Sunday, October 30, 2011

Cripes! This Baker Thing Has Legs!

First, thanks to all that bought something during the sale. Big success. :)

On October 11 Vincent Baker made a post on the Forge with the title "Lamentations of the Flame Princess is made of lies!"

I made my comments here on October 14.

But it spreads!

On October 22 Baker's comments were addressed by someone on the RPGSite with the thread "Swine Attack LotFP." It's up to 111 posts with the usual Forge/RPGSite animosity.

Earlier this morning a thread started on RPG.net: "Forge Thread: LOTFP is made of lies." This one's going to weird places (see this reply as an example).

Whew.

I will once again state that I don't see how Baker thought there would be moral grounding within the game (I intentionally removed any such thing - A Stranger Storm doesn't work at all if morality is mechanically enforced or even tracked - the fun is in watching the players squirm as they try to decide what to do!). I don't think Baker really was attacking the game at all and he had fun playing even if he made some incorrect assumptions out of the gate.

I also think that different people playing my game differently is an awesome thing, and even if they don't have a consistent vision of what LotFP is supposed to be, it's still coming out differently than people playing Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry or old D&D - mechanically similar in many respects but not the same games as LotFP.

If my resources weren't tied up with Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown (both should go to press in 8 days!), I would have gotten an adventure or three out by now out which would better define my perception of the weird with some more ready-to-go examples and how it's not very hard-codable into rules. But I didn't because Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown aren't going to get done without deciding to get them done, you know? And at that point there's nothing to do but put everything else on hold and sacrifice the resources necessary to do them right.

22 comments:

  1. Does it matter if a few kids on the internet don't understand what your game is?

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  2. Not as such.

    That the game is being talked about (and argued over!) is something that matters a bit. :)

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  3. A little more publicity surely is a good thing.

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  4. "(see this reply as an example)"

    That post, right there, is a small exhibit of what's wrong with the Forge. Deconstructionist critique written from a nominally neutral POV, but stuffed so full with weasel-words, strawmen and malicious interpretations it is almost a parody of disingenuousness pseudo-academic discourse. For whatever positive the Forge might have done, this is its most poisonous by-product.

    TheRPGSite's anti-Forge crusade has become pretty limp as of late (even Pundit is going against other targets), but here, with this specific post, it is entirely justified.

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  5. disingenuousness --> disingenuous

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. (retyping with small corrections)

    "That post, right there, is a small exhibit of what's wrong with the Forge"

    That's pretty weird considering it's on RPG.net, not on the Forge, and it seems to be condescending towards its own little concept of "the Forge" the same way it's condescending to everybody else.

    Posts which point to random posters on RPG.net and describe them as "what's wrong with the forge" are themselves the reason that when I hear somebody dislike "the forge" I never assume that the thing they dislike bears any resemblance to the site, the people who have posted there in the past and in the present, and the things they've written. Because "The Forge" has long ago become this big boogeyman on which people project all kinds of bizarre resentments and personal issues.

    Fuck that.

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  8. Jim - I totally understand why it's important, or at least advantageous, for a guy in your shoes to have a presence on the rpg message boards. But man, I don't envy you.

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  9. "Rulebooks describe the constraints that constitute the game system;" --that stuffis guy

    Here's the whole problem in a nutshell, folks. It's the classic mistake you see all over the spectrum: D&D RAWpunks, Forge Storynowistas, OSR beardoes and hardcore simulationists all waste tons of time butting their heads against this particular wall.

    What am I talking about? Mistaking the rules for the game. You know how in the 3e era "Rules Mastery" was a big concept? RULES MASTERY IS LEVEL ONE KIDDIE STUFF. Everything important in RPGs happens the moment you stop holding onto the rulebook with both hands.

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  10. Dear Ed H, it is neither weird nor random. The linked post has a very specific pattern to it, from terminology to underlying assumptions. Most ideas do not arise in a vacuum: they can be traced back to their origins. One can often identify posts when they come from the assumptions of "the OSR blogosphere", "TheRPGSite", "the Knights&Knaves Alehouse" or "RPGNet - Tangency". When someone says, "this dungeon is steeped in Gygaxian naturalism", you can safely tell he or she has read Grognardia.

    The specific post James linked to is blatantly Forge-inspired. It also contains a blanket dismissal of "D&D" (and its derivatives). To cite only three of his talking points:
    "Rulebooks describe the constraints that constitute the game system; as long as the players aren't sociopaths, the rules also generate an agreed-upon set of desires that would otherwise not arise."
    This is a cornerstone of the classic Ron Edwards essay, System does matter (which contains a lot of other points I will not go into).

    "Ron Edwards (one of the useful/unbearable Richard Stallmans of gaming) has made the point many, many times over that this is also wrong, though in a more insidiious way - i.e. you can live that way at the table, contentedly, without ever realizing what a miserably narrow gaming experience you're forcing yourself to have."
    He literally name-drops Ron, then trots out the argument that people who disagree with the implications of the essay are wrong "in a more insidious way" (whoa), who "live that way at the table, contentedly" (what?!) getting a "miserably narrow gaming experience" (FUCK that guy!).

    Finally, he concludes with the implication that D&D players "bitch and moan at the first suggestion that RPG systems do not exist simply to scaffold players' limitless self-generating power fantasies", something "we could psychologize about at length" (but we won't, because we are above those sheeple, so above them we can't be bothered).
    What? What?! Seriously, FUCK that guy! And I say that as "the guy who hates fun".

    To sum up, stuffis gets from the subtle biases to the batshit elitism within a single post. No, Ed H, this is not a random, context-free post with iffy bits. It is a fucking shooting gallery of WRONG.

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  11. James, you are continuing to do an awesome job of winding everybody up so they talk about and buy our stuff. (Which is good because our stuff is good and they never regret it.)

    Anyway, I know you got Halloween stuff to do and so do I, but if you get a minute could you wind everybody up again on my RPG.net thread? It seems to have died down since the troll on there migrated over to your thread.

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  12. "(Which is good because our stuff is good and they never regret it.)"

    Damn Straight! :)

    "What? What?! Seriously, FUCK that guy! And I say that as "the guy who hates fun".

    Damn Straight! :)

    "Everything important in RPGs happens the moment you stop holding onto the rulebook with both hands."

    Damn Straight! :)

    " And at that point there's nothing to do but put everything else on hold and sacrifice the resources necessary to do them right."

    Damn Straight! :)

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  13. I'm having a sort of epiphany lately, and the more bland OSR stuff I see coming out the more I'm driven from it. The warm fuzzies from childhood are turning into "Enough already."

    I thought I would never say this until now, but count me in for a copy of Carcosa. As far as D&D goes, I need a serious fucking change-up. I'm serious, I might just buy the entire product line for myself this Xmas.

    Zak, your a trip dude. You're calling dissenting opinion gold here, while at the same time on the Grognardia Dwimmermount art thread you're lecturing me about how such opinions have no merit. Crackin' me up, bro.

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  14. Aaaand I'm still having somebody point to a post on RPG forum A and tell me how terrible and awful it is and so that proves how bad RPG forum B is.

    All this is so much bullshit over nothing. Vincent loved the game but found some parts of it different than he expected (and, he later said, BETTER than he expected), he posted about it in the odd and sometimes provocative manner in which he posts about everything, and hundreds of fanboys across the internet lost their shit.

    And the shit-losing goes on.

    Why?

    Because Vincent is defined as being part of the Forge Tribe, and the game was written by somebody who is defined as being part of the OSR Tribe, and the OSR Tribe just KNOW that the Forge Tribe are horrible snooty pseudo-intellectual shitbags, so this must somehow be an INSULT to the OSR TRIBE, it's time to call out the troops and declare a WAR OF NECKBEARD AGAINST NECKBEARD.

    HELL EVEN IF HE LIKED THE GAME IT IS INSULTING THAT THE FORGE TRIBE SHOULD SPEAK OF THE OSR TRIBE'S GAMES. IT IS SACRELIGE; THEY ARE FOUL AND DO NOT DESERVE OUR GAMES. FIE ON THE FORGE TRIBE!

    Jesus, people.

    Raggi isn't losing his shit; why do so many other people have to lose their shit?

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  15. @bruno

    just because being dumb makes us money doesn't mean calling people out for being dumb isn't a good thing to do.

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  16. Ed H. Your're upset about a vocal minority, most of us simply don't care to engage in or give any particular weight to, the tribalism and self important, self imposed segregation some cling to. For the most part its simply a question of interests, what social media one frequents, not a quest to draw boundaries and define truths.

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  17. DHBoggs, God Bless you for that.

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  18. Thanx for the weekend! Finally got my grindhouse order up! Can't wait the product.

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  19. Ed H, +20 for that post. "War of neckbeard against neckbeard": priceless!

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  20. "the usual Forge/RPGSite animosity."

    So, RPGPundit ranting on to the general disinterest of everyone else?

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  21. "If my resources weren't tied up with Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown (both should go to press in 8 days!)..."
    Whoot, whoot! Light at the end of the tunnel!

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  22. @Jeff Rients, The following quote by you will be plastered on my forum signatures, because I find it to be utterly amazing. :)

    "Everything important in RPGs happens the moment you stop holding onto the rulebook with both hands." -Jeff Rients

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