Why Does Malcolm Sheppard Suck?

I haven't posted since Monday! Damn. Been busy with stuff. But I think I have time for a rant.

Malcolm Sheppard Why do RPGs Suck? What a load of shit. I've read exactly two things by Sheppard (remember Why You Can't Have Nice Things?) and they both show his utter contempt for the traditional role-playing game, the people who play them, and the people who make them. How else do you explain his saying things like 'hexcrawls are a symptom of a writer's disdain for himself and his audience' and pushing the idea that clones are proof of creative failure without taking a closer look at what the "clone" movement has in turn enabled and grown in the player base.

He's got this notion that if you find something you like and you want to play in that sandbox and not take a great big bite of every new idea that comes along, you're irrelevant and indeed harmful to the hobby and industry. If you produce material for these satisfied people, you're creatively bankrupt. The ever-growing number of OSR players and publishers are pissing all over those notions from a great height.

At some point you just have to admit that the RPGPundit's "Swine" are not imaginary boogeymen. They do exist...

(oh shit, Pundit's already weighed in: "For him 'creative' means 'the brilliant and artistic splatbook auteur creates a work of his own genius that you proles will devour like the mindless unwashed that you are.'" *checks Sheppard's writing credits* Sounds about right.)

Steve Long The Licensing Trap This is a different sort of thing. Long is just wrong here. Not contemptuously so, but wrong.

Frankly, if a group wants to play in "a licensed setting," who gives a shit? A group having fun playing in someone else's world is just as entitled to that as playing in a setting made up by the GM. There are pitfalls, as I talk about in the Ref book of my game, but it's not awful in concept.

"Let's play some Dr Who!" (for example) is not an idea that I would expect to be rare in gamers, you know? How is it bad business sense to take advantage of it? How is that being bankrupt of ideas? If a licensed game indeed enables play in that particular world, that's fucking awesome. Some people do want to get on with gaming and not customize all this shit endlessly themselves, strange as that sounds to some of us.

As I've said before, our job as publishers is not to amaze purchasers with how amazingly original and clever we are or to develop IP for other media. Our job is to produce gameable material for play. That's it. Nothing else. All that other stuff we do along with that is for our own benefit and satisfaction and amusement, not the purchaser's.

Does it really make one shit's difference if a group wants to play in Golarion or Middle-Earth anyway? Or how about The World of Darkness vs the Dresden Files world? One of each pair is purpose-built by a RPG company, the other comes from novels. The decision to play in any of these worlds means a group is not using a "home-brew" world. So what's the difference on the publisher end? Prestige in the community? Getting patted on the back by other RPG designers? The hopes of a Hollywood deal?

*fart*

(wait a minute, why does Sheppard think Golarion sucks? I haven't read a word of Golarion setting material, but an off-the-cuff guess is that it is a setting that provides opportunities to engage in the kind gaming that gamers like to do instead of presenting them with foreign concepts and ideas that don't do dick for encouraging or sustaining a real-life at-the-table game)

Frankly, playing in a "licensed" setting means the players might actually know what the fuck is going on once in awhile without all the info needing to be spoonfed to them by the GM. That may not be the creative option, but sometimes it's the better option.

Remember, it is not the publisher's job to be the creative one. It's the publisher's job to excite the imagination of the potential GM and inspire the creativity there. A hex crawl, for instance, demands that the GM create and improvise because there is no way in hell to make a comprehensive hex-crawl that gives all the answers and provides all the necessary information on a platter during play. A good module has a setting or situation with no scripted outcome; anything can happen and watching the players destroy the module's carefully prepared environment is the fun of it.

All the unique IP in the universe isn't going to help a game if the core of it doesn't contain gameable stuff, and if there is gameable stuff then the IP attached to it is pretty much just window dressing - the stuff can be transferred to other "IP."

... why yes, I am releasing hex-crawls in the coming months and assuming that the company doesn't go ptbtbt I'll be chasing a license this summer (just because sometimes I want to call a spade a spade and stop euphemizing - I have no desire to make it appealing to the "property's" current fanbase). And I made by own simulacrum! And no official explicit company setting is even in the planning stages! It's strangely satisfying being everything Sheppard thinks is wrong with RPGs these days, considering that it looks like he's the embodiment of everything that kept me out of the game shop for well over a decade.

(Maria: "These people have fallen onto their own sword.")

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(and while I'm ranting and my blood's pumping, something unrelated: I'm waiting on the final art pieces for the Tutorial and Rules books for the Grindhouse Edition. To save the artists themselves being associated with my RAARR RRAAARR!!!!, I'll say this here instead of when I post the pieces:

The gauntlet is thrown down. I dare anyone to produce better gaming art in 2011. Wizards of the Coast and Paizo and Fantasy Flight with your deep pockets and pick of whatever talent you want, my fellow OSR publishers with your unlimited well of ideas, all you storygamers with your edgy concepts all about making meaningful fiction happen in play... any of you. Match this. Try. Please.

You might think this is just empty hype. You might think "How good could a gaming illustration possibly be?" You might think I'm creating unrealistic expectations that this art can't possibly meet. You might even think I'm just full of shit. However, I have one advantage here that you don't: I've seen the art.

Trust me on this one. During the next week or so they'll get done and I'll show them to you and you'll see for yourself and you can join me in over here being in awe of these things.)