Required Reading (silva keep out)

[Dean]

When people show up to the Den there is always a delousing period where standard Grognard beliefs need to be argued. This means that the same arguments need to be rehashed over and over again every time someone comes in to tell us how their particular brand of stock-common fallacies are actually the hidden truths that no one else has figured out.

Every time this happens I wish we had a reading list. Some cache of links and quotes that would provide a basic understanding of the most commonly misunderstood issues regarding the concepts of Balance, MTP, D&D, Roleplaying games, DMing, and RPG History. A crash course of the most fundamental concepts that need to be accepted before any rewarding conversation can be had. It would also be useful as a filter, as someone who was unwilling to do basic reading in favor of continuing to spout tired arguments would demonstrate pre-emptively that they were not arguing in good faith and not interested in the issue they are supposedly discussing.

Does anyone have recommendations for what would be in those readings? I feel like selections from Races of War, The Dungeonomicon, and Phonelobsters "The DM is Not God" would be good inclusions. Also possibly Lago's Monk story.

[Schleiermacher]

I don't think that would have any particularly beneficial effect. It seems very likely to create an echo chamber.

Besides, from what I've seen most newbies (and I include myself among their number) are either pretty reasonable and quick to learn, or incorrigibly unreasonable anyway.

[Wiseman]

The people who can't be reasoned with are thankfully few, and easy to just put on ignore if you want to.

[Dean]

I don't think that would have any particularly beneficial effect. It seems very likely to create an echo chamber.

I think you can have sets of basic assumptions without becoming Airstrip One. That's how any body of knowledge works. I would wager that Kaelik, Lago, Frank, and Phonelobster all agree with the broad points of Phonelobsters "The DM is not God" manifesto. This does not mean that Kaelik, Lago, Frank, and Phonelobster will never disagree or argue points of disagreement and it's demonstrably true that that does occur frequently.

Agreement on rationally argued and demonstrated viewpoints doesn't inhibit intelligent conversation it is a requirement for it. If two astronomers sit down to discuss manned missions to mars the quality of the conversation will not be improved if one of them is a flat-earther.

[Krusk]

Dean I think your signature really sums the gist of it up.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

I think you can have sets of basic assumptions without becoming Airstrip One. That's how any body of knowledge works. I would wager that Kaelik, Lago, Frank, and Phonelobster all agree with the broad points of Phonelobsters "The DM is not God" manifesto. This does not mean that Kaelik, Lago, Frank, and Phonelobster will never disagree or argue points of disagreement and it's demonstrably true that that does occur frequently.

Agreement on rationally argued and demonstrated viewpoints doesn't inhibit intelligent conversation it is a requirement for it. If two astronomers sit down to discuss manned missions to mars the quality of the conversation will not be improved if one of them is a flat-earther.

The difference being that in one case two people are disagreeing on a solid fact and in the second its a matter of design philosophy in a type of game which is meant to be tailored and modified to best suit the people you play with. I ran into this problem a while back on a little board called History, Politics and Current Affairs, which started off with a core of people, some ex cia, military, centered around a former nuclear and naval defense advisor. The problem was that as time went on things never changed and as the people at the core showed their knowledge, they began to be treated by the regulars who stayed as the word of God. Great when it came to knowing hard data regarding the capabilities of a third world military, shite when it actually came time to argue over what was the best course of action regarding said military.

As one of said new people in need of "delousing" as you say, I'm quite happy to read the opinions of said people and I do consider their input when deciding what I find to be a good opinion, but to ask me to take them as word of God and necessary foundations for a reasonable debate is to basically neuter the entire point of a discussion forum. That and the last thing the RPG world needs in general is more adherence to a certain line of thought, its already inaccessible enough as it is. Seriously, is there another form of media with a fanbase as hostile to newcomers as TTRPG's? I've tried to get new people into the genre over the years and maybe its just the gaming groups in my respective areas (Tuscaloosa, Boston University and St. Louis) but there's always some dick at the table lambasting them for not knowing the ins and outs of a system they were encountering for the first time. The closest thing I can find is maybe Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth and other MOBA games.

That and I'd have to unignore phonelobster, which I kinda don't want to have to do on the principle that recreational time on the internet is best spent doing things I like and not reading through massive blocks of glurge to find the nugget of decent information Frank is going to post anyway in a less repulsive manner. Which sucks, because the article on social mechanics is really freaking good.

[codeGlaze]

MMOs can be on par with MOBAs. Similar crowd I think.

An FAQ / KB could be potentially awesome for TGD, assuming it's put together well.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

MMOs can be on par with MOBAs. Similar crowd I think.

An FAQ / KB could be potentially awesome for TGD, assuming it's put together well.

I think it's maybe because they rely on group action, so a person who doesn't know the game drags down the group. Problem is that MMO's and MOBA's are online so you are more exposed to them and can find other groups to play with a bit easier.

I'd actually love a "best of" list of articles, sort of what there is already going with the tome collection thread. FAQ's would be nice as long as the questions aren't Q- "I don't play the game the same way you do, am I wrong?" A-"YES AND YOU ARE A HORRIBLE HUMAN BEING TOO! TONS OF GRATUITOUS SWEARING!!!111!!".

[Mistborn]

I'b be a big supporter of a required reading list for. As far as most important point to be drilled in newcomers heads it would probly be this post by Frank in the MTP. Original content thread (which I'm fond of quoteing.

MTP is usually used in the context of "that's just MTP". Magical Teaparty is the first RPG element. It's free. And we can use it to mind caulk anything. That's not revolutionary, and the results aren't predictable.

So when someone says they have a cool system of handling something, and that "system" is MTP, it would not be unusual at all for someone on the Den to say "That's just MTP." And even though tone doesn't carry over text on the interwebs terribly well, I want to assure you that the sentence would be absolutely dripping with scorn. But it wouldn't be dismissive and contemptuous because MTP is inherently bad, it would be such because the delivered product would be literally the equal of what a five year old could do.

If a five year old does a stick figure in crayon, it is charming and goes on the fridge. If a grown man does one and asks why I don't want it on my fridge, I don't think that needs a reasoned response. It deserves a dismissive and cruel comment. And I am sure that it would get one.

But what MTP is, fundamentally, is worse than every single other rule in your game. At least, it fucking better be. Because MTP is free and takes up zero space. So absolutely any rule you write that isn't better than MTP is something you should cut in editing. Which doesn't mean MTP is "bad" or that it doesn't have a place. It just means that every single rule you include in your game is supposed to be better than MTP.

-Username17

I can't thing of a better Den 101 post than that one.

[OgreBattle]

All of the introductory and descriptive text in TOME projects works. Like how Races of War talks about why current warrior classes are balls

[fectin]

So start indexing various points you think are especially apt, so it's easy to link them.

If you you want it done, do it.

[Dean]

The difference being that in one case two people are disagreeing on a solid fact and in the second its a matter of design philosophy in a type of game which is meant to be tailored and modified to best suit the people you play with.

I mean this in the nicest possible way: Fuck your relativism bullshit. All values are relative ok? Murder is not objectively bad and Beethoven's Pathetique is not objectively good and saying so is NOT INTERESTING.

The moment something is at all subjective people throw up there hands and declare everything equal. That's bullshit. If we ask a thousand people to listen and rank 5 songs from best to worst and 4 of them are from me and the 10th is Lennon's "Imagine" I'll bet there will be a landslide winner. Imagine is a beautiful song and just because there isn't an objective metric for it being "More Song" than mine it doesn't mean they are equal. The fact that human beings use subjective measurements for things they like doesn't mean we can't discuss what they like and how to improve it. Relativism is not an excuse for failure and ignorance. When Zak S failed to design rules that any human would have found within acceptable standards and then declared victory because relativism means that someone somewhere could potentially have wanted his shitty rules he wasn't finding a secret genius loophole. He was shitting on the conversation and indeed anyone's ability to have any meaningful conversation about anything. Just because subjective measurements are being used doesn't make my shitty songs equal to Imagine and Zak's shitty rules aren't equal to good ones.

The really intolerable thing about this new relativism defense is not just that it's a cowardly way to avoid accepting faults when they are demonstrated but also that it is thoroughly dishonest. When Silva shills for MTP heavy games he isn't saying they are immeasurable and thus equal he is stating they are better. Zak S didn't advertise his leet MTP skills as separate but equal he said they were better. All of this relativism bullshit ONLY comes out on the last legs of a lost argument. When their positions have been so thoroughly annihilated that declaring total absence of all values is the closest they can manage to a victory.

It's bullshit and you should stop saying or thinking it as fast as possible. Not everyone is the same or likes identical things. What-the-fuck-ever. If you show a thousand people a thousand paintings they will still GENERALLY like similar ones so lets focus on how to make more Starry Nights and less piss stains on paper.

Finally this..

I'm quite happy to read the opinions of said people and I do consider their input when deciding what I find to be a good opinion, but to ask me to take them as word of God and necessary foundations for a reasonable debate is to basically neuter the entire point of a discussion forum.

No one wants you to swallow the kool-aid and listen to Dear Leader. Expecting you to have a basic foundation of learning in a field before you argue in it is not demanding fealty it is requesting intellectual honesty. If you found a group of Psychoanalysts and began to tell them what you thought was REALLY happening in their field you would be expected to at least have read a LITTLE Freud before you started.

[codeGlaze]

So start indexing various points you think are especially apt, so it's easy to link them.

If you you want it done, do it.

Here's a wiki for you crazy bastards, have at it*.

I'm happy to field any questions you may have in getting started.

* Pretty sure you need an account to interact with it. Other than that, it should be open to the public.

[TheFlatline]

MMOs can be on par with MOBAs. Similar crowd I think.

An FAQ / KB could be potentially awesome for TGD, assuming it's put together well.

I think it's maybe because they rely on group action, so a person who doesn't know the game drags down the group. Problem is that MMO's and MOBA's are online so you are more exposed to them and can find other groups to play with a bit easier.

I do believe that if you could physically kill someone over the internet then like half of the DOTA2 players would be on death row for multiple grisly murders.

[OgreBattle]

I save the stuff I read on th' Den that stands out as being helpful advice. Like on "Math that Just Works":

So when 4e came down the pipe, one of the things they promised that the math would "just work". And of course, we now know that was a lie, but it was a good lie, because it turned out to be what a lot of people wanted to hear. Because frankly, doing the math to check to see whether a particular giant spider is going to eat the party or get taken down is hard. And it's also time consuming, and not really what most DMs want to do. What they really want is to be able to grab a monster from the monster book and use it as-is according to the level guidelines and know that the PCs are going to have a kind of tough time and still come out on top. And that in turn gives Mister Cavern more time to worry about shit like NPC personalities, maps, backstory, clues, and world interaction. And that's good, because that other stuff is really important and the game can't necessarily help Mister Cavern deal with it, save by freeing up their time spent on other stuff.

Now, unfortunately your system has to be used by actual humans, and humans kind of suck at arithmetic and risk assessment. The average human simply stalls out when asked to do repeated math functions - even if they are simple addition. And players will be straight up confused when their character doesn't live through something that they had a 90% chance of living through... even after attempting it ten times in a row. So with that in mind, here are some math don'ts:
Don't use fractions. I once had this alternate save system where people added 2/5 or 3/5 to their saves each level so that good and bad save progressions would add up - it was mathematically kind of pretty but it was a complete cluster fuck. As Mister Cavern I had to redo everyone's save bonuses every level. People just couldn't wrap their heads around adding .4s to things at all. So I don't give a fuck how nice the math comes out adding some kind of fraction to things, just don't do it. Whole numbers only unless you want players to look at you like lost lambs every time they have to interact with the numbers.

Always use linear addition. For various reasons it is sometimes necessary to have a big bonus at the beginning of a progression and then a more measured bonus after that. It may be tempting to add these bonuses in some kind of logarithmic fashion or to have bonuses add up to arbitrary values that are then cross referenced to a table or to add half of subsequent bonuses or whatever. Do not succumb to this temptation, because that kind of shit paralyzes people. Players have enough problems adding 4 and 3, the moment you ask them to add 5 and half of 4 they are drooling vegetables.

Don't let numbers get too large. It is a fact of mathematics that numbers raised to an exponent have the same relation as numbers that are lowered by the same exponent. That you could have perfectly identical mathematical relationships between levels by constantly raising things to the same exponent. And that shit works just fine in a computer game. But humans lose track of numbers when they get big. Dong repeated subtraction from a 3 digit number is hard for people, and doing repeated subtraction from a 4 digit number might as well be pushing Sisyphus's rock. Sometime try watching a Mister Cavern deal with an epic level Solo against a group of PCs, it's hilarious, yet also faintly sad.


But while that is fascinating in its way, it merely shaves an infinite number of possible numeric progressions off of an even larger infinite number of possible numeric progressions. To get farther, one has to make positive assertions as well as negative one. Here are some:
The numbers have to start large enough that they can get smaller. Player characters can't really start in the AD&D "single hit die" crowd, because it is sometimes game mechanically relevant for there to be children or cats. Basically this means that a first level character who begins life with less than 10 hit points or so feels ridiculous in the face of potential hazards that are supposed to be substantially weaker than they are (like familiars or poisonous snakes).

Numbers actually shouldn't diverge very much as levels continue to rise. This is not to say that an 8th level character has to take shit from a 4th level character, but that two 8th level rogues need to have fairly similar abilities with lock opening for an "8th level lock" to have much meaning.

Numbers should be pretty tight at 1st level too. The entire RNG is only 20 points long, so the days of a Halfling Rogue getting +5 for Dex, +5 for Skill Training, +2 for Racial Bonus and +3 for Skill Focus at 1st level while a Dwarven Fighter gets a -1 Dex modifier to the same task really has to end. Any task that players within the same party are expected to all perform, need to be relatively tight in total bonus one to another.

Any ability gained at any level needs to be competitive at the level they have it. Which in turn means that abilities need to either go obsolete or stay numerically competitive in a predictable fashion.

And finally, characters need to be different one from another. Despite the fact that them diverging much is what makes the game fall apart and the math stop "just working" - it is precisely the existence of the difference at all that makes one character feel different from another. Players seriously do want their characters to have a different Sneaking bonus than another character.


That's something of a tall order actually, although there are still infinite numbers of potential things that could fit that.

But there's another thing about level appropriate challenges that is only tangentially about the math. People fucking hate it when you tell them that a Level 8 character should be climbing a DC 23 wall. They have no problem at all being told that an Ice Wall is DC 23 Wall and is appropriate for an 8th level character. The 4e difficulty system would have offended people even if it had provided usable DCs, simply because the presentation of those DCs was offensive. Difficulties need to be task oriented rather than level oriented or no tasks you compete will ever feel at all meaningful.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

doubles

[TheFlatline]

No one wants you to swallow the kool-aid and listen to Dear Leader. Expecting you to have a basic foundation of learning in a field before you argue in it is not demanding fealty it is requesting intellectual honesty. If you found a group of Psychoanalysts and began to tell them what you thought was REALLY happening in their field you would be expected to at least have read a LITTLE Freud before you started.

I wouldn't mind a sticky at the top of the forum with a synopsis of 1. Discussions that have already more or less been resolved or reached consensus and 2. discussions that will, intrinsically, never be resolved, and invoking them is like summoning Cthulhu: the thread will be consumed and washed in insanity and nothing will ever be agreed on, and after 3 pages nothing will ever even get discussed.

There's also a handful of den-isms like MC instead of DM that could stand to be described. So yeah, slang, topics that have been beaten like a dead horse, and topics that summon Cthulhu might not be a bad idea.

[ubernoob]

//

[Koumei]

I tend to say MC, which leads people to assume I'm using "Master of Ceremonies" as though the DM is some hip DJ or something - but they roll with it, and there's no need to stop and have a discussion. Usually. Sometimes they ask, and I remember to introduce them to DrD+.

[Chamomile]

That MC stands for both Mister Cavern and Master of Ceremonies is a neat bit of Den culture. I think it deserves to be passed on despite the fact that you can get the basic gist of its meaning from context. Also, how many threads have we had about a glossary of Den terms? How many of them have not been stickied? MTP is one that commonly confuses people. Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit is known outside of just the Den but it couldn't hurt. And so on and so forth.

I do think having a sticky to point to so that the next time someone makes another Fighter thread we can just shout NO and point them to the sticky rather than having a 40 page clusterfuck about it.

[Koumei]

Yeah, I still see "MTP" and briefly think "My... something... Pony? Oh wait, no". As for Angel Summoner + BMX Bandit, if people know about that, it's because of That Mitchell and Webb Look. They might not realise you're actually talking about RPGs and how that sketch really is a perfect illustration of a major problem with D&D and its ilk.

[silva]

FAQ's would be nice as long as the questions aren't Q- "I don't play the game the same way you do, am I wrong?" A-"YES AND YOU ARE A HORRIBLE HUMAN BEING TOO! TONS OF GRATUITOUS SWEARING!!!111!!".

I have bad news for you: the Den dominant party has a very specific definition of what constitutes good rules based on a strong taste for D&D3e-like gamism, which is used as parameters for measuring up everything. In other words, its like Action-flick fanatics who find Citizen Kane crap cause there isnt enough car chases and boss fights. What this means is that any FAQ or article will tend to fall on the camp of "YOURE PLAYING WRONG AND ARE A STUPID HUMAN BEING !!! TONS OF GRATUITOUS SWEARING !!111!!!!.

The only reasonable person here is shadzar.

[Leress]

The only reasonable person here is shadzar.

Except for by your definition shad isn't reasonable either, since he has done both as well.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I have bad news for you: the Den dominant party has a very specific definition of what constitutes good rules based on a strong taste for D&D3e-like gamism, which is used as parameters for measuring up everything.

Apparently you haven't read the good things that get said about Munchhausen. How does your theory alter to accommodate that?

[OgreBattle]

Here's a bunch of quotes where rules lite games are discussed in a positive light.

Honestly, rules-heavy science fiction games don't have a great track record. Generally speaking they are incredibly specific and hard to adapt, incredibly borked mechanically, or both. You can do pretty well with a rules-lite, and you probably should. Munchhausen or FATE would be a good bet.

-Username17

Munchhausen is a very bare bones cooperative storytelling game. Your character sheet is just your character's name and title. You take turns telling stories, and if someone has an idea they say "That's not how I remember it..." and go off on a tangent or rewrite some of the last part of the tale. If people like the new direction, they just go from there, if not they revert, and if there's a disagreement you settle ties with rock paper scissors. It is highly recommended that you drink while playing.

And that's essentially the whole game. It tells stories in any genre and is the fastest rules litiest game that can exist. It doesn't work for players who need more structure or when two players fundamentally disagree on story tone.

-Username17

MTP is deeply disempowering on many levels, and this is just one.

I think that goes a bit far. MTP can be empowering, but only for the people making MTP declarations. Munchhausen is not a disempowering game.

That being said, having the MC go off on a paradigm shifting rant of MTP every time you roll dice is massively disempowering. You can't plan from one action to the next and your actions have no identifiable connections to the results. You might as well be playing Deal or No Deal.

-Username17

This last one is from a thread that Silva was posting in too.