Quote from: misterguignol;487729I think this is usually a function of age.  When I started playing D&D at 13...yeah, those early games were probably in the murder-hobo vein.  

A couple games in high school (such as when we tried an ill-advised all-evil party) dipped back into murder-hobo-ville.

Since then?  Not so much.  It's possibly a function of learning how to get more from the game as you become accustomed to it.

I'd agree with the age thing. My campaigns in Junior High were pretty bloody and players spent a lot of time destroying Halfling villages. And like you I think I saw one or two more instances of that in highschool. But for the most part, ninth grade and on there just wasn't that much of this.

Quote from: TristramEvans;689326The substance of your statement was a tangent from the discussion. We were talking about player perspective and you responded by talking about design perspective, so it mostly came across as a non-sequitur. Thus I have no response, I'd rather not shift goalposts this quickly in the discussion.

This tangent can not be disentangled from the design perspective. Anyway this line of argument is likely to result in something more constructive than people just whining about other people liking things that they dislike ;3

Quote from: Mistwell;689234I swear hanging out with you people on this board has poisoned my mind.

I have not been posting to EnWorld for a couple years now.  I go back there for 5e discussion, and the 3e/Pathfinder and 4e fans are irritating the shit out of me!

It's all DPR and tactical combat and Kewl Powerz and optimization between feats and class powers and magical items and balance stuff and all this bullshit.

Fuck people! When the DM looks at you and says "what do you do", do not look down at your character sheet or power cards or figurine or whatever the fuck you've been depending on to tell you what to do.  You look the DM in the eye and you say "I toss my torch at the rug that troll is standing on, intending to light the rug on fire, and then I get the fuck out of there before the whole place goes up!" or "I try to convince the troll to allow us to escort it to a whole den of tasty Kobolds to eat, in exchange for safe passage" or whatever it is you think your character would do to get out of that situation alive and (hopefully) a bit better off for it.  

The game is not about doing the most damage.  This is not a wargame for fuck's sake, it's a role playing game!

Argh! OK, sorry, rant done.

It's all your fault.  You people and your ideas, they're poison I tell you! You boiled me in your TSR era pot of water and before I realized it, this frog was cooked!

Is the correct answer!

I see we have Denners Part II going on in this thread, too.

Quote from: Mistwell;689234I swear hanging out with you people on this board has poisoned my mind.

I have not been posting to EnWorld for a couple years now.  I go back there for 5e discussion, and the 3e/Pathfinder and 4e fans are irritating the shit out of me!

It's all DPR and tactical combat and Kewl Powerz and optimization between feats and class powers and magical items and balance stuff and all this bullshit.

Fuck people! When the DM looks at you and says "what do you do", do not look down at your character sheet or power cards or figurine or whatever the fuck you've been depending on to tell you what to do.  You look the DM in the eye and you say "I toss my torch at the rug that troll is standing on, intending to light the rug on fire, and then I get the fuck out of there before the whole place goes up!" or "I try to convince the troll to allow us to escort it to a whole den of tasty Kobolds to eat, in exchange for safe passage" or whatever it is you think your character would do to get out of that situation alive and (hopefully) a bit better off for it.  

The game is not about doing the most damage.  This is not a wargame for fuck's sake, it's a role playing game!

Argh! OK, sorry, rant done.

It's all your fault.  You people and your ideas, they're poison I tell you! You boiled me in your TSR era pot of water and before I realized it, this frog was cooked!

Yup. The game is not the rules, and the rules are not the game.

I feel you, man. It was a cool post/rant for me to read on your part though.

Quote from: Benoist;689340Yup. The game is not the rules, and the rules are not the game.

That doesn't even make sense :?

Quote from: Benoist;689340I feel you, man. It was a cool post/rant for me to read on your part though.

No that post wasn't cool. People making a show of how upset they are that people like things they dislike is actually incredibly lame -_-

Quote from: gamerGoyf;689323Do you not understand what I'm saying, or are you being deliberately obtuse because if you did follow me it would lead to conclusions you are uncomfortable with? Seriously what's with the greedy reductionism :?

You seem to think you can get there (to, I guess, an objective world-sim) with pen and paper rules – I don't think 3e is actually very close in any coherent sense – but it's either going to make the game so slow it's unplayable by humans or so rigid that to adjust the game-world it presents requires modding the game they way you would a computer game. Thus the only real choice you have with P&P are more-or-less fiddly games of let's pretend. You can make a veneer of world-sim but for a P&P system to handle it, it will need to be abstracted, which will create stupid edge scenarios which you then have to resolve by fiat.

Objective world-sims, like rabbit-pellet level-and-loot-grinders, are better handled by computers, though the objective world-sim is a much harder task once you've started focusing in from a wide level of abstraction.

Quote from: Mistwell;689234I swear hanging out with you people on this board has poisoned my mind.

I have not been posting to EnWorld for a couple years now.  I go back there for 5e discussion, and the 3e/Pathfinder and 4e fans are irritating the shit out of me!

It's all DPR and tactical combat and Kewl Powerz and optimization between feats and class powers and magical items and balance stuff and all this bullshit.

Fuck people! When the DM looks at you and says "what do you do", do not look down at your character sheet or power cards or figurine or whatever the fuck you've been depending on to tell you what to do.  You look the DM in the eye and you say "I toss my torch at the rug that troll is standing on, intending to light the rug on fire, and then I get the fuck out of there before the whole place goes up!" or "I try to convince the troll to allow us to escort it to a whole den of tasty Kobolds to eat, in exchange for safe passage" or whatever it is you think your character would do to get out of that situation alive and (hopefully) a bit better off for it.  

The game is not about doing the most damage.  This is not a wargame for fuck's sake, it's a role playing game!

Argh! OK, sorry, rant done.

It's all your fault.  You people and your ideas, they're poison I tell you! You boiled me in your TSR era pot of water and before I realized it, this frog was cooked!

There may be hope for you yet....

Quote from: gamerGoyf;689290Yes it has, so let me snap you back to you senses ;3



All of those scenarios assume an absurdly cooperative GM otherwise

"The rug is too wet to catch on fire, the troll eats you."

"You fail to escape, the troll eats you."

The troll is not convinced by your argument, then the troll eats you."

because in any "old-school" system heck in D&D Next even, those actions are governed solely by GM fiat. So if he isn't on board you are not escaping the troll today. Now you are right, combat being the only option on the table sucks. That has nothing to do with what isn't on peoples character sheet and everything to do with what is -_-

Show us on the doll where the Bad DM touched you.

Quote from: Arturick;689298Then you're not playing D&D of any edition.  You are having tea with teddy bears.

Aww, look, it's the old Magical Tea Party arguement come to visit us again after all these months...

Quote from: jeff37923;689352Show us on the doll where the Bad DM touched you.

Isn't it weird how many schools of bad RPG theory share a fundamental distrust and even hatred of the DM?

Quote from: gamerGoyf;689345

Quote from: Benoist;689340Yup. The game is not the rules, and the rules are not the game.

That doesn't even make sense :?

That is why you fail.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;689345That doesn't even make sense :?



No that post wasn't cool. People making a show of how upset they are that people like things they dislike is actually incredibly lame -_-

Makes sense to me.

1) Ben is referring to the fact that there is more to a gaming group and experience than just the rules, there is the interaction, the personal side, houserules, adjudications...lots more than just the rules.  In the case of Ben's exact response to Mistwell, he was responding to the assertion that there is more to the play than a character sheet and some dice.

2) You don't know your history.  Mistwell was giving people a backhanded compliment that posting here had given him an added perspective on gaming that included some more OSR mindset, I believe.

Quote from: Imp;689349You seem to think you can get there (to, I guess, an objective world-sim) with pen and paper rules

That is specifically what I'm not saying hence my accusation of greedy reductionism -_-

My point was that "Magical Tea Party" is an essential and undeniable part RPGs. No one is arguing for the removal of Magic Tea Party as an element of RPGs the impossibility of such a thing is intuitively obvious to everyone with a brain. However we are all in agreement that rules can potentially be and improvement from MTP. At least I assume so given we all play RPGs with at least some rules ^_^

Quote from: J Arcane;689354Isn't it weird how many schools of bad RPG theory share a fundamental distrust and even hatred of the DM?

One Horse Town declared a while ago that the majority of problems people claim in RPG design actually stem from a distrust of the people that are enagaged as participants.

Quote from: jeff37923;689352Show us on the doll where the Bad DM touched you.

So you assume that the GM must always have your harebrained schemes succeed. That's some pretty hefty player entitlement you have there. Remind me to never run a game for you.