Quote from: TonyLBOh, right!  That's why nobody plays D&D any more.  White Wolf killed it dead.

Wait.  No.  That's not right either.

You're a real joker Tony.   Or did you really forget that part you'd so desperately long to forget, when D20 came along and kicked all of your asses?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditYou're a real joker Tony.

Oh, I can't take all the credit.  You make it very easy to make jokes.

Quote from: RPGPunditOr did you really forget that part you'd so desperately long to forget, when D20 came along and kicked all of your asses?

Y'know, it's a funny thing:  I was playing Castle Falkenstein and Amber when D20 came out ... and I kept right on playing them.

I mean ... something clearly went wrong in the bureaucracy there.  If I'm to believe your take on the world then the popularity of D20 should have bodily prevented me from continuing to play those games.  Somebody probably just lost my paperwork.  That kind of thing happens in the chaos of war.

This just in: walmart is having a special on meaningless strawmen- they come with free matches!

Quote from: RPGPunditAnd those who are part of the Forge that tell you that it would not be their fondest wish for "their" type of gaming to dominate the hobby are simply lying to you.  The only difference between me wanting them out and them wanting me out is that I'm not two-faced about it.

Right.  And those Forge guys are dicks.  Does them being dicks really alter the games they play?  Gareth-Michael Skarka and Kevin Siembieda and Richard Tucholka still make RPGs.  Justin Achilli's work still qualifies as an rpg.  Being a full-on son of a bitch doesn't change the fact that I think all these guys make RPGs.

I appreciate you being honest about your position.  I really do.  It's one of the things I really dig about you.  But I think the term 'role-playing game' still has room for expansion.  We didn't kick Call of Cthulhu out of the club when it came out, despite being a radically different kind of game at the time.  RuneQuest wasn't kicked to the curb for the crime of lacking both classes and levels.  Toon and Ghostbusters we're waived past the red velvet rope, even though you can't even friggin' die in those games.  And Amber.  Jesus, do you not see that Amber was considered not-an-rpg by many deluded fools, including myself, when it first came out?  For the love of God, Montresor, Amber does not use dice!  How can it be a role-playing game?!?!?

QuoteNow you admit that it was a mistake to do so, because you just gave Ron Edwards and his ilk another tool by which to argue that mainstream RPGs aren't really "real RPGs" at all, and conceded ground that we have desperately fought to maintain in asserting that OUR games are RPGs, and theirs are not.

That´s your interpretation. I have never ever seen the term adventure roleplaying game being used in any negative way. Show me a link where the term is used to further "the forge/Swine" cause.
When I made my "but" comment, I just was trying to think like you.

Seems I was right:
You are not argueing about reality, but about how much word-power ground can be granted to your chosen enemies. This is another discussion than the one you  started.

Quote from: RPGPunditEither:

1. Forge games are the inevitable wave of the future and I'm a quixotic "idiot" for wanting to resist that wave.

or

2. Forge games are insignificant and I'm paranoid for thinking they could ever have any effect that would change our hobby whatsoever.

I would say that you're both things: the first (quixotic idiot), because change happens in all things. It has not to be an enormous change, but things change. As Jeff Rients wisely said, if every one had been a caveman as you are being, then your precious Amber never could have been considered and RPG (it hasn't dice, for God's sake!), and we'd never have had any other games other than barely tolkienesque fantasy games with levels, classes and stuff (What heretic shit is that Traveller? It has no orcs!). Fortunately, there is D&D (which is great) and there are other games (which is also great). And the new indie games just add more variety to the hobby, not less. I played Aquelarre yesterday, and you don't get much more traditional than that. And I had a blast of a game. Tonight, I'm playing Sorcerer with my girlfriend. And doing that does not prevent me from playing Cthulhu the next week, as soon I come back from London.

Your false point here is: you have to choose one side and if you play these games, you can't play the others. Which is bollocks.

On the other side, you manage to be the second (paranoid) as long as you claim that the hobby was subverted and controlled by the Swine, ignoring the blatant truth (and even your own affirmations!) about D&D being the most played game ever, in any time frame you wish to elect. I don't know how things were in your cave, but in the rest of the world people didn't stop playing D&D if they liked it. Vampire in its highest day was the second most played game. So, for all your pretended oppression of non-storytelling, non-traditional gamers, we find that the hobby was never controlled by anyone, and more on, that most of the Internet debate about gaming is not a warring battlefield about shit: it's people talking about their games, most commonly their D&D games. As has always been.

Your false point here is: my hobby was near destruction, because people stopped playing it. Which is also bollocks, as your favourite game never stopped being the most played, and your favourite gaming style was the most played around.

I'm sure that it must be gratifying to think that you're fighting for a good cause. That you're leading some stupid holy war. But the more I read you, the more I got the next conclussion: You really don't know a shit about what you're talking. You took your own negative experiences about the 90's and concluded that the whole hobby was under the same situation, when it was not true. And now, you go to some forums, see that some people uses Forge jargon, that some games that you don't like are discussed, and you conclude that the majority of the gaming discussion on Internet has been subverted, happily ignoring the fact that the biggest Internet boards out there are D&D boards (ENWorld, Wizards and the like), and the fact that in every other game board people can (and usually do) talk about traditional games as always. Yes, even in the Forge.

But I understand that is more gratifying being the fundamentalist Christian of the Swine Church, spit silly and unfounded conspiracy theories, and see how you have the most famous Uruguayan blog gaming in the world, which must give you a big hard on given how much you do like to gloat about it. Of course, I'm with jhkim on that: you must have RPG.net cock firmly stuck in your mouth given that, as they have more traffic than this site or your blog, they must be better (according to your twisted reasoning). And I'm also with J. Arcane on this other thing: all you and your soldiers on your Cocksmock Crusade are doing here, in Internet is fucking irrelevant. You don't affect a shit with your antics, apart from giving us laughing material.

You want to know why indie games have experienced such a growth? Because, apart from spurting shit on Internet boards, many of their authors go out and do things. They go to Gen Con and get people to try their games. They make people like Mike Mearls and Ryan Dancey try thir games, so after that Mike Mearls write good things on his blog for the people who check Internet. They go everywhere showing actual things that they do. And their games grow in sales, slowly but steadily. Simple as that. But the indie games propably won't surpass D&D and other games in sales numbers - at least not for the foreseeable future. The will simply add to the enormous and rich tapestry of options availabe for people who love games. And that's it.

So I have to congratulate you, because all of your achievements regarding mental illness and cocksmockery (and thanks, JimBob, for such an awesome swearword!), and by being something like the missing link: a rare archaelogical curiosity, from some weird dinosaurs lost world or something like that.

Fandom needs you, indeed. We need you and your army of deranged people who fight shadows as a living proof of what could happen to us if we don't go out to make cool things, and start believing that our limited experience is the sum of the hobby for everyone. Kudos to you, Admiral Cocksmock!

QuoteWe need you and your army of deranged people who fight shadows as a living proof of what could happen to us if we don't go out to make cool things, and start believing that our limited experience is the sum of the hobby for everyone.

So smarty-pants: Come to germany, where the Swine rule supreme. Then you will know what the hobby can become. You are totally right, in that the Pundit doesn´t need to wage this war for the North American Market. But for the anglophone Internet it´s needed. And in germany it is needed too.

Quote from: SettembriniSo smarty-pants: Come to germany, where the Swine rule supreme. Then you will know what the hobby can become. You are totally right, in that the Pundit doesn´t need to wage this war for the North American Market. But for the anglophone Internet it´s needed. And in germany it is needed too.

Set, I wouldn't discuss the state of the hobby in Germany, as I don't have such information. So in take your word for true, at least until some other German gamer add information that is in disagreement with your point of view.

On the anglophone Internet, though, I stand by my point.

First: the Internet discussion is irrelevant to the hobby. Irrelevant with a capital I.

Second: the biggest Internet boards are devoted to traditional games in general, and D&D in particular. ENWorld has 46,033 members as I write this, and you will find few Forge jargon over there. RPG.net has 32,930, with a significant part of them being non-gamers. And in the gamer part, discussion on traditional gaming is dominant. Each main mainstream publisher has its own forums, where the discussion is mainly mainstream.

So no, Internet debate is under no threat. Again, the Pundit takes his experience from the boards he has posted (and usually got banned from), and has concluded that the whole of the Internet discussion is like that. Wrong again.

About local situation: if you go to any Spanish con, most games are traditional games, with some people doing indie demos, a lot of boardgaming, a lot of CCGs, a lot of consoles, and a lot of girls. And as you can imagine, one thing doesn't exclude the other. The same people I was playing with in a fantastic Sorcerer demo I ran were playing a great WoW D20 game the next day. In both cases, they enjoyed the game inmensely. And when I talked to them about your war, they laughed their asses out. His answer was clear: 'conceptual wars on RPGs are for jackasses. People should go to cons and play like rabid hamsters.'

If you go to Spanish messageboards (as inforol.com, distrimagen.es, and the like), the situation is quite similar: mainly D&D and other big titles talk, with some people talking about other games. Some people will be interested in some new games, and some others will be happy with their regular ___ game. No biggie.

So, I could draw as a conclussion from the Spanish hobby that there is no other game than D&D, CoC, Vampire, and the like. Which would be false, as I know of a lot of groups that don't appear on your radar (as they don't use messageboards) that play indie games, trad games, and the like. Variety rules.

As I said before, I can't make an informed statement about the hobby in Germany. I take your word to be true. But even in that case, I'm pretty confident that there is a lot of people who doesn't show on Internet and from whom you don't know nothing, who play traditional (or 'adventure') games, that don't know about your war, and wh wouldn't give a shit if they knew about it.

The german gaming scene is a different can of worms-let´s open another thread for that one, okay?
@internet: On EnWorld, you can´t really discuss gaming in general. Which leaves the next biggest site. And that´s were it starts.

Quote from: ImperatorSecond: the biggest Internet boards are devoted to traditional games in general, and D&D in particular. ENWorld has 46,033 members as I write this, and you will find few Forge jargon over there. RPG.net has 32,930, with a significant part of them being non-gamers. And in the gamer part, discussion on traditional gaming is dominant. Each main mainstream publisher has its own forums, where the discussion is mainly mainstream.

So no, Internet debate is under no threat. Again, the Pundit takes his experience from the boards he has posted (and usually got banned from), and has concluded that the whole of the Internet discussion is like that. Wrong again.

Tell me where I can find a forum where people are discussing RPG design without it being dominated by Forge / GNS discussions.

There are lots of places to talk about whatever your favourite game might be... but there is *nowhere* that I've seen, that focuses on practical RPG design patterns without the Forge / GNS stuff.

Nowhere.

Ya know? I hear RPG.net has like, an ignore function. You don't even have to see posts about GNS more than once, and you're under no obligation to answer them.

It's pretty awesome.

You mean set posts by particular people in a thread to not display and make it so that you can only seeing bits and pieces of a conversation?  You actually use that feature?  :confused:

Quote from: Stuartthat focuses on practical RPG design patterns without the Forge / GNS stuff.

Nowhere.

This is gonna sound weird, from me...  But I'm cooking that up.

A forum for pure craft.

For real game theory? Probability curves and distributions and tipping points and shit?

I think the math behind the games is the most important, least worked-on part of all.

QuoteThis is gonna sound weird, from me... But I'm cooking that up.

A forum for pure craft.

I saw that on your blog... but how would it be any different from Story Games?