The Gaming Den

So this is a forum about tabletop games. I assumed it is intended for people who like tabletop games. However, browsing the topics suggests that in fact everyone here hates almost every single tabletop game mentioned in any topic. Some games are mentioned to have some merit though the deep and all-encompassing flaws of any systems given the slightest praise are immediately mentioned by the person who gave that faint praise. Is this forum actually a support group for people who have been deeply traumatized by tabletop games and who are now seeking validation of their trauma in a group of similarly injured people?

I don't hate TTRPGs, I'm just disappointed. The genre has incredible potential as both art and game, and most of that potential is squandered by amateurish design work and an entrenched low-expectation culture. I'm here because I have found nowhere else to have candid discussions about what does and doesn't work in games without getting banned or buried by defensiveness.

For me, it's a love of TTRPGs and a knowing they can be better. Tough love.

TTRPGs sit at around 3-4% of the total hobby games market:

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Both total revenues and market share were much greater, but this ended sometime around the end of D&D 3.5 and the release of D&D 4E around 2007-2008.

The decline of TTRPGs can be chalked up to much better competition: MMORPGs, the board game renaissance, mobile games. Entertainment has grown in quality and convenience across the board. TTRPGs? Not so much.

Try playing the original Deus Ex (2000) vs. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011). The newer game isn't just prettier, the systems and UI make the old one feel clunky. Same for System Shock 2 (1999) vs. Bioshock (2007) vs. Bioshock Infinite (2013). More fun distilled out of the same concept.

Not so with TTRPGs. D&D5E has streamlined things, but its system is filled with vague or missing parts that put more strain on the GM. Other parts of the system have logic errors that produce absurd outcomes, much like bugs in a computer game. Again, more strain on the GM.

No GM, no game.

If you think TTRPGs can't be much better than they are now, why aren't they a greater share of the hobby games market? Why are their annual revenues less than a single AAA game?

TTRPGs have never been more mainstream or popular, and the biggest IP is somehow on life support, run by a skeleton crew, and total bullshit to boot.

There is a window of opportunity to go full Disneyland on the genre, get actual professional mathematicians, theater artists, psychologists, and so on, to do real analyses and recommendations, to revolutionize the whole form. But it's entirely possible that window will be missed because the industry is mired in nepotism and amateurism.

Well, I mean I'm on this board because I am shockingly ignorant about TTRPG's. Also, Darth Rabbitt is a personal IRL friend of mine and so it's his fault I'm here.

I've been here for... fuck, seven years? Jesus, that's a long time to talk about nothing. Anyway, in all that time, the only thing I've learned about all these games is that there are too many rules for them and that makes my tiny mindbrain hurt.

(By the by, it's spelt "atrocity". I'm a stickler for spelling.)

I like the D&D 3.5 homebrew here as it's usually interesting and not too fiddly. I have little experience with other games.

Table Top RPGs were making more money in absolute dollars twenty five years ago, despite that those were 1994 dollars and not 2019 dollars. White Wolf sold more dollars worth of core books at $20 a book in 1994 than they do today at $50 a book.

-Username17

I'm here to learn about games. Dunno what crawled up your ass.

I can enjoy a thing while being able to criticize its shortcomings. I in fact think that it's bad when a thing has a bunch of fans that are terribly uncritical of the content they consume.

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Dunno what crawled up your ass.

Just the standard culture shock when people find us and realize we’re not a hugbox. Most forums are absolutely smothered with rules about civility, to the point where you can’t even disagree with a thread’s OP sometimes.

I’m here because we can have a forthright conversation, and if we tell each other to suck a barrel of cocks, it gets laughed off instead of treated like a war crime.

I'm here because the other RPG discussion forums don't give me the intensity of discussion that I've become addicted to. TTRPGs aren't a dangerous addiction, but the den is.

I'm in the same boat as Foxwarrior with a little difference. I'm here because I liked the TOMEs and ended up finding a TTRPG forum to become addicted to.

This is a good place to get feedback on original game mechanics, or a good explanation of what outputs certain mechanics will give you

There's occasionally some play by post games that end in TPK's

I followed Frank and Ancient History from Dumpshock.

To the OP: Hoo boy, you're in for a fun history lesson!

The Gaming Den originated in the early Aughties as yet another gaming board, although around this time two guys named Frank Trollman and K wrote up an in-depth set of house rules known as the Tome Series meant to address the pitfalls of 3rd Edition's shortcomings while also allowing for cool material. It was quite popular, and got a lot of fans in the Character Optimization subculture.

Although CharOps existed for a long time, the D20 System with its intricate character creation rules highly encouraged this. That said system was highly unbalanced and a lot of options were traps only compounded the need for gamers who knew what they were doing, thus leading to the creation of handbooks outlining ways to make competent characters.

The Gaming Den's design philosophy was wrought from this line of thinking, but with a heavy "player empowerment" focus and a bit of a cult of personality around Frank and K. It was also heavily discouraged against the use of DM Fiat as a means of resolution, coining the phrase "Magical Tea Party" for groups who chuck out sections of the rules for improv or coming up with rulings on the spot when the answer couldn't be found in time.

In some cases the Den takes this a bit far, focusing on weird edge cases as a means of ascertaining a game's quality. There have been arguments that it's possible to create rules to discourage IRL players from being disruptive dickheads, but if /r/rpghorrorstories taught me anything rules like Kender PCs and the Lust Vice from World of Darkness don't really bring out jerk behavior such as allow already existing jerks to hide behind the veneer of "da rules."

But back to the point, I post here for a few reasons: one is that I like posting and enjoying the in-depth reviews of gaming sourcebooks, tagged OSSR (Old School Sourcebook Review) and reading peoples' reaction to mine. Another is that it's one of the few "angry critical gamer" outlets which hasn't become an alt-right chud factory as a result of contemporary culture wars. Not being a GamerGater or white supremacist isn't exactly the best bar on which to judge, but the Den overall has veered left on quite a few issues. Combined with their critical views of most games, this means that they are more cognizant of the hobby's various faults in regards to social justice issues. And finally, I guess it's because I used to hang out here a long time ago before going on a long hiatus, and came back b/c I felt like it and could serve as a bit of a balance to the more caustic critics which dominate other threads.

Stahlseele wrote:I followedstalked Frank and Ancient History from Dumpshock.

Fixed that for ya [/I]

Just teasing

As far as I know here nobody here is a sex criminal, so the assertion that folks here are more hostile than in 'other communities' is legally false!

sendaz wrote:

Stahlseele wrote:I followedstalked Frank and Ancient History from Dumpshock.

Fixed that for ya [/I]

Just teasing

I mean, it's not wrong.

The dumpshock exodus would be kinda funny if it wasn't in response to crime.

I like critical analysis of games and their design. That's pretty rare these days, and most of what's out there is god awful. The Den is one of the exceptions, so I come here to scratch that itch.

The forum would be better with a little less negativity, but it's natural given that the state of RPG design really is pretty damn trash. Still could be better if people made an effort to assume the strongest versions of the arguments they're responding to and were more willing to try exploring unusual premises. I have made a few threads now that were of the form "Assuming we do X and Y, what happens to Z?" and the responses were all about how X is a bad idea, which is pretty frustrating when I don't give a fuck about any of this individual letter shit and want to talk about permutation of letters.

Zaranthan wrote:

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Dunno what crawled up your ass.

Just the standard culture shock when people find us and realize we’re not a hugbox. Most forums are absolutely smothered with rules about civility, to the point where you can’t even disagree with a thread’s OP sometimes.

I’m here because we can have a forthright conversation, and if we tell each other to suck a barrel of cocks, it gets laughed off instead of treated like a war crime.

Keep in mind, this is also a site where if you start promoting political evils like white supremacy and the forumgoers tear you an unapologetic new asshole, the mods won't crush your critics under the guise of "civility." Yes, there are rpg forums that are straight-up neoconfederate trash, but others won't be so courageous and will quietly side with someone who just implied their personal amusement is greater than the right of your family to exist and that won't be uncivil -- but non-curse-word criticism of that post will be. This isn't the only site free from that kind of obnoxiousness, but its far-less-horrible-than-average mods are a significant issue.

One thing the OP fucks up here is that he concludes that people criticizing a thing mean they hate it. What that person fails to realize is that rpgs are really hard to make. Like, stupid hard. Failing at their creation is trivial beyond words. Worse, the rpg market is filled with uninformed consumers (no inherent shame in that, btw), grifters, IPs with more marketing money than sense, fandoms with variable degrees of honest reporting, and good-old fashion mistaken thinking. Even will you ignore people acting in bad faith, upon occasion or as a career choice, the signal-to-noise ratio in rpg culture is horrific.

I don’t praise every aspect of this site, but stripping away all cultural aspects (including hostility and personalities and other positive or negative things), what makes it useful is that the issues in the above paragraph are the starting point of discussion. That is how all rpg sites should be, not just a few, and because it’s how just a few of them are, this site gets clicks.

Not saying that the site wouldn’t deserve views if honest critique were the norm, but I subjectively believe that there are plenty of people who hit this forum, either to lurk or post, who couldn’t care less about the subculture here and just want to mathhammer a book they’ve halfway-convinced their gaming group to buy. . . and there aren’t as many other places to do that as there could be.

jt wrote:I like critical analysis of games and their design. That's pretty rare these days, and most of what's out there is god awful. The Den is one of the exceptions, so I come here to scratch that itch.

The forum would be better with a little less negativity, but it's natural given that the state of RPG design really is pretty damn trash. Still could be better if people made an effort to assume the strongest versions of the arguments they're responding to and were more willing to try exploring unusual premises. I have made a few threads now that were of the form "Assuming we do X and Y, what happens to Z?" and the responses were all about how X is a bad idea, which is pretty frustrating when I don't give a fuck about any of this individual letter shit and want to talk about permutation of letters.

This, pretty much. I get more interesting discussions from 4chan of all places, plus they cater to my goblin fetish. Sure, you get the same arguments over and over again, but really there aren't many threads here that go more than 2-3 pages that don't devolve into posters yelling arguments past each other that the other side doesn't care to read.

Why am I here? I dunno, inertia mostly? I've ragequit this board so many times that it used to be a running joke at one point.

I've only been here a bit more than 3 years, after looking up stuff about old gamebooks (Duelmaster, IIRC).

I'm more interested in the world-building and setting elements rather than rules, though those aren't seperate things.

As mentioned, this site is much more civil than most, sure there's some pointless seeming angry arguments (which often I lose track of very quickly), but no defending Nazis cause attacking them is mean or whatever.

I'm not.

OSSRs are a big "why do i read" draw. Old design analysis threads are good to reread when working on something new.

Its also a good place to post something you can link people to, that I can be reasonably sure it won't get lost/purged/deleted. Added bonus, someone will tear me a new asshole when I'm doing something dumb. And spell it out in excruciating detail. So I can actually make sense of it, instead of a broad "maybe this could be better, but overall you're the best and I love your work".

Krusk suggested some hypothetical person wrote:"maybe this could be better, but overall you're the best and I love your work"

You want offensive language, now this is the good stuff.