...and why I am probably going to quit most of them, very soon
Well, really, because it's the same 10 or so post topics all the time. Maybe not actually 10, but that's how many fingers I have so I'll just assume it's 10 without any actual proof, as that's a number I am comfortable with and accuracy isn't strictly important for the purposes of this discussion. Maybe I am just too jaded. Really, I know should be happy that there are so many people now enthused by RPGs that they are a thriving presence on social media, buzzing with naive enthusiasm. It's just pretty wearisome seeing the same stuff come around again, and again, and again...
In no particular order, and most definitely including some unfair generalisations for which I apologise in advance:
1) "One of the things I admire most about 5e compared with older editions is..." states a thing that was also true, or possible, or included, in at least one, possibly all, earlier editions.
2) Today's post optimistically seeking affirmation that it's OK to run a GMPC, with totally predictable result of a mixture of people saying: "NOOO get thee behind Satan, you will break D&D" / "OK as long as they are just party support" / "Hey, do whatever you like it's your game" in roughly equal proportion. There'll be another one tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after.
3) "I like to run my own totally original homebrew campaign. I'm now going to ask you all for ideas."
4) "Ha ha ha here's my DM beating magical weapon of mass destruction! Ha ha ha I WIN lolz!" This bro's DM will throw it right TF out when he actually tries it at the table, if they have any sense.
4a) "Look upon my mighty character build and despair". Yawn.
5) "I never plan anything, I am way too cool. I just DM by the seat of my pants. Players....paranoid conjecture....etc" Translation: don't try anything on with this DM's NPCs, that involve game mechanics, they'll just be making up whatever they want to happen with them. Their world is peopled with Deus Ex Machinae. Because they have no stats. You created and invested many hours of play in a diplomancer because your personal fantasy is to play someone with the social skills you don't have IRL? Ah, that's too bad. The charisma dump-statted barbarian whose player makes funny one-liners is going to be your party diplomacy bunny regardless.
[I do have respect for DMs who are good at running spontaneous unplanned stuff and "funny voice" NPCs, but the rather less cool prep-heavy DM'ing style has some upsides that are rarely acknowledged: a world not driven by momentary gut reactions laden with unexamined bias. Chance favours the prepared mind. Which in turn favours fairness.]
6) Memes about Natural 20 / Natural 1 skill checks in D&D 3.5 where the real humour is in the fact that the meme maker clearly doesn't understand how skill checks work in 3.5.
7) "If you’re in my campaign don’t read ahead
.
.
."
Forget it. They'll read ahead. Well, some of them will. Trust me on this.
8) "I'm not trying to be confrontational, but I just wondered why more people don't..." cue passive/aggressive screed on theatre of the mind vs minis / hex maps vs square maps / milestone levelling vs xp / sandbox vs railroad / random stats vs point-buy / dm screen vs no screen; subtly or not-so-subtly shaming those who lack the supposed wisdom to do things the exact same way the author does.
Milestone levelling and Theatre-Of-The-Mind GMs on FB are like that stereotype of vegans that isn't really true, where they are supposedly always getting up in your face and telling you why their lifestyle choices are so superior. All those memes that are like "Lol, look Vegans....some Bacon" ought to be replaced with "Mmmm, Minis and XP are so delicious. Go on, don't you want some XP, milestone leveller? Ah, go on. You know you want it really."*
[*I am truly sorry if you are a milestone levelling GM who doesn't go on and on about the superiority of milestone levelling; maybe you could have a word with your peers for us]
9) Something something Fireball. It was a little bit funny the first time someone cracked this. Just a tiny bit. Hint: it's now the millionth time.
10) "Last night I killed a player and I feel terrible about it." You should. And now I'm phoning the police.
Well, I have carried out 'the purge', but retained a handful, just to keep a finger on the pulse.
ReplyDeleteLike everything these days, all the thinking seems infected by extremism. No one wants to actually talk anything through; rather the "X is better than Y," is confronted with "Y is better than X" and both sides chatter approval in a mindless chorus. Get people away from the platform and they seem able to understand the merits of different gaming approaches, but on the computer... it becomes binary.
ReplyDeleteSo, yes... where have all the actual conversations gone? BTW, I sometimes do milestone levelling -- but only when running a published adventure, which is a very different creature to a campaign. The artificial structure is part of the charm and we get "meta" at the table as I always preface most encounters with... "Incredibly, unbelievably, in a coincidence of unparalleled scale, you arrive the X just in time to ..." as this is the structure of all published adventures. When we are "off-book" I will place placards of a child outside of areas with the title "you must be this tall to ride," and then list a level.
I'll also run serious campaigns, like the old days, but about 50/50 with the pickup style where the intent is to talk politics, roll dice, and be silly. There are a couple of players who always get lost with intrigue and nuance -- so the group really matters.
Hi Rich - thank you, my first commenter! You must surely have picked this up from Gamegrene; I haven't cast a wide net yet for readership, just a few places. I might register with the RPG Bloggers network, which seems to be purely Twitter-based nowadays.
DeleteI re-iterate my apology for being mean to milestone levelling DM's; there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the technique per se, I might just as readily have picked on Theatre-Of-The-Mind or any of the other dichotomies that pervade the TTRP sphere. Maybe the real issue, as you say, is the febrile nature of exchanges on Facebook. Or maybe, the febrile nature of those exchanges is a reflection of societal shifts towards extremism. Maybe the one is helping to reinforce the other, confirming the hypotheses proposed in the early 2000's that the Internet could be a driver of social balkanisation.
I once got into a discussion with someone in a Facebook D&D group about a variant system I use for allocating experience points (which I may blog about, at some point). This individual told me he would become physically violent if I imposed such a system on him as a player. I reassured him that the likelihood of him ever becoming a player at my table was vanishingly small, and definitely getting smaller by the moment. He then called me a 'douche' for daring to suggest that he might be a bad player.
Where did all the conversations go indeed?
Yeah, it is amazing how people can become emboldened by the separation provided by the computer. I've been playing chess online since the start of the plague, and recently had someone comment after losing to me .."Oh great, I just got beat by a moron." Perhaps he was railing against my lack of opening theory, but I was shocked that someone was so emboldened as to make such a statement. I fought down my immediate and visceral response, and simply blocked and reported him; but I was taken aback by the hostility.
ReplyDeleteI'm continually surprised by people who react "against" a play style or an idea out as a reaction rather than understanding the context around it.
Don't feel bad for criticising milestone levelling. It is a worthy target of critique. You tend to play sustained campaigns; and in that context it adds and abstraction upon an abstraction. Only through the context "story progression" does it find a shred of redeemable merit.
It is funny how social media has made us at once so sensitive at also so intractable. To me the lure of these platforms is to find different ideas, and to engage in worthwhile debate. Now, if I can just play nice and not get banned for calling people "stupid Brits." I was actually quite offended that Facebook could interpret an obviously ironic comment as hate speech. I even asked for a human to review it.. who came to the conclusion that it should be banned. What kind of semi-literate monkey thinks that... "oh, there you go carefully defining terms and parsing nuance, stupid Brits!" is anything other a back-hand at-a-boy.
Yes, so I'll keep checking in here and hopefully we can find some meaningful ideas to argue about.