Gatekeeping

One possibility, but there's also the rare queen bee guarding their manharem, or the person whose gatekeeping blocks players who would have otherwise passed shit tests because of personal dislike.

There is no better schadenfreude than seeing the look of terror on the local queen bees face when a moderately attractive woman walks in and steals her orbiters attention.

Without gatekeeping you're just the undertale fandom.

>without muh thing that exists only because I need to invent a term that is self serving at best
This thread is distilled faggotry.

>If more people played WFRP2e, I'd just have more people to talk to about it.

>If more people played WFRP2e, I'd just have more people to talk to about it.
It would no longer resemble WFRP.

There's a solid reason to keep some type of "barrier to entry" in most hobbies to keep them from becoming a watered down bland fest that resembles every other thing that already exists.

...

You can get more people to play a game without watering it down. It's called "cultivating good taste in other humans."

>Prove me wrong
Burden of proof is on the person making a statement to begin with, so you are required to prove youself right first.

So, what about the practical people? People who learn by getting a general idea of how to play, jumping in feet first as quickly as possible, and then learning the details of things they don’t get later?

One of my game groups is pretty much all normies. Yeah, they started as doing your usual lolrandum shit, but that got boring for them pretty quickly. I then was able to teach them to actually get invested in their characters and the world, and they're enjoying themselves more than ever. This game is way better than the ones I've run for neckbeards.

Neckbeards CAN be really good players. The difference between them and normal people is that, since normal people actually have social skills, they're capable of communication and learning how to be good players. If a neckbeard is a shitty player, they'll pretty much always be a shitty player.

It's weird that you consider barriers to entry to be the sole criterion that distinguishes a game from other games.
Barriers to entry seem to be the least interesting thing that could go into making a game special.I'd argue that interesting mechanics, interesting setting, great art, community engagement etc. all contribute far more to distinguishing a game than making it arbitrarily hard to get into. Barriers to entry may come as a incidental result of the previous, but they shouldn't be mistaken as necessary.

>Barriers to entry may come as a incidental result of the previous, but they shouldn't be mistaken as necessary.
That doesn't have to be mutually exclusive and I'd argue by being interesting and unique, those things ultimately serve as the barriers that are in fact necessary.

>reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee normies!

You're a bunch of fucking teenage edgelord cunts. As an actual adult who grew up during a time when pretty much nothing considered "nerdy" was in the mainstream: it's objectively better now that most things are mainstream. There's more content being created, there's more money to be made which means more of that content becomes available, the quality is generally higher (this goes for pretty much every form of media). Anyone saying otherwise is either wearing nostalgia goggles or is a hipster.

None of that addresses anything said. As long as the barriers are organic and not solely derived from people screeing about bad/wrong fun and/or price, a little gatekeeping is fine.

Streamlining for mass appeal is what leads to soulless and shallow products. Things with mass appeal aren't necessarily soulless (E.G. early Star Wars, pre-WoW Warcraft) but streamlining an existing product to tool it for mass appeal is an easy way to remove all the interesting bits, like what happened to Skyrim and Fallout 4.

>ie. yes you have to read the goddamn book before you play an RPG.
That's not gatekeeping. Knowing the rules before playing a game is common sense.

>Veeky Forums’s discursive reality encourages performative role-play in the form of anti-normative, egregious, and abusive dialogue. These practices serve as informal structures of socialisation and coincide with the anthropological notion of the habitus. Cultural competence is dictated not only through the performative offense of gate-keeping insults but also by consistent presence, as content refreshes rapidly on Veeky Forums and is irrevocably deleted. Unlike other forms of communication online that are continually archived into databases, this permanent ‘refresh’ of content necessitates the transmission of collective memory through orality and the sharing of personal archives to which 4channers save material they deem worthy (Bernstein et al, 2011: 5–7)
An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

Gatekeeping kills. Anti-gatekeeping is the only thing keeping this place alive

Reeeee normie!

Seriously you're full of shit. Making things mainstream doesn't make them better. Quality doesn't increase with quantity, if anything the good things are drowned out by the dull mainstream corporate noise.

but gatekeeping is 100% that

read the rules, learn what you're expected to know, and then you're allowed to play and gain practical experience. it's that easy.

It's impossible to remain impartial, avoid over investing and getting personal, then unhelpful then outright hostile and driving people away. Nobody can enforce conditions to a hobby they enjoy without eventually killing it by stagnation

It depends a lot on what grounds the gatekeeping is being done

...

>There's more content being created, there's more money to be made which means more of that content becomes available, the quality is generally higher (this goes for pretty much every form of media).
But the content is worse and has less depth. You don't sound like you actually enjoy things.

is this guy MGTOW?

No; he intentionally seeks out women to drive them away from ttrpgs.

wew lad

First things first: if you either support or reject gatekeeping because you think that your individual actions have an influence on the hobby as a whole, you're an idiot and also deluded.

Understanding that, the rest of it's fairly simple; if you want someone to play with you you act friendly and helpful, and if you don't want to play with them you act like a cunt. It's not like one autist can blackball someone from a fucking hobby.

I mean the question is how often people gatekeep and why through the hobby as a whole, an individual gate keeping doesn't mean shit but a hobby wide trend does and you can either encourage or discourage that

Except you can't meaningfully encourage or discourage gatekeeping because it's an abstraction of people choosing who they want or don't want to play with.

If my good buddy Steve wants to play some PnP but doesn't know a system, I'll go out of my way to help him out.
If someone nobody in the group knows wants to play some PnP, we probably won't accept him unless he shows he already knows the rules so we don't have to waste time and effort helping him.
If some autistic cunt who smells like a latrine wants to join the game, we're going to tell him to fuck off no matter how well he understands a game.

All these are examples of "gatekeeping", but when you think about the concept of encouraging or discouraging it's literally either some rando online telling you who to play with, or some company telling you who to play with; both of which are nonsense.

Imagine walking into a FLGS with someone that you know who is, or appears to be, a "normie" to most people (especially if they're girls).

Now imagine the fattest, stankiest, neckbeard walking up to you guys and giving you a pop quiz on [X] like a goddamn bridge troll, with the intention of shaming your "normie" friend who might not be as antiquated with the crunch/fluff of [X], which they're trying to get into.

Now imagine that neckbeard being your average fa/tg/uy, who doesn't actually give a fuck about the community that he has sworn to protect and is only interested in making the community something based on his own personal views on the perfect community your friend's presence threatens that perceived utopia, even if your friend is trying to get into the hobby.

That's gatekeeping.

TL;DR: Imagine NOFUNALLOWED board police who actually pulled their shit IRL, that's gatekeeping in a nutshell.

When the entire hobby is comprised of self-important dicks, you end up with Veeky Forums.

If we're being honest though, nerds are way more detrimental to a hobby than normies are because at the end of the day, it's much easier to teach a newbie how RPG's work in a practical setting than it is dealing with an autist who has already decided what D&D is supposed to be and will argue tooth and nail if you disagree with them.

Plus, normies are less likely to shit themselves if someone tells them "no" or "you're wrong."

At the same time though, D&D 5e is a much better edition than 3.PF or 4e, with the added bonus of being modular enough to where you can explain how to play in less than five minutes.

Besides, streamlining only becomes an issue if the devs involved don't know how to streamline the game without actually knowing what made the game good in the first place, like what happened in Super Smash Bros. Brawl or Mighty Number 9.

I'm going to keep introducing normies to tabletop gaming and there is NOTHING you can do to stop me.

Look at the higher quality of dice, models and RPG tools in general, that would never have happened with no popularity.

Right. It happened because of nerds who cared about quality.

I just like doing things I enjoy with people I like to do them with. I don't really think about things beyond that.

If I know somebody who isn't familiar with the games but I think they might be interested then I'll offer to have them join in on something small to give them a small taste of a game.

No it didn't, nerds will happily buy Rogue Trader-tier minis and run inefficient business models incapable of creating good sculpts.

> you have to read the goddamn book before you play an RPG.

People actually believe this now? Woah.

>not solely derived from people screeing about bad/wrong fun

That's all gatekeeping is.

>Making things mainstream doesn't make them better

Reality says you're wrong.

>But the content is worse and has less depth.

You are the one that lacks depth user. Content is absolutely no worse than it was, and most times is better.

>You don't sound like you actually enjoy things.

This must be ironic.

This is the truth. This is why you fucking neckbeards need to learn social skills or you're going to be pushed out of your hobby communities. No one wants to play in with a bunch of smelly retards who can't dress themselves if on top of that they are anti social cunts.

This.
Someone on /co/ the other day talked about how, if Veeky Forums literally kept anyone new out of the site, the whole place would like exactly like /jp/ a few years ago: boards where there are no more than 5 pages long, topics are limited to the same 10 or so subjects, and everyone kinda wanders around in a "we've been talking about the same thing for years... is there anything left to talk about?" stupor.

In fact, it would basically end up like what happened to iichan; so few new people come to the point to where entire boards are literally kept alive by the same person in the hope that someone else would actually show up, only to evaporate in to nothingness.

>you fucking neckbeards need to learn social skills or you're going to be pushed out of your hobby communities
This is a weird statement. This kind of hostility is why nerds are accusing people of driving them out of the hobbies they themselves created. Because posts like this, bait or rant or otherwise, openly state it.

>This is a weird statement.

No, it's not. It's coming from someone who grew up as a neckbeard.

Learn social skills or you're going to end up a social reject. And with the mainstreaming of "nerd" media you're going to be pushed out because people don't want to interact with someone who both smells like stale Cheetos and is a complete fucking asshole.

It's more like a butting of heads.

The grognards find the very presence of youngbloods disconcerting because they've built a sheltered world for themselves out of the belief that they're the only people interested in the hobby, yet fear that they might be keepers of a dying flame. Meanwhile, the youngblood see this brotherly community that seems to yearn for new members, but is suddenly struck out of nowhere with a wave of condescension for even being curious about the hobby, which leads to them hating the grognards.

>is a complete fucking asshole.
This.
It's not hard to attempt to be a decent person and play pnp games.
Respect the other people at the table and their choices, even if you don't agree with them.
Remember that your fun should not come at the expense of the fun of others.
Resolve disagreements peaceably and amicably when possible.

Old Veeky Forums is dead. Lack of gatekeeping killed it.

This. Neckies are simply afraid of being pushed aside by normies.

So "nerd culture" is being taken over by people who call everyone Cheeto stained and socially incompetent losers and push them around for being too nerdy.

Bullies suck. Pointing out that "that guy" needs to take a shower isn't really a counterpoint. Yes he does need to take a shower. We all agree. It's still awful to invade and take over a subculture while denying it's happening, then turn around and boast that it's happening because fuck nerds they smell xd.

Old Veeky Forums was literally everything that we hate about reddit and meme-culture now. You literally had to know every face on pic related to "fit in" on a board that should have been completely antithetical to the idea of "fitting in" at one point.

You know that video of the dude jumping on the counter screaming about Rick and Morty sauce and squealing "Reeeee" at McDonalds? That would have been celebrated on Old Veeky Forums as "epic trolling for the lulz". Hell, the reason why /jp/, /vp/, Veeky Forums, and /vr/ exist is because the old guard REFUSED to allow the discussion of their topics. They aren't containment boards; they're "the original board is so set in its ways it can't even talk about the multifaceted nature of it's own main topic correctly" boards.

Wait a sec. When I buy an RPG, I don't agree to any "subculture" bullshit. Even less one that empowers smelly menchildren.

So... why should I accept them and not treat them like in any other social situations?

Lol nice deflection.

People will put up with, and many times be a normal level of friendly towards, unhygenic people.

People will not put up with an unhygenic asshole.

You only get to be one of those things. It's like in the art industry: people will hire you if you're fast and nice, fast and good, or nice and good. They won't hire you if you're a prodigy but you're a complete asshole and you miss deadlines all the time.

>implying normies are willing to actually learn RPG rules
>implying normies won't just get bored and go play drunken smash brothers or pie in the face or something the moment they have to actually use the rules and not just describe how they are Legolas surfing on a shield.

You sure are doubling down on your portrayal of nerds. We don't disagree that assholes are assholes. You're just insisting that nerds are trash and that's... weird.

>It's still awful to invade and take over a subculture while denying it's happening, then turn around and boast that it's happening because fuck nerds they smell xd.

I forgot to address this specific part:

I'm not taking over anything. I've been playing PnP games, video games, collecting toys and comics since I was in elementary school. And I grew up as a literal fat and smelly neck beard until I ended up a high school athlete.

In the mean time I also learned how to be sociable and found out that was the primary reason I got so much shit. Most people generally didn't give a shit if you were fat and/or smelly if you were otherwise a nice person. And I ended up in a field that relies on interpersonal skills.

I'm not pushing you out and saying "take a shower you fat fuck", I'm telling you that you're being a complete cunt and if you don't become generally more sociable it won't just be normies in every other environment reacting negatively to you, it will be normies in your Veeky Forums related environments too.

Or perhaps people who re obtusely unwilling to even attempt to learn the rules, throw a shitfit when you ask them to follow the rules cause ithe rules are hampering their 'fun' and are expected to be coddled because they are 'new' and a 'normie' are the real assholes.

>I'm not pushing you out and saying "take a shower you fat fuck", I'm telling you that you're being a complete cunt
See again, this is hostile. We're quite alike and not that it matters but I'm quite physically fit and social as well. I'm just in this thread defending the concept of antisocial nerds not being pushed around. Lot of stereotypes being relied on instead of argument you know?

>You're just insisting that nerds are trash and that's... weird.

No, I'm not. As a fucking "nerd" and at one time literally a neckbeard, I'm telling you that you can be exactly who you are now without people not wanting anything to do with you and being indirectly pushed out of your fandoms so long as you aren't a complete asshole. This thread is literally neckbeards talking about how important it is to their identity to be assholes which is, ironically, directed at what they feel is mainstreaming pushing them out. What they don't recognize is that their being complete cunts is feeding that cycle because they are having an identity crisis.

>implying normies won't just get bored and go play drunken smash brothers

Are you a time traveler from the year 2000?

>I'm just in this thread defending the concept of antisocial nerds not being pushed around.

Anti social nerds being assholes because they think they are gatekeepers to their hobby are not being pushed around. They are being pushed out because they are being assholes.

>Lot of stereotypes being relied on instead of argument you know?

You can't actually believe that the gatekeeping asshole neckbeard is just a stereotype.

You seem like an asshole.

> Gatekeeping is fine as long as you don't actually gatekeep.

>You seem like an asshole.

I'm not the one being pushed out of my hobbies by normies ;^).

> too fucking thick to understand that the excerpt he replied to literally explained why this isn't true.
Ok lad.

Right you're the bully laughing about it.

>Are you a time traveler from the year 2000?
If only.

You've obviously missed the trend of normies playing 'old' consoles thinking it makes them cool or 'retro' or something. Honestly it's just an excuse to drink heavily and act stupid, the same reason they eat shit like the wii and kinect up.

I don't understand how you can be "pushed out" of a hobby. if people aren't doing something I like with my hobby I just don't join in. I'll play with my circle of pals and we can take what we like and leave the rest. I feel like most people who get angry about this shit are just insecure and need to feel elitist about something.

>The only people who are anti-gatekeeping are either terrible or have a financial stake in the game they're trying to ruin.
>Prove me wrong

You OP are a faggot. We are all faggots but have over time (hopefully) become better faggots. To become better faggots we had to unleash our faggotry in unacceptable ways before being told by others to occasionally fuck-off (in the worst cases) but usually just tone it down. Gatekeeping quite literally just seeks to shut people down and encourages them to leave dissuading them from ever trying to get better and making the overall pool of players within a game fairly small causing a very real risk of the game dying out.

That being said if you are running a game and wherever you list it you mention it is for players of a certain skill level that is more reasonable and while some novice could get in it is best to kindly teach them with patience instead of going into a fit of autistic screeching over a person's lack of experience.

You can't be. The anons worrying about it are dumb, and the anons gloating about it are dumb.

You have one group of anons who feel all self-righteous about 'accepting' normies who are just going to get bored and move on to the next anyway and another group of anons who are taking the whole thing way too far and just act like a bag of cocks dividing the community when they could just ignore the normies and they'd probably just go away.

>Right you're the bully laughing about it.

I'm actually not. I'm trying to tell you that you can't try and gatekeep, and demonstrate your lack of sociability, and not get pushed out. I'm trying to help you user.

>the trend of normies playing 'old' consoles

>the same reason they eat shit like the wii and kinect up.

I know quite a few normies. The only people I know that are buying and playing "retro" consoles are my friends who grew up playing them. And we are all in our 30's.

Oh, and my mother who will be 60 pretty soon. But she was playing "retro" consoles before you dad got his first erection and loves to play the Wii and Switch.

I'll be honest, I don't think I've ever seen any instance of people gatekeeping in all the time I've been playing tabletop. Everybody I've known who plays tabletop is relatively accepting of new people getting into the hobbies and has acted fairly nice.

Like it's never even been a question of, "should we try to let new people in" or "we're worried about new people coming in." None of this argument has ever come up and it's frankly kind of baffling to me how many people there are who are legitimately concerned about this.

You probably don't see them that often in person because it's hard to be part of the group when you're always being anti-social and you push back against any constructive criticism.

>I know quite a few normies. The only people I know that are buying and playing "retro" consoles are my friends who grew up playing them. And we are all in our 30's.
Right, I'm sure some of your best friends are normies.

Perhaps your issue is you have a narrow peer group and can't conceive of the fact that, yes, 20-somethings hipsters really think playing Smash Brothers on N64 makes them retro and cool. If you want evidence go to one of those pretensions hispter stores that sell old records for way too much and notice how they are also selling shit like refurbished N64 and the upper film of popular gaming on the system like Smash Brothers and GoldenEye.

>Oh, and my mother who will be 60 pretty soon. But she was playing "retro" consoles before you dad got his first erection and loves to play the Wii and Switch.
And my parents learned to program using punch cards? Who he fuck cares? Aside from you and you need to establish your dominance by prove how old you are. Yay, you're old...?

I've never seen a tabletop group IRL be accepting of new people, and very few individuals willing to help new people learn - only the Pokemon and YGO communities here for that. TTRPG groups outright say "if you didn't play AD&D when it was new, you're too young for tabletop".

I don't know where the glitch happened but I swear we're saying basically the same thing. I wish you well user. I also wish the neckbeards well on their path.

These are good posts. Good on you, lads and/or lassies.

There's no gatekeeping. There's people who don't want to be part of community but feel like they should want to, so they make up excuses blaming the community for not accepting them. And there's idiots within the community who listen to them and attempt to make it more welcoming to people who only going to make more excuses why they don't participate.

>Perhaps your issue is you have a narrow peer group

Nah. Age ranges from early 20s to late 30s.

>Aside from you and you need to establish your dominance

It sounds more like you're feeling self conscious.

It's pretty easy, don't be an anti-social gate keeper if you don't want people to think you're an asshole and shun you.

>There's no gatekeeping.

Just because neckbeards aren't successful at gate keeping, as evidenced by the thousands of neckbeards reeing on the internet about normies, doesn't mean they aren't trying.

>to make it more welcoming to people who only going to make more excuses why they don't participate.

If they aren't going to stick around then why do you care? There are only upsides to the mainstreaming of "nerd" hobbies then.

>If they aren't going to stick around then why do you care?
Because hobby is getting ruined by trying to attract fictitious people.

>Because hobby is getting ruined

By more content being generated for you to enjoy?

You do realize content isn't going to be generated at nearly the rate it is now without some viable market.

By content being generated to be enjoyed not by me, but by fictitious people who would totally consume that content if not for evil gatekeeping neckbeard.

Once the transition is complete, it might as well be dead.

I have never once met someone who actively gatekept shit who themselves were actually truly knowledgeable about their own subject

Take for example /tv/ gatekeepers who mostly spew the same Lynch movies over and over or /co/ gatekeepers who only ever read Big 2

You're entirely correct, but too often gatekeeping is confused with a system being obtuse, clunky or bogged down in legacy elements. While this technically has a similar effect of raising the threshold of entry, this also stifles and mechanical evolution and refinement the system might experience.

>By content being generated to be enjoyed not by me

The content you enjoy is only able to be produced because that "fictitious" group of people, who in reality actually do exist, buy into it.

Or are you claiming that there is no mainstreaming of "nerd" hobbies?

There is mainstream appeal to "nerd" hobbies. But those "mainstream" people are already here.

What there isn't are people who would totally join in if the hobby was more watered down and "progressive" and "inclusive" or whatever the hell.

Those are just people making excuses for why they don't enjoy something that they feel like they should enjoy. This is why they think getting familiar with the material is a chore and an obstacle invented by evil neckbeards, rather then the point.

>What there isn't are people who would totally join in if the hobby was more watered down and "progressive" and "inclusive" or whatever the hell.

That's not who is being "gatekeeped". It's those who are entering the hobbies because they are becoming mainstreamed.

That's why gatekeeping just looks like manchildren flailing and having a conniption fit to everyone else, including "actual nerds" who realize that you can't be anti-social and expect to not be shunned.

>Old Veeky Forums was literally everything that we hate about reddit and meme-culture now
You learned about Oldchan on ED, didn't you?

You know "No Spoonfeeding"? Not answering requests for Sauce?!?! because the reverse image button is right goddamn there. That's a type of gatekeeping, and that tiny difference between the person that googles and one that won't is what keeps board quality up

>Skyrim is better than Morrowind, look at the grafix

>if you want someone to play with you you act friendly and helpful, and if you don't want to play with them you act like a cunt.

this