Online Gaming Communities (rant-ish)
Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:57 am
We're all familiar with the kind of bizarre arguments that can appear on WotC: circular logic, hothouse conclusions, (insert series here) purists, 3v!1 r0**or5, roleplaying vs rollplaying, OD&D was better, real roleplayers don't care about "balance", etcetera, etcetera.
But it's not unique to D&D. I've spent quite a few years looking for places online to talk about games other than D&D, games like GURPS, Hero, even oddities like BESM or Mekton. All in all, D&D forums still have a distinct advantage in that, while a lot of the arguments are cliches, at least there'a a variety of them.
GURPS
You would never think there were so many rocket scientists and law-enforcement, military, and ballistics experts all interested in the same small-market RPG. Nonetheless, posters on GURPS forums seem obsessed with reality simulation, especialy when it comes to bullets, guns, explosives, military vehicles, and hard-scifi physics.
A few years ago I had the privilege of talking to David Pulver in person, and I suspect that if he bothered paying attention to this he'd laugh himself to tears. At the same time, for some inexplicable reason the most recent edition of GURPS has something like 5-7 seperate damage types just for bullets....
Champions/Hero
These people just scare me. On one hand, they can't understand any way of using rules aside from examples expressly described in the voluminous main and supplemental rulebooks. They expect everyobody to interpret the rules exactly as they do.
At the same time the same people revel in loopholes in the game and brag about doing so. This kind of "I can break the rules, but you can't bend them" attitude may seem familiar from the WotC boards, but it's been my experience that Champions/Hero players take this kind of hypocrisy to a whole 'nother level.
Mekton Z
The online community for this defunct anime robot game is the living, breathing, hissing, seething emobodiment of the Oberoni Fallacy. R. Talsorian gave up on the game a decade ago, and despite the numerous flaws and potential updates suggested over the years by numerous different people, you'd be hard-put to find any online fan of the game who support any change to the game they didn't come up with themselves.
These fans also consider R. Talsorian above any criticism for dropping Mekton Z in favor or newer flash-in-the-pan products. Any sort of update or revision of the system would interfere with all the cheats/exploits they've become intimately familiar with over the years.
Me, bitter? Maybe a little. The most devoted fanbase for Mekton Z seems to consist of 30-40 regulars on the Mekton Mailing List (most fan sites mention it). Years ago I regularly posted to this list, but the hidebound loyalty to rules they regularly altered themselves, as well as the prevalence of trying to make Mekton in Battletech (entirely different styles of games), made me give up on it years ago.
WotC and other DnD forums can be really bad, but at least when jerks fall into lockstep they tend to follow a variety of different beats.
But it's not unique to D&D. I've spent quite a few years looking for places online to talk about games other than D&D, games like GURPS, Hero, even oddities like BESM or Mekton. All in all, D&D forums still have a distinct advantage in that, while a lot of the arguments are cliches, at least there'a a variety of them.
GURPS
You would never think there were so many rocket scientists and law-enforcement, military, and ballistics experts all interested in the same small-market RPG. Nonetheless, posters on GURPS forums seem obsessed with reality simulation, especialy when it comes to bullets, guns, explosives, military vehicles, and hard-scifi physics.
A few years ago I had the privilege of talking to David Pulver in person, and I suspect that if he bothered paying attention to this he'd laugh himself to tears. At the same time, for some inexplicable reason the most recent edition of GURPS has something like 5-7 seperate damage types just for bullets....
Champions/Hero
These people just scare me. On one hand, they can't understand any way of using rules aside from examples expressly described in the voluminous main and supplemental rulebooks. They expect everyobody to interpret the rules exactly as they do.
At the same time the same people revel in loopholes in the game and brag about doing so. This kind of "I can break the rules, but you can't bend them" attitude may seem familiar from the WotC boards, but it's been my experience that Champions/Hero players take this kind of hypocrisy to a whole 'nother level.
Mekton Z
The online community for this defunct anime robot game is the living, breathing, hissing, seething emobodiment of the Oberoni Fallacy. R. Talsorian gave up on the game a decade ago, and despite the numerous flaws and potential updates suggested over the years by numerous different people, you'd be hard-put to find any online fan of the game who support any change to the game they didn't come up with themselves.
These fans also consider R. Talsorian above any criticism for dropping Mekton Z in favor or newer flash-in-the-pan products. Any sort of update or revision of the system would interfere with all the cheats/exploits they've become intimately familiar with over the years.
Me, bitter? Maybe a little. The most devoted fanbase for Mekton Z seems to consist of 30-40 regulars on the Mekton Mailing List (most fan sites mention it). Years ago I regularly posted to this list, but the hidebound loyalty to rules they regularly altered themselves, as well as the prevalence of trying to make Mekton in Battletech (entirely different styles of games), made me give up on it years ago.
WotC and other DnD forums can be really bad, but at least when jerks fall into lockstep they tend to follow a variety of different beats.