People are the worst

I made one of my three or four times a year pilgrimages to ENWorld to see what was going on there the other day. Curiously, the beta fascism of Umbran wasn't in sight, or at least not in anything I was looking at.

But there's another curiosity. Again; I don't know what "always" happens, because I'll pop in for a week or two and then disappear for months at a time. But every single time I pop in, and I do mean EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. there's a thread where someone tries to talk about character, roleplaying or playstyle in a D&D context, and after a few pages it turns into a strange argument about indie games like Burning Wheel, Dogs in the Vinyard, or whatever other fashy indie game du jour is making the rounds. (But mostly Burning Wheel.) It's the same half a dozen (or less) usual suspects who do it. This shift doesn't happen in a context of, "Oh, if you're interested in that kind of thing, then here's something from a very different kind of game with very different design parameters that you might find interesting, because it'll expand your repertoire beyond what you'll see in D&D."

No, rather it's in the context of "No. What you said about characters in D&D is wrong because in Burning Wheel you do this." These posts are often also written in some kind of cipher, where they look like English words, but the meaning is strangely scrambled. It always takes several pages for people, who are trying to engage with this tangent in good faith, to actually figure out what the indie-gamer guys are even talking about, because they don't use words in the common sense common parlance that everyone else is using them in. By the time this Alice in Wonderland bizarro-conversation has matured enough that enough people are finally on the same page to be able to actually talk to each other as opposed to at each other (several pages worth of posts later) then nobody remembers to point out that this entire thing is a non sequitur that has nothing to do with the discussion that was being had, which has now been choked out. And then the thread carries on for many more pages talking about indie-game character mechanics, that have little to no connection to the context in which the conversation was started.

I'm not sure why I see this pattern repeated. Is it as common as it seems, or do I just happen to coincidentally show up when these kinds of threads are popping up? I suspect, because of the statistical laws of sampling populations, that there's almost always a thread of this type on the first page of ENWorld since there always is every time I sample the list of threads at ENWorld. What drives it? Monomania? Fanatical system evangelism? Is it just pretentious name-dropping to try and impress everyone else with the gamers' sophistication?

At least it's a little better then back in the day when these same topics would be subject to thread vandalization by proto-OSRians saying something to the effect of "When I started playing, the peak of roleplaying was dealing with 3d6 in order. And we didn't have any skill system, we just ROLEPLAYED it. You duchess tea party mamby-pamby method actors aren't playing real D&D (1974), the one true game. All others are a pale imitation." Cuz I remember when that was a thing. At least with this indie discussion, there's at least the slim chance that someone will inadvertently be tipped off to something that they find interesting outside of the D&D mainstream.

Technically I'm an indie-game guy, since m20 is certainly an indie-game, and I've borrowed other indie-game mechanics, like from FATE and stuff. I used to play The Window, and Red Box Hack, and other indie-games, although I'd suggest that much of the indie-game stuff that I dabble in is JV league compared to what they're talking about, at least in terms of being significantly or drastically different in terms of its approach to mechanics. But when I go to ENWorld, and people are talking about D&D specifically, I don't go all preachy on them about why I don't play D&D and they shouldn't either, because other things "do it better." And I certainly don't just talk to them as if its a given that they're not playing D&D when they're clearly talking in a D&D context, which is a very odd thing that some of these guys do.

I also found that a guy that I know who I recall as normally being pretty sensible in these types of discussions, who knows about indie-games and plays them, but hadn't ever exhibited any of this cult-like behavior, because he was socially astute enough to actually hold normal conversations with other people, has now gone to the dark side and is acting as bizarrely as some of the other more notorious posters.

I kind of bailed on this conversation mid-stream and left ENWorld again in disgust, as usually happens after a week or two of hanging around ENWorld anymore. But this was a little different this time, as it wasn't the toxic beta mod who disgusted me this time, but just kind of the general gamma environment. Sigh. Which of course I was aware of, but there were always a few lights in the darkness that still occasionally drew me in. Now... I don't feel that. My already infrequent perambulations back to ENWorld may become even more infrequent following this latest disappointment. People. They just always let you down. They really are the worst.

However, given that I'm back in the RPG saddle, so to speak, with regards to my blogging, I've got a few more topics in the batting order that I'll hit here shortly. In fact, yesterday I re-read The Forgotten Forge for my Eberron Remixed project, and I'll be talking about that shortly as well.