Why D&D?

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Abbreviated Forge Wars History
Honestly, I had no idea that the Pundit had that much history in this. I first encountered and promptly ignored him in the days of G+. Kind of makes me respect and pity him a little more.
 
Also, I even think that 4e D&D was a good game for what it was attempting to be, which probably angers people on both sides of the fence :B :B :B.
I think 4e would have done fine if it hadn't been attached to the D&D brand. It didn't benefit from those expectations.
 
It is that kind of game where I WANT to like it but then when I played it just never seemed to work right. Like in theory the rules should do what I like, but in the end I think I just didn't really like the fact that 90% of the game part of it is just the FATE point economy.
I can understand that. Same reason I passed on to other games, really, after playing Fate for a while:thumbsup:.

I don't think I was there. Or maybe I was, a vague memory of people running in and out of the room wildly springs to mind. Perhas I've blocked it out. I'm sure I didn't participate. I think some of us may have ended up playing a different game while this was going on all around us.
Too bad. It might have made for an entertaining story, though it was probably a good decision...
But you know what they say, experience is born from bad decisions:shade:!

I've said many times that it would make a great miniatures skirmish game or campaign-style boardgame.
Me too! But apparently that also angers people on both sides of the fence:grin:!
 
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I agree. I just think the problem is what it was attempting to be....wasn't D&D.
I had a similar issue with 6th ed Gamma World. It would have made a fine d20 postapocalyptic game, but it wasn't Gamma World. I do think designers have to accept that if you're working with a well known property that comes with certain restrictions in terms of how much you can make it your own.
 
I agree. I just think the problem is what it was attempting to be....wasn't D&D.

It is weird, like it is D&D but through a very very different lens compared to what most people want D&D to be. If you look at it as D&D it is like a parody of D&D. It's like if someone looked at D&D from the outside, and then tried to write D&D without any first hand knowledge of reading the books or playing it.

We're actually using it for a kind of take on the base idea of XCrawl (though we're basically just using the idea of "modern day setting, medieval style dungeon crawlers are like sports stars, dungeons are made specifically for them to compete in" and it is part pro sports, part pro wrestling kayfabe and over the top acting). And it has worked really really well in that specific concept.
 
Let's just say that some of us felt 4E was more true to what we had wanted out of D&D for decades and enjoyed playing it for the 6 years it existed ... and that others didn't ... and no one in the entire affair was 100% correct ...
 
I wondered what happened to Spoony since I hadn’t heard much from him lately. I watched his videos like 15 years ago. I read he wastes most of his time on Twitter now. His patreon has dried up to almost nothing.
 
Let's just say that some of us felt 4E was more true to what we had wanted out of D&D for decades and enjoyed playing it for the 6 years it existed ... and that others didn't ... and no one in the entire affair was 100% correct ...
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I remember the last great edition war. I remember the best gamers of my generation broken and fallen on the battlefield. The flames rose so high whole forums were consumed in their conflagrations and only piles of ash remained where once mighty trolls had gone forth to do battle wielding weighty rulebooks. D20s were shattered underfoot until, as armies of gamers advanced, the crunch of plastic beneath their feet became their constant accompanying refrain. Moderators wailed piteously at the carnage and then turned and fled. Some, it is said, so far that never were they seen again.

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I wondered what happened to Spoony since I hadn’t heard much from him lately. I watched his videos like 15 years ago. I read he wastes most of his time on Twitter now. His patreon has dried up to almost nothing.


Oh there's a whole epic story there...which someone has inevitably done better job than I can explaining...

 
I wondered what happened to Spoony since I hadn’t heard much from him lately. I watched his videos like 15 years ago. I read he wastes most of his time on Twitter now. His patreon has dried up to almost nothing.

Spoony self destructed. There are so many hypotheses as to why, with varying levels of damning the man. But I think a decent chunk of it was he had that wildly successful Patreon and it may have dawned on him in that moment that he really didn't want to do what he was doing anymore. You can almost see it in the Patreon thank you video he made, where there's that realization of, "why am I doing this?"

Then there's his inherent narcissism and mental illness. I don't say these as character impugning things, but rather as simple factors that caught up with him.

I miss Spoony. I still watch quite a few of his old videos over and over again. I think my favorites are Yor, Heroes of the Lance, and Microcosm. While the FF8 and Ultima series are too long to watch frequently, they are some of the most epic angry reviews ever done.

Sadly, that Spoony is gone forever.
 
Fourth edition was perfect for about a third of all D&D's fans. What it did so well was the last thing anyone else wanted. I think part of the problem is that D&D players have been told their game was bad and needed fixed for a very long time so when someone tried to impose a functional system on them they revolted. I think, D&D more than any other rpg depends on the DM to make it work. Some people like it that way and some don't but fourth edition was just too structured and mechanically sound for people who like DM fiat. My own dislike for it related more to the attempt to spread out core material and force you to buy more books. Want a dual wielding fighter, well that's not in the core boyo.
 
Fourth edition was perfect for about a third of all D&D's fans. What it did so well was the last thing anyone else wanted. I think part of the problem is that D&D players have been told their game was bad and needed fixed for a very long time so when someone tried to impose a functional system on them they revolted. I think, D&D more than any other rpg depends on the DM to make it work. Some people like it that way and some don't but fourth edition was just too structured and mechanically sound for people who like DM fiat. My own dislike for it related more to the attempt to spread out core material and force you to buy more books. Want a dual wielding fighter, well that's not in the core boyo.
...there might be something to that logic. But personally, I kinda wanted many of the things they were achieving, just not done in that specific way.
For a skirmish game it might have been almost perfect, though.
 
It all comes down to tight and loose designs. D&D was generally a pretty loose design, OD&D was barely a framework. It can be easier and harder to DM a loose design. If you've got a rules lawyer or an argumentative player you don't have a recourse to the rules and have to rely on your own arguing skills. I used to DM my rather abusive older brother and he'd hit me anytime he disagreed with my rulings so at least there was clarity. D&D 4e was a very tight and structured design. If you like more structured play that's focused on the action it's a great game. It'd be a better game without some of the D&D sacred cows they kept but then it wouldn't be D&D at all. But if you want a game that you can mod and tinker with and house rule without catastrophic consequence cascades fourth edition is a painstakingly balanced minefield. Back in the day no two groups played D&D quite the same way and it worked because the DM made it work or it didn't work because the DM couldn't make it work. It's a two edged sword. Fifth is the second tightest version of D&D. It's got some functional options but its still built on a tighter structure than OD&D, AD&D, BXCMI, AD&D2, or D&D 3e.

Tight design isn't a virtue or a vice necessarily but loose design is one of the hallmarks of D&D and it might even be the secret of its success as a loose design is better able to be all things to all people.

Now that I think of it there's always D&D being a mass battle game and TFT being a skirmish game. 4e was a skirmish game.
 
Fourth edition was perfect for about a third of all D&D's fans. What it did so well was the last thing anyone else wanted. I think part of the problem is that D&D players have been told their game was bad and needed fixed for a very long time so when someone tried to impose a functional system on them they revolted. I think, D&D more than any other rpg depends on the DM to make it work. Some people like it that way and some don't but fourth edition was just too structured and mechanically sound for people who like DM fiat. My own dislike for it related more to the attempt to spread out core material and force you to buy more books. Want a dual wielding fighter, well that's not in the core boyo.
It kind of sounds like you are saying I am too stupid to understand a good thing because I don't like it. Am I reading that right?

This seems like a good example of edition warring to me here. A backhanded concession about the edition of choice.

I will tell you why I didn't like 4th... it did not play like Dungeons and Dragons. It played like a pen and paper World of Warcraft. It was not a bad system, but it was not a recognizable D&D. Add to that all the gamer politics around it and a lot of us said to hell with it and to hell with WoTC.
D&D was never broken and in need of a fix. If it was, there would not have been edition wars in the first place. Each edition has its fans for their own reasons, and I would bet that none of them are because we couldn't accepts 4th edition's supposed perfection.
Regardless of anything, 4th was a commercial failure and Paizo overtook them because somewhere int here, they lost touch with those who had otherwise always supported them.
If you are a pro 4th fan, there is nothing wrong with that, but people in general need to be real about this...

... We either liked it or didn't like for entirely valid reasons, and telling us why we did or didn't like it doesn't actually change them.
 
Also, I even think that 4e D&D was a good game for what it was attempting to be, which probably angers people on both sides of the fence :B :B :B.
I agree. I just think the problem is what it was attempting to be....wasn't D&D.

I'm not going to weigh in on whether it was "good D&D" or even "D&D at all"... but frankly, I think it was a pretty good game that I regret sleeping on while it was in-print, and its poor reputation stems more from WotC's smug and hideously ill-considered marketing than anything really wrong with the game itself. Also... to be fair... a great deal of its reputation with 3.X fans stems from the fact that WotC deliberate and successfully tackled problems that the 3.X/PF1 fanbase continues to view as features.

Paizo attempted to solve the same problems with their Second Edition, and the result has been fracturing their own fanbase with the PF1 partisans saying that Paizo's Second Edition looks too much like WotC's Fourth Edition. Now, former Pathfinder third-party publishers are designing their own "spiritual successor" to PF1 using the Open Game Content from 3.5 and PF1.

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I had a similar issue with 6th ed Gamma World. It would have made a fine d20 postapocalyptic game, but it wasn't Gamma World. I do think designers have to accept that if you're working with a well known property that comes with certain restrictions in terms of how much you can make it your own.

I am still salty over GWd20. Not so much the fact that it was a piss-poor adaptation of Gamma World or a piss-poor implementation of the d20 System, but the fact that the designers publicly derided their critics as not being sophisiticated enough to understand their work, deliberately antagonized them, and then hid behind the skirts of forum staff to avoid the inevitable and justified backlash.
 
Oh, also, I love the 4e D&D based Gamma World, even with all it's ridiculous card based addons. (I have a complete set of the cards for that matter >_>).

I mean, I don't think I could ever play a SERIOUS game with it, but man I think it is fun for goofy high combat games.
 
I'm not going to weigh in on whether it was "good D&D" or even "D&D at all"... but frankly, I think it was a pretty good game that I regret sleeping on while it was in-print, and its poor reputation stems more from WotC's smug and hideously ill-considered marketing than anything really wrong with the game itself. Also... to be fair... a great deal of its reputation with 3.X fans stems from the fact that WotC deliberate and successfully tackled problems that the 3.X/PF1 fanbase continues to view as features.

Paizo attempted to solve the same problems with their Second Edition, and the result has been fracturing their own fanbase with the PF1 partisans saying that Paizo's Second Edition looks too much like WotC's Fourth Edition. Now, former Pathfinder third-party publishers are designing their own "spiritual successor" to PF1 using the Open Game Content from 3.5 and PF1.

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I am still salty over GWd20. Not so much the fact that it was a piss-poor adaptation of Gamma World or a piss-poor implementation of the d20 System, but the fact that the designers publicly derided their critics as not being sophisiticated enough to understand their work, deliberately antagonized them, and then hid behind the skirts of forum staff to avoid the inevitable and justified backlash.
Honestly, That's pretty much it. I don't mind 4th as a system, there is a lot about it I like.
Every edition has something I like about it. Personally, I am a 3.5 fan... that edition nailed it for me. I started with the Rules Cyclopedia and quickly went to 1st. I've played every edition in due time.
Each has it's charm. To me, however, the only edition to miss the mark on tone and feel is 4th. To me it was rather jarring how different it played and felt overall.
 
Are we titting for tatting? Oh well. I thought we were having a vigorous dialogue about how to define narrative versus simulationist games.

If the group is focused on collaborative storytelling using the mechanics of a game? Then you are playing a narrative system.

If the group is focused on pretending to be character having adventures in a setting the you are playing a roleplaying system.

If the group is focused on achieving victory conditions in a scenario the you are playing a war game or board game.

It not complicated unless the referee or group can‘t articulate why the hell everybody is there for.
 
Once upon a time there was a web forum called The Forge, run by one Ron Edwards, which devoted itself to developing "RPG Theory". Edward's approach to RPG Theory was based upon the premise that the majority of people playing Roleplaying games weren't having any fun playing Role-playing games. Edwards believed this was because RPGs were "incoherent" because they promised one thing, but their mechanics did not support that thing (Edwards go-to example was that White Wolf games used the "Storyteller system" but that system did not support "creating stories"). This premise is summarized in the essay "System Matters" (The Forge featured a lot of essays by Edwards).

Edwards' solution was to attempt to create a lexicon that definitively classified rules, approaches to rules, and playstyles, with the idea that a correct method of game design would chose exacty one playstyle to focus on and then include only rules that were similiarly classified as supporting that playstyle. He and his fellow adherants at the Forge began by taking the Threefold Model developed on usenet that had gained popularity, switching around all the meanings of the terms, and then, over the course of several years, adding more and more terms with more and more baroque explanations.

Meanwhile, there was a very outspoken poster who frequented RPG forums in those days going by the name Nisarg who idolized both Hunter S Thompson and traditional Dungeons & Dragons. As this was years befor the OSR, posters on forums tended to look down on and be contemptuous of D&D in those days, and Nisarg, being the sort of fellow who smoked a lot of weed and got into a lot of online fights, got very angry about people's pretentious attitudes towards D&D. And as Edwards was not only one such person who was basically constructing a pseudo-scientific theorywank that "proved" D&D was badwrongfun, but he was getting a lot of attention for it, Nisarg declared Edwards his arch-enemy. Nisarg saw himself as the righteous protector of all that was good and pure in RPGs and people who actually gamed, and Edwards as the personification of all the worst aspects of pompous theorywanking RPG forum-goers. Niarg launched a personal civil war upon the Forge.

To this day, I'm still not entirely sure if The Forge was even aware of this.

Anyways, Meanwhile The Forge theory had finished it's bastardization of the threefold theory to come up with the terms "Narrativism, Simulationism, and Gamism". And from that point on, every gamer on every forum of the world would completely misunderstand the counter-intuitive explanations Forge Theory offered of these terms and utterly misuse them for all eternity.

An RPG that had Gamism as it's design goal is meant to be a game-game. The Forge members didn't devote much attention to this, it was just sort of tut-tutted as the domain of Power Gamers, D&D-playing relics, and those awful gamers who didn't take RPGs as seriously as they deserved and just played to have fun.

An RPG that had Simulationism as it's design goal sought to model a specific reality or genre, and became associated with those players who talked about stuff like "Immersion". Edwards and co didn't care much for this at all, and eventually backtracked and decided that Simulationism didn't actually exist, and that all those posters on forums who talked about Immersion were just liar-liars pants on fire.

Which left the major focus of the Forge's attention, and those people who adopted the theories, on Narrativism, those games whose goal was to provide a satisfying narrative experience. I'm not sure who first dubbed such games "Storygames", but the name stuck and its usage spread like wildfire.

Cut back to Nisarg, who thus decided that since the evil Forge liked these Storygames, they in turn must also be evil, and in fact were part of a plot to destroy the hobby by being all narrative and stuff and not being real Roleplaying games, because they weren't D&D.

Around this time there was a small forum devoted to a Youtuber named Spoony who was associated with the Nostalgia Critic and that group (there's a whole nother cycle of drama there, but that's a story for another time). Anyways, Spoony got tired of running this forum and decided to hand it off to someone else, and Nisarg was like "I'd like a forum", as by that point he'd been booted off most every other forum. And so Nisarg took over this forum anf re-branded it "The RPGSite", and Nisarg, now having a platform for his gaming ideologies, went super saiyan and transformed into his Final Boss form - The RPGPundit.

Pundit thus declared that "storygames" were all the RPGs that weren't really RPGs, and written by people he disliked from the Forge, and were thus attempts to destroy the RPG hobby. For years and years posters pressed him for an actual definition of a Storygame so they could figure out the distinction between them and "actual RPGs", but RPGPundit never did so, so that eventually people just accepted that "Storygame" was just any game Pundit didn't like.

Other people thus came up with their own definitions of Storygames, some of which made sense, and others didn't*, and anything "not a storygame" became, by default, known as a "Traditional game".

Meanwhile, eventually, Edwards and Co reached maximum Theorywank, and declared The Forge "finished" and "a success". No one was sure what The Forge had succeeded at except causing decades of online arguments about RPG terminology, but Edwards then shut the doors of the forum, turned out the lights, and passed away into legend...or, well, into Google Plus at least.

Then the OSR happened, and suddenly instead of looking down on and tut-tutting D&D, a bunch of people started posting about how awesome D&D was, especially the old D&D. Because Pundit had been doing this for years without any thanks, he initially resented the OSR and called them a bunch of posers.

And the OSR basically ignored him.

Then, abruptly, years later, Pundit declared himself the leader and spokesperson of the OSR.

And the OSR continues to ignore him.

And then, in a move that (in my headcannon at least) was meant to be the ultimate troll of Pundit, Edwards abruptly declared that he and the Forge had created the OSR.

The OSR ignored him too.

Cut to now, now, and we have people who continue to abuse Forge terminology (declaring games "Simulationist" or whatnot) and we have a hundred different individual definitions of Storygame floating around. If you see anyone use that term at any point, the best course of action is to ask them their definition of it, because chances are they will more than gladly pour out their personal manifesto on what that means (presumably while masturbating furiously*).

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And thus the definition of "Traditional Games" is , ultimately "whatever that person doesn't think is a storygame".



*I have my own definition of Storygames, and I will gladly share it if requested.
OMG TristramEvans TristramEvans you just totally won the internet with this post !!!
I'm spilling my coffee here laughing at this! Outstanding insight and humour
This post is definately a Critical Success; it's exceptional and will be referenced and quoted for years to come heh heh !!! :thumbsup:
 
I don’t think it is very productive to try to classify whole games as one thing or another. It is much easier to try to categorise specific mechanics.

To further complicate things, the game ‘axis’ is also really important in my opinion, and currently that isn’t getting much airtime in this discussion, so it’s not even a linear comparison. After that, the idea of first person versus third person is another facet of games, and isn’t inherently connected to any of the above, although there is a fair bit of correlation.

So - it’s quite a complicated subject! And with no academic community to (mostly) agree on these things, like e.g. literary criticism can fall back on, it becomes highly subjective.

All RPGs have a mix of the three in them*, and to make it worse there isn’t really a spectrum in the sense that ‘X is inherently more [classification] than Y and therefor the presence of X implies Y‘. It’s more like a conglomeration effect, and there are both specific mechanics which people dislike and other times when it is the cumulative effect of multiple mechanics that causes a person to dislike a game.

* ETA: I will qualify that to say (before the hoard arrives :clown: ) that yes - I would really struggle to point at any narrative style rules in early editions of D&D and games very strongly based of them. Nothing is absolute.
 
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OMG TristramEvans TristramEvans you just totally won the internet with this post !!!
I'm spilling my coffee here laughing at this! Outstanding insight and humour
This post is definately a Critical Success; it's exceptional and will be referenced and quoted for years to come heh heh !!! :thumbsup:

I don't know how true it is, but it actually explains a bit about Pundit that was missing for me. Enough that I'd totally believe it even if it was made up. I'd had one or two debates with him about his unbelievably narrow-minded view of "story gaming" over at his site and ultimately decided he just wasn't woth conversing with on the matter.
 
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Oh there's a whole epic story there...which someone has inevitably done better job than I can explaining...



Man, I hate Youtubers. I do like the Down the Rabbit Hole guy though, he does a good job of documenting some of the sadder corners of 'net culture.'
 
Terrific summary, TristramEvans TristramEvans - there were some details in there I'd forgotten, or repressed, perhaps.

Only one thing I'd add regarding El Pundejo: the lad considers himself a poet game designer and wrote a D&D heartbreaker, Forward! to Adventure, which was inconsequential and barely noticed, leading him to direct his butthurt at the OSR, which in response gave exactly zero fucks.
 
Doesn't even have to be a explanation, a link would suffice. Obviously I can Google but in this case I prefer to start with a Pubber recommendation AND work from there.

You're wrong and i'm right.
 
It kind of sounds like you are saying I am too stupid to understand a good thing because I don't like it. Am I reading that right?

This seems like a good example of edition warring to me here. A backhanded concession about the edition of choice.

Nah, I'm just trying to be funny. If you want to see edition warring ask me about Rolemaster. But the thing is that just because something is theoretically good or ideal (game balance, structure, uniformity experience of play, easier to DM) doesn't mean it's what people want or need. D&D's greatest strengths are its greatest weaknesses. The flexibility that lets everyone tailor it to their own play style is also the reason so many people can't figure the game out by reading the rules (well, that and Gygaxian prose for AD&D) and why so many new DMs and players have bad experiences.
 
Only one thing I'd add regarding El Pundejo: the lad considers himself a poet game designer and wrote a D&D heartbreaker, Forward! to Adventure, which was inconsequential and barely noticed, leading him to direct his butthurt at the OSR, which in response gave exactly zero fucks.
Wasn’t it more influenced by T&T?
 
Then the OSR happened, and suddenly instead of looking down on and tut-tutting D&D, a bunch of people started posting about how awesome D&D was, especially the old D&D. Because Pundit had been doing this for years without any thanks, he initially resented the OSR and called them a bunch of posers.
Excellent accounting of events. There are one thing missing and one thing not complete.

The missing
The Pundit was every bit as as you described him but by the time he assumed the Pundit personae he was looking to publish RPG materials. I believe Forward to Adventure! was his first published project. It is a "old school" system adapting some ideas from Tunnels & Trolls with Pundit's own idea. It good as these things go but nothing to set the world on fire.

Reading between the lines, I believe he was disappointed in this and ever since commercialism became ever more larger part of his Pundit personae. The point of allowing "gaming" politics on the main forum of the theRPGSite so that his gaming politic screeds get the most views which forms what he considers an essential part of his marketing strategy.

I was a moderator over on TheRPGSite for a time and I quit over this issue. My attitude towards politics of any kind in the gaming forums is to move that shit to the Pundit's personal forum, including his own posts. Leaving the gaming forum to talk about gaming. But we didn't not see eye to eye and so I resigned as I wasn't going to waste my hobby time trying to wade through the muck that it was developing into. And it is also the time I found this place and moved over.

The incomplete
Yes the Pundit thought the OSR was a punch of posers. However your otherwise excellent story omits how this all came about. So back in 2009, the OSR pops up on theRPGSite's radar and comes to a head in this epic thread. Note that I was a participant in this. The summary of his complaints that he was hurt that he hadn't gotten the recognition he deserved for writing Forward the Adventure! And now a bunch of plagiarizers and copiers are getting all the kudos.

However what infused the Pundit with white hot rage was this post by Stuart Marshall by one of the authors of OSRIC. Ever since Pundits tried to reign nuclear Armageddon on the OSR. And when that didn't work tried to become its leader by writing his own "true OSR" products starting with Arrows of Indra. In part because I and other posters of the time challenged him to take advantage of the open content show the rest of the OSR how it done. I even pitched in with the maps.


For those who don't want to wade through the entire thread I posted a 3 post summary here several years later. Memories were starting to fade and folks including the Pundit were trying to peddle inaccurate accounts of what happened.

So that is my side of the story that Tristam excellently recounted.
 
I don’t think it is very productive to try to classify whole games as one thing or another. It is much easier to try to categorise specific mechanics.
It doesn’t really matter. As long as someone can identify and differentiate the mechanics without having the distinctions themselves called into question, you can have a meaningful conversation.

To further complicate things, the game ‘axis’ is also really important in my opinion, and currently that isn’t getting much airtime in this discussion, so it’s not even a linear comparison.
You’re trying to recapitulate the early days of rfga development of the threefold. To sum up a quarter century of history: it was a mistake.
 
Excellent accounting of events. There are one thing missing and one thing not complete.

The missing
The Pundit was every bit as as you described him but by the time he assumed the Pundit personae he was looking to publish RPG materials. I believe Forward to Adventure! was his first published project. It is a "old school" system adapting some ideas from Tunnels & Trolls with Pundit's own idea. It good as these things go but nothing to set the world on fire.

Reading between the lines, I believe he was disappointed in this and ever since commercialism became ever more larger part of his Pundit personae. The point of allowing "gaming" politics on the main forum of the theRPGSite so that his gaming politic screeds get the most views which forms what he considers an essential part of his marketing strategy.

I was a moderator over on TheRPGSite for a time and I quit over this issue. My attitude towards politics of any kind in the gaming forums is to move that shit to the Pundit's personal forum, including his own posts. Leaving the gaming forum to talk about gaming. But we didn't not see eye to eye and so I resigned as I wasn't going to waste my hobby time trying to wade through the muck that it was developing into. And it is also the time I found this place and moved over.

The incomplete
Yes the Pundit thought the OSR was a punch of posers. However your otherwise excellent story omits how this all came about. So back in 2009, the OSR pops up on theRPGSite's radar and comes to a head in this epic thread. Note that I was a participant in this. The summary of his complaints that he was hurt that he hadn't gotten the recognition he deserved for writing Forward the Adventure! And now a bunch of plagiarizers and copiers are getting all the kudos.

However what infused the Pundit with white hot rage was this post by Stuart Marshall by one of the authors of OSRIC. Ever since Pundits tried to reign nuclear Armageddon on the OSR. And when that didn't work tried to become its leader by writing his own "true OSR" products starting with Arrows of Indra. In part because I and other posters of the time challenged him to take advantage of the open content show the rest of the OSR how it done. I even pitched in with the maps.


For those who don't want to wade through the entire thread I posted a 3 post summary here several years later. Memories were starting to fade and folks including the Pundit were trying to peddle inaccurate accounts of what happened.

So that is my side of the story that Tristam excellently recounted.


That actually fills in a few puzzle pieces for me, namely that the Pundy persona was born simultaneously with FtA!

I always thought what really held Forward...To Adventure! back was the "art"...meaning intentionally blurry photoshopped pictures of cosplayers. Rather than evoking an "old school fantasy" vibe it was more like a "self-published on LuLu" vibe.
 
To sum up a quarter century of history: it was a mistake.
I personally find it very useful to keep that third point in mind, otherwise people end up shoe-horning stuff into one of the other groupings. What about it is a mistake, in you opinion?
 
What follows may be written in a very compressed fashion, without the usual disclaimers and nods to exceptions, that could ruffle some feathers.

Basically, the “simulationists” don’t care why you’re deviating from a simulation with an actor (Forge-sense) perspective, only that it happens. For them, it’s a single axis of cognitive relationship to the game.

The “gamists” stepped in and demanded respect, and the response of a bunch of what would today be called STEM academics was to create a 2-d graph with three axes. It should have been a solid, something more like a misshapen cone.
 
Remind me, who was the guy who'd written "the greatest rpg ever" that was never going to be published because the world wasn't ready for his genius? He was a frequent poster on therpgsite back in the day and I've quite forgotten his name. It wasn't me, my genius isn't ready for the world which is an entirely different form of hubris.
 
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