I thought that Iron Heroes was full of interesting ideas. Not my cup of tea but some cool stuff and I know a lot of people like it.

Now I understand the desire to speak with passion about things that we find interesting. I did an entire video rant about the spiked chain. But this? This sounds like sour grapes. Frank already doesn't like me, so I have zero to lose here.

Quote from: Tetsubo;415143Frank already doesn't like me, so I have zero to lose here.

Wait, I don't? I don't really recall having any arguments with you at all.

-Frank

Quote from: Benoist;415133Your WHOLE premise is that there are only rules, and only rules matter to decide whether a game is any good or not. And I'm telling you: this is bullshit. Pure, simple, straight, flat out wrong bullshit.

So your whole essay, to me, reads like wankery in theoretical la-la-land.

Si senior!
But, if I may say, what perhaps you should consider is that besides your fundamental idea and opinion regarding rpgs, some discussions are about a tad more intricate things and sometimes since you do not want to get it you just threadcrap.

What Frank says is that in respect to d20 srd, Iron Heroes manages to be totally worse. He is not talking about rpgs in general. He is specifically making a comparison among d20 srd and Iron Heroes. Why the fuck won't you let him do it? It is a legitimate discussion he can have, no?

Benoist, even if many times people lose the forest for the trees, it is just not all the fucking time. Lets see if you can acknowledge you are being overzealous and let it be.

Besides, you should check other boards about rules minutia of the D20 rules over one class power and another. D20 is a gamist system and apparently it makes people care about whether specific rules balances fail. This is not necessarily bad. Yeah, it is a bad thing if a game makes it so that it becomes the players' purpose but trying to fix balance issues so people do not have to worry about it is not something evil -in this case there just exists a balance problem to begin with.

Cheers

Quote from: xech;415155What Frank says is that in respect to d20 srd, Iron Heroes manages to be totally worse. He is not talking about rpgs in general. He is specifically making a comparison among d20 srd and Iron Heroes. Why the fuck won't you let him do it? It is a legitimate discussion he can have, no?

While well intended (and laudably well written), I'm afraid you waste your breath on a lost cause. There's a reason why I don't react to certain of Frank's posts on this forum, but prefer to do so on his own.

Certain things have become absolutely worthless to discuss here. I mean, look at this trainwreck of a thread. It's the whole Paizo "playtest" melt down all over, where rule XZY is "in good order" because someone just feels it does, or did at one point in that session he can't quite recall those years ago, but hey everyone had fun and it sure worked for us!. ('Heaven forbit you insult our FUN!') That's not to say that something worthwhile can be salvaged from a remooootely related angle on Frank's post, but the Badwrongfun rhetoric it sure ain't.

And when I can no longer tell the difference whether a game is discussed on paizo.com or over here, then it's perhaps really time to put the lights out. J_Arcane certainly's on the right about this.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415120OK, there is a meme that really needs to die: the idea that Mike Mearls has ever written anything good.

IMO, he's written plenty that is good.

Whether or not that includes Iron Heroes is another matter. I certainly wouldn't know from your post. Lots of naked condemnation, very little, you know, actual play.

I would agree the magic system is laughable based on my reading (though I could be wrong there too... but I have heard people who have tried to use it share the sentiment.) As for the rest, I'll call the jury out until I hear some (more?) people that say "yes, this is what happens."

Otherwise, it sounds like more theoretical ranting to the tune of "3e casues massive multiclassing" and "the 3e monk is overpowered."

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415139Uh.. yes. The value of ruleset is 100% determined by what those rules actually are. I don't even know how much pot I would have to smoke before I thought that was worthy of serious discussion.

QFT.

I get really, really tired of the whole "those game rules aren't bad because I played them and had fun" bullshit meme  - it seriously needs to die.  

Whether or not someone managed to have fun in spite of badly written rules is immaterial - if the rules are badly designed, then the game is badly designed, period.

Quote from: Benoist;415125I appreciate that you made it your mission to destroy any game you think is wrong at everything it does...

I thought his mission was to smear Mearls as much as humanly possible ("...there is a meme that really needs to die: the idea that Mike Mearls has ever written anything good.") I have seen Trollman finally participate in a thread where he wasn't busy trying to take apart Mearls or former industry comrades, but he still just basically is here bitch and kick over block towers...

Seanchai

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415139Uh.. yes. The value of ruleset is 100% determined by what those rules actually are. I don't even know how much pot I would have to smoke before I thought that was worthy of serious discussion.

-Frank

If I smoke pot, you're an idiot to believe the value of a game is only in its game system and some fabled rules balance that disintegrates as soon as the rubber hits the road in an actual game.

Quote from: Seanchai;415221I thought his mission was to smear Mearls as much as humanly possible

I think that's the whole point here, indeed.

Quote from: jgants;415179I get really, really tired of the whole "those game rules aren't bad because I played them and had fun" bullshit meme  - it seriously needs to die.

It won't die because it's the simple, plain truth that a role playing game, an ACTUAL game at the game table, is made of far more than people looking at each other's character wondering if they've been let down by the rules.

This:

Quote"Balance" is way overrated. I don't play a role playing game to have a character perfectly balanced compared to the guy next to me.

• For one thing, we're two completely different individuals with a different psychological makeup (including passive vs. active behavior in a role playing game session for instance, introverted vs. extraverted, analogic vs logic, or whatever other mental capabilities or approaches we have that may or may not relate to the game, its game play and game mechanics, and so on, so forth).
• Second, the importance of our classes relates to a particular game experience, and how it itself balanced by the types of challenges in play, the way the challenges themselves unfold, including dice rolls and results, and by the way the GM puts them into play.
• Third, it depends how the GM generally manages the game, whether miniatures are used or not, how the GM manages fiddly points of the rules, how he manages conflicts at the game table, how sensitive he is to psychological manipulation, and so on, so forth.

So, the rules balance is just one of the components of the overall game balance, to me. Absolute rules balance is thus a ridiculous game design goal in and of itself, and just satisfies gamers who either have a problem relating to any of their neighbors across a game table, or never play the game to begin with. In the former case, they need psychological help, and in the second, they need to shut the fuck up and run some games.

This here, is no "meme." This is the truth.
The "meme" as you say, is this strange belief that somehow an absolute balance of the rules makes for a balanced game.

Benoist, here's an idea: take your "play the game, not the rules" bullshit and stuff it right up your ass. For fuck's sake, every time you are playing the game you are either playing by the rules or you are breaking the rules. If you're breaking the rules and that's a good thing, the rules were bad. If you're playing by the rules and you should have been breaking them, then the rules are bad.

Rules can be bad. It's a real thing that really happens. Rules have measurable and predictable effects on the games that they are imposed upon. And those effects can be bad.

And if you die a little bit inside every time someone pulls back the curtain and discusses whether and how a specific rule is good or bad, maybe you shouldn't hang out on a message board whose nominal purpose is the discussion of role playing games and the things they are composed of. Because you know what? 100% of what makes one RPG different from another RPG is the rules. So if we don't talk about and rate the rules, we don't have a fuck of a lot to talk about.

-Frank

Quote from: xech;415155What Frank says is that in respect to d20 srd, Iron Heroes manages to be totally worse. He is not talking about rpgs in general. He is specifically making a comparison among d20 srd and Iron Heroes. Why the fuck won't you let him do it? It is a legitimate discussion he can have, no?

Absolutely. That's a worthwhile discussion. Just concluding, however, that the whole game "fails at everything" because well, this or that bit is not perfectly balanced, or "I don't like to have 9 different mechanics for token pools" is perfectly fine as an opinion, but not as some sort of fact that determines that anybody actually liking Iron Heroes must be out of his mind.

Fuck that noise.

Quote from: xech;415155Benoist, even if many times people lose the forest for the trees, it is just not all the fucking time. Lets see if you can acknowledge you are being overzealous and let it be.

Yes, I'm being overzealous, but not nearly as overzealous as Frank in his OP, I think. He's got a grudge against Mike Mearls, maybe because he's got a recognition that Frank doesn't enjoy, and thus wants revenge on this guy who's only quality for Frank is to put out X zillions words per week on a screen, but that's no excuse to walk all over a game that some people happen to like for widely different reasons, including myself.

That, and if there's really a meme that needs to die, that's this "rules balance über Alles" bullshit.

Quote from: xech;415155Besides, you should check other boards about rules minutia of the D20 rules over one class power and another. D20 is a gamist system and apparently it makes people care about whether specific rules balances fail. This is not necessarily bad. Yeah, it is a bad thing if a game makes it so that it becomes the players' purpose but trying to fix balance issues so people do not have to worry about it is not something evil -in this case there just exists a balance problem to begin with.

I've seen it, and that's what made me quit the d20 system in the first place, because this type of bullshit was all over the place. But you know what? In hindsight, I love d20 games, but I just don't care for this sort of nitpicky taking apart of rules as if that was the point of the game itself. It's NOT. Not to me. Not to many people who like to play games like I do, or in different ways than I do.

What I don't like is this constant diktat that somehow the rules and their balance must be the sole end of the game. Fuck that noise. Fuck it with a crowbar, beat the shit out of it, pour gazoline on it and set it on fire. This is really, really stupid bullshit I can't stand, because it pretends to be "objective" while in fact, it not only isn't, but it's completely misguided in treating the game system as an end, rather than means being part of many parts that make role playing games enjoyable to whole lot of people including me, myself, and I concur.

Wonder if Mike Mearls ever published anything before the d20 boom (ie. before 2000).

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415227Benoist, here's an idea: take your "play the game, not the rules" bullshit and stuff it right up your ass.

I love you too, Frank.

Quote from: 837204563;415127Way too much effort for an irrelevant critique.  Pretty much everyone has made up their minds about Iron Heroes already, so its irrelevant on that front.  And it's irrelevant as a critique of Mike Mearls because it's five years out of date.  People improve over time, so if you want to make the case that Mearls is a bad designer you need to show that what he is doing NOW is bad, what he did in the past doesn't matter.  They say it takes an average of 10 years to become good at something.  Since Mearls started publishing in 2000 (so sayeth wikipedia) then he was only 5 years into the learning process.  By the average time it takes to learn to do anything well (assuming you put in eight hours a day) Mearls would be just starting to realize his potential.  Maybe he still sucks.  But a separate case would have to be made.

First, it is relevant.

Second, that "10 years to do stuff" meme is a load of bullshit that people really have to stop saying.  It can apply to completely technical activities, like playing tennis or guitar. It does NOT apply to creative activities like writing songs or books or RPGs.
If it did, Gygax's later games would have been unbelievably better than the game he wrote with essentially 0 years under his belt. And they really really weren't.

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