Privateer Press finally banned me and what it means to you

[Dean]

So I have been haunting the Iron Kingdoms RPG boards for a while and recently I undertook an experiment which culminated in me getting banned. Now I planned for that to occur but I learned some lessons along the way and I think as a group we can take some information away from it. So this was my plan and my story: Where I became the most hated man on a forum of idiots, accidentally become their hero, and in trying to make them hate me again learned some valuable lessons. So this is my story. Presented as a classic hero's journey. Anyone who wants to may skip my story till part 3, where I'll just TL:DR what it says about making the hobby better for all of us.

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE
So back when I did my REVIEW for the new IKRPG I started hanging around their forums to talk a few things out before writing things up here. Several threads I posted in got real ugly. My first post was in a thread where someone thought a gun called the "Quad Iron" was too powerful which is correct because the Quad Iron's special ability was to net you free attacks for every attack it landed until the gun ran out of ammo. Compared to most guns special ability of "Jack Shit" it was pretty outta line. People shot back that they were fine and balanced and there were no problems. So I posted a build that could use a series of gun bandoliers to draw, fire, and drop multiple Quad Irons in a round potentially chaining up to 16 attacks in a game where 3 attacks is considered amazing. Most of what followed was some variant of "If you did this everyone in the world would beat you up!". My favorite example was someone saying, try to follow this, that if they were my DM they would send 24 men after me and my party so that when I killed 16 of them the remaining 8 would all kill me and then my party would hate me. The flaw in that plan of course is that a party who saw that would not say "That Quad Iron was a bad idea" but "Thank God for that hero who died killing those 16 men immediately in what have otherwise been a party wiping enemy! Three cheers for Quad Irons! HUZZAH!".

TRIALS, ORDEALS, and ENEMIES
Over the next few months there were many hard fights made increasingly more difficult because arguments I made would be deleted by the mods with such regularity that I would write them first in a word file I called "Shit They'll Delete" before posting. There were many debates I would seem to disappear from as posts of mine would get deleted further and further back in a thread as some Mod or another disagreed with me. To be clear I wasn't denying the Holocaust or slinging ethnic slurs. I was just arguing against the grain. Over those hard months I learned what I'll call the Sacred Truth's of the IKRPG boards by having them smashed into me in repeatedly. These were things deemed unassailably true and no amount of argument to the contrary could prove anything except that I was an idiot for disagreeing with them even if using simple math to prove points. The 5 Sacred Truths were as follows.

1: The Setting is well defined, inalterable, and perfect.
The setting of the Warmachine world is insane. It has Voodoo alligators, radioactive dragons, Jesus, robo-necromancers, time travelling wizards, and anthropomorphic pig kings. But thread after thread would consist of these idiots screaming at anyones idea for a character that wasn't a replication of someone already in a book. An Ice Elf that knew fire magic instead of ice spells? INSANE!!! A Mechanic that had his own style of Warjack? RIDICULOUS!!! A Goblin aristocrat. IMPOSSIBLE!!! Every thread was an OP and me arguing against a horde of screaming lunatics insisting that a setting with both time travel and Vodoun alligators was too conceptually pure to allow any outside influence. It should be mentioned that in the months we argued these things Privateer Press put out books introducing 60ft tall godzilla monsters and hundred foot tall robo-krakens into the PERFECT UNALTERABLE WORLD. These idiots think Warmachine is Tolkein or some shit instead of a company shouting "Buy all our playsets and toys!"

2: There is nothing unbalanced in the book, only bad players.
Every class is perfect, every option equal. That's the line. The problem with that is when PP made their second book it had a class in it called "Thamarite Advocate" which could do EVERYTHING better than EVERYONE. Most classes have abilities like "can repair vehicles expensively" or "can cast a few spells". Thamarite was a class that could have invulnerable soul fields defending their character, chain unlimited attacks, tell the future, make magic weapons, cast every good spell, and raise the fucking dead to create unlimited necromantic armies. D&D has no equivalent to the power gap between everything else in the IKRPG and the Thamarite. It would be like if the only class that existed was Fighter, Ranger, and Monk and then Mystic Theurge came out in a splatbook. Yet people insisted that it was balanced because anyone using that foul dark magic would certainly be killed immediately....bringing me to

3: If a character is powerful everyone will kill them for no reason
I'm convinced they couldn't orgasm if they didn't say this enough. There was constant repeated declarations that any player being powerful would cause everyone around them to inexplicably come at them like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There actual argument was that if a character walked around armed or armored (like every character in every piece of art in the book) then the town guard would show up to kill them. But since the town guard mechanically suck this eventually became that every town in the Warmachine world had a suicide pact that would trigger the moment PC's entered the town. With everyone throwing themselves on the PC's blades for daring to own weapons or look genre appropriate. My frequent telling them that every nation was at war so probably didn't have to manpower to throw pointlessly at making wandering combat gods conform to unwritten dress codes met little success. Apparently Warmachine leaders fight problems like Zap Brannigan. Sending unlimted soldiers to die to a party and their robots until they short out and fall over from exhaustion.

4: Every character ever written into an Iron Kingdoms book or story is more powerful and more special than any character a player could create.
These guys suck their fictions dick so hard they could not accept even playing in the same world. They talked endlessly about how no mechanically generated character could be as powerful as the amazing Warcasters in the actual Warmachine game. The interesting thing about this claim is they never stopped saying it and this one is the most OBVIOUSLY untrue! It was actually possible to make starting characters better in EVERY way than many written Warcasters and even when I just wrote those stats out and compared the numbers my posts would either be deleted or the thread would end on that post with NO FURTHER COMMENT. And finally....

5: Doug Seacat is perfect, his heart knows only truth
On those forums a guy named Doug Seacat posts semi-regularly. He is the official fiction director for PP or something and if he wrote that wishes are kept inside cat vaginas then every PP poster would be in jail for bestiality in 24 hours. Every sentence he speaks is echoed on through the ages and whole threads will go by with posters not discussing anything to each other but just trying to shout over each other to talk to Seacat, taking the occasional break to tell him how they love his beautiful soul.

This story will continue later tonight in Part 2. Where a few misplaced words take me from the most hated man on those forums to the bell of every ball. Tune in later for Part 2 where I try to make as many Trading Places and Pretty Woman jokes as I can feasibly fit in!

[Wiseman]

So can you link me to some of the threads? Or do you no longer have access to the site at all?

Because the flamewars might make for some interesting reading.

[DSMatticus]

We don't do that 'round these parts, because links bring floods of idiots. But his forum name there is still deanruel (just without the 87), so you can google him and read to your heart's content (he's mentioned his adventures over there before at least once, so I got curious and went looking).

[Kaelik]

3: If a character is powerful everyone will kill them for no reason[/b]

I only kill people for grapes anyway.

[Dean]

Yeah, I can show some particular flame wars, should be fun. The Quad Iron thread or Healing Grenade thread are both good reads. A few of them demonstrate well the kind of total wall I was banging up against. My posts tend to be lengthy rebuttals of opposing viewpoints and the counterargument is usually ignoring me or TOTALLY unnecessary as I seem to become suddenly silent which just means my shit got deleted.

Here's how often my posts got wiped. 3 weeks AFTER my ban I was still getting messages about posts getting removed due to "inflammatory posting". 3 weeks of inactivity and they were still fighting the good fight.

[Dean]

Part 2: ORDEAL, DEATH, and REBIRTH
So after months of being this boards militant liberal munchkin reject a bizarre turn of events occurs. At some point I am arguing with a poster who is giving terrible advice to deal with players who have the gall to choose even moderately powerful classes. His advice includes making prostitutes steal all a parties gear with no rolls and making water towers that, if the PC's don't take precautions, flood the town and ruin all the PC's mecha-gear. Nowhere in the rules is water's mecha annihilating effects written about so I can't guess as to what "precautions" he expected the party to invent to combat a rule he had just invented. I argue his ideas are terrible and he responds by saying he's been a DM for decades and knows what he's doing. And honestly this gets to me a little. I personally work very hard on my studies in game design. I buy books, I read and write daily but being in my 20's I have had to get that type of "Get off my lawn" lecture from old DM's in Game Stores across the country for years while they handed me down their hack advice. So I write that his ideas are still bad and that while I don't have the length of his experience I'm still...

a game designer who spends an average of between 1 and 2 hours a day studying and working on the latest advances in game design

A phrase that I didn't put much thought into. I then go on a lengthy rant about Killer DM's, Gygax himself, the Stormwind Fallacy, and why I despise all of them. It's a who's who of things this board uniformly loves and supports and I'm declaring a hatred against all of it. Little did I know that my choice of wording would turn everything on it's head.

See the next poster did something that had never happened before. He quoted me and gave a big "Hell Yeah!" and a thumbs up. That seemed bizarre to me. Then a bunch of other people did the same all quoting or agreeing. In the days that followed almost any post I made was quoted and then given responses like "Great stuff" or "That's expert advice" Now even my vanity has limits and this was downright impossible so I got a friend and fellow poster to look at what was happening because we agreed that the 180 degree turn that had occurred in this boards attitude towards my basically identical posts was baffling. We read all my recent posts then my friend pointed out the quote above. He said, slowly, "I think.....they think....you're a Professional games designer".

And he was right. Overnight I had gone from the guy who everyone had to drown out with their Privateer Press cheers to the wonderful games designer deigning to grace them with my presence. People thanked other posters for their thoughts in our arguments "On behalf of Dean and myself!" and generally went from vocally hating me to taking the time every post to congratulate me for being so brave and handsome. My friend then had the idea to use this new found goodwill to attempt to attack the things we'd found totally unassailable. The Sacred Truth's the forum had all silently agreed on. Would their bias for my "authority" outweigh their bias for uniformity? What would these posters choose when trapped between two kinds of cowardice?

So I went back in with fervor. I declared that I could make a character better than a famous big deal character in the fiction called "Drake McBain" in every way. I said I could build a character that could "slap the cigar out of his mouth" with starting XP and refused to let people let the thread die. I attacked Doug Seacat's knowledge of the game by referencing book and page against things he'd said were true and even got him to backpeddle on an issue of spell upkeep (I should mention I have no personal problem with Doug, he seemed a good guy honestly I just didn't like the cult following), I attacked Gygax and punishing DM's regularly in what turned out to be a sticking point and the thing that would eventually get me banned and in the last days I made a thread called "Lets Tier the Classes!" in what I assumed (correctly) would be a final straw in the place where everything was equal.

All in all I had perhaps a month of goodwill and the thing that's noteworthy about that month is people agreed with me. My points didn't change, my tone didn't change but suddenly people agreed. Some people might respectfully disagree but they'd "see my point" or thank me for my advice and by in large people agreed. To say it again. People agreed with the points I'd been making all along because now I was The Game Designer. Even attacking the boards most sacred cows got only some argument and many people trying to change the subject like mommy and daddy were fighting in the kitchen. Eventually my goodwill did evaporate as I attacked everything the board held dear without ever again playing the Game Designer card. Finally I posted what would turn out to be my last post in a thread about how spells in IKRPG had insufficient descriptions. Which some people said was a positive because you could make them up and who wants lots of "rules" anyway. My last post is contained below for anyone curious.

This system's weak descriptions of spells is a blatant failing and people trying to turn a lack of clearly useful information into a strength reeks of fanboyism. The irony is the same people who in discussions of combat mechanics will dismiss you and say that how characters interact with the setting and world is all that matters will, in a thread about how spell information is too sparse to know how it interacts with anything in the world, dismiss you and say that it doesn't matter and how it's actually a strength and how everything can just be made up anyway.

Don't bother trying to chase down their argument because they do not have one. It's unfortunate but Privateer Press is famous in gaming circles for the amount of illogical fanboyism devotees express. The joke I've heard many times is "When Warmachine came out fans said it was perfect. Then they fixed the whole game now it's perfect again."

And the whole "Everything can just be made up" crowd deserves genuine derision at this point. People who spend actual money to buy books full of nothing BUT rules and turn around and say rules never matter and designers don't need to write good ones deserve mockery. They are repeating propaganda Gary Gygax put into his books because he personally could not write good rules compared to others he worked with and he was an incredibly insecure braggart. So final copy of every book he produced would have tons of pathetic back-patting and excuses about how the ability to make quality rules didn't matter and all that actually mattered was the thing he liked to do which was make up whatever he felt like while running games.

PART 3: Denouement, What it all means and the TL:DR I promised
Questions that we ask on TGD are can we make people understand that fighters need to be magic? Can we make people understand that rules should be functional and well balanced instead of jammed full of MTP? Etc. The answer I will have moving forwards is absolutely. You just have to have your name on the game's cover. I think most people are basically fascist. They will accept whatever information is given to them from on high without question and the only way to make them change their minds is to give them different information from on high. The way to make the next generation of players believe less harmful idiotic things that stem from Gygax's personal insecurities and less harmful idiotic things that stem from Mike Mearl's incapabilities is to make it so their names are not on the covers. If what we want is for people to have the player empowering beliefs we have on this forum then the way to make that happen is to have the people that populate this forum make the game books people will play with 15 years from now and to write those beliefs in those fucking books.

I wish everyone analyzed what they were told to find what's true and false. But since that doesn't happen the actual answer is you just need to tell idiots what's true and be in a position where they stop fighting your words and start fighting for them. Basically if one of our names is on the books of tomorrow then that is when people will believe the way we do.

So that's what I wanna do.

[tussock]

I love your conclusion, go you, but the argument behind it is deeply specious.


What you're describing is a result of the lack of free speech. That leads to conformity. Every time. It's not "these people are fascists", it's "these people are posting in an oppressive thought-crime state similar to that which fascists made people live in 24/7".

So you're only learning (confirmation bias ahoy) things about heavily moderated message-board fanboys from a tiny niche within a tiny niche. They've got nowhere else to go, as no one else on the planet gives two shits for talking about Iron Kingdoms. They have no choice but to agree with each other or have their right to talk about the thing at all be removed. People who deviate far from that aren't there any more, like you.

From there, they have to be fond of the designer because he never gets moderated and anyone who persistently argues with him always gets moderated. You skipped that because he agrees with a lot of what you've got to say, and the mods follow his lead, but most people can't make a good enough argument to convince Doug Seacat (or anyone else who can't already see it) that the sun is bright.

The fanboys have to love the game world because suggesting it might be bad in any way gets moderated out of existence. Sure, they loved you when they thought you were a game designer, but the mods love their game designer and so everyone is strongly conditioned to post only agreement with such folk.


I essentially only hang out in unmoderated forums because it's constant argument, demands for clarity, testing concepts to destruction, and total disregard for designers who aren't here to speak for themselves. I thought the Tomes were a bit crap in some ways, but I'm here because the people who wrote them had interesting ideas and were willing to defend them against all comers, and it turns out they did with them exactly what they set out to do, I just want different things in an RPG. So the Tomes are great, they're just not for me.


Having said all that, good luck to you. Beware that the vast majority of RPG players do not care to post on message boards, or ever think twice about anything that would be a topic of interest here. The arguments you've had simply wouldn't have traction out in the real world either way.

Hell, so far as I can tell, I'm a rare DM in that I actually use the rules when playing RPGs. Most people think games are fine because they're not even playing them, it's just turtles all the way down.

[Voss]

Wow, dean, thats a lot of text for 'Waah! Facism!' as a conclusion. Its also a pretty contemptible one, since your conclusion isn't that you want to make better games, but that you specifically want to be Mearls and Gygax. All because an insular and fairly fanatical message board population just didn't like you, except for a brief period when they gave you a taste of what being on the receiving end of cockgobbling was like.

But way to give the Den head in the end. It seems ridiculously unwarranted, but whatever.

[OgreBattle]

what was your goal on their forum, to taunt then until you get banned? Did you manage to convince anyone to your points?

[malak]

So...why should anyone care?

[Mistborn]

So Deanruel, what you're basically saying is if the Den actually writes and publishes Castles and Cocks then the gaming community will take us seriously. There's one problem with that theory. Frank is a game designer his name is on actual game books that have been published and he designed and released After Sundown, yet his ideas have basically no credibility outside the Den.

[Mask_De_H]

what was your goal on their forum, to taunt then until you get banned? Did you manage to convince anyone to your points?

To get himself off, of course.

[nockermensch]

So Deanruel, what you're basically saying is if the Den actually writes and publishes Castles and Cocks then the gaming community will take us seriously. There's one problem with that theory. Frank is a game designer his name is on actual game books that have been published and he designed and released After Sundown, yet his ideas have basically no credibility outside the Den.

See the bolded part. The gaming community at large don't take Iron Kingdoms seriously. The trick is:
1) Identify a demography you'd like to captivate.
2) Write a RPG book with high production values, aimed at that demography.
3) Hype it enough on channels that will hit your target public.
4) THEY WILL COME.
5) Have your own mini-forum where THEY will congregate and worship you.

The take home lesson on Dean's story is not that people are fascist, but that people believe in the magic of "published books with high production values". How could such a professional-looking book lie to them? I think it's seriously this simple. Of course, this spell isn't absolute, and saying bad things about them on the Internet will break the spell for some people (and after enough bad things are said, break it for most people) but the fact that 4E still have defenders to this day should be proof enough of how people buy into what's written in something professionally-made as if it was Divine Revelation.

[NineInchNall]

The take home lesson on Dean's story is not that people are fascist, but that people believe in ... How could such a professional-looking book lie to them? I think it's seriously this simple.

This is really the thing. I'm not sure deanruel's story has much bearing on this point, but it is the thing that we've all encountered on message boards. The default assumption people have is that the people writing the books are smart and know what they're talking about. Consumers tend to read gaming books in the same way they do religious texts, including the phenomenon of selective reading and ad hoc contortions of logic and language to make things work.

It's actually unusual for people to deconstruct received knowledge, whether that's in religion, pop philosophy, alternative medicine, or gaming.

[Dean]

@Tussock: I like the terrifying "It's a Good Life" vibe you give moderated environments.

So Deanruel, what you're basically saying is if the Den actually writes and publishes Castles and Cocks then the gaming community will take us seriously. There's one problem with that theory. Frank is a game designer his name is on actual game books that have been published and he designed and released After Sundown, yet his ideas have basically no credibility outside the Den.

Frank has his name on books but the only people who have copies of those books are people who already do respect his design or who buy them to write hate-reviews. I'm not saying your name has to be on any book I'm saying your name has to be on the book that idiot owns. If Frank was a Pathfinder dev he could go over there and write the same things he does now and people would agree and repeat those statements in their social circles as their thoughts.

Did you manage to convince anyone to your points?

Yes there was a definite period where people were accepting and posting the things I was saying and had been saying all along. The point was that people DID start to accept my points but the points had not altered. If Castles and Cocks had statements like "The DM's job is to enforce rules fairly and make a fun night for everyone involved not to get in power struggles with players" than people who owned it would turn on Killer DM's. NineInchNail basically has it. If people are going to read game books like almighty words of God then the only way to get those people off of bad ideas is to write our good ones in the books they worship.

since your conclusion isn't that you want to make better games, but that you specifically want to be Mearls and Gygax.

Blow me. My statement isn't that I specifically want my name to be on the title but that I want someone's name who doesn't have archaic and harmful forms of thinking.

[Username17]

The take home lesson on Dean's story is not that people are fascist, but that people believe in ... How could such a professional-looking book lie to them? I think it's seriously this simple.

Pretty much. The RPG market exhibits almost total failure of market principles. And it's not really weird that it does so. Capitalism works when consumers have perfect information, and defenders of the capitalist system claim that perfect information is a reasonable approximation. Meanwhile, RPGs are selling a product which is an emergent mathematical system which is explicitly and deliberately hidden from the user inside two hundred thousand words (or more) of text.

It's simply unreasonable to expect the public to judge RPGs based on their actual quality as games. That would require people to read hundreds of thousands of words to find the hidden functions and then work through their implications despite the fact that many are almost (or in some cases, literally) uncomputably complex.

Even the reviewing system is hopeless baroque and corrupt. Reviews are not standardized, many of the people giving the reviews are completely unqualified, and lots of them have financial associations with the product they are "reviewing." Truly, the consumer is operating in an almost complete information void - meaning that games sell almost wholly by name recognition and the prettiness of the cover.

4e D&D was a colossal failure, and it deserved to be because it was a horrible product that nobody liked. But it was still the second best selling game on the market even two years after it came out and "everyone" knew it was an unsalvageable piece of shit. Seriously: no one fucking likes it and it gets negative ratings everywhere, and it's still selling ten times as many books as games that are in the top five at the same time. That's market failure almost as total as it is possible to imagine.

The bottom line is that you need a damn budget. You need an editor and an art director. You actually can't get anywhere in this market with some great ideas and some solid writing. The market is basically incapable of identifying quality other than cover art quality.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

I remember when my gaming group discovered the internet in the 90s. People were so set on believing "published" materials, even the worst unbalanced fan-made material was accepted by default if posted on teh interenet, while anything a player from the group proposed was dismissed by default. I remember asking one member if I had to put my proposed stuff on a web page and then claim someone else had written it. Even obvious mistranslations in official books and errors were accepted blindly.

[NineInchNall]

Even the reviewing system is hopeless baroque and corrupt. Reviews are not standardized, many of the people giving the reviews are completely unqualified, and lots of them have financial associations with the product they are "reviewing." Truly, the consumer is operating in an almost complete information void - meaning that games sell almost wholly by name recognition and the prettiness of the cover.

Yep. That's my experience with SR5. If detailed and accurate information regarding it, I probably would have not bought it. But all I had to go on was A) it's Shadowrun, B) 5th > 4th, C) pretty pictures!

*sigh*

Wasted $40.

[JonSetanta]

4e D&D was a colossal failure, and it deserved to be because it was a horrible product that nobody liked.

I hate it too, but experience dealing with the rabid fanbase says otherwise.

They are out there. One of my friends even converted, I got a taste of the MMO goodness for two sessions before he stopped inviting me (probably because I kept saying combat took too long and casting "Magic Missile" every round was the only contribution I could do)

[Dogbert]

It's pretty much the same thing on all forums dedicated to a single game or publisher. I've learned to stay away from fandoms.

Fanboys ruin everything.

[Voss]

Blow me. My statement isn't that I specifically want my name to be on the title but that I want someone's name who doesn't have archaic and harmful forms of thinking.

Based on things you've posted, I'm afraid that avoiding archaic and harmful ideas isn't really in your future. And the Den in general couldn't sell water in a desert, let alone a new direction for RPGs. While folks like Frank and Ancient History have a publishing record, the direction of SR4 and for fucks sake, SR5, suggest that Catalyst & Co. wanted a further departure from rationality. WW is dead, WotC is digging a deeper hole, and then we've got crazy shit like AssWorld, and for some reason Palladium still publishes its utter crap. Archaic and Harmful pretty much seems to be the order of the day without wholesale murder of the current customer base and bringing a new one out of re-education camps.



@Dogbert, well, yeah. Fans want to love their chosen obsession. People poking holes in it isn't going to come across as helpful, no matter how much thought and logic goes into a constructive critique. Its true regardless of genre, platform or how good or bad the product actually is. Some fucker is going to latch onto it and try to shove it up everyone else's ass, whether they want it or not. We see a fair amount of that behavior within the Den, let alone outside it.

[Mask_De_H]

You really want someone to suck your dick, dean. Hand not doing it for you anymore?

Anyway, all hope is not lost. FATE Core is open source, mechanically open and (outside of expectations of the fate point economy and a good explanation of aspects), structurally tight. There's the Cortex+ system that does some things right and smaller "happening" games like Fiasco and Golden Sky Stories that cut into solid gaming ground. Even Dungeon World is a (cynical) streamlining of the actual game of D&D people played up until Rules Cyclopedia/3.0, ie, make shit up and the MC makes decisions ad-hoc.

After a point, it's not just the games that are terrible.

E: Popularity wise, though, Frank's mostly bang on. The culture was formed on not knowing how the fuck the rules were supposed to work, so why expect them to know or care now? For the vast majority of players, TTRPGs are games of Magical Tea Party with some numbery bits.

[Aryxbez]

If what we want is for people to have the player empowering beliefs we have on this forum then the way to make that happen is to have the people that populate this forum make the game books people will play with 15 years from now

So that's what I wanna do.

I actually welcome the notion of someone wanting to step up and seek to make a difference within this industry. Though I recognize as been said in this and the thread I linked, is the need for a budget, and a team to design, art presentation, and editor for the game. I myself feel I lack the discipline to want to design things, in addition to the lack of knowledge that others on this forum empirically have.

So...why should anyone care?

Because the spread of good ideas, and the destruction of bad ones is a good thing? It brings up prior notions that have been discussed, that we need to figure out a way to get a budget, and then those who have the power to make change, should do so. It'd be a waste of opportunity/talent otherwise if Budget twas no longer an issue. Your desire to seemingly perpetuate this downward spiral, contributing naught, only makes you as useless as the Mike Mearls out there.

so why expect them to know or care now?

It'd be difficult to get the grognards to the point I find them irrelevant to RPG's and its market. However, there are new players that desire to get into the hobby, and thus don't have that baggage of ignorance = superiority. For everyone else, there's MasterCard if your product flocks enough of the majority, the rest will likely soon follow.

[Heisenberg]

This thread is very amusing, but I should get back to work.

[Neurosis]

PART 3: Denouement, What it all means and the TL:DR I promised[/u][/b]
Questions that we ask on TGD are can we make people understand that fighters need to be magic? Can we make people understand that rules should be functional and well balanced instead of jammed full of MTP? Etc. The answer I will have moving forwards is absolutely. You just have to have your name on the game's cover. I think most people are basically fascist. They will accept whatever information is given to them from on high without question and the only way to make them change their minds is to give them different information from on high. The way to make the next generation of players believe less harmful idiotic things that stem from Gygax's personal insecurities and less harmful idiotic things that stem from Mike Mearl's incapabilities is to make it so their names are not on the covers. If what we want is for people to have the player empowering beliefs we have on this forum then the way to make that happen is to have the people that populate this forum make the game books people will play with 15 years from now and to write those beliefs in those fucking books.

I wish everyone analyzed what they were told to find what's true and false. But since that doesn't happen the actual answer is you just need to tell idiots what's true and be in a position where they stop fighting your words and start fighting for them. Basically if one of our names is on the books of tomorrow then that is when people will believe the way we do.

So that's what I wanna do.

Speaking as a real life, bona fide "professional" game designer (scare quotes because we don't get paid as much as doctors, or lawyers, or garbage men or janitors for that matter), this is absolutely untrue. Idiots are still going to be vile, vile idiots, no matter how many books your name is on the cover of.