Gaming Ballistic - GURPS Content Posts

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

To me - and I really do mean this as FOR ME - those niches are "the games that I drop out of, and players I kick out of my games," and "fun."

Posts including lines about how "GURPS doesn't need" things don't read as "for me" posts. They read as wrongbadfun.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

That's fair - but then the tone of the conversation would be (again, in my opinion) improved by asking questions rather than looking for occasionally-to-often out-of-context tidbits to defend what looks like putting the rules on the rack until they say what one wants. If you want to do that, just declare it a house rule and be done with it.

Link is bad.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Sindri

Posts including lines about how "GURPS doesn't need" things don't read as "for me" posts. They read as wrongbadfun.

Fair enough, but I stand by what I said, in that I think that when people are looking around to learn about GURPS, if much/most of what they see are abstract rules arguments going for (as per the example) sixty posts and seemingly resolving nothing, they're going to walk away. If that is a new player's first exposure to gaming in general, they will likewise walk away. That is neither good for GURPS nor is it good for the hobby.

One more point: sometimes I take things like commentary on posts to my blog. I do that when I'm speaking for myself, and for those who come onto the blog who are looking for my opinion on things. Everything on there is, of course, my opinion, and if I feel strongly about something that's my place to be judgmental about it if I choose to be. If someone wants to take me to task for it on the blog, that's the right place - though I expect that person to identify themselves when doing it. I don't much respond to anonymous posts anymore, as I noted to Vicky above.

Link is bad.

Fixed.

[Ulzgoroth]

I don't think your typical forum rules-lawyering is about trying to make the rules mean what you want them to, it's just about trying to really hash out what they do mean. Which is sometimes not easy.

Table rules-lawyering may be different, I don't know about that. (And if somebody drops the results of rules analysis on someone who isn't familiar with it it may look like they're trying to put one over even if they're not.)

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

I mean, I was in a game once online with Peter, using Fourth Edition rules, and he'd declared a Wait, and when his foe came into range, the GM had him roll as for Cascading Waits when no cascade was in the offing. Peter noted that that was a very Third Edition way of looking at it, and being told that that's how the GM played it, he just adjusted his tactics and moved on.

Wrangling about RAW isn't a rejection of houserules. We mostly talk about RAW because that's what we have in common to talk about...but if the topic is a defined houserule or set of custome rules, you can go at it exactly the same way.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Fair enough, but I stand by what I said, in that I think that when people are looking around to learn about GURPS, if much/most of what they see are abstract rules arguments going for (as per the example) sixty posts and seemingly resolving nothing, they're going to walk away. If that is a new player's first exposure to gaming in general, they will likewise walk away. That is neither good for GURPS nor is it good for the hobby.

Any form of long lasting thread divergence is bad exposure for new players, it doesn't really matter if it's high level rules mastery or setting critique.

On the other hand rules mastery is one of the main things that gets players involved in a game's online community instead of getting just a bunch of GM's talking to each other and the GM reflecting pool is a rather distasteful community to step into when I'm getting into a new game.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

One more point: sometimes I take things like commentary on posts to my blog. I do that when I'm speaking for myself, and for those who come onto the blog who are looking for my opinion on things. Everything on there is, of course, my opinion, and if I feel strongly about something that's my place to be judgmental about it if I choose to be. If someone wants to take me to task for it on the blog, that's the right place - though I expect that person to identify themselves when doing it. I don't much respond to anonymous posts anymore, as I noted to Vicky above.

I don't have a livejournal, wordpress, typepad, AIM or Open ID and I'm simply not going to get them or use a google account to comment on a blog.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I don't think your typical forum rules-lawyering is about trying to make the rules mean what you want them to, it's just about trying to really hash out what they do mean. Which is sometimes not easy.

Some of the more recent threads don't read that way from my perspective, but I get what you're saying. Some of the thread, though, do read as pushing a particular interpretation of a rule, rather than offering up a "this is how it works" as more of a hypothesis to be looked at for "things this implementation does well vs. things it does badly."

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Sindri

I don't have a livejournal, wordpress, typepad, AIM or Open ID and I'm simply not going to get them or use a google account to comment on a blog.

Fair enough.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

Some of the more recent threads don't read that way from my perspective, but I get what you're saying. Some of the thread, though, do read as pushing a particular interpretation of a rule, rather than offering up a "this is how it works" as more of a hypothesis to be looked at for "things this implementation does well vs. things it does badly."

Well, those are two distinct things that sometimes go together but don't have to. Figuring out what the RAW actually does isn't about whether what it does is good or bad. It's pretty much an exercise in creative symbolic manipulation, like math. There's either a right answer, or a recognizable set of answers based on alternate interpretations of fuzzy rule points.

The question of whether what the rule does is really what we want it to do, and if not how to make it better, is based on the 'what do the rules mean' results, but is separable from the process of figuring them out. (And that part may be less interesting to people who don't expect to be playing under houserules of their own design.)

[Kalzazz]

I love this forum, so I love posting on this forum (and honestly, this forum is probably at least 4/10ths of why I love GURPS, the other 4/10ths are that my friends love GURPS, 1/10th that GURPS is a pretty slick ruleset, and 1/10th miscellaneous), so, I am quite happy to post my comments (on the rare occasions I have them) in threads on this forum (without the threads I probably wouldn't know the blog posts exist)

That said, I really do wish there was some way to resolve the 'tilting at windmills around and around and around again' problem that periodically crops up in forum posts. The pectoral thread springs to mind . . . . I still do not understand how pectorals work, and as more and more posts and more clarifications by DanHoward got added I got even more confused (and this is no slight to DanHoward by the way, he is an awesome guy, and I love how he and David Pulver and you and TKD and RPK and other GURPS authors make this forum such a swell place)

I don't think it is because we are posting in many cases under pseudonyms . . . I have been on this forum for X many years and Y many posts, I don't want to be an idiotic on this forum, I have way to much respect for you, Vicky, refplace, etc to want to be an idiot on the forum

I think Bruno had it best 'tell the DM your awesome combo ahead of time, so we can work it out ahead of time, instead of bogging down the game'

GURPS jsut sets the bar so high that you are sure there must be a super easy to understand, concrete, no fuss, no muss answer for everything while in another system you would assume lets kludge it and move on, that people feel compelled to study the GURPS rules as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls looking for enlightenment

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Kalzazz

I don't think it is because we are posting in many cases under pseudonyms . . .

For the record, nor do I. i just like to be able to associate a feedback stream with a particular source.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Well, those are two distinct things that sometimes go together but don't have to. Figuring out what the RAW actually does isn't about whether what it does is good or bad. It's pretty much an exercise in creative symbolic manipulation, like math. There's either a right answer, or a recognizable set of answers based on alternate interpretations of fuzzy rule points.

The question of whether what the rule does is really what we want it to do, and if not how to make it better, is based on the 'what do the rules mean' results, but is separable from the process of figuring them out. (And that part may be less interesting to people who don't expect to be playing under houserules of their own design.)

Exactly. RAW isn't only an option to implement for a game, it's also an entire frame of discussion. RAW is also really important for some cases. For example, I created a thread to discuss Focused Defense and in it I assumed that reduced reach from Focused Defense reduced the penalty for Close Combat. I didn't assume that because I was deliberately reading it in such as way as to get unfair benefits, I assumed it because I was totally blindsided by the idea that it would be intended to allow you to reach less far but still count as it's normal reach for things that functioned off of that. If the authors of GURPS don't intend it to be written to legalistic standard that's fine, but it's a serious problem when multiple people on a forum read a rule and never even consider that it would be interpreted as intended and that's what causes the frustration people (very rarely) have with RAW.

Originally Posted by Kalzazz

I love this forum

The GURPS forum adds a tremendous amount to the game. An RPG with a quality and active community is in practical terms simply a better game than the same RPG encountered in isolation. One of the important parts of that is letting people do their thing as long as they respect the desires you have about your threads.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

For the record, nor do I. i just like to be able to associate a feedback stream with a particular source.

If you are interested in options, I've encountered blogs that allow anonymous commenters and ask for them to sign their posts so you don't get weird conversations between anonymous people.