The Gaming Den

Lord Mistborn threads are still alive and well this time operating under new rules. Since basically all of my major threads have degenerated into me + Kaelik and team basketweave shouting past each other, I've decided it would be more productive to just not invite them this time. Shadzar would be in the thread title but noone reads his posts anyway so he can't derail threads, silva get's a preemptive warning due to being a RPGsite transplant. I don't want to have to do this so I'd appreciate the excluded posters PM me so we can work out a way for the to be let back into my threads not keep shouting past eachother.

So I think we can all agree that culture surrounding RPGs has serious problems. Fuck the fact that even on this forum which prides itself on being the one true bastion of ration throught relating to RPGs four people need to not be allowed in these threads. This however has taught me something important. RPGs are as a general case full of terrible rules and design. This has creates a cultrure around RPGs that is equally terrible. Which given how RPGs are designed largely by promoted fanboys leads to more shitty games, like an some kind of ouroboros of ruing RPGs for everyone.

The problems within the RPG community can be (mis)characterized by me as being maladaptive in nature. Rather many of the problematic parts of RPG culture can be traced back to problems in the rules of the RPGs they play. Well that's my grand sweeping thesis anyway. Basically this is a thread in which we catalog patterns of thought and RPG we feel are damaging the hobby and suggest ways we can counteract them. Also please feel free to tell me when my self-important pronouncement are full of shit.

Possible write-ups include
Team Basketweaver
CharOpjectivists (think Roy or me when I first started posting)
Tarnowisk (because seriously fuck that guy)
4rries/4vengers
{RPG faction you don't you don't like goes here}

Team Basketweaver.

Team basketweaver's core conceit is that weather you succeed or fail/ live or die in an RPG is the sole domain of the MC. Thus if your character died it's the MCs fault, and conversely whenever your character succeeds a something it's because the MC let you. This point of view is obviously disempowering to player but the problem Team Basketweaver creates go deeper.

Their biggest problem of course is how they encourage deception and drama at the game table. Team Basketweaver are both on record as saying that since you can't have real threats the PCs you have to deceive they players into thinking that negative consequences might happen even through you know it's impossible. Team Basketweaver is on record also as being pro-dishonesty relating to the social contract. When RPG groups start what needs to happen is contradictory expectation are worked out and people all sign on to a social contract. What team basketweaver advocates is once the MC has a story they like they start fudging behind the screen or as players their social contract always contains a hidden bad things can't happen to me lest I derail the game by throwing a tantrum clause.

Now these are all problematic things and their no objective difficulty position seems to preclude ever writing a CR system that works but they have an understandable source for their complaints. D&D has a fairly high mortality rate for PC and in addition games like 3e are lousy with trap options and failure classes. The Players handbook tell you that your Monk with Spring Attack and Sword and Board Fighter are perfectly cool and acceptable characters and it is lying and played intelligently a Bone Devil will obliterate most 3e parties. It's no surprise that DMs feel comfortable lying to PCs when the books are already doing that. The preferred response of team anti-basketweaver does not help. Saying that the response to poor play is to set people character sheets on fire is the wrong answer. What we need is to have future games make it harder for uninformed players to make characters that can't compete because most players will not be informed.

Well, essentially, the big thing you have to do in order to improve CR and help uninformed players is get rid of character optimization. Nothing messes with predicting difficulty more consistently than letting people play characters you hadn't thought of.

Unfortunately, there's a large demographic of people who think that making characters is the best part of D&D, and I have to admit that having fun designing a character in an RPG system is a great way to get excited about trying it out.


Who's Tarnowisk?

He's better known as the RPGPundit he refers to players of games he doesn't like as 'the swine' and compared 3e to the Holocaust

Foxwarrior wrote:Well, essentially, the big thing you have to do in order to improve CR and help uninformed players is get rid of character optimization. Nothing messes with predicting difficulty more consistently than letting people play characters you hadn't thought of.

Optimization itself isn't a problem as long as your entire party is doing it. The actual problem is when a party comes into an adventure with disparate power levels. Encounters are either too easy because the stronger party members are carrying everyone else or the Encounters are too Hard because the weaker members are dying every session.

And the People that you have to watch out for are the dudes who will enter a game with a grossly under/over-powered character, be told that they've got to change to fit the power level of the rest of the party, and then they don't... and then they complain about how every fight is a walk in the park or a constant rape-train run all over their character's corpse.

I want to point out that Team Basketweaver as you are using it is a complete misuse of the term that has no relation to its actual definition. As far as I know, the way you're trying to use it starts with Roy showing up and saying that people should optimize or have their character sheets torn up and devoured in front of them, then shat into a flammable bag on their doorstep whenever is most convenient for the DM's bowels. And if for some reason you disagreed with Roy's position of "optimize or you don't deserve fun," it had to be because you were terrible at D&D and a basketweaver. And somehow, through the drifting nature of those threads, team basketweaver has transmuted from "people who disagree with Roy about anything ever," to "people who think D&D should take a lesson from pro-wrestling and danger should be a carefully controlled illusion."

Neither of those actually has anything to do with basketweaving in RPG's, so you need a terminology change. On the principle of go big or go home, I say Team Hitler. Same idea, but nobody will ever get confused and think it's an earnest or representative label. If for some reason that doesn't sound like the fantastic idea that it totally is to you, you could try changing the name to reference their position in some way. Something to do with the dishonesty angle, whatever.

Wrathzog: Yes, making sure the players are neither ignorant nor stubborn is an alternative solution.

If the players are good at identifying how strong characters are, though, why bother restricting PCs to a specific level? Why not say "For this campaign, you should make a character that is as strong as this level 8 Wizard"?

Lord Mistborn wrote:Team Basketweaver.

Team basketweaver's core conceit is that weather you succeed or fail/ live or die in an RPG is the sole domain of the MC. Thus if your character died it's the MCs fault, and conversely whenever your character succeeds a something it's because the MC let you. This point of view is obviously disempowering to player but the problem Team Basketweaver creates go deeper.

Their biggest problem of course is how they encourage deception and drama at the game table. Team Basketweaver are both on record as saying that since you can't have real threats the PCs you have to deceive they players into thinking that negative consequences might happen even through you know it's impossible. Team Basketweaver is on record also as being pro-dishonesty relating to the social contract. When RPG groups start what needs to happen is contradictory expectation are worked out and people all sign on to a social contract. What team basketweaver advocates is once the MC has a story they like they start fudging behind the screen or as players their social contract always contains a hidden bad things can't happen to me lest I derail the game by throwing a tantrum clause.

Now these are all problematic things and their no objective difficulty position seems to preclude ever writing a CR system that works but they have an understandable source for their complaints. D&D has a fairly high mortality rate for PC and in addition games like 3e are lousy with trap options and failure classes. The Players handbook tell you that your Monk with Spring Attack and Sword and Board Fighter are perfectly cool and acceptable characters and it is lying and played intelligently a Bone Devil will obliterate most 3e parties. It's no surprise that DMs feel comfortable lying to PCs when the books are already doing that. The preferred response of team anti-basketweaver does not help. Saying that the response to poor play is to set people character sheets on fire is the wrong answer. What we need is to have future games make it harder for uninformed players to make characters that can't compete because most players will not be informed.

As someone who can understand both sides of this disagreement, I think you're being unfair to 'team basketweaver'.

(1) Some people hate being spoilered on a movie, book, or whatever. Some don't. It really depends what they're watching/reading for. People who hate spoilers love to find out *what happens*. People who don't mind spoilers like to see *how it happens*.

Similarly, when you watch a tragedy you're supposed to know how it ends. You're frequently supposed to know or predict many of the nuances that get you from the start to that end. But the performance itself is still enjoyable to watch. (And in the case of actual stage performances, you can appreciate how a role was realized in that specific instance of the performance).

So, coming back to roleplaying, team basketweaver may well be saying that *the ending isn't what's important*, but what happens along the way to that ending. You still know you're going to get to that ending, but you can enjoy the journey even knowing that.

(2) I think team basketweaver has a very different concept of player agency than you do. You seem to be saying that agency happens at the dice - that success or failure allows players to have agency. Team basketweaver is saying agency happens *before dice*. Whether or how you engage an encounter is player agency that has nothing to do with the possibility of success or failure in that encounter. (This feeds into #1: we may know the party is going to get past Cerebus and into hell from the start, but player agency determines whether they smack him down with a sword, distract him with a steak and walk past, or send a letter ahead of time so that Satan sends a minion to the gates to let them in.)

The other place team basketweaver may be claiming player agency is where players can directly impact not only the current story, but the type of stories that can be told and the outcomes of those stories by *talking to the DM ahead of time*. Let's say I want to play the rightful heir to the kingdom, illegitimately denied his claim. I can talk my backstory over with the DM. Now, either the DM can implicitly factor this into the campaign plot (by having part of the plot involve restoring my character to the throne), or I can explicitly ask the DM to make this part of the plot (either as a player-DM discussion, or by taking actions in-character in pursuit of those aims which clues the DM in about what I want). That we end up doing that quest at all is entirely due to player agency, even if there is no chance of failure and the whole story for the actual action itself gets scripted by the DM ahead of time.

---------

Effectively, 'team basketweaver' has entirely different goals in playing than 'team death is good'. So when you criticize them for not having meaningful success or failure fighting monsters or achieving quest ends, they don't even see that as something that was desirable to have in the first place. They want to play the role of hero in a story, and the hero always wins and always gets the girl. Always. Meaningful success/failure isn't even a concept here.

Now, I don't recommend outright lying to players, but I don't think team basketweaver thinks fudging rolls behind the screen as 'lying'. Killing a character unexpectedly would be lying, because it makes a lie of the 'you're playing a hero' conceit. The GMs job for team basketweaver is to keep the story flowing smoothly so everyone can enjoy the journey and arrive at the satisfying conclusion. His job is *not* to challenge the players.

This is why gaming groups need to talk about what their goals are in playing beforehand. T:BW wants to play an entirely different game than T:DiG (Death is Good). And as long as everyone signs on to play T:BW, or everyone signs on to play T:DiG, there isn't a problem. But if one person thinks they're playing T:BW and another one thinks they're playing T:DiG, then you have a serious problem.

Foxwarrior wrote:Well, essentially, the big thing you have to do in order to improve CR and help uninformed players is get rid of character optimization customization. Nothing messes with predicting difficulty more consistently than letting people play characters you hadn't thought of.

Others allready said it. One side are the minmaxers, the other side are the minimizers.
Both don't mix well with an 'average' group.

So fixed your quote for you.

All your self-important pronouncements are full of shit.

I'm going to fall asleep now so I'll try to do this quickly.

DSMatticus is correct that you are combining your old use of that term which meant "people who can't optimize well and try to MTP everything" into the same group as your new opponent of "people who don't think winning D&D fights is a skill".

You admit D&D has a surprisingly high mortality rate which would be fine if it were a combat game. But it's not. It's a storytelling game which uses hundreds of fights in sequence to tell a story. So it is actually failing at the principle goal of the game itself if it has an arbitrary chance of removing characters from the story at random. And remember statistics do not respond to emotion or drama. If there is a 2 percent chance of death then there's a 2 percent chance. And that's worse for the game in general.

You should fix your internal conflation of your old and new concepts of team basketweaver because they are nothing alike (I mean you have K as one of them, look up Wish and Word and tell me if that's something Benoist could build), and then you should try to look at what the goals of D&D are and if having random deaths helps them in those goals, or if they require massive internal contradictions in peoples beliefs about the game to support them existing in it's current state.

Agreed with Kaelik.

Completely setting aside any actual argument about games, you are hilariously mistaken if you think this is the place to boldly announce your own insignificant, elementary realizations on gaming culture and design like they're some kind of revelatory insight with your characteristic staggering lack of self-awareness, and you are an irredeemable loser and an idiot if you think this is the place to set up a masturbatory, circle-jerking echo chamber on your pet issue by telling respected long-time members of the forum that you joined less than a year ago to stay out of your thread in the bleeding title.

Picking up your actual point again, see what squirrelloid and dean have said: D&D is not one game, it is many, parading around under one name. People who come to play one "game" of D&D will have issues if they play at the same table as someone playing a radically different "game" of D&D, as you can imagine. It's the New York Knicks vs. the Harlem Globetrotters; yes, they do the same thing in the same place, generally, but their purpose and the resulting experience are vastly different.

If WotC had any balls, they would come out and say, "This is a game about fantasy combat and logistical puzzles," or, alternatively, "This is a game about simulating heroic fantasy narratives," and stick to that, molding the rules and the presentation thereof to deliver such an experience. But at this point, WotC has too many fans to lose either way, so they will keep putting out the same chimeric mess and trust each group to figure out what's going on and get on the same page on their own, which is actively impeded every time either side starts stigmatizing the other and crying badwrongfun to stroke their juvenile egos on the internet.

DSM wrote: I think team basketweaver has a very different concept of player agency than you do.

Absolutely they do. Fuchs said that if a player wanted to play by the rules and not cheat on die rolls in the way Fuchs personally likes to cheat on die rolls, that Fuchs would personally see to it that that player was less integrated into the story by half-assing interactions with that player until he conformed to Fuchs' cheating play style or quit in disgust. Benoist said that if a player made a Priest of Ares character who happened to outfight a Fighter that he would strike that player physically and eject them from the game. These aren't weird one-off moments of hyperbole, both people stood by those generalizations through multiple threads over multiple days - that is apparently their actual positions.

Both members of team basketweaver have staked out a position in which players actually following rules in order to realize their characters in the way they want them realized is an offense that has to be punished both in and out of game. Now there is more to it than that, presumably they aren't offended by every example of a player following the god damned rules. But considering that the examples cited as being worthy of punishment were the shockingly normal sounding "rolling saving throws in the open" and "using weapons as a priest of the god of using weapons", I can't help thinking that there are in fact many such landmines of player choice that will make these guys flip the fuck out.

-Username17

I'd just like to point out how stupid this thread is to be excluding the people who disagree while attacking their position. I was one thing to tell E to fuck off because he was derailing every conversation into his own pet peeves; but we might as well start a thread "Why LM is wrong about everything (LM excluded)"

I was one of the first people to do an exclusion thread (regarding E) and I think this is bullshit censorship of an opposing view.

Had this been simply a thread about how to have a more death heavy game (or however the fuck you want to word your argument) and asked people who fundamentally opposed the gaming style to not interject the objections to the entire style, that would have been fine and I doubt K, Fuch or PL would have wasted their time.

But this is publically bitching about people while trying to curtail their response so to LM I say "go back to fucking that high horse you rode in on"

Can we please stop saying "team basketweaver" as though LM is someone who we should even slightly be taking seriously? For that matter, can we stop posting in this thread at all? I think basically every single one of K's stated positions in the difficulty thread are absurd, but that doesn't mean that an ounce of worthwhile discussion will be had by starting a thread to hate on that position and then not inviting any of its defenders. This is like when Redditors start a new subreddit dedicated solely to hating on another subreddit, and then ban everyone who comes in to argue for that subreddit's side. Sometimes pre-emptively. I struggle to find words to describe the immaturity and stupidity behind the very premise of this thread.

These discussions are pointless because diplomacy almost never works when you're screaming at one another about how stupid the other side is, it just makes your opponent get more entrenched in their shitty ideas, because they'd rather risk being wrong than lose face in front of that jerk who was mean to them.

Seriously, there will never be a middle ground when you're all so mean to each other all the time :'(

Well, and these discussions do not take into consideration the tables at which games happen.

Fuchs, is basically saying, I play with friends, and my friends want to be the stars in a Star Trek style game. They're the Bridge officers, and so even though they appear to be in danger, everyone knows when it's time for someone to die, it's going to be Lt Hansworth who got his name this session.

Frank is saying, "that's crap. When I play, I want my tactical and optimization decisions to have made a difference and that there be a 'real' chance that if I mess up, or the dice just hate me today.. then my character dies. Oh, and I spend a lot of time optimizing my character to survive streaks of bad rolls.

Lord Mistborn is saying, "Herpderp"

Everyone else seems to fall somewhere in the middle where they would rather be characters in Game of Thrones. Sure they don't want to die, but if that's how it plays out.. that can be cool too.

I just think that it's cowardly as fuck to talk about people behind their backs and don't give them a chance to defend themselves.

I mean, really, what the fucking hell?

Foxwarrior wrote:Yes, making sure the players are neither ignorant nor stubborn is an alternative solution.

Well, sure, but that is a way higher level issue than just deciding who to play games with. Like I try to do that outside of my gaming group (sidenote: I don't have friends outside of my gaming group).

If the players are good at identifying how strong characters are, though, why bother restricting PCs to a specific level? Why not say "For this campaign, you should make a character that is as strong as this level 8 Wizard"?

Because of expectations and Incomparables.
Expectations come into play because no one is going to appreciate when Bob gets X character levels "for free" because he's playing a Fighter and Incomparables come into play when your group starts trying to figure out what X is.
Now repeat for every player in the group.

FrankTrollman wrote:Both members of team basketweaver have staked out a position in which players actually following rules in order to realize their characters in the way they want them realized is an offense that has to be punished both in and out of game. Now there is more to it than that, presumably they aren't offended by every example of a player following the god damned rules. But considering that the examples cited as being worthy of punishment were the shockingly normal sounding "rolling saving throws in the open" and "using weapons as a priest of the god of using weapons", I can't help thinking that there are in fact many such landmines of player choice that will make these guys flip the fuck out.

I'd like to note that they what those people have in common is false expectations about the game rules. They have those expectations because the game has been lying to them. Is it any wonder that they would rather put their head in the sand than confront the game as it exists?

deanruel87 wrote:You admit D&D has a surprisingly high mortality rate which would be fine if it were a combat game. But it's not. It's a storytelling game which uses hundreds of fights in sequence to tell a story. So it is actually failing at the principle goal of the game itself if it has an arbitrary chance of removing characters from the story at random. And remember statistics do not respond to emotion or drama. If there is a 2 percent chance of death then there's a 2 percent chance. And that's worse for the game in general.

This is wrong. D&D is not a storytelling game, people may play it like it is but those people are wrong about the intent of the game.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I just think that it's cowardly as fuck to talk about people behind their backs and don't give them a chance to defend themselves.

I mean, really, what the fucking hell?

I know I'm being huge asshole here but there is no way we are going to be able have this conversation with them allowed in the thread. Remember that the key conceit of this thread is that groups like Team Basketweaver have legitment grivances it's just the way their acting on them is bad for the hobby. So I'm legitamately trying to understand other peoples positions here not just badmoulth them.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I just think that it's cowardly as fuck to talk about people behind their backs and don't give them a chance to defend themselves.

I mean, really, what the fucking hell?

Phone Lobster has long since passed the point where talking to him is meaningful in any way. He just intermittently spams the board with bizarre rants that blatantly lie about things people said. Nockermensch goes from thread to thread making content-free posts insulting Mistborn specifically, so I can see him being up there.

K and Fuchs do not deserve to be iced out of this thread, especially because their position is untenable. They should really be edited out of the "stay out" portion of the thread title.

-Username17

D&D has been a ROLE playing game (ie story telling game) for at least 2 decades now. 1st and 2nd edition were dubious, in that their primary focus was really more of a small scale miniatures combat game, than an actual roleplaying game. But 3rd Edition has been used to tell stories in a fantasy land for longer than you've been alive Mistborn.

Saying D&D isn't a story telling game is.. myopic and stupid.
Now, it's not a "Storyteller Game" Which is basically WhiteWolf and Ars Magica. But the fact is that most people who HATE 4e D&D hate it because it took the 'story' and 'role' out of the game, and put in boring flavorless shit in it's place.

Mistborn wrote:This is wrong. D&D is not a storytelling game, people may play it like it is but those people are wrong about the intent of the game.

[FullRetard.jpg]

Wrathzog wrote:

If the players are good at identifying how strong characters are, though, why bother restricting PCs to a specific level? Why not say "For this campaign, you should make a character that is as strong as this level 8 Wizard"?

Because of expectations and Incomparables.
Expectations come into play because no one is going to appreciate when Bob gets X character levels "for free" because he's playing a Fighter and Incomparables come into play when your group starts trying to figure out what X is.
Now repeat for every player in the group.

How can Expectations and Incomparables muck things up if you're fixing the optimization problem by requiring all players to be able to identify how strong their characters actually are? Are you saying that these people would still be mad about one player getting to play a 20th level Monk while another player is an 8th level Wizard, despite knowing that the Monk isn't really stronger?

Lord Mistborn wrote:So I'm legitamately trying to understand other peoples positions here not just badmoulth them.

How do you hope to understand someone's position without letting them explain theirselves?

Thread of the Month!