Reddit is almost as bad as ENWorld

As the title says. I need to get out of internet conversations altogether. I rarely find that people are 1) intelligent enough to follow the logical outcome of what they even say, 2) discuss in good faith, or 3) exhibit anything at all approaching common sense. In fact, as both reddit and ENWorld have become more and more liberal, they are subject to the following problem, which rather than quote in part, I'll just link to. It's a very good piece.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-involution-of-the-liberal-mind

Anyway, today's particular nonsense came from a post in, I believe r/osr where someone asked what changes to ShadowDark one would make. Houserules, etc. There was a small digression where one guy said that he strongly recommended not changing anything until the OP had played with the rules as is first, and a couple of other people chimed in to suggest that was some kind of law or something. Now, at the bottom of this page, you may notice that one of my mottos is, in part, the famous Latin phrase "Eventus stultorum magister est." And the fact that I first heard it in Tombstone doesn't negate the wisdom of this ancient proverb. That advice given on reddit is lowest common denominator advice, literally for the fools—the stulti, who can't figure anything out except by experiencing it personally. It's ridiculous advice for anyone who's been a roleplaying hobbyist for any amount of time at all. But, I guess, if you're not smart enough to extrapolate how a rule will work in play or if you're even interested in using that particular rule, I guess maybe it's decent advice. Stumble around on your own the hard way if that's the only way you can learn. Sucks to be you.

This was especially notable given the example I gave. One of the things that I don't care for in ShadowDark is carousing, wherein you can spend treasure to get bonus XP. I don't like any GP = XP equivalency rules, or rules where you can trade one for the other. There's generally two reasons for this kind of rule; 1) to motivate people to go seek out after treasure (I have no interest in motivating players to do that, but Gary Gygax did, back when the game was much more wargamey and roleplaying hadn't yet really caught on as the actual main event of the hobby, because everyone doing it was an old wargamer.) 2) to bleeds off excess treasure, because now your characters have too much. I called it a patch, in fact, to bleed off excess treasure, because due to inertia from old school treasure distribution, which has for a variety of reasons never been addressed in D&D-likes, characters get too much for most GM's taste. 

Given that this situation has literally been the case in D&D-likes for more than 50 years now, the idea that I don't know if I like how it works specifically in ShadowDark is absurd. 

And then Kelsey Dionne, writer of ShadowDark jumped in and said that carousing wasn't a patch to fix excess treasure, it was a resource to be spent. That's semantics, though. If you have treasure to spend on bonus XP, especially the really spendy bonuses, then you have too much treasure, and the bonus XP is a method to bleed off that treasure. And advance faster. Both of which are, by my tastes, not desirable. Therefore, they're easily fixed by simply giving less treasure and getting rid of the carousing stuff altogether. Don't bleed treasure (that you now don't have anyway) off to advance faster, so that you have a slower advancement schedule—which is also better. 

And... just to add some visual interest, here's another piece of Midkemia cover art, from the book that follows the Riftwar Saga and kind of starts treating with the next generation; Arutha and Anita's spoiled twin sons.

I have to wonder if the artist, Don Maitz, is familiar with Arnold Friberg's famous Book of Mormon illustrations, given the obvious resemblance here to this earlier work. His biography doesn't mention anything about his religious affiliation, or even much at all about his personal life, other than that he's married to Janny Wurts, who co-wrote the Empire trilogy with Feist, a spin-off from the Riftwar Saga. Probably how he got the gig in the first place. Of course, you don't need to be LDS to appreciate the art of Arnold Friberg; I've often thought that any sword & sorcery fan would immediately click with his weird mixture of savage Mesoamerican, Middle Eastern and Roman style aesthetic. 

Speaking of OSR weirdness, here's another reddit post I made, on a thread on "what are your OSR 'sins'?"

The thread title hardly endears to those who already see the OSR as almost cult-like in it's application of the "correct" way to play. That said, I'm a fan of the OSR mostly because I'm old, I remember when OD&D, Holmes, and B/X were what we played because they were current, and I love the DIY, garage band, indie aesthetic that the OSR has brought back to D&D-like games. I'm not, however:

• Very interested in faithful recreations of the original rules that don't fix certain things for either mechanical improvement or to change the tone of the game. I greatly dislike the overly weak thief, even though I love the archetype, I greatly dislike Vancian magic, I disbelieve the illusion that the cleric is actually an archetype and I don't like using them, etc. I've also never had problems with a shorter skill system of some kind, having also played plenty of GURPS and Cthulhu back in the day and been very comfortable with the idea of skills, etc.
• I'm also not at all interested in the so-called OSR playstyle. I don't have "adventurers" as a social class of any kind, nor do I find the implied story of dungeon-crawling for treasure to be interesting in the least. I strongly dislike dungeons, especially if they're loaded with gotcha traps, puzzles, riddles, or other things that have never existed really in reality. My playstyle is quite trad, although modified with a number of old-fashioned caveats. Maybe paleo-trad. My games tend to resemble more a combination of The Godfather, Mission: Impossible and James Bond in a dark Warhammer FRP or Cthulhu-like fantasy setting, and my motto is that while maybe I'm not old school, I certainly am old fashioned. That said, I don't mind hex-crawling as much as dungeon-crawling, but maybe that's because hiking/backpacking is another real-life hobby of mine.
• I simply cannot wrap my head around the idea that games that adhere to the "OSR as playstyle" but which don't really resemble old D&D are actually OSR. I know that I'm going to gradually lose this argument more and more as time goes on, but I've got to give credit to Yochai Gal for trying really hard to get the NSR recognized as something separate from, albeit related to, the OSR, rather than part of the OSR as a whole. Part of his failure may well have been the toxic gatekeeping, purity testing and insane overly political stance of the NSR in general, which makes it more difficult to focus on the NSR as an actual category of game and playstyle that's separate from the OSR. Or maybe the different types of rules aren't as important as I think that they are, and the OSR and the NSR, from the point of view of someone outside of either, are too similar to bother splitting.
• Similarly, I'm a little ambivalent on some aspects of weirdness and gonzo. While I incorporate a great deal of Lovecraftian influence in my fantasy gaming, it's less of the cosmic horror and semi-science fiction elements, and more of the interdimensional horror and risk of character madness. Warhammer FRP and the Darkest Dungeons video games are more the style that I'm looking at rather that mi-go and Yithians taking people to their interplanetary cities or whatever. Demons are, in fact, demons, and not intergalactic aliens, or whatever. I also dislike science fiction elements in fantasy; or rather, I don't consider it fantasy anymore when they're present, and I prefer to keep them discrete. Don't get me wrong; a Thundarr the Barbarian meets Cthulhupunk sounds amazing, but I'd have to treat it like something completely separate from whatever I'm doing in fantasy. Probably another reason that I consider the NSR so different from the OSR, given that the NSR is "more weird" than the otherwise fairly traditional OSR.

This isn't part of my post, but while I'm giving credit to Gal for that particular attempt, I also credit (blame) mostly him specifically for the NSR being such a hotbed of woke politics and cancel culture nonsense. He's specifically the one most responsible for how toxic the NSR community is. Although maybe it was inevitable given the genesis of the NSR community in the early work of weirdos like James Raggi and Zac S. to begin with. It naturally gravitated to that kind of personality, even if the games themselves (some of them, anyway) aren't necessarily woke. Some of them, in fact, I'd actually probably like. But the community... blegh.

Maybe, given that the OSR has been around for a good twenty years now (depending on when exactly you consider it to have started.) I have to stop trying to think of it as a monolithic thing. There are a lot of people in the OSR doing a lot of different (and mutually exclusive) things. It's OK to be a fan of certain elements of it and not necessarily the movement as a whole. I think a lot of people are having trouble letting go of the idea that they're part of "the OSR community" but I do think that it's clear that original B/X fans and fans of NSR stuff are two different communities... at the very least. In reality, you can break it down into being fans of all kinds of specific games and not of others; just like being fans of RPGs overall. The OSR has become something too big to just treat it as a single thing, just like being "a gamer" is too big for that mostly too.

Doesn't mean that there can't be a lot of overlap between fans of various different games or even various broader approaches to gaming, however, even while acknowledging that being a fan of this or that isn't necessarily correlated with being a fan of that or this. That's a bit of a pet peeve of mine in general; the assumption that because I play D&D, I must like any other RPG, or that I must like anime (I don't) or heavy metal (also don't.) But because the OSR was for quite some time united under a relatively singular approach and goals, it's been harder to give up the idea that it's not anymore.