I'm in a Different Hobby than All These Other Folks...

My ranty rant here may have been a bit over the edge, but my "I'm washing my hands of them and declaring them a completely different hobby altogether," line seems to have raised a few eyebrows.

Here are some examples of why I feel this way. Admittedly, these are cherrypicking other internet nutcases in order to make my case, but... it's a scary internet out there.

Check this out. "My players wasted time looking for stuff that wasn't there. Was I wrong to have it not be there?" Perhaps it's a nice thought exercise about how to run games, so the premise really isn't that absurd (my opinion on the matter is included in that thread), but it's this inanity that really makes me want to hand myself by my dicebag drawstrings. This guy who claims that a flying wizard with no stairway access would break his suspension of disbelief because... he feels the flying wizard would need stairs sometime, just because. And then there's Mr. "Gaming is a Wonderful Fancyland", who declares that whatever feels most happy at the time is the correct thing to do.

Sometimes players just suck, and sometimes even excellent players get sidetracked with nonsense or don't figure something out right away. Crappy players don't improve by caving in, and excellent players will appreciate that an earned victory means more than one given to them because that was the most fun thing to do at that moment.

Reading some of the responses in that thread, I get the feeling that they'd be happier if the ref, or GM, or Player Fun-Facilitator or whatever his title is, should just throw the adventure down in front of the players and ask for the players' descriptions of how their characters beat the adventure and call it a game.

I guess this is all part of the greater phenomenon of thinking everything has to be awesome at all times. That shit-ass TVtropes.org website calls this The Rule of Cool. Basically, this rule says that if you numb someone with sensory overload, you can do anything, and they'll like it, and they think this is a good thing. TVtropes.org is a top driver of traffic to this site since somebody over there completely misinterpreted my I Hate Fun thing, and it's also a piece of shit website because instead of exposing the cliché garbage that TV peddles (like I was hopeful it would do from its name), it peddles these clichés as true and awesome culture, else it wouldn't be repeated so often on TV, right? TV is our god.

The Rule has its adherents in RPG circles as well. There's a load on rpg.net. Recent blog posts here and here advocate it. Robin D. Laws was all about this in his much lauded Robin's Laws book.

You know what? Cool stuff is cool, but the Rule of Cool is absolute Crap and following it, especially on the spur of the moment, will lead to more Mortal Kombat II finales than it will... um... I really can't think where The Rule of Cool ended well, ever. That Was Cool is a fleeting fart of a sensation. That Was Well-Done and/or That Was Impressive are completely different sensations and ones more well worth pursuing.

I'll tell you another idea-pox upon this hobby that I supposedly share with thousands of people across the globe:

All RPGs are wish-fulfillment. Unless there is a "Full-time Paid Referee: The RPG" or a "No Conflict, You're Just Always Right: The RPG" out there, this is pure hogwash from my point of view. Most activities that occur in RPGs are things that I would never want to do, even if I knew I would always succeed in the end. I have taken absolutely zero steps in my life towards becoming rich, or a great warrior, or much of anything besides a big blow-hard that pontificates about shit with zero meaning to the "big picture," really. Being powerful and able to kick ass is all well and good, but frankly if I was in a situation where being powerful and kicking ass was something that had to be done, I'd feel pretty shitty about the whole thing. It doesn't matter if I somehow could handily dispose of (in whatever genre-appropriate fashion) a gang of thugs that was trying to mug me... the fact that someone tried to mug me would ruin my evening regardless of whether they took a dime or whether I got a scratch on me or not.

And as a referee I design dark and dangerous hellholes. As if I'd build a house full of man-eating tigers and booby-traps if I ever won the lottery and had enough money to make my every wish come true.

In fact, people who do use RPGs as wish fulfillment are really kind of sad. You really want to be a dashing hero (or explorer, or murderer, or whatever)? Then go do it and stop sitting around pretending to do it!

I can't be arsed to search out other living examples of these-people-aren't-doing-the-same-activity-I-am I've read recently, but there is a lot of the type that inspired the I Hate Fun essay going around the message boards. Lots of talk about game balance (I think precipitated by the above factors to provide a "safe adventuring environment" which is about as oxymoronic a phrase as there is), lots of talk about miniatures (can we at least be unanimous that miniatures collecting and painting - and LARPing, while we're here - are separate, although related, hobbies from role-playing?), dead games and the horridness/impracticality thereof (that's right, games not currently in print and easily available and actively supported by a slew of totally game-changing new rules don't really count to a lot of people... can you imagine AD&D 1E with a new Unearthed Arcana appearing every month or two? Fuck), discussion on licensed RPGs (and the apparent necessity to have a separate one to play that setting since a complete game these days comes with a setting so of course you can't use an existing game to... AARRRGGHH), the treatment of industry news as relevant to their gaming hobby (I'm torn on how the Zagyg/Gygax Games saga fits here; I was never going to run Castle Greyhawk anyway, so would my interest in it, especially a newer interpretation, even if it had been by Gygax's own hand, actually be a part of my actual gaming hobby?), being a collector of role-playing books (would those 10 books you got for Christmas be for reading, shelving, or playing?)

Keeping in touch with the greater hobby is healthy. It's a source of fresh ideas and new perspectives. So the mood-soothing advice of, "stop cruising the internet," is detrimental to my gaming in the long run, as there are some prime peanuts of usefulness out there. But it's increasingly difficult to pick those peanuts out of the feces because it's difficult to find discussion along the lines that are actually relevant to my gaming.

Awesome. This was just going to be a quick explanatory note and it turned into I Hate Fun the Holiday Edition.

Happy frickin' New Year.

*grumblecakes*