Orion vs. Lobster; how I think; rhetorical devices

[MGuy]

If PL were to listen to me I'd suggest he abstain from Orion's project(s) / posts going forward if he feels that the person is either not seeking criticism or has personally slighted him.

You tell me how I should respond to "Hey I'm looking for validation to not engage this person based on their identity alone" and then this thread, and a name banning, and his new "I'm angry at you because you never said that thing you totally said" bullshit.

I was I think super polite to Orion for too long on this topic considering the shit he pulled. I should have torn him a new one for the insulting "should I engage" bullshit alone. I should have utterly savaged him for the insult that is this very thread the moment it appeared. But he just got to a point a little after that I think its entirely fair to let go of the restraint.

However as justified as I feel I am with being aggressive in response to his stupid bullshit, I don't think trying to remember that Orion talked nonsense and really, REALLY cocked up basic engagement with criticism and therefore ignoring him forever is particularly helpful as a forward looking decision for anyone. I also don't think it's wrong to respond in the short term to his total insulting mishandling of criticism with at least some level of hostility.

The alternative is what? That the posters on here that are most prone to producing nonsense and least capable of dealing with criticism of it should what? Get some sort of special protection free pass forever?

Maybe the problem is that we have inadvertently given people too many tools to do that with already. Maybe this is a very good example of exactly the mechanisms by which it is a problem.

If it were me I'd just stop responding to his thread(s) in response. I'm taking you at your word and going with the idea that you don't see any value in what he's posting. Ignoring it really isn't a big deal, I'd think, if I believed he were circling the drain to nowhere. What Orion seems to be working toward is a form of analysis and hasn't gotten to a point where I think there's anything worth saying X or Y is wrong. It may just be that I don't understand what his end game looks like yet but if I thought nothing of value was being said it would join the other threads that I simply don't post in.

On the other hand if you think that there is something somewhere in what he's saying, you think you know how to say it better, 'and' you are concerned that people who are following what he's saying will be led astray then I guess I'd say you should make your own thread and do it the right way. You have convinced me of things before so if you are ahead of the game then I mean... go ahead and be a pioneer.

Assuming that I'd gotten to the point where I felt personally slighted AND felt the poster wasn't here for criticism of course.

[Sunwitch]

Like, if Sunwitch comes in and says "some individual observations seem valid, but lots of others look like nonsense, and it's not clear that there's any connection between the valid parts," I could ask her to name a couple of valid parts and see if I could justify how they're connected.

fwiw, you can start with my implication here:

like, i'm someone who prefers preconceived character advancement (i guess that's "unembedded"), the PCs as fluent and contextual actors in the setting (seemingly "embedded"), power sets that operate similarly between campaigns (seemingly "unembedded"), and serial rather than episodic campaign structure (seemingly "embedded"). i don't see the relationship between these things. and maybe i've misinterpreted what you're trying to do here, but... i'm actually not sure what it is you're trying to do in the first place.

like i certainly don't think any aspects of RPG design and play can be reasonably cordoned off from each other, but you seem to be implying a kind of underlying scale of embedded-unembedded play (as far as i can tell) that links, in this example:
- the question of how much a character's advancement and "build" should be based on campaign-specific factors rather than existing as a preconceived entity
- the question of how much a character should directly interact in and affect the campaign setting
- the question of how much a character's abilities should directly relate to the campaign at hand
- the question of how much a given "module" or "adventure" should contextualize and flow into the next

and again, these variables can relate, but not in particularly predictable ways. the first and third factors especially would seem to have direct correlations, and indeed, i tend to prefer having characters that stand on their own as a concept apart from a campaign world. in fact, when DMing, i tend to build campaigns around characters. and i can totally see how some people might want to have characters who are built for a campaign (a seafarer for a seafaring campaign for instance), but have a preconceived idea of how they're going to play out and what magic items they'll get rather than being thrown into this or that class, or conversely, people who prefer to build characters very organically but don't really associate it with the specific themes of the campaign. to flatten this into a typology of embedded-unembedded misses a lot of the nuances of what's going on in a situation like this, i think.

[PhoneLobster]

I guess I'd say you should make your own thread and do it the right way.

I think it is entirely reasonable to think an idea is stupid and yet could gain traction if protected from criticism. I feel like we could arguably label more than half the TTRPG anything communities on the internet as having issues in that regard.

I also think that a thread can contain entirely valid ideas laced through a nonsense ramble and there not to be a super effective way to spin that off into another thread focusing only on the good bits.

Go back to Orion's embedded thread. Go back to my "this should just be ideas Orion has" post. Now almost every topic I list that Orion brushes upon, often only to the degree of a bare mention, are valid topics in their own right (and pretty much only in their own right). It's a long list. It's only from about half way, it covers maybe half the topics the complete thread currently brushes past.

Which... half dozen? Topics should I spin off into a new better thread without the nonsense? Isn't just the sheer number of individual topics a problem here, nonsense wise? Even if they all got their own separate threads?

And... is it the best time to spin them off to new better threads while they are being conflated and confused in another ongoing thread?

Is the "Well then I'll make my own thread with black jack and hookers"... really the mature and productive thing to do? Or does it maybe undermine the value of the black jack and the hookers?

You can't always have a better option than just calling something stupid out for being wrong. Sometimes maybe just calling it a bad idea in it's own thread IS the better option.

[Orion]

He didn't invite me to place my criticisms of his other thread here.

I intended to; I guess I should've done so more explicitly. That was what I was getting at when I said that I thought we might get into a long back-and-forth.

You tell me how I should respond to "Hey I'm looking for validation to not engage this person based on their identity alone"

What, I'm just supposed to pretend we don't have 12 years of history? Look, PL, I think you're a smart guy. You have created some good stuff and you have frequently posted accurate and effective criticisms of other people's ideas. I would encourage anyone to take the first post you make criticizing them very seriously and to weigh those arguments carefully. But I would not generally recommend that anyone engage with you. The reasons for that are that in 12 years on this forum I do no recall witnessing a single case of your changing your mind about anything or anyone, and I do not recall a single case of your praising or endorsing anything except by saying that it happened to resemble something you've already written. I've also never seen you say you disagreed with someone and then leave it at that. I've only ever seen conversations with PhoneLobster end in one of 3 ways: the other party agreeing with you, you getting namebanned, or the death of the thread. At the time I questioned the wisdom of engaging with you in that thread, you'd made 3 posts, and although the first had some legitimate criticism, the second one just worked by treating a part as a whole, and the third one opened with a pedantic vocabulary "gotcha" that wasn't even correct. It's really hard for me to believe that it makes any difference to you what I post, going forward. If I post nonsense, you'll call it nonsense, and if I post wisdom I expect you to call that nonsense too. And if there's a Gaming Den in 2030 I expect you to post in every thread I'm active in about how I'm the guy who came up with that "embedding" nonsense. (Note for the pedantic: that was hyperbole) I'm not the only one who sees you this way; I was pretty surprised that MGuy expressed so much respect for you and I made this thread on the strength of his encouragement.

For fuck's sake, I only just took you off ignore a few months ago after having you on ignore for years. And I had you on ignore despite thinking you're one of the sharpest posters on The Gaming Den because you are also the most repetitive and tedious. I still remember the good old days and all your feuds with Frank. And you know what, I'll give you this: You were basically right about centaurs, and Frank was basically wrong. The thing is, I was capable of thinking Frank was wrong about one issue and still be interested in hearing what he had to say about other things. He was making threads with value and you were baiting him about centaurs and there was nothing to be gained for anyone in dragging that out. My "context" thread is the same kind of situation. You made it very clear that you think my "context" thread is nonsense. No one is in danger of getting confused about that. On the other hand, a number of people seem to enjoy reading it. The only thing you accomplish by reminding us of your opinion every time I post something is to bloat the thread and make it harder for other people to read content they enjoy. Name-banning you wasn't even my idea, it was requested by one of my readers.

[PhoneLobster]

What, I'm just supposed to pretend we don't have 12 years of history?

Well I don't. The only thing I remember about you is that yes. Orion. That's a name that there was.

I'm here contending with what you are doing and saying in the moment and you are imagining up your own one sided decades long bias to cling to that as excuses for what you are doing and saying in the moment. A bias made out of nonsense. Are you really sure I've never changed my mind really? Really I've never had anything positive to say about anything? Me using the mechanics and ideas I like... discredits them and me because I (apparently) only mention liking things I use? What? The utterly natural outcomes of every thread on the gaming den and somewhat the internet as a whole, agreement, acrimony or obscurity, are unique to me now?

Still. Nice to see some incredibly belated support, no wait, it turned into an accusation, for the whole horses inside incident. Now that I remember. But... I mean what you are going to hold a grudge against me for in the past apparently mentioning a thing that I haven't mentioned and that you actually brought up? What? Am I the one with a problem with some sort of cross thread grudges or is it you?

bloat the thread

Again. It was what a two line objection, explicitly as an alternative to an extended line by line mess. That was a danger of thread bloat? Did you want a 500 word point by point take down? Apparently not.

Ok so, short objection out. Long objection out.

What's left? I should agree with you or shut up? Because what other post wouldn't have been "bloat" at that point?

If you are adding more material that you genuinely feel somehow expands your idea and validates the former portions of it against criticism you think continued criticism of your additional material is... not needed? Irrelevant? If the criticism of the additional material is a waste of time that can only mean that the additional material is itself a waste of time. Or, that you are clutching an excuse.

You seem to clutch a lot of excuses and every last one of them seems to boil down endless variants of ad hominem "you are too mean" which is REMARKABLE considering the things you feel absolutely fine saying about me.

[MGuy]

I guess I'd say you should make your own thread and do it the right way.

I think it is entirely reasonable to think an idea is stupid and yet could gain traction if protected from criticism. I feel like we could arguably label more than half the TTRPG anything communities on the internet as having issues in that regard.

I also think that a thread can contain entirely valid ideas laced through a nonsense ramble and there not to be a super effective way to spin that off into another thread focusing only on the good bits.

Go back to Orion's embedded thread. Go back to my "this should just be ideas Orion has" post. Now almost every topic I list that Orion brushes upon, often only to the degree of a bare mention, are valid topics in their own right (and pretty much only in their own right). It's a long list. It's only from about half way, it covers maybe half the topics the complete thread currently brushes past.

Which... half dozen? Topics should I spin off into a new better thread without the nonsense? Isn't just the sheer number of individual topics a problem here, nonsense wise? Even if they all got their own separate threads?

And... is it the best time to spin them off to new better threads while they are being conflated and confused in another ongoing thread?

Is the "Well then I'll make my own thread with black jack and hookers"... really the mature and productive thing to do? Or does it maybe undermine the value of the black jack and the hookers?

You can't always have a better option than just calling something stupid out for being wrong. Sometimes maybe just calling it a bad idea in it's own thread IS the better option.

I'm not saying you shouldn't express your opinion about an idea. You did that. I'm saying that the best option for you going forward is to disengage. Others, including Orion himself, agree with you more or less. And Orion is not done developing the idea. I don't think it's actually a big ask to just wait until he's done to criticize the full product. And I only say this because you, yourself, don't think Orion is receptive to your criticism, you don't seem interested in making it more palatable for them, and you feel 'personally' slighted. Right now I don't think there's a whole idea for you to even tear down anyway so you're taking personal offense over what's just an idea in development and there doesn't seem to be any real reason for you to deal with that.

[PhoneLobster]

Others, including Orion himself, agree with you more or less.

You know. I'd talk about community standards and what not. I'm very much on a "Is THIS the standard here now?" bender and that's largely why I care about this at all. But I'm getting tired of that.

I am however fascinated that your take away somehow includes that Orion agrees with me. More, less or any other modifier aside.

[MGuy]

PL you can feel however you want to feel about where you think the community 'should' be but you have neither the power to enforce it or popular support to back you. Even when directly addressed about it you staunchly refuse to even attempt to change your rhetoric to better promote it. It feels as though you're trying to will a square peg into a round hole for reasons that are beyond me. Orion straight up said at least part of your criticisms were legitimate and if you can't take any concession as sign of success I do not understand what it is you want. If I were trying to get someone to listen to me and they told me "Well I think X part of your criticism is valid but the rest is bad for X or Y reasons" I'd note that as a win. That means they are listening to me at all and so I can probably convince them of other things. I would then try to figure out where I could sharpen my rhetoric in order to change their mind.

If I am uninterested in changing that persons mind then I would use my rhetoric in a way that would convince others. If others then tell me the same thing, that they can agree with part of my criticism but parts of it are distasteful, then I'd be convinced that my rhetoric needs to be changed if I am to effect the opinions of the audience. If I don't care about the person I'm engaged with or the audience then I'd really have to ask myself what the point of me speaking at all is. Is there something specific you are seeking? If so just be clear and upfront about exactly what you're wanting. As it stands I don't see it as a big deal to just sit back and see where things go instead of uselessly hounding Orion as they make their way to whatever endpoint.

If you're unsatisfied with what's being talked about then you could channel that energy better producing content more to your liking that people can engage with.

[Orion]

I would recommend in any future posts or restructuring that you begin with a statement of what I as a Player, DM, or game designer am supposed to do with any of this.

Good idea. Let's try "Thesis: Most people who are tinkering with 3rd-edition-style heartbreakers would be better off if they started by picking one or two core tenets of 3rd edition to explicitly reject."

I've been mostly out of the RPG-playing and RPG-design scenes for several years, but I recently started playing games at my FLGS (and then online when the pandemic hit), and even more recently started hanging out in some Discords and browsing the Den more often. A lot of people I know are apparently working on versions of D&D or D&D-like games or talking about getting a group together to do a shared D&D-style project. I could be mistaken about this because I've haven't looked closely at any of them but my assumption is that these are mostly 3e-inspired games. What I mean by that is, basically that when you have a community that plays or analyzes a system together they tend to converge over time on a set of norms, which are basically like meta-rules which they feel explain why the rules are what they are and that they use as guides to house ruling. The online 3.5 diaspora community has norms like "this is mostly a game about small group skirmish combat," "classes should be balanced against each other and maybe balanced against the game with a same game test," "mass combat happens off stage or not at all," "downtime is mostly useless, or at least doesn't grant character progression," "high-level play is mostly about doing small group skirmishes against weirder opponents in more exotic locations; building bases and ruling cities is cool but optional and probably doesn't affect your adventures much." There are some disputed norms, like "each player only gets one character; ban leadership and planar binding/ally" versus "a high level character should commnd an entourage," but overall there's a pretty robust consensus. We got to this state of affairs partly because the 3rd edition books are unusually detailed and explicit about the norms their designers were working with and partly because we've had such a long time to refine our opinions.

From what I have seen, it looks like a lot of people I know who are working on games are trying to implement very similar sets of legacy norms from 3rd edition, and that seems like a bad thing. If they mostly succeed at implementing those norms, we may end up with a bunch of games that are too similar to each other and a lot of redundant wasted effort, and even if the games are very good, they'll be very good games in a niche that's already well-supplied with games that are pretty good. On the other hand, if they don't succeed, that means they'll break norms accidentally, and breaking norms accidentally is pretty bad. Breaking a norm accidentally is much worse than doing it on purpose because you're more likely to only break the rule once, and once is the worst number of times to break a rule. When there's exactly one way to break a rule, you do have to deal with whatever problems that rule was supposed to head off, but also the one thing that breaks it becomes disruptively important. If you write in one feat that lets you earn serious gold or XP in downtime, you now have to make sure your campaign structure can cope with it, but you also get to deal with whole groups where everyone takes it and complains about the feat tax, and you also get to deal with groups where only one player takes it and it provokes conflict with the other players. The best thing you could do to improve the situation would actually be to write a half-dozen more feats that let people do useful things in downtime, which would allow the game to settle into a new equilibrium where everyone generally takes one downtime feat and different players have different ones.*

I think that if one tries to include enough cool new ideas in their D&D-like game to make it feel genuinely fresh and exciting in 2020, they're very likely to end up breaking 3e legacy norms at least a few times. And if those breaks are unplanned, they might end up breaking a few different norms one or twice each. It seems like it would be easier to stand out from the crowd and easier to make room for safer innovation to explicitly demolish one or more legacy norms from the outset and then intentionally explore the design space that you opened up.

*This is pretty much the "deep structure" that I was having so much trouble putting into words. It turns out to be just that the architecture of a system is shaped around a set of protected norms, and that sometimes seemingly-unrelated aspects of a system are actually shaped by the same norm. If you change one piece in a way that abolishes a norm, you free up everything else protecting that norm to also potentially change.

[Kaelik]

I would recommend in any future posts or restructuring that you begin with a statement of what I as a Player, DM, or game designer am supposed to do with any of this.

Good idea. Let's try "Thesis: Most people who are tinkering with 3rd-edition-style heartbreakers would be better off if they started by picking one or two core tenets of 3rd edition to explicitly reject."

Dividing all the possible aspects of the game up into two mutually contradictory categories of "embedded" and "not embedded" does not seem to be a useful way of either helping people accomplish this goal or convincing people to do this thing.

[Orion]

you seem to be implying a kind of underlying scale of embedded-unembedded play . . .

and again, these variables can relate, but not in particularly predictable ways. . . .

to flatten this into a typology of embedded-unembedded misses a lot of the nuances of what's going on in a situation like this, i think.

You definitely can't make a viable game by trying to go high-context "across the board." You do have to pick and choose some types of context-dependency to implement and others to skip over. My personal high-context pitch featured treasure-hunting, political factions, and organic character development, but it didn't feature some of the other things I've talked about like recurring antagonists with dynamic agendas, or tracking the prosperity and security of the common folk. Even if we could cram all of that into one game, we could go on inventing new types of context without limit.

Like how about ecology? You could work up an ecological model of your monster food chain and run a game where the PCs have the option to hunt the wild manticore but probably shouldn't, because it's the only thing holding the dire wolves back from overrunning the region. Or you could play around with security. A lot of D&D games treat towns, or at least certain towns, as "base" where you're safe aside from scripted events. We usually handwave most of the details of conducting financial transaction and assume fairly stable and transparent pricing. We don't usually keep explicit track of how how-profile the PCs are living and where they flash their cash. But you could run a game where the PCs do have to think carefully about these things because throwing money around in public attracts thieves and con artists and leads to normal people raising prices on them. We could make it a double-edged sword kind of thing where staying in luxury inns and throwing money around also had benefits like more chances to encounter potential patrons, more people trying to sell them magic items, or getting more trust and respect from the locals. There's also room for almost infinite variations on similar themes, too. I proposed a political system that's about currying favor with different factions to get their help, but you could just as easily have a political system that's about maintaining a balance of power between factions so they don't get out of control.

Low-context is much more of a specific thing, because you actually can go low-context across the board. In fact, I probably should have described that one as the presence of something and the alternative as the absence of something. Instead of "unembedded" vs "embedded" or "low context" vs. "high context," I maybe should've been talking about "curated" vs. "uncurated" or just "balanced" vs. "unbalanced." I never personally encountered it until 3rd edition D&D, and I think Foxwarrior summed up the benefits pretty well:

Hmm, I think this is often what I think of when I think of an RPG being "balanced", or perhaps being able to be balanced, that in an "unembedded" game the game designer has access to enough information to ensure that every PC is equally useful, while in an "embedded" game it's not possible for the game designer to do much balancing at all, in the conventional sense.

I'd say (just on intuition) that once you have three or four types of context with real impact in your game, your game's overall outcomes are mostly context-driven. You've probably mostly given up the benefits of consistency and balance that one gets from avoiding context. You could continue piling on more types of context, or you could stop where you are to limit complexity and avoid pulling focus off the stuff you have, but you probably can't make the outcome more context-dependent than it is already is. Games with just one or two types of context feel different enough to be worth examining separately, especially because in a lot of cases what appears to be two reduces to one, anyway.

PS: Doesn't fit in this post specifically, really, but it turns out that I put random outcomes on the wrong side of the line. I was originally thinking about it in terms of "choices with consequences" vs "choices with no consequences or illusory consequences, or the absence of choices." But I think it's more useful to look in terms of "more consistent, more regulated" vs. "more variable, more open-ended." Randomly rolled treasure creates treasure-based context.

[MGuy]

One of the things I really am interested in, as far as my heartbreaker goes, is having some representation of certain things people are likely to expect to be represented in some way. For instance I 'just' want to have a fleshed out crafting subsystem in my heartbreaker. One of the considerations I made was whether or not I was going to have ingredients be a thing that people can get and use to create stuff. I decided that 'yes' I'll include that (because I am clearly a masochist) but I decided to have ingredients be more generic because I am not absolutely mad.

I could give other examples but a number of considerations were made for this subsystem that I think are clearly relevant to the discussion about context. I wanted going to fight frost giants to mean something different in the context of the game than going to fire mountain to fight fire drakes. To do this that means that something you get from a frost giant has to be different than something you get from the fire drake. This would be an example of context being important. However I also made the decision that the same difference might not exist if you instead fight the fire salamanders in fire mountain. Both would give you a 'fire' ingredient. The reason I made less of a difference between fire drakes and fire salamanders was not necessarily a question of 'balance'. It was more that I don't want to make a specific ingredient for literally everything in my bestiary. I also think it's better that players, who are likely to be adventuring in different places and fighting different creatures, not be locked out of certain crafting bits because of where they happen to be. I could probably make a system where no matter what monsters you faced all the things you made out of them would be balanced for the level you're expected to fight them at.

At first when you started this I thought what you were doing was analyzing the effects of high context occurrences in the game versus low context rules/abilities etc. Now I don't think that is the case and it seems like you're trying to separate various parts of the game through the lens of how 'contextual' they are. Or along some other axis that don't seem to work.

Above you talk about not going high context across the board and then go on to talk about Balanced versus Unbalanced. I'm planning on implementing a system basically as I described above and I intend for it to be balanced (there's no current reason for me to believe it wouldn't be) and for it to operate with respect to 'some' contextual inputs but not to others. Given what I've presented how would this fit into the paradigm you're trying to create?

[Foxwarrior]

However I also made the decision that the same difference might not exist if you instead fight the fire salamanders in fire mountain. Both would give you a 'fire' ingredient.

Something similar to this is actually the reason I was disappointed by the type-based immunity system in 3.5e, long ago. You gotta remember, adventures are often "themed". You might find the party fighting 80% undead enemies, or adventuring in fire mountain for five levels, or doing a quest to slay drakes from all corners of the globe, so it's good to ensure that almost no matter what theme gets picked, there'll be a decent amount of mechanical diversity in the challenges and rewards.

[MGuy]

However I also made the decision that the same difference might not exist if you instead fight the fire salamanders in fire mountain. Both would give you a 'fire' ingredient.

Something similar to this is actually the reason I was disappointed by the type-based immunity system in 3.5e, long ago. You gotta remember, adventures are often "themed". You might find the party fighting 80% undead enemies, or adventuring in fire mountain for five levels, or doing a quest to slay drakes from all corners of the globe, so it's good to ensure that almost no matter what theme gets picked, there'll be a decent amount of mechanical diversity in the challenges and rewards.

That's a matter of just having fire spookies somewhere in one of your haunted castles. Maybe first haunting the little candles in one of the earlier halls. Later, a bigger one fireplace. And even later a few of them haunting the coal mines. Etc etc.

[zugschef]

I still don't get how any of this is of any worth to anybody. The main factor to why your idea is bad is that you are wasting countless words on it and still nobody knows exactly what you mean. The issue being that you probably don't know it yourself. Just like those artists who hope that their art is smarter than they themselves are.