The peripheral community that is a f*cking pox on our hobby

[Pseudoephedrine]

Can you cite games where you have seen the negative effects you're worried about actually take place?

White-Wolf books being padded with in-character fiction of mostly middling quality. It eats up quite a lot page space and adds nothing to the playability of the game, but is of interest to the collector because it tends to feature the same or similar characters across books and develops their story.

As a specific example: Hunter: the Reckoning, which was otherwise a very good game, had this problem. The line had some truly excellent books, but many of the smaller books, especially the splats, were heavy on fiction and light on actual gaming material.

Stephen Lea Sheppard, the mod at RPG.net / actor, is an example of a guy who owns everything White-Wolf has ever made (and even works for them now) despite barely playing the games anymore (Last I'd heard, he was too busy acting and modding at rpg.net to get a game going).

That's one set of examples.

[Settembrini]

That is one of the most ridiculous comments Ive seen for a while, Ive played with a fresh GM who I gave the game to read and he was perfect at it.
It had nothing to do with him collecting but knowing the genre and style of the setting, that being CoC.

Rog.

How long did that campaign last?

EDIT:
BTW: Aren´t you the guy working on Dr. Who and Starblazers? Fuck if there ever were collector/heavily invested fan products, than it´s those!

[Pseudoephedrine]

Also, while I don't think a DM or PC needs to have a lot of books to be good at a game, they do need to have a habit of reading books for pleasure. One of the most important ways people learn how to tell stories and use language in interesting ways is by experiencing complicated, engaging, well-written stories of the sort that only written fiction really provides.

In our group, the guy who's the worst DM is the guy who only reads D&D novels because he doesn't really understand how stories work. His models are highly simplified versions of movie and TV plots (if they're even that good). He just doesn't quite understand how characters and plots work because he doesn't experience them except in the radically simplified forms they appear on TV. Similarly, on RPG.net, people have some really stupid ideas for stories simply because they read very little worthwhile literature. They frontload the story with the idea like a television show does, instead of developing it like a book does.

I think the growing influence of anime in RPGs comes from the decline in reading and the increase in television and movie watching amongst young people. The models they have for how stories work are shitty Japanese cartoons instead of say, the Iliad or Blood Meridian. The kinds of stories they like and want to tell are based on those same shitty Japanese cartoons. And, because they are unfamiliar with the complicated narratives of literature, they prefer the superficial sequences of the lowest sort of anime. People don't recreate Wings of Honneamise (one of two anime movies I've seen that isn't laughably stupid, even controlling for differences in the visual grammar of a Japanese audience), they are interested in recreating Yu-Gi-Oh, Naruto, Bleach and Dragonball Z.

I think it also drives people towards rules-light systems and away from anything that demands that they read more than a few pages of light fiction. As evidence that people really do object to reading just a few hundred pages:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=408102
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=408226

[Mike S.]

That is one of the most ridiculous comments Ive seen for a while

Rog.

Apparently you haven't read many of Settembrini's postings.  This is very common.

[Blackleaf]

I go to events and I see *tons of kids* ages 10,11,12.. playing D&D. The group I Dm on Saturday contains mom, boyfriend and an 11 year old son. My own kids play from time to time.

Then that is a really good thing, and something WotC didn't expect.  In one of our past discussions, Ryan D said he thought it very unlikely that kids under 12 would play D&D pre-3.0 and with 3.0+ they shifted the focus of the game to a more mature audience.

Wow, you are really confusing two different trends in the comics market.

It wasn't the collectors who drove the trend towards darker storylines, more sex and violence, and other symptoms of grim and gritty syndrome.  

Some collected to keep them in boxes in 'mint' condition, and others collected because they were just really into into.  This is different from the casual reader who might pick up a copy of Spiderman for their kids to read on a car ride to see Grandma.

Hmm.. I am not sure about Stuarts point here. When comic were written for kids they sold more comics but they were shit.

Now they're written for "adults" and they sell less comics... and they're still shit.

Just kidding.  Except, you know, not really. :-/

[Thanatos02]

But 100 is a big number, Psuedo!

Ok. You know that I am kidding.

It might be that I'm not a good person to be talking, because I've been known to enjoy a bit of the anime, myself.* I do, however, think you have some valid points even if I speculate that perhaps the Stephen L. thing is an edge case. Plus, I'm not sure if I've ever disliked anything he put out. I don't recall what he's worked on.

In addition, I wonder if it's more that people who are predisposed to a simplistic view pattern their games off of simple children's television rather then children's television making them simple. I don't know where this begins,  though. I think that maybe, though, your dislike for a lot of that stuff took you on a tangent?

I think you could have stopped at 'people think reading is too much work', and your examples were good ones. Perhaps if the majority of viewable product were complex, they would think complexly, but these arn't people who are reading anyhow.


*I make no pretenses! While I'm pretty (some have called me overly) critical of the media I watch, I've enjoyed some pretty ridiculous shit in my time even if I wouldn't pattern games off it.

[Koltar]

I for example would like to see GURPS die so that HERO could take that niche of rpgs completely, and thus be ab.....blah, blah, yadda -yadda, yadda...

Blasphemer!  

  Heretic!!


  Nah - its okay, I think the same way the other diection. Sorry, my knee-jerked a tad there.

As to the main topic: Say What??!


- Ed C.

[Pseudoephedrine]

SLS worked on WoD: Armoury, which is actually a really good book. I don't think there's any contradiction between being a collector and being a good player or writer.

I've got three complaints really. I'll separate them out more clearly in case they weren't before, and develop them in a bit more depth.

1) Books designed for collectors, by which I mean people who are going to treat reading the book as the primary recreational activity they use it for, rather than playing a game with it demand different features in their books than people who are mainly interested in playing games using the books.

Some of these features include more in-character fiction, better production values, more space devoted to art, less space and attention devoted to rules (especially to charts and tables), and less space and attention devoted to dealing with issues surrounding running a game. More attention also tends to be devoted to wacky or weird takes on the game rather than ideas that could actually be developed in play.

As an example of that last point, I'd point to the Exalted 2e book, which seriously proposes a Voltron-style game as legitimate (I have never heard of anyone actually running one of these, merely people exclaiming on the internet about how neat it would be to), while including no information on using the system to run a game with the stylistic elements of the Iliad or Aenead (Some of the original inspirations for Exalted 1e).

2) People ought to read fewer game books but more books in general. A good reading habit is immeasurably valuable to roleplaying. Reading works of literature like Blood Meridian, Don Quixote and the Iliad, as well as a broad variety of non-fiction, is more important than getting the newest book in some line.

It's valuable to read these books because they show one methods and styles of using language that can achieve certain effects in an audience. They show one how complicated narrative structures can be deployed properly. They equip one with a variety of information that provides one with a tool set for telling stories, creating worlds and characters, and resolving disputes.

People ought to take the money they piss away on getting complete runs of game lines and spend it on other books. They ought to devote the attention they currently spend on reading game books as light fiction and instead read some fiction of real merit.

3) People learn how to tell stories by modeling other stories they have encountered. Too many gamers have their primary experience with stories through television, crappy movies, low-quality genre fiction and mediocre comic books. The little reading they do is of game books, genre fiction and comic books, especially intellectually and aesthetically undemanding forms of these. This has several pernicious effects.

First, it means that many games are just variants of the same impoverished story-models found in these media. Second, it stultifies public discussion of more complicated narratives, especially of the sort (most relevant to us) found in long-term actual play. It does so by creating a climate of idiocy where discussions of complicated narratives are ordinarily reduced to a set of references to the impoverished story models they are familiar with. Third, it means that the influence of these simplistic models in roleplaying game books increases, leading designers to try to reduce the complexity of stories one can tell with the game to a handful of simplistic models.

As a paradigmatic example of this, I point to the creeping influence of anime throughout gaming. As a specific example, the Voltron suggestion in Exalted 2e is once again an example of how a game with potentially complicated narratives available experiences pressure to simplify and stultify.

[stu2000]

I don't mind that there are a lot of games. I don't care if people buy them. That's not a bad thing, really. But it does lead to something I find sort of . . . annoying.

Gaming has a huge percentage of fans that go on to try to create something. Kudos to designers and all--I'm not putting anyone down for being creative. But due to the nature of gaming, it's not productive or possible to try to institute any kind of criteria for quality, so there's just too much of it. I mean--think of it like every twelve year-old that ever read a comic trying to draw one himself and actually getting it sold.

There's a huge contingent of wannabe designers with more money than sense who buy everything they can from other wannabe designers, so they can stay in some kind of imaginary "design loop," maintaining their delusion of being "in" an industry.

It's not just games. There's a similar contingent of bad internet musicians and bad podcast novelists and bad creative hobbyists. I don't mind that they're getting their bliss on or letting their freak flag fly or whatever they're doing.
It's the shared conceit that they are all doing something more than they are that's sort of . . . unseemly.

All that said, my favorite game product ever is Arduin--which is just another GM's demented, self-published campaign notes/house rules. So. I don't know. I'm not sure what it is that bugs me.

It has something to do with the fact that when I used to go to screenwriting conferences, all anyone wanted to know about was what kind of software they should use for formatting.

I'm rambling. At any rate, I don't think it's a pox on the hobby. I think it's a separate hobby.

[Aos]

Psuedo, I've read tons of lit- including everything on your short list, but I'm sorry to admit that my gaming is more likely to be informed by  stuff like People of the Black Circle, Guyal of Sfere, Ill Met in Lankmahr and Jack Kirby comics than Gravaty's Rainbow.

[Aos]

It has something to do with the fact that when I used to go to screenwriting conferences, all anyone wanted to know about was what kind of software they should use for formatting.

I've worked with a couple of fledgling fiction writers in my time, and man you are 100% right about this.

[Pseudoephedrine]

Psuedo, I've read tons of lit- including everything on your short list, but I'm sorry to admit that my gaming is more likely to be informed by  stuff like People of the Black Circle, Guyal of Sfere, Ill Met in Lankmahr and Jack Kirby comics than Gravaty's Rainbow.

Structurally, or just in terms of content? I don't have a problem with using genre fiction to supply the content, or even using genre tropes in a particular story. I just finished up playing in a campaign that had a lot of content stolen from George R.R. Martin and steampunk, personally. My problem here is that cliche is coming to dominate the _structure_ of play, not just the content of it (though I'd prefer it didn't dominate content so much either).

For example:

Picture a Japanese author from the year 2899. He knows as much about European history as the kid who screams "Ninja Turtles" knows about the Meji Restoration. And he is writing the defining novel about the West for his century. And the theme music is METAL!

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=408117

The description of this game is just basically a collection of references and allusions to crap, and the various character ideas and description of the setting are just cliches stapled together. And this is just a game I randomly found on rpg.net. While rpg.net is more extreme than most perhaps, I think we can see this in weaker forms throughout most of gaming, both on the design side and on the play side.

[Aos]

Structurally, or just in terms of content? I don't have a problem with using genre fiction to supply the content, or even using genre tropes in a particular story. I just finished up playing in a campaign that had a lot of content stolen from George R.R. Martin and steampunk, personally. My problem here is that cliche is coming to dominate the _structure_ of play, not just the content of it (though I'd prefer it didn't dominate content so much either).
.

Well, to be perfectly honest I can go both ways on this and often at the same time. My last campaign's story (at least at the onset) was very influenced by Stevenson's Kidnapped,  Hamlet and Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. The short campaign I ran before that was an attempt to do something very much like a 30's Republic serial, with elements of Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon and Hitchcock's North by Northwest. I've thought quite a bit about trying to do something like the Illiad though, but I have to cop to being a fan of the movie Troy. FWIW, and correct me if I'm wrong- Hamlet is part of a tradition of similar if inferior revenge plays and is built on a rather cliched structure itself.

[Pseudoephedrine]

Well, to be perfectly honest I can go both ways on this and often at the same time. My last campaign's story (at least at the onset) was very influenced by Stevenson's Kidnapped,  Hamlet and Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. The short campaign I ran before that was an attempt to do something very much like a 30's Republic serial, with elements of Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon and Hitchcock's North by Northwest. I've thought quite a bit about trying to do something like the Illiad though, but I have to cop to being a fan of the movie Troy. FWIW, and correct me if I'm wrong- Hamlet is part of a tradition of similar if inferior revenge plays and is built on a rather cliched structure itself.

I think you're right about Hamlet, but the cliches it draws on aren't really ones with the same familiarity or immediacy for a modern audience as say, those of popular television crime dramas. The structure and style has a freshness for a modern reader because of that - it's not really like most of the stuff that they're familiar with from the television and children's books they've probably grown up with.

[Aos]

Okay, I get where you're coming from. Truthfully, though, most GMs I've met have trouble getting any kind of structure at all into their game.