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Reposted

cavegirl @cavegirl.bsky.social · 2h

a crudely-edited meme parodying Kung Pow Enter The Fist, reading "I must apologise for the D&D fandom. He is an idiot. We have purposely trained him wrong, as a marketing strategy."

enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 56m

The McElroy's Gambit... a classic approach to navigating the tension between play and performance... can they thread the needle? Or will there, in fact, be Bummers?

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 1h

It's like pulling teeth, good god.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 7h

The point of a gameified framework for roleplay is to codify options which encourage character decision-making which reinforces the core themes of a game and that *produces* your character - it's not simply acting, it's dramaturgy. If it's intuitive, it's because a designer worked their ass off.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 7h

If you think about a choice in a game, it's because 40 people thought about that choice before you did and tried to make your desires align with that choice. They're trying to make the game structures facilitate the act of playing the role, of making you say "*I* want to do this."

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 7h

Also, like... have you never played a console RPG?

You're not inventing a character when you play a mainline Final Fantasy title, you're occupying their space in the narrative. You're Playing their Role. The designers and writers are trying to craft ways to elicit characterful actions from you.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 7h

The notion that no effort goes into crafting scenarios and frameworks to determine how much distance there should be between a player and their character, then facilitating that distance mechanically and narratively is comical. Breathtakingly stupid.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 7h

Pack it up, LARPers, you don't need a rules structure, theory, safety tools, genre conventions, story briefs, anything at all to circumscribe the break between IC and OOC - we will plop you into a setting and you figure that shit out! It's intuitive! It's like when children play pretend!

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 7h

It's dismissive of everyone at once. People who think RP is hard. People who like RP. People who don't like RP. Game designers. Actors. Professionals. Hobbyists.

You're all wasting your time. You should just receive the appropriate RP framework for the game you're playing via the Akashic Record.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 7h

It manages to accidentally suggest that it isn't a skill, that anyone can do it and all forms of RP are equally effective and useful at the table, which. Dope. This thing? Anyone can just do it with no instruction and everyone inherently possesses identical degrees of skill at it.

Screenshot of a tweet by Twitter user wint @dril which says "the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

It is timestamped 1:52 on the 2nd of June, 2014.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 8h

My favorite soundbite from all this is "roleplaying doesn't have rules its intuitive" An empty-headed assertion made with total confidence by someone without a single clue what any of those words mean. It's so impressively wrong that it's kind of awesome.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 8h

So many "discussions" around TTRPGs are 5e lifers arguing with designers from positions which imply that game design is a frivolous, unskilled activity because you can just make anything up.

Playing pretend and a structured, systematized practice treated with the same weight by a Disney adult.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 8h

This somewhat rhymes with a common expression in the D&D space of just wanting "the rules to get out of the way of the story" and frustration around the dice "not wanting to tell the story everyone at the table does."

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 8h

As an example, role-playing in WoW naturally runs up against the combat system built into the game, and the issue that players have with mediating the story via the combat, leading them to contrive all manner of substitute systems for aping a fight without actually engaging with combat.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 8h

The degree of effort for that kind of extracurricular activity has some overlap with the kinds of stuff people talk about in 5e "content," namely how much is just veiled fiction writing and improv advice, or ways to retrofit the combat rules chassis with explicit narrative-enforcement mechanisms.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 9h

But hey! On a 31-40 you get caught up in a whirlwind romance, so maybe that's what the viral Twitter post doing the rounds depicts.

enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 9h

When people cast a sidelong glance at the suggestion that the game is just as much about the Carousing activity which can land you in jail for 1d4 days based on a single d100+level roll as it is about armor class, that incredulity is not misplaced.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 9h

As an example, for 3 years the Crafting Magic Items downtime activity was 1 chart with 5 entries and like 2 paragraphs of rules no one liked.

Xanathar's functionally adds some roll tables with "Complications," expanding the rules into something else no one liked and commonly had to homebrew.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 9h

I think you're overstating this. Core rulebooks launched in 2014 with a combined ~6 pages across the PHB and DMG, some of which are a single roll or just "talk to your DM about it."

Xanathar's in 2017 added about 9 pages which are basically a redo and expansion of the rules in the DMG and PHB.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 10h

I do love the admission that the core gameplay loop of combat is so repetitive that you've got to minimize its presence lest everyone decide it isn't worth playing D&D.

It's so cool how an entire cohort of consumer is locked into an ecosystem that primarily provides rules for an activity they hate.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 10h

Putting out an ad push for Honey Heist which is just artwork of a wounded Iorek Byrnison passionately kissing Baloo by a Dark Souls bonfire and lecturing incredulous onlookers that Honey Heist is not primarily about being a criminal bear but about all the bear sex in Anor Londo we roleplay.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 13h

If you wanted to you could use the WoW interface to sell Amway to people in Orgrimmar. No one would call that playing WoW.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 13h

You can create shared narratives with other likeminded people if you hammer out what that looks like or comport with the traditions of the group, but out of the box your character is directly incentivized and DIRECTED to walk into the wilderness and start killing NPC mobs.

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enemyskill.bsky.social @enemyskill.bsky.social · 13h

I feel like a fruitful comparison could be the RP community that sprung up around WoW.

You could go 1000 hours without ever seeing someone roleplay but you'd have to go out of your way to find, engage with, and learn the customs of a given WoW RP subgroup to get 10 hours of RP in.

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Reposted

Foucault's Pudendum @kaitave.bsky.social · 13h

The fundamental disconnect I am starting to put together here, which I'm sure someone else has long since beat me to, is people keep conflating what you CAN do with a game versus what the game itself actually IS, and do not seem capable of separating the two out from one another

Foucault's Pudendum @kaitave.bsky.social · 16h

You can roleplay in anything, you can roleplay in fucking Monopoly if you want, and if you see that and go "well that sounds dumb" then congrats, you know what it's like to be told that a game can have 200 pages about combat and two paragraphs for Diplomacy checks and not "be about violence" somehow

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