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Author Topic: From the RPGPundit's Blog: The Swine are Online  (Read 3202 times)

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From the RPGPundit's Blog: The Swine are Online
« on: August 28, 2006, 05:33:13 PM »
Fortunately, since the advent of the D20 system, the general gaming hobby has reverted to sanity, and stepped away slowly but surely from the incestuous inward-turning voluntary suicide which would have been the desire of the "storyteller" crowd that drove the gaming industry to the ground in the late nineties.
 
D20 restored a kind of populism to the RPG, it was accesible to all gamers by revitalising the single most popular RPG, Dungeons & Dragons.  It was revitalising to the industry thanks to the D20 systems open gaming license, Ryan Dancey's work of genius, ensuring that D20 would establish a kind of hegemony that would not only protect it from being replaced as the foremost system of the hobby but would also assure evolution and innovation in design; as well as giving room to independant companies to produce material that would work with, rather than compete against the dominant system.
 
In the end, D20 is by far the most popular RPG system around these days; and to the vast vast majority of gamers, "story-based" gaming, metaplot, and all of the flawed theories of the "rpg as art/intellectual achievement" school of pretentious pseudointellectuals had become just so much garbage on the heap of bad RPG ideas.
 
Unfortunately, in the more extreme fringes of the hobby, namely those who would post in online fora, these ideas are far from finished. They live on, in their own little fantasy worlds, in places like rpg.net; imagining that the general public gives a rat's ass about second-rate artsy nearly-unplayable games like "Nobilis" or "my life with master"; discussing the White Wolf games as though they were still the ones that mattered, and trying at every possible moment to either denigrate D20 or (better yet) deny the reality of D20's dominance in the market today.
 
The sad part about it is that these cowards hide behind the veneer of "balance" when in reality they could teach the good old boys down at FOX news a thing or two about partisan selectivity.  On RPG.net, someone could post a vicious attack against D&D or D20 on a regular basis (or against other systems that fall outside of the pseudointellectual fold, like Champions or GURPS), and get little more than a reluctant slap on the wrist if enough fuss were raised about it.  On the other hand, if you criticize one of the RPG.net "pet systems" (Exalted, Nobilis, My Life With Master, etc etc), you are immediately painted as a troll and hunted down.
 
It isn't fundamentally about criticizing their systems, though, or even about promoting D20... its fundamentally about not shattering their created reality.  These ragged survivors, these former pretentious potentates of the Generation of Swine don't want anyone there who will dampen the delusion they have of still being the "guys who matter", of still being relevant to the hobby, and not the last lingering remains of an infection that nearly brought the entire hobby down.   They want to believe that they are the "average gamer"; and that the average gamer really does care about G/N/S theory, or that the average gamer would agree that "Dogs in the Vineyard" should win an award over the D&D Basic set (and that any other result is just a "opularity contest").  They want to believe that the millions of people who play and enjoy the D20 system are just deluded idiots, too ignorant to realize that they aren't "maximizing" their roleplaying experience by sucking every last drop of enjoyment out of it, who only need to be shown the true light of story-based revolution to don a beret and join them all in a glorious rebirth of pseudo-intellectual shit-slinging unplayable-rpg goodness.  And when you remind them of how out of touch they really are, when you remind them they lost, they hate you for it.

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