Retarded RPG lingo that ruins everything

[Kaelik]

Didn't know of its broad definition, as otherwise just really seemed like the fanbase would call everything a "nerf". Also part of it I suppose I didn't look at it granular enough, so didn't think things a "nerf" if the overall design was still good (this case the character is still good despite some of their features may've gotten dubbed down).

You really need to read everything I said. Nerf =/= change, nerf = change that reduces power. So they won't call everything a nerf, just things that make a champ or item weaker.

If you go to say, Shyvana right now, and you changed her passive fury gen from level 1 ult from 1 per every 1.5 seconds to 1 for every 1.500000000000000000005 seconds, that would be nerfing her passive fury gen. Just because something gets nerfed doesn't mean it is now garbage, it means it is weaker now than it was before by some amount. Something being nerfed is in fact very much not "changing it to suck dick" because the primary place where nerf is used is in relation to things that are too powerful getting changed to be (ideally) on par.

[momothefiddler]

If you go to say, Shyvana right now, and you changed her passive fury gen from level 1 ult from 1 per every 1.5 seconds to 1 for every 1.500000000000000000005 seconds, that would be nerfing her passive fury gen. Just because something gets nerfed doesn't mean it is now garbage, it means it is weaker now than it was before by some amount. Something being nerfed is in fact very much not "changing it to suck dick" because the primary place where nerf is used is in relation to things that are too powerful getting changed to be (ideally) on par.

It's an understandable mistake, though, because people who use the term most loudly are whining about how going from 1/1.5s to 1/1.500000000000000000005s is changing it to suck dick, i.e., it has a negative connotation.

[hogarth]

Since people have already leaped on "toon" meaning "character", I'll add my vote for "God Wizard". A wizard who casts good spells and avoids casting shitty spells doesn't require a specific name, let alone one which implies deification.

[Blade]

For me the problem isn't with the terms, but with the concepts (at least for some of them). I don't remember many fiction works where a member of the team is there to get all the enemies to hit him, while another is there to do the maximum amount of damage to the enemies.

There can be cases where there will be one hero who's very tough/armored or who's got a very strong shield and says "stand back everyone" when under heavy fire. But he won't spend all the fights getting all the enemies to attack him instead of the others and waiting for his friends to do the killing.

[souran]

For me the problem isn't with the terms, but with the concepts (at least for some of them). I don't remember many fiction works where a member of the team is there to get all the enemies to hit him, while another is there to do the maximum amount of damage to the enemies.

There can be cases where there will be one hero who's very tough/armored or who's got a very strong shield and says "stand back everyone" when under heavy fire. But he won't spend all the fights getting all the enemies to attack him instead of the others and waiting for his friends to do the killing.

Group RPGs are terrible at capturing lots of elements that are typcially essential to a genre. In lots of fantasy stories you never hear anything at all about what kind of armor people wear or it will be a very generic "he donned his mail and picked up his sword and shield" type thing.

Historically and indeed up to the current day, you wear the maximum amount of armor you can while also doing your job. The clossest thing to a real "glass cannon" are certain kinds of naval vessels where the understanding is that the only effective defense is to eliminate possible sources of counterattack before they know where you are.

Games, on the other hand, generally enforce tradoffs and while in most games trading the ability to understand the magical secrets of the universe for the ability to wear heavy armor is a bad trade long term, it is at least a listed choice with a clear purpose.

A player who builds a character with an impressive defense or array of defenses WANTS to be the target of the nasty crap. Its a perfectly viable role with a clear use. While it has basically NO analogues in fiction, it has LOTS of analogues in sports. In football the defense would indeed like to sack (kill) the quaterback (wizard) on every play (turn) but the existance of the offensive line prevents that. Additionally, they are able to do so without holding the person trying to get around them....

Specilization is literally the thing that makes teams work. It is what makes socieity work. The whole point of having a defense specialist in your 4/5 man band is so that the other 3/4 people can minimize their own defensive expendatures. If you don't like that outcome, then the solution is don't let people specilize in defense. Make armor costmetic.

[Orion]

Should be "remove thy persons." God.

[souran]

The term that bugs me is "Tank" but mostly because its bass awkards.

Tanks are not "defensive hard points." Those are FORTS. Tanks are highly mobile offensive weapons. Heck, they are not even that hard to destroy. Artiliary, planes, helicopters, even shoulder mounted weapons exist that can cripple or destroy tanks. The term portrays a childish understanding of military equipment. From a hobby with roots in the wargamming it seems like the sort of thing that should have gotten smacked down by the "old guard" long ago.

What I really wish is that people from table top community would stop losing their shit over the use of MMO terms. Having been deep into both communities I can truthfully report that if you forced table top rpg players and mmo players to play the same game the mmo players would fucking destroy the table top players.

MMO players find what works and do that. MMO players look at numbers and say "this is how it is" they don't try and argue that you can't draw conclusions from various kinds of testing. MMO players optimize ruthlessly there are no munchkins or powergamers in the MMO community. Instead that same level of scorn is leveled at players who are either unwilling or unable to become compotent or learn enough optimization to be effective.

Since I started with talking about the term tank I would like to also point out that table top players who complain about "tanking mechanics" often are too stupid to realize that said mechanics are usually the end result o the monsters behaving in exactly the way said players want the monsters to behave (i.e. get the one in the dress!).

Lets take everyones most hated babygame WOW. In wow, monsters that are attacked/activated build a table that records who has done the most damage to them and is doing said damage the fastest. They then pick that person and try to kill them. The attacks of tanks, while weaker than other players, include a secondary "fake" damage component. As opposed to monster mind control, it is entirely consistant within the context of the monsters programming it is fighting the target it believes has inflicted the most damage. Hell that is more "associated" and has more verismitude than any 3.x style "fight me" mechanic that was ever printed.

So I guess really my view would be that table top players should stop panicing over MMO terms showing up in their games and remember that table top players are the ones on the short bus.

[Aryxbez]

You really need to read everything I said. Nerf =/= change, nerf = change that reduces power. So they won't call everything a nerf, just things that make a champ or item weaker.

No, I did, I meant I was clarifying why I suppose I was thinking it a different term based on the definition otherwise. So I agreed it was to mean makes something weaker, but focusing more on the second part of "less desirable". So yeah, something can be less effective than it was before, but they can still be good and junk like that.

It's an understandable mistake, though, because people who use the term most loudly are whining about how going from 1/1.5s to 1/1.500000000000000000005s is changing it to suck dick, i.e., it has a negative connotation.

He had the right idea yeah, negative connotations is what can make the term displeasing to see through such overuse.

[Username17]

What I really wish is that people from table top community would stop losing their shit over the use of MMO terms. Having been deep into both communities I can truthfully report that if you forced table top rpg players and mmo players to play the same game the mmo players would fucking destroy the table top players.

MMO players find what works and do that. MMO players look at numbers and say "this is how it is" they don't try and argue that you can't draw conclusions from various kinds of testing. MMO players optimize ruthlessly there are no munchkins or powergamers in the MMO community. Instead that same level of scorn is leveled at players who are either unwilling or unable to become compotent or learn enough optimization to be effective.

This is a load of horseshit. MMO players are constantly whining that this or that is an "exploit." People doing legal and effective things is the cause of about 400% of all dramabombs in the MMO forumosphere.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

I propose a new term

Fluffer: one who writes fluff.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Big Bad is a corruption of the phrase 'Big Bad Evil Guy', the latter of which has existed in the TTRPG lexicon for decades. I remember seeing it on message boards back in the 90s. And BBEG is supposed to be a lighthearted parody of the concept of the denouement-on-defeat-triggering antagonist, as his role in the story is reduced to nothing but a faceless instigator. As oft tends to happen in D&D-stories.

I don't know when Big Bad started getting used without even the vague hint of irony BBEG used to have, but if I was a betting man it'd be sometime around when TvTropes got popular. Fucking TvTropes.

[souran]

This is a load of horseshit. MMO players are constantly whining that this or that is an "exploit." People doing legal and effective things is the cause of about 400% of all dramabombs in the MMO forumosphere.

-Username17

This is exactly the sort of bullshit that comes from somebody who doesn't play.

The response to a player whinning about an "exploit" is "QQ MOAR NUB."

Both the MMO community and the tabletop community are filled with and run by dicks. However, the MMO community is willing to put it out on the table to be measured. The table top community, on the ohter hand, assures you that it has the biggest one while arguing that all the methods for measurment are not in keeping with the spirit of the game...

[Koumei]

I dunno: when some exploits were found for killing certain Epic Level Bosses in Neverwinter, some players went around teaching others and saying "This is how we do it." But the methods of doing so were quickly patched out... because a whole bunch of players whined that it was a thing you could do.

Under your theory, everyone would just be using those exploits to this day.

[virgil]

This is a load of horseshit. MMO players are constantly whining that this or that is an "exploit." People doing legal and effective things is the cause of about 400% of all dramabombs in the MMO forumosphere.

This is exactly the sort of bullshit that comes from somebody who doesn't play.

As someone who has played, Frank's hardly misinformed. The drama is usually focused on X being way OP, which is absolutely a case of whining while doing legal & effective things.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

MMOs have the advantage that the designer can datamine information on stuff like the team composition on parties who kill a given boss. If it's nothing but Pun Pun killing Arthas, then that class gets a ne... throttled down until team compositions become more diverse, representing a broad spectrum of play styles. It's hard to do that kind of testing with an RPG module, since once you've completed a module successfully, you know which NPC to scry-n-die (another lame term?) to win it again.

EDIT: there's also PvP to consider. It's probably reasonable to get angry when a class matchup turns into Dan Hibiki vs Akuma, considering how freaking long it takes to level up.

[Seerow]

I dunno: when some exploits were found for killing certain Epic Level Bosses in Neverwinter, some players went around teaching others and saying "This is how we do it." But the methods of doing so were quickly patched out... because a whole bunch of players whined that it was a thing you could do.

Under your theory, everyone would just be using those exploits to this day.

In my experience, those sorts of exploits are patched not necessarily due to player complaints (fact is most MMO players are more than happy to succeed with whatever method is available, and if an exploit is deemed okay to use, the whole community will adopt it relatively quickly), but due to the developers not wanting their content to be trivialized. So you can probably compare it to a railroading DM more than anything else.

Basically it's a situation where the players say something like "Yeah we're going to climb up this wall and pelt the boss from where he can't reach because he bugs out and stands there til he dies when we do it this way" and the developers go "Okay everyone who got a kill that way? You're banned for a week and lose your acheives until you kill it legit. That bug is now fixed."

[Seerow]

This is a load of horseshit. MMO players are constantly whining that this or that is an "exploit." People doing legal and effective things is the cause of about 400% of all dramabombs in the MMO forumosphere.

This is exactly the sort of bullshit that comes from somebody who doesn't play.

As someone who has played, Frank's hardly misinformed. The drama is usually focused on X being way OP, which is absolutely a case of whining while doing legal & effective things.

Complaining about classes being OP or UP is actually something dramatically different from complaining about Exploits.

Exploits are generally one of two things: 1) Exploiting mob AI, area design, or limited use items not intended for a instanced environment to make an encounter dramatically easier This is typically more common in PVE. 2) Outright hacks that enable people to do things they should not be able to. These are more common in PVP. For example recently in WoW there's been a hack going around that lets people fly in BGs.

In either case it's a case of something being used in a way completely unintended that the developers are going to fix regardless of player whining. A lot of the time far more players complain when such an exploit gets patched than when it is active.


Those are exploits. What you're talking about is class balance. remember the original point: Souran says most MMO players will tell you to suck it up and optimize correctly. And that is more or less true. If you are using suboptimal talents, badly itemized gear, not gemming/enchanting said gear, and don't know what buttons are supposed to be on your bars and are complaining about not being competitive, nobody is going to coddle that player and agree that they need buffs. They're going to point out to them everything they are doing wrong, and tell them they need to play better.

Class balance is important because while cleaning up your build, improving and optimizing your gear, and learning to play better are all things that can be expected, there is an expected level of diversity among classes and specs. Players expect every class to be viable in end game content. If there is a class with no viable specs, that is a balance issue and people will complain.

Why? Because you shouldn't need to reroll your character to another class because the game decided this patch Shamans are going to suck. Unlike in D&D if you start a new character, you're starting from level 1 and having to grind through all of the content you don't care about anymore to get back to raiding. Some people enjoy doing that and have a stable of alts so they can flavor of the month reroll every patch to whatever is on top, but most people have one or two classes they like and are happy to stay with those as long as they are competitive enough to be useful.

[souran]

Seerow has the right of it. Although, in an established MMO even class balance whinning usually results in the whiner being told "suck it up, classes are constantly retuned"

The long and short of it is: Table top players are always looking for an excuse, and if the numbers say that they are wrong they argue that the numbers are not valid. MMO players look at the numbers first and get pissed off if you do not do what the numbers say is the correct.

[souran]

I propose a new term

Fluffer: one who writes fluff.

I second this whole heartedly. kudos on the excellent double entendre as well.

[virgil]

This is exactly the sort of bullshit that comes from somebody who doesn't play.

As someone who has played, Frank's hardly misinformed. The drama is usually focused on X being way OP, which is absolutely a case of whining while doing legal & effective things.

Complaining about classes being OP or UP is actually something dramatically different from complaining about Exploits.

Frank wasn't really talking about your definition of exploit, as he clearly explained in the second half of his own sentence.

Still doesn't change things: outside of Frank's obvious hyperbolic 400% claim, I certainly see many a flamewar over whether something needs to be buffed or nerfed; which is claiming that the numbers aren't valid and need to be changed. The fact one side says QQN00B doesn't mean the drama doesn't happen or change the fact the drama is about things that are legal/effective.

[DSMatticus]

I am guessing that souran is involved in some MMO's competitive scene and has completely fucking forgotten what MMO communities actually look like, because his assessment is fucking crazy-wrong. If you get involved in a top-tier guild playing the game competitively, you'll see a lot of theorycrafting and mathhammering, because those are the people best at the game and doing all that theorycrafting and mathhammering is what made them the best at the game. Similarly, "dealing with the game as is, not as they would like it to be" is a requirement for remaining competitive. That subset of the community self-selects for the exact traits he's describing, but here's the thing - the vast majority of the community isn't actually in that subset. Instead, they're a bunch of random nobodies with ideas about how they expect the game to be and ideas about how they want the game to be, and if you are one of those people who shits all over their ideas by playing the game (semi-)optimally they will call you a "tryhard" and tell you that you're "ruining the game for everyone." And if you have never been called a tryhard for kicking someone's ass in a videogame, then you are either not playing competitively, a scrub, or so completely isolated in the upper echelons of the competitive community that you can't actually see the teeming masses from up there.

You can even get MMO GM's who think this way. Let's talk about the EQ series's Kerafyrm - Kerafyrm was a boss event intended to spawn on a server once and only once when certain conditions were met and then rampage across the server murdering people indiscriminately with impunity. So a bunch of the top guilds got together and decided they were going to spawn it and murder it. And when it looked like they were going to succeed, the GM's despawned it, and then apologized and respawned it later to give the players their fight. Of course, it has 100 times as much HP as the next strongest boss, immunity to almost every single spell in the game, and a bunch of instant kill abilities. It only died because there were a bunch of people using resurrection abilities in the background of the fight fast enough to outpace the bosses's "you die gg no re" attacks and because NPC health regen was broken at the time.

If that sounds like a bad TTRPG table, that's because it fucking is. You've got a bunch of players who hate powergamers for making the game play differently than they expect it to (and blame those players instead of the developers) and a bunch of DM's who will smack you in the face with their DMPC's penis (and then cheat to protect those DMPC's). This is not a subtle connection. It's very, very blatant. As a general rule, people get pissed off when reality differs from what they expect, and people are frequently stupid enough to get pissed off at the thing in front of them (the person exposing them to uncomfortable facts, i.e. the player) than the root cause (whatever made those uncomfortable facts true, i.e. the developer).

[Lago PARANOIA]

I am guessing that souran is involved in some MMO's competitive scene and has completely fucking forgotten what MMO communities actually look like, because his assessment is fucking crazy-wrong.

You know, I'm really darkly amused about how MMO communities get portrayed in fiction compared to the actual reality of playing in that shit. I haven't seen or played much in the way of crap like .hack or Sword Art Online or that one VG Cat comic about FFXI, but my actual experience of playing an MMO (that wasn't a text-only MUD) was like the complete opposite of what these way, way over-idealized self-advertisements said they were.

One of my roomies got so addicted to FFXI that after we graduated he outright deserted his submarine command and went into hiding with his grandmother to play more of that game. Back when I played, he gifted me a lot of money in an attempt to get me hooked and when my monk purchased top-of-the-line equipment from the AH with his gift I constantly got called a Real Money Trader in groups. And the community? Sucks to the community! I wasn't even in a linkshell and every one of my interactions past level 5 were strictly business. No making friends, no chatting about life, no real enjoyment of the process of playing the game. Just 'whoo, +100 XP, time to kill another crab for the next four hours'. If someone was unlucky enough to lag or lose hate and people got killed? Cue abusive language and rage-quits. And I'm not even getting into the actual mechanics of FFXI. Just, my entire experience was filled with backbiting, boredom, and jealousy.

[Kaelik]

I think the bottom line re: MMO's versus TTRPGs comes down to something like this:

There exist a subset of people, X who are mathhammerpowergamermunchkinmonsters, and Y who are realroleplayerstorygamerotherwords. There are approximately Z% of all gamers are X, and the rest are Y. For the most part, the proportion of MMO players and tabletop players are who are X are approximately Z%. Neither game has more of either type proportionally. Obviously some games cater more to X (3.5/WOW) and some more to Y (GoddawfulshitWorld/SecondLife).

But this is the final point. If a tabletop group that is half each, you will all spend the same amount playing the actual game, but if you have a guild that is half each, the Xs will play more and will become a dominant force in that guild. Likewise if there exists an all X group that meets in the basement of dorm building for 4 years in college, and plays there Xed up 3.5/Tome games, no one outside that group is ever effected by that in any meaningful way. But if that same group of people start an MMO guild, and dominate the auction house of an entire server for two years, lots of people are effected by that.

True story, we did both those things.

TL;DR: The proportions of each type aren't probably all that different, and if you see a difference, it is probably because powergamers in MMOs have a disproportionately high influence of the experience of other MMO players as compared to powergaming TTRPG players.

[AndreiChekov]

Add "Toon" to that list.

If by "add" toon you mean "replace the entire list with toon" I might agree.

Yes, please, replace the whole list with just Toon. After all, why even include "Tank" if you're not going to include "DPS"?

Because we don't count out turns by seconds. I have both heard and used DPT. But I normally don't abbreviate it.

Also, what do you say for skill monkey? And how can you avoid loving the sound of that? Just try saying it 4 times or so.

[OgreBattle]

In a MMO, you have to petition loudly on forums and whatever communit channels the game uses for a patch to see change.

In a tRPG, you can buy the DM a pizza to petition for change.

As for my FFXI experience, it was filled with polite people that chatted casually about various things, particularly FF games. Then every once in a while I get into a party with Japanese and we go camping in a spot North Americans don't know about and smoothly acquire oodles of exp. A sample size of one will vary wildly from one to another.