent to this, as a comic can still successfully have internal rules like "The MC and his crush are not allowed to die", a thing which a ttrpg which has a mechanic about death can only do by rewriting the rules, one of the principal complaints in the entire essay. In order to create the kind of fantasy novel-esque story structure, an enormous amount of effort must go into bending, warping, and changing the rules so much that what you get at the end is at best a facsimile of the thing you went in to create, and if the efforts prove fruitless this is not the fault of either the game or of the expectations put on it to demand those efforts, but of the GM who failed to produce a game design degree via first principles.
And so the way that DnD is treated is often more like modding Deus Ex so that there is either no way to fail or die regardless of which path you take or else to mod it so that there is only one preconceived path which the game must take. When it became an increasing norm of the culture of play to demand that the GM ask permission for characters to be killed (a mechanic which the game has specific rules for for which there are not alternatives) rather than accepting that death is something both mechanically implemented and a story beat which will be generated by the semi-random output of the machine, enormous pressure came down to completely rework the machine from the ground up rather than exit the walled garden and engage with a machine which does not produce outputs which the players do not desire. The purpose of a machine is what it does, and what this machine does in its design does not produce conventional satisfying, novel-like stories. It creates a lot of emergent situations which must be handled, for good or ill, by semi-random, dice based mechanics. Unfortunately, people believe that that is not the purpose of the machine in spite of all evidence from the text due to their folkloric understanding of it and so view it as broken and anyone not able to fix it as having failed.
I think my biggest problem with the arguments A.N.I.M & simpleimple brought up here is how they are simultaneously too specific and too general.
You're talking about really broad stuff like people's expectations of games, wider trends in the TTRPG culture of play while arguing that those are mostly happening because people miunderstand the rules?
You seperate the text of the game from the folkloric understanding of the game.
The text is not the game.
What is happening during play is the game, which is heavily influenced by the folklore.
People can play this game very differently depending on experience and preferences with TTRPGs or games IN GENERAL.
Can you Imagine walking up to a group of people having fun and going "Pals, you are doing this all wrong, you could be having so much MORE fun" is madness to me ... MADNESS.
Im sorry but I feel like these arguments are really a gross misunderstanding on what playing TTRPGs is about for most people.
If you wanna try out different TTRPGs on the regular you need people in your group that find that exciting!
I dont wanna be antagonistic, I just feel these arguments are going nowhere really.
NOW if you wanna talk about how capitalism is turning TTRPGs into a commodity to own instead of play I am ALL EARS and sopping wet with guilt!
The folkloric understanding of what TTRPGs are and what they are supposed to do has, especially in the specific context of D&D and other very traditional challenge-focused RPGs, largely emerged from a culture of play that treats the text of these games as incidental. These games do exist as texts as well and when the culture of play around these games exists largely as divorced from these texts and it is effortless to also demonstrate that playing these games while adhering to the text does not result in gameplay that is inherently undesirable, it is in fact good to remind people that these texts should not be treated as incidental.
In fact, to your capitalism point, the ones who have the most to gain from an understanding of tabletop RPGs as just a set of folklore and vibes where the text doesn't matter are, in fact, the folks at Wizards of the Coast. Arguably a very large part of the marketing (not just from WotC but also from the industry that has sprung up around D&D) of D&D the game relies on the notion that D&D is good for collaborative storytelling (something it, as a text, doesn't actually primarily support) and that the rules ultimately don't matter. And when the rules of a game can be reduced to nothing but a set of vibes that are completely divorced from the game as a text this in fact mostly benefits the game that has already captured a large part of the hobby and industry.
And I don't think this should be taken to some extreme like "by actually taking RPG rules as texts worth engaging with instead of just sets of vibes that may or may not result in good gameplay you are actually doing an epic anti-capitalism," but tabletop RPGs do exist as books with rules not as an accident.
And to quote a much more eloquent person than I, the designer of Cairn: "Playing rules-as-written isn't obedience. It's literacy."
Nerds love taxonomy; it gives order to the world, and provides a meaningful sense of control. Of course, it's all an illusion. At best taxon
This also applies to analyzing games and the cultures of play surrounding them. For a culture of play that treats the text as secondary or incidental to gameplay and where the desired gameplay is actually orthogonal to the text, saying that the culture of play would actually benefit from engaging with the text as is or engaging with a different game altogether is the most charitable interpretation of what is going on.
TLDR
So the just of the argument from Thydungeongal, simplesimple, and animm-trpg's is that the Text is written by an individual with the intent of giving a certain type of experience and that experience might run counter or against what you want from collaborative story telling. i.e. if you are playing a game like Mothership and a players character dies and they don't want their character to die you could ignore some of the death choice rules of the game orrrr you can acknowledge that the tone and intent of a game like Mothership is to cause or have many PC characters die and thus going against that rule completely ignores the text of the work.
I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:
Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.
Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.
In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.
D&D is not a universal entry-level game.
All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.
D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".
Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.
They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.
So how does Hasbro square that circle?
Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.
Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.
The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.
The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.
The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.
Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.
(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)
The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.
In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.
It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.
Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.
That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position they want the GM to be in.
making a game where when you get tuckered out, you become Really Annoying, but in a Philosophy way
Fascinating that MCDM basically stood up and said, "missing attacks isn't fun and halts gameplay!" And a bunch of designers were like, "you'rrrreeee so fucking right bestie!" And immediately began copying their homework. Which I'm all here for, missing attacks isn't fun and does halt gameplay. Bestie was right.
Girl Frame 1.8 is out! Including:
Red Queen Frame
Enforcer who jerks off in your dirty laundry
The umpteenth pick-me playbook
A chaser rebel faction and playbook
A full rewrite of the Strain system
Frantic is WAY more fucked up
This update comes with a pretty eclectic mix of stuff: little bit of new, and lots of improvements. Here’s a few of them: Improvements: Stra
I think Knave 2e is one of those games that should be mandatory reading for aspiring ttrpg designers (especially those coming from the D&D-adjacent fantasy space), not because it does anything particularly exceptional (it's a great game but other than the amazing collection of tables it's a pretty standard OSR dungeon-crawler with a couple cool innovative ideas), but because of the designer commentary section at the end where Ben Milton breaks down what purpose he was trying to achieve with pretty much every single system and mechanic in the game, and lists the inspirations for each of them too.
At the very least reading it has made *me* a better game designer by motivating me to be more purposeful about game mechanics.
Even if I'm unlikely to ever actually write it down, imagining I'm writing a similar Designer Commentary section in my mind about every system I'm including definitely made MPN into a much better game than it would have been otherwise.
Just got my copy of "Defy the Gods"
and holy shit
More of this! Give me more!
Bluesky liked this so y’all get it too
This definition of ttrpg isn't even wrong.
only thing that comes to mind today.
the fad of putting these little blurbs in TTRPGs was probably the most embarrassing bit of useless wanking the little industry scene has ever done, besides the time Warmahordes put a "this aint your daddys tabletop game!" in their rulebook.
does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?
At the absolute minimum you could make a game which actually is a meaningful cultural expression of your ideals, or which is politically anti fascist in any way.
So this is actually I can reassure you, the exact opposite of self indulgent wanking with no impact. It’s aggressively impactful in a very specific way—by making the nazis in the room very loud about the fact that they’re nazis.
I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.
This is the updated version. It’s animated now.
But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.
And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.
For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.
And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.
And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.
While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.
So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.
Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?
This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”
It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.
Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.
It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.
So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.
Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.
It doesn’t fix the world— anyone who thinks the table top scene will magically save the day is a fool—but it does increase the odds that the hobby will be a safer place for more reasonable people, and not become a bastion of fascism like the wh40k fandom has.
Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.
It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.
Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.
Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.
See also the Godot discord, with an icon that scrolls through pride colours in a beautiful way.
It even works for games famously infested with fascists like 40k. Games Workshop coming out with a (really rather tepid) statement of support of BLM had Nazis losing their minds in the comments fucking immediately
I remember the meltdowns when the new Worls of Darkness books came out that this blurb is in. It's pretty easy to piss fascists off by just saying you don't want them there.
The Pathfinder Facebook group did something like this on purpose as a honeypot and immediately banned all the bigots coming out of the woodwork, and immediately eliminated more than HALF of all incidents requiring moderators. Not just about bigotry, everything.
And that is TACTICALLY USEFUL.
Because game companies spend so much money moderating chat spaces (both forums and in-game chats) and they lose so much business when dominant third party online spaces associated with their game turn toxic. Hell moderation is the big money sink for social media. Managing that cost is one of the most difficult aspects of the business.
Now imagine telling a game or social media executive that you can eliminate half of their harassment in a single honeypot operation. Imagine telling them that you have a technique which surgically targets a majority of their most toxic members and immediately gets rid of them. Because that's what this is.
You slap up a big pride or power banner and an announcement that this company stands with [insert group here], or stands against fascism, and you take names on everybody who has angry or quibbling shit to say about that. And then you ban them all. And just like that the moderation load you're dealing with gets so much lighter. Keep it up with a similar announcement whenever a topical opportunity presents itself and you clean out any new trash which walks in too.
And it just so happens that the way to do this is to clear out the bigots and make a safe space for oppressed groups.
There are so many of these companies which are worried that by taking a stand like this they will hurt their user base. There are so many forums online with volunteer moderators who reflexively don't want to wait into politics because they think that will increase their workload. Give them good solid practical examples of this reducing their workload instead, and you will get some of them onboard.
Because this has a real measurable impact with the right follow through, and the impact is a general reduction in all harassment of everyone. And that is worth capital M Money and capital T Time to some people.
It's also important to note that VtM has had long-standing fascist problems, especially when this blurb was included in a release in 2018. Paradox, the rights holders of VtM, had been letting White Wolf have effectively free reign in their VtM releases, until the Camarilla and Anarchs books were released for v5. One of them included referencing the torture and murder of Chechen queer people as a fodder for in-world plot, when it was very much occurring in real life at the time.
Paradox responded by tightening the leash on White Wolf. This blurb was included in the next book as a confirmation to the community that they were making active changes to do better.
I don't disagree with the observation that a lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe that game design is real (i.e., in the sense that they believe any GM should be able to achieve any experience of play using any system and refuse to recognise that rules are opinionated about what sort of games they want to produce), but I feel like putting that at the forefront is confusing the symptom for the disease. A lot of folks in tabletop roleplaying spaces don't believe game design is real because they don't believe that games are real.
I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to be play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.
The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.
And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.
Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.
(Note that, while I've identified Hasbro's deceptive marketing as the ultimately source of this culture of play, indie RPGs are hardly innocent of perpetuating it. You only need cast a critical eye on the "Rule Zero" sections of many popular indie games to notice that many of their authors are all in on the idea that games aren't real!)
Dumb question: What does an opinionated, rules-heavy game actually play like?
Like you describe, I play roleplaying games as a guided improv thing. As a player, I describe in-universe actions that I think my character would take. In this view, the point of the rules is to:
Make something happen in response to that.
Make that thing interesting. Different people find different things interesting, which is why there exist multiple games.
Resolve disagreement. The world should feel real and players should not often think "come on, that's bullshit". Consistent rules make this a lot easier.
All these goals are perfectly well served if one player makes everything up, but when that's what "GM" means, it sure gets hard to find a GM. The reason to have rules is to take some of that work off their plate.
I'm willing to do the fiddly dice maths as the price of a fun improv night. But I don't enjoy it: it throws me out of the imagined world. So obviously I want the rules to be as light as possible.
Wait, actually I've found another possible source of disagreement:
The folks who don't bother to learn the rules they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math
The D&D 5e player's handbook is 293 pages long. I'm perfectly happy to read it several times and work through a dozen examples before I show up to the table, and to bring various cheat sheets, and to try to learn the rules that others explain to me. But I am simply not able to:
Learn the rules well enough to be able to play without constant assistance, in less than 3 or so sessions
Learn rules that don't come up for my character at least a couple times per session, ever
Quickly read and apply a rule for a given situation; either I get help, or it's a laborious, game-halting process
It's not that I don't bother. I actually, highkirkuinely can't.
It's the same for non-roleplay board games. A decent board game player reads through the rules of a medium-complexity game, forms some idea of how to play well just from that, and usually can review the game after playing once. I need one or two playthroughs just to figure out how to make legal moves, never mind a strategy.
So of course I want extremely simple rules: I don't like slowing everyone down! And simpler rules mean more gaps in the rules, where improv is needed to bridge from "the dice say partial success" to "He sighs. You're pretty sure you've just burnt a bridge, but today you have his vote."
First off, all games are opinionated to some extent even if you don't recognize it. The nature of the game is in what rules exist, how much focus is given to any of them, and how those rules are implemented. Any game with rules for character death as a result of npc actions, unless it is entirely voluntary, expects that sometimes characters will die outside of the player's control. But a lot of 5e tables don't really want that to happen to their special blorbo characters they've put time into making a build for and maybe even commissioned art of, so it's often considered bad, oppositional GMing to actually kill off characters without a player's permission. Meaning it is up to the GM to try and dance around and circumvent the game's rules to avoid the outcome the players do not want. And of course what rules a game does not have is also a pretty clear indication of what genres and storylines the game is not meant to support. If a game just straight up doesn't have any rules for the kind of story you're trying to tell, you may as well not be playing one.
I would describe my roleplaying game experiences as less of guided improv and more like the kind of roleplaying you'd see in an mmo or other rpg. People are in character, and doing what their characters would do, but within the framework of the game. Mechanical elements like classes, abilities, traits, and equipment are taken for a mixture of personal and practical reasons. The act of playing a game with numbers, a victory condition, and strategy, does not detract from the 'narrative experience' because all of those things are themselves elements of the character being played. Immersing yourself into the mechanics of the game, and of your character within it, does not take you out of the world because those mechanics are one of the primary ways you interface with that world.
As far as what the actual experience of playing a crunchy game is, I will note that 5e is not only above-average crunch but in my opinion poorly constructed in ways that bog down the table and the learning process far more than other similarly or even more crunchy games. 5e's encumbrance rules for example essentially never matter at the table and were only put in to convince old players that they were moving away from the abstractions of 4e, but they didn't want it to actually be an element that mattered so they designed it in such a way that renders the entire mechanic useless bookkeeping. The point of a game having an encumbrance system is the possibility that the players will have to make interesting and complicated decisions about what to carry, what to leave behind, and when to risk being encumbered. As a gm, a well-built game with a lot of rules for a lot of different things means that I don't have to be the one to consider how to resolve any of those things. Someone else has already decided that. And a game with long and expansive rules about specific things, leads to the kind of mechanical depth you see in other types of game, like video games and board games. Because roleplaying games are, indeed, games. A lot of the Lancer games I've ran would probably be pretty boring and repetitive in a guided improv system, while being exciting, engaging, suspenseful and challenging as a series of combats in a tactics games. And that's not because mecha can't be done well in a rules lite game, but because the experience of immersing yourself in a detailed mini-game around combat is not something that can be emulated by collaboratively writing a fight scene.
I will also say that in my experience lighter games can actually be slower and more difficult for people to learn and play, because more improvisational games rely on the players' personal skills to keep it going, while a game with a clear goal, clear means to work towards that goal, and cleanly defined mechanics for how things work and interact lifts a lot of that burden from new players. I think 5e is a notable outlier in the fact that you can read the rules several times over and still have to spend several sessions learning how to play, because the text of 5e's rules and it's culture of play are two very different things and you effectively have to be inducted into the latter.
With that said it still definitely can be much easier for some people than others to translate the text of rules into how they are used in play. Games will usually have some example section that cleanly goes through the step by step experience of how the game is played, which I often find more helpful than the actual rules text for understanding how to do it. If you can find some example actual plays online that can also help, though a lot of 'actual plays' for 5e are largely scripted spectacles that don't actually resemble how the game is realistically played.
Once you have some understanding of the basic structure of play, the rules regarding it become a lot more parsable because you have the framework to implement it into. A rule without that framework is just kind of a formless mass of words.
working on my normal game for normal people
