This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There are a pretty good number of open-source and closed-source-but-much-friendly options, and to an extent everyone thought the OGL here was an open-source alternative (to something like GURPs). That said: the big thing D&D brought to the table was a Schelling Point.
It was seldom -- if ever -- a particularly good option for any particular genre of game. For actual high-fidelity wargaming, for heist games, for stealth thievery, whatever, there's not only something better, but often something that's been better at it for multiple generations. Older versions of D&D had a strategy-game-like at the higher end of the power scale that, as far as I know, literally no one bothered with and only really existed to sell supplements/explain genre conventions; there are few competitors that aren't better at that.
But if you put down five nerds and try to get picks for the best RPG for a given genre, you'll get somewhere between six and twelve different answers. If you ask for a compromise that everyone's familiar with and no one actively hated (until this month), you get D&D. And given how much running a game overlaps with herding cats anyway, the average gamemaster will take what you can get.
Uh, and until the early 00s with the rise of Kindle/PoD, TSR/WotC was one of three big companies could handle the investment costs and quality control of bulk printing high-quality major rulebooks and supplements at scale, and that's for really marginal definitions of editing, lol WhiteWolf.
((I don't know that I'd fully condone vorpa_glavo's post here. There's a handful of small games that at least had some recognize fans and playerbase outside of the D&D/WhiteWolf/Paizo/Warhammer-sphere: Blue Rose, Don't Rest Your Head, GURPs (kinda), Mouse Guard, Palladium system (though this to the player's detriment), IronClaw, FATE Core/Accel, Eclipse Phase might have gotten into the thousands of actually-played games.
But outside of that, yes, absolutely. Hell, there's even stuff like Continuum which I'm pretty sure has never ever have a completed game including its authors. Hell of a read! But ohgod.))
More options
Context Copy link