Biggus Geekus: A Hobby Divided

In regards to the title of the show—Divide, Divide, Divide the Hobby!—the first thing that needs to be said is that there is no "community". This is something grifters like to push in order to manipulate and exploit people that are lonely, obnoxious, and/or retarded, convincing them that they are part of something, that someone actually gives a fuck about them, even if they don't participate or even contribute (buying some dice and watching hacks pretend to play on Youtube doesn't count).

Now, the grifters do care, sort of, so long as your actions and behavior contribute to their social standing and/or income. It depends on how much of an impact you have on them: give the greedy narcissists enough money and attention and they might return the favor, so long as it's still lucrative for them in some way. However, they are greedy narcissists after all, so be prepared for them to throw you under the bus at the earliest opportunity: it all hinges on whether defending you or not will ultimately be of greater benefit.

Again, there's no overarching community. There's the...illusion of one, but it primarily serves to benefit privileged narcissists. There are however numerous smaller ones, but these tend to be insular, largely comprised of people with similar beliefs (with perhaps the odd troll or contrarian). And while you could say there is "a" or "the" hobby it is similarly divided, has been from the start, and always will be, so as with communities it's best to just embrace the division and find the camp (or camps) that best align with your wants and needs.

One of the topics was about something referred to as 4D roleplaying, something I'd heard mention of here and there but didn't pay it any mind because it sounded pretentious and pointless. This belief was confirmed when I found a video where a guy talks about it, initially defining 2D gaming as essentially playing a board game, perhaps with some roleplaying layered on top. He uses The Fantasy Trip as an example, as well as Matt Colville's latest grift, but since I've played neither I have no idea what he's talking about.

Really, the closest thing that matches this initial criteria would be Index Card, or for something with actual production value, depth and innovation maybe Mansions of Madness. But he later conflates asking the GM questions about the environment as 2D roleplaying behavior (ie, are there any rocks I can pick up). This activity doesn't require minis or a map at all, and to make it even more confusing states that in "3D" roleplaying you would instead say that you're looking for rocks and wait for the GM to give you the okay.

So, asking the GM if there are any rocks is "bad", but saying that you are looking for rocks and waiting for the GM to say that there are rocks is "better".

This reminds me of one of the times I played Dungeon World, and the guy running it got annoyed that I just said I'm going to hit a monster with whatever weapon my character had, or I might have just said "I'm going to use Hack & Slash" on it (which is the name of the melee attack move, similar to saying "I attack" in a normal RPG). What he expected me to do was describe what my character was doing in-game, just so he could tell me to roll Hack & Slash.

In other words, take more time going through unnecessary descriptions just to arrive at the conclusion that we both knew I wanted in the first place. And I get it: adding description to your character's actions can help paint a more vivid mental picture (not that everyone needs to be on the same page), but when everyone is describing every action it bogs the age down and becomes tedious, like watching an overly long summoning animation in a Final Fantasy game.

What we typically do is describe things at first, and then just resort to stating the action, though we often will state the intent ("I attack"), and use the die results to describe what really happens. This makes much more sense than a player describing his totally awesome attack, but then botching the whole thing and failing spectacularly.

4D roleplaying is just the worst elements of storygaming, where players can define reality without even having to spend any sort of nonsense metacurrency like Fate Points. Here the player declares that he looks for a rock and then finds one automatically, though the GM can still intervene and declare that, no, there aren't any rocks. This sounds like 3D roleplaying, just players are encouraged to narrate whatever they want because, why not? The worst the GM can do is shoot you down.

The whole thing is weird and pretentious, and I don't see any particular benefit. It reminds me of the Brody Bunch pretending a rule exists just so they could then pretend that they discovered it and give what they consider to be purpose to their otherwise uneventful and meaningless existences.

I see no problem running the game normally, with me describing an environment, players telling me what they are doing, ask questions, etc, and then I either decide on the outcome or make a roll if I'm not certain. I don't know where this would fall on this arbitrary scale, as we aren't playing a board game with roleplaying elements, and the players often have to ask for clarification about the environment. Maybe 2.5D? 2.75D? 2.8758943759476952D? Playing the game normally?

Who knows and, more importantly, who cares? Run the game you want, and if your players are enjoying themselves keep at it. You could perhaps try these strange, alien ways of gaming because maybe you'll like it more for some reason, but if not then no biggie. It's not like the way you run your game affects the other 99.999999999% of gamers out there, anyway.

Eventually they get to talking about whether there are too many stand-alone games, and there aren't so long as there isn't an existing game that does everything or nearly everything you want. Case in point, I know there are a bajillion D&Dish games out there, but most are incomplete vapidware trash with gimmicky nonsense rules, an existing addition with a few houserules shoehorned in, an exisitng edition but rearranged, and/or not even a proper roleplaying game.

Since none of those or any of the official editions—including the skinsuit rehashes that happen to share the name—were sufficient, my wife and I decided to do our own thing, which involved discarding almost all of the material and building it back up from scratch (not just mechanics, but also flavor material). We have a number of settings that we're going to publish (also adventures), but want to finish our even more wildly divergent 2nd Edition, first.

I just hope that when it's released, I won't suddenly have a bunch of issues with that version as well.