Things that a few people pretend are really important on Veeky Forums, but aren't really important at all

>"pwease stop playing popular games! play my games pwease! pwease! pwease pwease pwease it will make you better gamer i promise pwease i don't want my game to die im so lonely"

You sound really pathetic right now, and this is coming from someone who's never touched pathfinder.

Except foodies do go out of their way to experience a wide variety of tastes, to broaden their palate and help them taste greater nuances and subtleties in flavours?

Leaning more systems is exactly the same. With more knowledge and understanding of game systems you become better able to assess them and evaluate them, noticing problems and how to work around them, finding their strengths and how to leverage them. That knowledge has a direct effect on your ability to utilise systems effectively.

All RPGs are not created equal. A game being bad doesn't mean it is unplayable, but one of the best things to have if you're trying to make a bad game work properly is an example of another game that does it better.

Given your lack of reading comprehension I can only assume you've never touched Pathfinder because you've no ability to actually learn the fucking rules.

It's only really important to have a passing familiarity with some of the major systems, and really just the mechanics, for reference when people talk about them so you can compare appropriately. Experimenting with a new system teaches you things about game design and GMing that are applicable to all games you play.

But in reference to the original subject:
>Being familiar with OC Project #5372 circa 2007 that Veeky Forums remembers fondly
>Moral relativism as it pertains to an objective moral alignment grid
>Hating Elves
>Adoring J.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Terry Prachet, or New Fantasy Writer 2kX
>Using GURPS

>Leaning more systems is exactly the same.

The problem with just learning more systems is that you need time to learn any of the subtle nuances of a system. While you're relearning basic mechanics that are essentially just different versions of the same central concepts, you're left without any real experience with the more complex and subtle interactions.

Systems aren't like dishes. They're like books. Learning fifty systems is like reading the first chapter of fifty books. While that's certainly a good way to learn how to write a first chapter, I'd value the experience of someone who's read five books from cover to cover more.

I would never demand someone play it, but GURPS is fun dammit.

Again, that seems like an odd false dichtomy. Why not read all fifty cover to cover? Isn't that better than either alternative?

This is an example of the classic technique of pretending a thread is listing examples of a thing but actually just trying to make a thread calling out one specific example.

Why didn't you just make a thread saying "Learning fifty systems so that blah blah blah... is something that isn't actually important"?

Why bother with the pretense that this thread is about
>Things that a few people pretend are really important on Veeky Forums, but aren't really important at all

Why even bother?

>wah pwease pwease stop pwaying popuwar systems wah it twiggers me wahhhh

Holy shit, calm down, you big baby. The fact that someone might be playing a popular system you don't like is enough to make you start shitposting here puts you on a transcendent level of butthurt.

>Adoring J.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Terry Prachet, or New Fantasy Writer 2kX

Really gonna have to agree with this one here. Like I read LotR, I enjoyed it well enough. But if one of my players says they've never read it I'm not gonna jump on them about it. Frankly even though I like it, Fantasy's Holy Trilogy actually contributes remarkably little to anyone who doesn't go through it with a fine-toothed comb.

I think it's generally more amusing the logical leaps you're making to construe almost any statement into perpetuating a particular agenda you're apparently seeing everywhere. Paranoid much?

Because reading fifty meh books is not even as good as reading five great books ten times each.

>The problem with just learning more systems is that you need time to learn any of the subtle nuances of a system. While you're relearning basic mechanics that are essentially just different versions of the same central concepts, you're left without any real experience with the more complex and subtle interactions.
THIS

You end up with knowledge of RPG systems that is a mile wide and an inch deep. I don't consider myself knowledgeable about a system until I've played it, even if I had the rulebook memorized.

It's sort of like teaching a kid to drive. You can give them all the manuals, DMV booklets, even driving sims in the world, and they're still not going to need to sit behind a wheel at some point and actually drive a vehicle on a real street around other drivers. There is no substitute for experience.

Your hypocrisy has stopped being amusing, and now is just sad.

And now you're making assumptions about quality?

Also, define 'good'. If you're talking about quality of experience, sure you'll likely have more fun reading those good books.

But I'm not talking about personal pleasure. If you want to learn about literary criticism, reading fifty books spanning the range from godawful to cultural masterpieces is a lot more useful.

It's pretty useful as a GM to understand a multitude of systems, especially if you GM a long-running game. Any long running group or game inevitably dabbles in homebrew - whether that's the extreme option of inventing rules from scratch or the very common option of houseruling so much the game you end up playing only superficially resembles the original. Knowing what problems your system has and how other games may have solved or avoided those problems can inform you and lead to a better game.

Ever notice how the only people that seem to struggle with this whole "learning many systems" thing is 3.5/PF fans?

Do you all really think that because 3.PF has such a high system mastery curve that all systems do?

If you actually tried you'd be surprised to find out that, at least 90% of the time, it's not as big a deal you're making it out to be. 3.PF certainly isn't the most complicated system(s), but the high mastery curve is an anomaly, not the norm.

Second hand experience can be helpful, though. Reading reviews and play reports of systems, talking to people who've played it and getting their feedback and so on.

Plus, past a certain point of knowledge it's generally pretty easy to extrapolate most of how an RPG will actually play just from the book. It might take a while to get there, but if you have a real interest in RPGs it's not hard to do.

What if the five books you choose to read repeatedly turn out to include one or no great books and the rest are meh books? Would you be able to tell for sure whether that was the case or not?

>If you want to learn about literary criticism,

How far into Twilight do you really need to go?

Read the first few pages of a bad book, read the good books again and again.

It's hardly ever good advice in any regard to say "You need to read the entire Twilight Series." You really need to sit down and think up some wild situation for when that could possibly be a wise recommendation.

It's more they freak the fuck out when they try to do something simple and realize that there are no rules for doing said simple because something that fucking simple goes without saying.

Pents of truth!

>Things that a few people pretend are really important on Veeky Forums, but aren't really important at all.
Magical realms and the avoidance thereof.

I'm not going to say it doesn't happen, but Veeky Forums leaves you with the impression pretty much everything is somebody's fetish and the concept has all but discredited some ideas, monsters, or concepts. When my group's GM gave us a tentacle monster (a mythological giant octopus, in the ocean, where one would expect such a thing to live) most of us just laughed about it and made the obvious jokes. I don't know anyone who tries to play a succubus or incubus "seriously" anymore because it's assumed to be a fetish thing, even though a seductive demon that tries to lure a hero into temptation is a classic fantasy trope and a potentially interesting change from the kill loot repeat cycle if played well.

My point is people are so paranoid about a thing that doesn't actually happen all that often that it's begun to limit what is "acceptable" in a game.

Are you still trying?
No one said anything about 3.5/PF.

Now, shoo, you weird troll. No more attention for you.

I think it's also a market share thing.

As much as people who are into the RPG hobby as a whole might be loathe to admit it, D&D and its variations is larger than the entire rest of the hobby by a significant margin. People who care about RPGs beyond D&D are a significant minority, while the vast majority only play D&D or close variations of it.

And it's just... The reality of the situation, and it shows no sign of really changing any time soon.

>Less important than Veeky Forums pretends it is
Quest Threads

Yeah but just look at niggers, you don't need to have black skin to know they're inferior.

It can be illuminating to examine what makes a bad book bad. You do need to learn what contrasts a good book, not just what a good book looks like. It's a poor literary critic that can't manage to do that. As in all thing sin life, knowledge of the bad leads to greater appreciation of the good.

If you want to learn literary criticism, you would need to read it cover to cover. The phrase 'don't judge a book by its cover' exists for a reason.

The ability to persevere, to understand why something is the way it is and assess it fully is a key and valuable skill for really evaluating media of any sort.

Because the people who learn new systems are inherently the kind of people who are willing to delve beyond the D&D and D&D-alikes they doubtless got started with.

Wew lad. First day trying to bait someone? Nah, you should've gone with 5e, or GURPS. That would've really set people off.

Twilight doesn't really have much pretense of being literary fiction. It's teenaged fantasy romance. But there is quite a lot of bad art (and in other genres, bad films, bad video games, bad paintings, bad sculptures, bad music you name it) that does have the pretense of being brilliant and meaningful without the substance of such, and it actually is important in professional critique to thoroughly explain why it is or isn't a good work.

Sometimes, for example, an "art film" really is nothing but a boring video of nothing interesting happening, and it's important to be able to thoroughly explain what it lacks rather than simply arbitrarily describing two superficially similar films as one being deep and the other being shallow. So it is with every medium, including RPGs.

You're a pretentious know-nothing and you're making a fool of yourself. Stop posting.

That's silly. I'd rather find out what makes a good book good and what also makes it bad then trudge through a bad book just for the sake of confirming what's already obvious from the first few pages.

To bring back the food metaphor, when it comes to fine cuisine, you actually need a cultured palate that's extremely sensitive and very easy to ruin. Gourmets can't eat things like junk food because it will literally desensitize their tongues.

To be able to determine that faults in a great work takes a cultured critic. To find faults in Twilight takes a 2nd grade reading level.

> I don't know anyone who tries to play a succubus or incubus "seriously" anymore because it's assumed to be a fetish thing

Not sure if that's the best example. Characters built around seduction--especially when the means are sexual in nature--are pretty unappetizing to most players. Even without the proliferation of the magical realm meme. In my experience people find it weird to start hitting on the GM or vice versa, even if it's IC.

>still trying
No attention for you, troll. Shoo.

If it's so simple and easy, then you should still be perfectly capable of reading the whole thing and clearly laying out exactly what its problems are, pointing out specific examples and discussing them.

High quality criticism takes effort, regardless of the quality of the thing you're criticising.

>everyone who disagrees with me is a troll

Maybe you should just talk to yourself in a mirror if you can't handle opposing opinions.

I honestly can't tell whether that's a male or a female.

Whatever it is, it's pathetic.

It's pure cancer regardless.

We should contain 40k/DnD/MtG to their own board.

Veeky Forums would be literally dead. Our board would get zero traffic, and long term that'd be totally self defeating. Even if it's a small proportion of the audience, that those largest games share a space with the smaller ones consistently creates opportunities for people to make the jump.

It might be frustrating at times, but retaining that strong connection is long term good for smaller games.

If you look at something like Homer or Dante, there's literally thousands of scholars who've dedicated their entire lives over the course of centuries to going as deep as they can into those works, going through precedents and inspirations while comparing them to contemporary works and performing the enormous task of charting what they themselves inspired.

Through their research, they've produced masterpieces in their own right, philosophical, theological, and historical dissertations that reveal facets and aspects of those stories that even other experts were not privvy too, and required years upon decades of careful study in order to compose.

If you propose that the same level of criticism should be performed to Twlight, then I'm guessing that you enjoyed those books a lot more than I did.

>still trying

>Veeky Forums should get its own board

Maybe you should just leave? It seems like that would be better for everyone, you little bitch.

I'd like to get into GURPS but it looks like a pain in the ass. Not saying anything about it mechanically. Just that it appears hard to get into from the outside. It doesn't help that whenever anyone talks about a specific game they usually mention rules coming from a couple separate books. I mean, most games you just find a copy of a core book and it's off to the races.

>what other people like to play

You can run a hell of a lot using just the 32-page Lite version. Most of the supplements are tweaks to the core to make it better simulate a given genre.

That said, GURPS is not for the lazy GM.

To be fair, seduction can mean more than pure sexual lust and if you widen the scope of the character just a little bit you can bring a lot under the wing of temptation and even seduction without it being a big-titted cute monster girl with devil horns and a spade tail talking like a porn actress and also without completely tossing away what makes the character a *cubus.

What you're talking about is an idea known as /tgg/ or Traditional Games Generals. It would absolutely ruin the board, because this same idea resulted in /v/ and Veeky Forums.

What he's talking about is being a bitchy contrarian. Thankfully, there's an entire board specifically for people like him.

I think it's only a thing with 3.5 fans because they're the dominant force of the market and 3.5 is the first system most gamers these days learned, so the annoying faggots that wind up extremely dedicated to one system are mostly found there. I've seen similar behaviours with OWoD players before.

At the core of it, I think it's just that idea that if someone isn't loving something you love the way you love it, there's a possibility that you shouldn't be loving it thing.

For starters, you're inappropriately assuming a black and white dichotomy of "utter garbage" and "masterpiece for the ages."

Critics three thousand years from now will not be dissecting the themes of, say, The Hunt for Red October, as they do with Homer. That does not, however, mean Red October is a bad book or not worth reading. And it would be fair work for a literary critic to read the book and explain what makes it good or bad on its merits as a techno-thriller of its day.

Secondly, as a private individual pursuing his own tastes for fun you can use whatever criteria you want. You can read the first sentence and dismiss a book as shit for all I care - I might disagree, but it's your time and money, so what do I care? This is why I and the other user talking to you are specifically regarding formal critique, not private individual tastes. There's no accounting for taste. But if we're talking on a level of bettering yourself as a critique and consumer of a medium, then yes, you should be familiar with bad examples as well as good ones and be able to discuss in depth what contrasts them. How can you tell what good is if you've never experienced bad?

>I'd like to get into GURPS but it looks like a pain in the ass. [...] Just that it appears hard to get into from the outside
You're not wrong. Outside of actually having a GM run it for you, GURPS' biggest problem has been bringing in new players because of the intimidation factor and the opaque nature of its presentation. The system itself, while actually quite easy to learn, just plain puts off a lot of newbies because of the presentation, reputation and layout.

I have a sense you're arguing just for the sake of arguing.

You're trying to pretend people need to pay attention to things that aren't important, when there's really nothing in it for them. Between a GM that knows fifty systems and doesn't know how to run any of them, and a GM that knows one system well, I'd prefer the latter. And, between the GM that knows fifty systems well and the GM that knows one system well, if we're playing the one system, it doesn't really matter.

Expanding your horizons is great. Learning a system well is far more important.

My experience as a noob that tried to get into GURPS (and ultimately gave up because I flat out don't like a lot of the mechanical choices in the game or see much merit to universal RPGs these days) a big turnoff wasn't presentation so much as the sheer amount of legwork doing anything with it requires.

this. To a point dividing the audience among more boards is a bad thing because you do want some cross-thread traffic. Finding a sweet spot between an overly broad and an overly narrow focus is important.

You've not really offered any argument as to why it isn't important. Anything to contradict the prior arguments as to why a GM knowing more systems is a direct advantage no matter which one of those systems they happen to be running. Rather than falling back on assertions, would you please engage with the point?

CoC was a shitty meatgrinder until 7th edition cleared up all the fuckery and made it playable.

>tfw you bought a good amount of 6th ed shit a few months before 7th ed came out

>so the annoying faggots that wind up extremely dedicated to one system are mostly found there.

Oh, no, you'll find plenty of annoying faggots extremely dedicated to one system in every game, there's just less of them because there's just less of them in general.

In fact, the worst faggots are easily the ones who cling to unpopular systems, because they get super bitter and jealous of popular games because they think that if those games stopped being popular, people would flock to their games, their games that have been available for years but have failed to provide any substantial reasons for why people should switch over to them.

It's almost like they think that the popular games fanbases are entirely composed of people who are blindly dedicated to them, rather than just them being largely composed of people who prefer those systems over the less popular ones.

>Between thing 1 and thing 2...
Again, false dichotomy. Do you even understand what one means when they say "false dichotomy"?

What we have been trying to tell you for the whole fucking thread now, you dense motherfucker, is that understanding other systems is an integral part of understanding one system well. Expanding your horizons helps you to understand your system in a way you didn't before, which is exactly why expanding your horizons is such a great thing.

I have the 6th ed book hanging around, what do you mean by shitty meatgrinder?

>It's almost like they think that the popular games fanbases are entirely composed of people who are blindly dedicated to them, rather than just them being largely composed of people who prefer those systems over the less popular ones.

Both are untrue. The majority of D&D's fanbase is literally people who don't know other games exist. That's just a fact.

You're playing a game of infinite time and resources. Cute for hypotheticals.

I'm simply stating that while expanding your horizons is great, learning a system well is far more important.

On the top of my head...
> R.A.W.
> Using coasters
> Boobplates being retarded (I mean, they are, but it's fantasy, I'm just glad it's not a chain bikini)
> -4 STR Lololololololol

I tend to enforce every single one by default (less women heroes, those with STR bonuses aren't pretty), but can recognize they're not needed for a game to be fun, and will drop the case in other peoples' games.

To be fair, there are lots of examples of shit being popular for one reason or another unrelated to its actual quality and worth - such as having a large marketing budget, having name recognition due to being first to market, having recognition due to celebrity endorsement or similar attention attractions, and the like. Some systems are unpopular only because they are obscure, even if they have a relatively good track record of converting people who give it a chance.

Do you understand that you're not even arguing in the same sphere as the argument?

And we're stating that the two are one and the same and that the former directly benefits the latter, which you have provided no counterpoint to refute.

That's a bold faced lie.

Why is expanding your horizons great?

You assume that any time spent learning a new system is inherently time NOT spent mastering your current one. Ergo, unless you are specifically in the market for a new system, why would a GM ever, ever want to expand their horizons? Why is it great? Isn't it, by your logic, actually a bad thing?

>Oh, no, you'll find plenty of annoying faggots extremely dedicated to one system in every game, there's just less of them because there's just less of them in general.

Yeah, that's what I meant. Gamers are mostly found there, and the annoying faggots that are dedicated to one system are most often dedicated to the one they started with and so are mostly found there.

>It's almost like they think that the popular games fanbases are entirely composed of people who are blindly dedicated to them, rather than just them being largely composed of people who prefer those systems over the less popular ones.

That theory would hold some water if it weren't for the fact that of a niche hobby, most people take only an entry-level interest in it and so never actually find reason to play alternate systems, so they just stick with what they know. It's not like the majority of gamers sat down and weighed the merits of every system out there.

Could you explain what your point was and why the post you're replying to did not address it? Because it looks pretty simple from here. You drew a false dichotomy ("Between a GM who does this, and a GM who does that...") and were called out for assuming both is not possible.

And I'm once again saying that learning fifty different systems does not mean you'll know one system well.

You are telling me they are one and the same, when it's flatly untrue. Learning fifty different core mechanics is neat, but that's only fifty different core mechanics, and it's hard to get any further than that when you're too focused on learning more games rather than learning games well.

That should be the priority. Let's make that clear.
Learning more games is not as important as learning games well, even if you are learning more games in order to learn games well.

>Critics three thousand years from now will not be dissecting the themes of, say, The Hunt for Red October, as they do with Homer.
To be fair, Moby Dick.

Just wanted to chime in that it's not a false dichotomy because op didn't say you should only stick to one system, given the option to learn one well or many poorly. He's tacitly granting that you could learn many well but that you get diminishing returns in real life experience or that 1 might be enough for practical purposes. That makes it opinion, not a fallacious logical argument.

Can you stop repeating yourself and actually acknowledge the arguments made throughout the thread? Or do you need me to go back and copy paste them all in one place so you stop ignoring them?

Not that guy, but most games are pretty simple. It really doesn't take much to learn them well.

I was just reaching for a book that is still good, but not universally hailed as a literary masterpiece with university dissertation tier philosophical themes. And that's the first book I could make out on my bookshelf at a glance, so I went with it.

You have a False Equivalence is at play here, and there was not a false dichotomy drawn.

As someone who came to the party late, I wouldn't mind that. I'm pretty curious what this shit-show of a fight is about.

>dichotomy
Did you just learn this word recently? It's the second time I've come across you using it without considering your opponent might not be a moron. Consider what user said (paraphrasing): "here's one extreme of book analysis on a complex work. I don't think as much work is necessary for a pulpy opposite extreme. "

That's not a dichotomy, it's a metaphorical comparison using 2 examples, both showing you the extreme ends of the spectrum and allowing you to infer that there are gradients of work-to-analysis ratios in-between.

The simper games are the ones that are actually harder to learn how to run well.

It's a beginner's mistake to assume that more narrative/freeform games are better for beginners, when they typically require an experienced GM to perform the equivalent of herding cats. New players need structure, and without it they quickly lose interest because it's hard for them to find any value in looser systems with vaguer feelings of accomplishment.

Even for advanced players, simpler systems require a subset of skills not easily acquired that depend more upon improvisation and shared intuition, and while it's simple enough to "play," it's not only harder to "play well" but to define what "playing well" means.

I'm assuming the other user is a moron because he's saying moronic things.

>It's almost like they think that the popular games fanbases are entirely composed of people who are blindly dedicated to them, rather than just them being largely composed of people who prefer those systems over the less popular ones.
Honestly in my experience it's true. Anyone I've met who plays pathfinder exclusively just won't give anything else a chance regardless of how good it is. I've met only like 1 or 2 people who aren't that way with popular systems, such as my father in law with 5eDnD

Maybe shitty is a bit stronger than I had intended.

But the game was set up with the idea of being difficult, and while that isn't necessarily bad it does make the game near impossible to play. I DM'd two modules of the game for friends inb4 barely enough experience to pass judgement (the Mr Corbitt and Dead Lights ones iirc) and a fair number of rolls ended in failure. I'm fully aware that it could be because of mine and/or their inexperince with DM'ing/building characters for this system, but I shouldn't have to plan for failure in every single instance that a skill/characteristic check is necessary.

7th edition, to the best of my knowledge, fixed a fair amount of issues with the older system by increasing the characteristics five-fold (from 3d6 to 3d6x5 and so on), and working in a difficulty system with skill checks (If your Computer Use skill is 75 then you would roll under 75 if you wanted to find porn, but you'd have to make a Hard roll of 15 if you wanted to access the deep web or some shit).

Again, I could be entirely wrong, so feel free to educate me if I seem retarded.

No, I meant like pretty normal games are simple to learn. I've always had the hardest time with narrative systems like Fate. But shit like Shadowrun, GURPS, AFMBE, were a cinch for me. You're making it sound as though learning a game is an intellectual discipline you have to spend an entire life to master.

See

I must say I'm rather impressed to be talking to someone who has personally met every single person in the pathfinder fanbase.

>going from bitching about troll threads to outright making them
You are such a sad little fucker

OP actually specifically mentions modifying and houseruling anyway, and I've yet to see a single answer to the perfectly reasonable point that understanding other systems and how they resolve issues is an asset to a GM interested in houseruling.

No, I've had it for a while and I've never been sure what to do with it. The whole CoC thing didn't seem all that appealing since most of the stories are "you investigated this shit, went bonkers, and probably died" and that doesn't sound fun.

The best I could come up with was some sort of half-assed bug hunt scenario that borrowed from Aliens, but I'm sure it wouldn't be suitable to it.