The Gaming Den

So, I started posting ... on some places... to possibly help with rules arbitration here and there.

I generally felt good about it the first few days. There seems to be some pretty cool heads prevailing in many situations.

Today I have seen some neck beard flashing, though... and I have to commend the majority of you guys who belong to other forums and regularly debate these people. I just want to drop into Dennizen mode, but that would be inappropriate and probably get me banned.

TL;DR : My hat off to those of you who don't immediately start flaming the shit out of these fuckwits out there.

So you're doing what?

Wiseman wrote: So you're doing what?

Trying to keep my temper in check.

At the same time realizing the self control Frank, DeadDM and many others have shown in the face of "the others" out there.

//

Yeah I've learned it is basically impossible for me to survive more than a few pages of the passive aggressive swiping, feigned politeness, and rampant repetition of factually incorrect memes that passes for dialogue anywhere else.

There are even some people here who post on places like the RPG site and argue for dozens of pages about issues that can be provable by casual observation. I don't know how they do it but they do.

ubernoob wrote:I've gone full denizen and gotten myself banhammered at a number of places. Their loss.

Haha, exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

Especially because I can see the other side of the argument, just didn't like the guy's approach. I don't handle elitism well.

Oh well!

Is linking to an ongoing grognard war against the rules? I love rage threads and bang your head against a brick wall stories, they make me laugh in my mild sadism.

Yea, directly linking to threads is against policy.
You can give general descriptions of what to search for, though. xD

I was more asking, you seemed like you had something horrible to share. Also what site is the rpg site ya'll keep referencing? I've googled it a few times and keep getting new sites every time I'm losing hope on how real it is.

I'm pretty sure most people here actually *do* go at least partially into Denizen mode and then get banned. Getting banned from the WotC boards was practically a badge of honour back in the day (when it was just 3.5 even, the one we liked), and I'm pretty sure people have been banned from enworld, rpgsite (or whatever it's called), gitp, privateparts press... and if GW actually were tech-savvie enough to have a forum, I can guarantee you I'd be banned from there. As-is, I just don't engage in those pointless arguments elsewhere because I get too worked up and angry about it, that's the only reason I have no bans to my name.

I mean other than temporary bans from 4chan's /tg/ for allegedly posting NSFW content, obviously.

I almost caught a banhammer over at Boardgamegeek.com for going full on Frank style drunken review of an opinion essay. By the end of that thread the author of the opinion piece had threatened my life twice (which was awesome, because he was basically threatening to stand outside an airport and beat up every person that came out until he got to me, which I find hilariously funny), the admins basically said "You're in trouble, but goddamn it was funny so you're not in *that* much trouble", and to this day it remains the single most popular thing I've ever posted over there.

Sometimes going full Dennizen is just something that has to be done.

"The rpg site" is often here: http://www.therpgsite.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2

(I think links to other sites generally are within the rules, just not "go look at this dumb thread." I'm certain I will be corrected if incorrect.)

RedstoneOrc wrote:I was more asking, you seemed like you had something horrible to share. Also what site is the rpg site ya'll keep referencing? I've googled it a few times and keep getting new sites every time I'm losing hope on how real it is.

Yea, I stupidly invoked RAI to back up my literal reading of a trait interaction with a skill and ACP.

It's not all that hilarious, just personally frustrating. I thought I had honed my debate skills a bit better.

Just google "Armor penalty trait", it's the first link on my results.

codeGlaze wrote:

Wiseman wrote: So you're doing what?

Trying to keep my temper in check.

At the same time realizing the self control Frank, DeadDM and many others have shown in the face of "the others" out there.

Have you tried appling that denner vim and vigor in a contrary fashion? Ex: when someone says a fighter ability needs to be nerfed, agree with them and state that a fighter can launch 14,400 attacks in a single 24 hour period (BEFORE iterative attacks), of COURSE a magic user can't compare to that POWER.

Ex: "Pre-eratta crane wing let a fighter block 14,400 attacks ALL DAY EVERY DAY in a 24 hour period, can Mirror Image do THAT??"

deanruel87 wrote:Yeah I've learned it is basically impossible for me to survive more than a few pages of the passive aggressive swiping, feigned politeness, and rampant repetition of factually incorrect memes that passes for dialogue anywhere else.

So much this. The idea that other places are any more civil than the Den is a lie. Civility is the thing mods show up and start banning people for once they decide a heated argument needs to end, but the actual bans are handed out on a completely arbitrary basis and have nothing to do with any standards of behavior and more to do with preserving the community status quo/echo chamber. They exist only to be abused, so why fucking have them? They're nothing but a disservice to the communities that "enforce" them.

I posted my giants on GiTP a while back, and got stupid responses like "You only have two hands! You can't make iterative attacks with a slam!" or a similar thing for thrown weapons.

I used to be sorta active on the Old Wiki, and spent lots of time refuting ratings given by folks who gave 1 out of 5 on both power and flavor for reason of "way OP".

But largely, I keep clear of other boards to avoid the temptation.

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]

Linking to the main page of another forum is fine as long as it is not accompanied by pathway directions to a specific thread (e.g. - go to tgdmb.com and then MPSIMS>You guys have some steely will saves>1st page, about 3/4 down).

[/TGFBS]

DSMatticus wrote:

deanruel87 wrote:Yeah I've learned it is basically impossible for me to survive more than a few pages of the passive aggressive swiping, feigned politeness, and rampant repetition of factually incorrect memes that passes for dialogue anywhere else.

So much this. The idea that other places are any more civil than the Den is a lie. Civility is the thing mods show up and start banning people for once they decide a heated argument needs to end, but the actual bans are handed out on a completely arbitrary basis and have nothing to do with any standards of behavior and more to do with preserving the community status quo/echo chamber. They exist only to be abused, so why fucking have them? They're nothing but a disservice to the communities that "enforce" them.

You said it better than I could... I've been banned via similar process from a forum that had nothing to do with D&D.

If you can be funny, you can get away with going neckbeardy or sperg-raging out on people. People are more willing to listen/less willing to ban you if they think you're joking and you don't technically break any rules.

If you can't, there's always /tg/.

E: The easiest thing to keep your will save high is to remember this: it's a game. It's just a fucking game. It doesn't matter what people think about it unless they are the arbiters of your particular gaming instance. Playing well is the best revenge.

Except enough people being wrong (or having differing opinions) actually does affect your games, because people in your group believe something someone said on the Internet about how you can't have both a story and mechanics in the same game, or all the designers in the world catch on to some idea that ideally you don't want players to really have a fucking clue what's going on or what the chances of success are, so every game comes out with dice pools where you roll a variable number of dice, each needing a variable target number, you need a variable number of successes, success and failure are still arbitrarily described by the MC of BEARS and you win the game if you roll a specific poker hand.

I mean, 4th Edition D&D didn't ruin my 3E games by transforming them into 4E games, but it did result in one ending (because the MC wanted to swap to 4E and do something else), in few new ones beginning (because people decided to run 4E and PF games instead), and of course, in the semi-collapse of roleplaying altogether. Not only did they cripple D&D that way, such that the 50% share of convention games dropped to "three Pathfinder Society modules, literally zero 4E games, ahahahaha", nothing else *really* picked up the slack - the closest would be Derp Heresy, which managed to get "on the table at all". Instead, the actual pool of games is smaller, and of those, most are simply systemless.

All because enough people out there are wrong. On the Internet.
Here and there in small patches, you can at least stop it from getting worse, by mocking stupid people. That's about the best you can achieve.

Those people are wrong in real life, not just wrong on the Internet. They also are allowed to run franchises in some cases.