Bill, I'd just stop posting in that forum if I were you. Even skimming that one thread made me rage against that Kent guy.
Here's a list off the top of my head:
Oberoni Fallacy: Rules aren't broke because you can change them. (If I wanted to write my own rules, I wouldn't have paid $30 for a game book.)
Stormwind Fallacy: Character optimization and roleplaying are mutually exclusive. (Usually a false dichotomy put up by the "roleplay vs. rollplay" crowd.)
Page 42 Fallacy: The rules aren't incomplete because you can make your own rules. (Again, if I wanted to spend the time making my own rules, I wouldn't have plopped down my hard-earned cash to buy a book.)
Paizil Fallacy: Claiming that facts are opinions. (This is Roy's. I'm not sure if I'm putting it correctly, but it basically amounts to ignoring statistical analysis because statements like "blaster wizards are underpowered" is just, like, your opinion, man.)
Allow me to point to a delightfully rage-inducing example on the Paizo forums:
...I am not now, nor have I ever been convinced that folks on the interwebs bearing "proof" of this or that have any idea what the hell they are talking about.
There is just so much more to actual play then crunching numbers, like for instance random variable from: situation/terrain, party/encounter composition, magic items available, flavor choices, different ability score brackets, equipment choices, feat choices, multiclassing, etc...
Just because you took a specific set of circumstances and tested raw damage output under those circumstances does not prove imbalance. All it means is that if we were not rolling dice (and living purely on set outputs for the rolls), and playing in a perfectly devoid microcosm that if two characters took those exact options that this "proof" would happen every time. But it does nothing to illustrate the classes overall balance in the thousands of other imaginable gameplay scenarios.
In that vein I often find that folks who have "proof", really don't have anything but an opinion they are trying to validate by creating a specific scenario that supports their opinion, while in most cases ignoring the rest of the variables of the game altogether.
love,
malkav
Playtesting Fallacy: You have to play the game to analyze the rules. (This is one I just thought up, given the whole Paizo debacle, but it's the idea that you can't evaluate the rules without actually playing the game. Math is hard or something.)
