Quote from: B.T.;513351No, that is how he sees himself, that is the image he projects, and that is the reality that the slavish tools on TGD accept.  Frank is wrong and has been proven wrong on multiple occasions, but his sycophants think he's some kind of game designer god and refuse to challenge him.

Usually, when you say 'he is never wrong' about someone when describing them it is a given you mean it faceticiously   Sorry I was not explicit enough on that.

QuoteFrank is a Marxist both in the economic and cultural sense, which tells you all you need to know about how he perceives reality.

That is a factual statement, but given the political tenor of this site, much as his own, I felt there was no profit in getting into the semantics of what flavor of Fellow-Traveller he really is or is not.

QuoteI just dislike this "Legend of FrankTrollman" crap and the absolute fawning over him that I see.

I felt no need to rehash my long standing mockery of his idea that deckers in Shadowrun should find it easier to hack brains that lack an I/O port than those that do.  Likewise, I felt no need to drag in the brief but vitrolic debate over time vs finance in D&D I had with one of his major partners in TGD. If you thought my post was fawning I'm not sure what to tell you.

QuoteThe Tomes are shit.  I would rather play Pathfinder than the Tomes.

Agreed. But relevant to my post how?

So this is the first time I've ever heard of this guy except for his occasional posts here, so I went to his site and dug around and man...what a bunch of crap.  Spherical cows?  WTF?  A broken rule you say "I can fix" is too broken to fix?  Does this guy even comprehend how to have fun with an RPG?  I'm so glad he's into the hobby now, him trying to play OD&D or Warriors of Mars or Traveller would've been hilarious to watch, assuming you weren't covered with dura matter and bone when his head exploded in apoplexy.  I mean, sorry if/when you read this Frank but you're hanging on too tight man.

Quote from: Benoist;513304an obsession with rules taken in a complete vacuum

This is his biggest (and The Gaming Den's) failing: the idea that rules are separated by context, and characters do not grow one step at the time with the players making choices according to both the long term strategy and the current situation (the Wizard that knows he will face an adventure full of enemies vulnerable to cold with take Cone of Cold fast, and not "the next step for the perfect build). I.e. that characters are not decks of M:tG cards to be built by having all the cards available to choose from, for games taking places in the void.

To be clear, it is the epitome of the old "The Gnome Giant Slayer prestige class is broken!!!!!!111" and then you find yourself on an island of gnomes suffering from frequent raids by giants - not to mention how, for a gnome character to want to specialize in that, is a given that in his world giants are a major problem.

My feeling about TGD is that it gathered some players who suffered from a serious nervous breakdown while playing D&D during the Math terms - and never recovered. Now they spend their days by publishing research on GdR, done on immense blackboards full of hyper-complex formulas, and not a sign of "but do Dark Elves actually exist in this campaign, uh?" in sight.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;513416Spherical cows?

Can you give me a link to this? I really want to know what this term means, because it's evoking nothing.

That's a bad sign. Good terminology should hint at its own meaning. It should illuminate, not obfuscate.

(And on that note, and near non sequitur, fuck the Forge.)

I believe the point about broken rules is actually sensible:

I bought your product hoping to have a usable rule set. If it includes broken rules that I have to fix, regardless of wether or not I can, you have failed.

But i could be wrong.

I do know, for example, that there is a lot of fairly sensible discussion about the un-fixable mess of Skill Challenges in 4e.  its not that the idea is unfixable, its that the stated approaches are unfixable (two mutually incompatable goals are being applied).

But yes, a lot of shit they go on about is in fact nonsense.  Hand waving away arbitrary amounts of time and labor does not prove a game or economic system is broken, for example.*




*In specific the example involved moving hundreds of tons of iron cannon balls from a trap to make hundreds of thousands in gold. Without getting into market saturation, I pointed out that logicistically an army of serfs (and donkey carts) would take ten years and 70% of the gold to actually pull this off and did not at all discuss the role of various nobles and bandits in disrupting this effort.  Scrolls of high level spells, like Gate, or 'chain binding' demons simply involved other hand-waves.

Was repeatedly told that I would be 'anti-fun' to not hand wave a decade to put free gold in players pockets, thus D&D's economy was broken.


Also: If you have the power to kill the king, you will automatically be the new king. John Wilkes Boothe most upset at news.

Spherical cow

Also Jason Alexander has a good essay on how the concept applies to RPG rules discussion.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;513418Can you give me a link to this? I really want to know what this term means, because it's evoking nothing.

That's a bad sign. Good terminology should hint at its own meaning. It should illuminate, not obfuscate.

(And on that note, and near non sequitur, fuck the Forge.)

Good luck with that. Most of the terms come out of various rants by Frank over various games or subsystems of games. There is no good collection of terms, and despite being a semi-regular reader of the site I frequently have no idea what they are actually referencing.

Spherical Cows, for example. No idea.  

Unlike the Forge, however, its less a deliberate creation of Jargon and more an insider group using inside references to exclude outsiders organically.

I view the gaming den of a place where they think in absolutes. It is always about zero or infinity. This is their sport. And this is also why I find it intellectually disgusting. It still is USEFUL. And often, they do indeed find zero or infinity in something someone else designed. Add they are then correct in pointing out that any system with infinity in it is utterly broken beyond repair.
Think about a communicating tubes, one whole somewhere, or one input that never stops, and everything is fucked.

But in their search for the infinites and zeroes, they often have to make assumptions that are inane, themselves falling into the very intellectual pitfalls that produced the designer's errors to begin with. So their method also needs common sense to distinguish between faulty assumptions and sound ones. Logic (and indeed they are way more using logic than what is sometimes called "math") always does.

Another way to put it is to say: TGD is using inductive reasoning.
And the whole point in inductive reasoning is to come upt with unexpected results that run counter to intuition and daily experience. Which explains the bad press he gets.

That also explains the use of "Vaporware". A product that does not do what it advertises is a non-product. Just imagine a Socratic dialogue, where Socrates keeps asking you of what price product and service are all about, and soon you might be forced to say yes to:

 "Oh and then, Posteropheles, is it not you who said something which does not what it was made for might as well not exist? And did you not agree that selling a hammer knowingly made never to function is the same as theft?"

And to be honest, after ~5 years of WotC bullshit, I can sympathize with radicalization. It is not like Frank and the Den are the only subgroup that radicalized itself...

Oh, I think Frank is right that 5E right now is (to use Justin's analogy) in the same state as skill challenges were prior to release. A half-baked, nearly non-existent entity with wild expectations attached to it. Because of that 'nearly', the term 'vaporware' does not apply.

And as I said on Frank's own board, even the playtesters confirm his thesis.

Quote from: Windjammer

Quote from: OgreBattleThis report from the playtest is more thorough as the guy pretty much delivers everything that's not in the NDA:

He cross-posted his playtest report at Enworld to which the following reply was promptly made:

QuoteI feel like I missed DDXP. I was there, I did the play test. Your experience in all aspects but one, is nothing like mine. Either I got a seriously bum DM, or the rules are in a very loose and open to interpretation state. The only part I had the same experience is, yeah, level 1 is not about victory, it's all about survival. In 6 combats, we fled 4 times, 3 of them all the way back to town.

Frank should collect these price quotes for his '5E = vaporware' thesis.

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=250779#250779

The short discussion of spherical cows for gaming is "you make one ridiculous assumption that you refuse to ever let go of...and come to ridiculous conclusions that you insist are actually relevant."

In this case, you assume all cows are spherical, and conclude that cows could never exist in the real world since they'd never be able to manage slopes. (I know, JA's post on this goes slightly different, but this is the short form). And you can't be corrected, ever, because you cannot abandon your assumption.

It's a very popular method of thought at TGD, especially in their politics threads.

And yeah, Spike, when you said "he is never wrong", it was tough to take that at your sarcastic intent. I'm glad I waited until someone else asked about that.

The Diplomacy check rant though is an example of broken thinking, not a broken rule.  Frank goes, "Why, Frodo could just ask Sauron to be his best buddy and he'd have to, because Diplomacy check!"

Wait wait wait so a hypothetical scenario arises where Frodo is facing down Sauron.  Face to Face.  And Frodo hasn't just collapsed in sheer terror.  And Frodo is going to try and convince Sauron to be his best buddy, forever, because that's what the rules say he can do.

let's ignore for a second the lunacy behind Sauron even pausing to listen to Frodo.  Let's ignore for a second that Sauron would simply reach inside Frodo's mind and snap it like a twig (or just draw his sword and slay him outright).  Let's even ignore the possibility that any of this might come to pass and focus on the circumstances.

Any DM worth his salt should have the player explaining specifically what he's telling Middle Earth's anti-Christ to try and convince him to sit down for some pipe-weed.  Allowing the player to simply roll the dice and say "Yo, major dippy roll.  I win."...?

That doesn't mean the rule is broken, it means the DM is broken.

EDIT:

we used to make fun of the stuff in the old SJG "Murphy's Rules" book (the actual column was a little early for us)...but it sounds like Frank may actually try to take some of the rules to heart in his games.

"So! You wish to play Avalon Hill's Speed Circuit with me?  Be warned - I will simply drive in reverse and bump you all off the track to no adverse effect to me!  Cars that are involved in a rear-end collision have a 50% chance of spinning out and wrecking, but the car that was struck in the rear is unaffected!  What do you mean 'that's ridiculous'?  It's right here in the rules!"

Quote from: jgants;513375The end product could look like anything at this point. I think way too many people (especially anti-4e people) are being way too quick to project their own desires onto the blank canvas that WotC has given us about what the new edition will actually be like. Skepticism in this case is the smart move.

There's a section in Paul Arden's "It's not How Good You Are" marketing bible which basically recommends this.

If a client comes to you, and your project is not ready, you show him a white panel.

Then you take it from there. The trick is to involve the client in a conversation, leading questions and so on, and you start drawing stuff on the panel as the conversation progresses.

The end result has nothing to do with your work on the project - because you have not done any - but only with gathering the client's wishes for his project. You're just bullshitting him and sweet talking him, and he'll kiss your ass on the way out and hand you the paycheck.

In other words, you make the client do the work he pays you for.

Now if that's what Mearls & co. are doing, then 5E is even more intellectually bankrupt than 4E was, where they met a deadline with half-baked core books by copy-pasting stuff from Wiley "D&D for Dummies" books.

And I wouldn't put it past him. Frank's subsidiary thesis that 5E exists to save Mike Mearls' ass from the axe looks remotely plausible, when it shouldn't look plausible in the slightest. And that's about the greatest insult I can think of, not of Mearls, but to the fanbase.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;513435The Diplomacy check rant though is an example of broken thinking, not a broken rule.  Frank goes, "Why, Frodo could just ask Sauron to be his best buddy and he'd have to, because Diplomacy check!"

Wait wait wait so a hypothetical scenario arises where Frodo is facing down Sauron.  Face to Face.  And Frodo hasn't just collapsed in sheer terror.  And Frodo is going to try and convince Sauron to be his best buddy, forever, because that's what the rules say he can do.

let's ignore for a second the lunacy behind Sauron even pausing to listen to Frodo.  Let's ignore for a second that Sauron would simply reach inside Frodo's mind and snap it like a twig (or just draw his sword and slay him outright).  Let's even ignore the possibility that any of this might come to pass and focus on the circumstances.

Any DM worth his salt should have the player explaining specifically what he's telling Middle Earth's anti-Christ to try and convince him to sit down for some pipe-weed.  Allowing the player to simply roll the dice and say "Yo, major dippy roll.  I win."...?

That doesn't mean the rule is broken, it means the DM is broken.

EDIT:

we used to make fun of the stuff in the old SJG "Murphy's Rules" book (the actual column was a little early for us)...but it sounds like Frank may actually try to take some of the rules to heart in his games.

"So! You wish to play Avalon Hill's Speed Circuit with me?  Be warned - I will simply drive in reverse and bump you all off the track to no adverse effect to me!  Cars that are involved in a rear-end collision have a 50% chance of spinning out and wrecking, but the car that was struck in the rear is unaffected!  What do you mean 'that's ridiculous'?  It's right here in the rules!"

TL;DR If you are retarded, don't GM.

For Frank's own peace of mind, he should play ASL.

re: intellectual bankruptcy

Indeed 4e was at least an attempt to come up with something new. Now, I always said it was ethically corrput int he values supported. But nevertheless they TRIED to do SOMETHING.

I agree that a half-assed attempt to pander to everyone with nothing to show looks crooked/desperate/not even trying.

Also: The recipe for 3.xs success cannot be the recipe for a new edition. Just as dwindling record sales cannot be fought with hiring Beatles-impersonators or even the remaining Beatles themselves.

EDIT: There is still hope in me they get it magically done. But then I am an "still half of my Hitpoints left" kind of guy.

The problem with all this horseshit is equating the game with the rules in the first place. In a nutshell, in an rpg if the game is nothing more than the sum of the rules I don't want to fucking play it.