Fallacies and Phalluses

 Fashionable phrases and buzzwords, often short snappy answers given by 'contributors' to online discussions in an attempt to appear intelligent, to win an argument with a deft wave of the tongue.

I hates them I does...

Why?  Not just because they are lazy and dismissive, and do nothing to further discussion, but because most of the time the 'contributor' (and I use that term in its loosest sense as their input contributes precisely nothing) uses the term incorrectly, they don't know what it means.  They've heard it, and think that using it will make them look superior.

It doesn't.

Perhaps the most idiotic was being called a 'railroader' because I insist my players use paper character sheets and real dice (wtf!), but I'm not going to focus on that here, I'm going to talk about the 'Stormwind Fallacy'.  In every discussion about roleplay vs rollplay, somebody will mention it, and usually in a very smug way ..."Like durrrrrrr, have you ever heard of the Stormwind Fallacy? You're wrong, because the Stormwind Fallacy...blah blah blah".  And once again, the person or people who dredge it up are usually doing so inappropriately.

If you've lived under a rock for the last 10 years or so you *might* not have heard of it.  It derives from a discussion on the WotC boards that took place at the height of the D&D 3.5E era.  Now 3.5E was a theorycrafter's ultimate wet dream, it was the peak of D&D character options, a time when the number-crunchers went to town to create ultimate character combos for POWER!  The original post on the forum stated:

"The Stormwind Fallacy, aka the Roleplayer vs Rollplayer Fallacy

Just because one optimizes his characters mechanically does not mean that they cannot also roleplay, and vice versa.

Corollary: Doing one in a game does not preclude, nor infringe upon, the ability to do the other in the same game.

Generalization 1: One is not automatically a worse roleplayer if he optimizes, and vice versa.

Generalization 2: A non-optimized character is not automatically roleplayed better than an optimized one, and vice versa."

He was not wrong.  But what many people choose to omit is what he went on to say:

"(I admit that there are some diehards on both sides -- the RP fanatics who refuse to optimize as if strong characters were the mark of the Devil and the min/max munchkins who couldn't RP their way out of a paper bag without setting it on fire -- though I see these as extreme examples. The vast majority of people are in between, and thus the generalizations hold. The key word is 'automatically')"

Yep, it's all true.  Being able to roleplay does not automatically mean you cannot crunch numbers and make a character effective, and vice versa.  The key points to make in any discussion about rollplay style vs roleplay though are tendencies and preferences.  And this is where those who are quick to quote the Fallacy in attempt to gain internet points miss the mark.

We're all on a sliding scale, very few gamers are at the polar opposite ends of that scale.  Equally, very few are *perfectly* in the middle.  A great many DO like to crunch numbers, and frequently this is at expense of logical roleplay, as they try to shoehorn the latest 'kewl' power into their character 'build', and justify it with decidedly dodgy reasoning in roleplay terms.  And probably just as many players are happy to sacrifice the 'perfect' mechanical option in favour of giving their character more flavour or a more logical sense of development in terms of the game story.

It's not that these players *cannot* do one or the other, it's that they prefer not to.  And most of the time this is what the actual discussions are about.  Player preferences.  And general tendencies. Players who are all about the power DO tend to crunch numbers at the expense of roleplay, because that's their priority, and yes roleplay does suffer as a result.  It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to.  And vice versa, the priorities of a more roleplay focussed player DO tend to lead to slightly less powerful characters - again due to player preference, not ability.  These are facts of gaming, we are all on that sliding scale. And yet someone always dives in and quotes the Stormwind Fallacy, smugly believing they have won the internet for that moment.

You haven't. You've just made yourself look a bit of a dick.

Just like the phallus who told me I was railroading my players because of my paper and dice table rule.

Hickman Saves the Hobby

 Tracy Hickman.  Tracy bleedin' Hickman.  In the mid 1980s his name was everywhere in D&D.  For those who aren't familiar, he was the co-author of the Dragonlance series, as well as the writer of the original Ravenloft module, most of the Desert of Desolation series, and Rahasia, along with supplements for other games.  It was his work that spawned the Dragonlance and Ravenloft settings, which were heavily supported throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Tracy Hickman wrote some classic stuff, that's undeniable.  The original Ravenloft is a masterpiece, a ground breaking module which brought home the concept of an intelligent villain who toys with the party and hunts them down, unlike so many other modules in which the bad guys so often sat waiting in their lair. The opening module of the Desert of Desolation series, Pharaoh, is a highly imaginative romp through an Egyptian inspired pyramid.  Great stuff.

BUT. His writing style was heavy handed.  All too often he started an adventure in an overly forceful manner, even in the 2 adventures above - Ravenloft trapped the party in Barovia, Pharoah had the party convicted of some random crime. Worse though, he was the master of the railroad, adventures which moved the party from one planned location or situation to the next, step by step, no matter what they did or how they resolved the issue.  Ravenloft was free of this, but the Desert of Desolation series, for all its merits, was linear.  The main culprit however, was Dragonlance.

 

The opening to Pharaoh, you have been charged blah blah blah, found guilty blah blah blah, of something you can do nothing about.....

 The Dragonlance modules tied in with a series of novels. The initial few modules were written 1st, then the 1st novel, then the procedure was reversed with the later novels being written before the D&D adventures.  This meant the modules, 16 of them in total including campaign add-ons, told a preset story. A very very long one.  They were designed to be used with the characters provided - those from the novels.  Of course, with such a lengthy story, using pre-set characters, the adventures were on rails. They had great artwork, many of the maps are among the best ever seen in TSR products, and contained some memorable encounters, but the feel throughout was that you were playing somebody else's story.  From the very 1st encounter in the very 1st module when Fewmaster Toede gives his spiel and gallops away, though to the 1st Dragon encounter when Khisanth has specific moves it will do before returning to its lair, there is an overall feeling of 'what the party attempts does not really matter'.  What if they want to fire arrows at Toede, what if they block off the Dragon's retreat, or manage to somehow take it down quickly? 

 

Uh oh, big nasty dragon.  Don't worry, just hide from its breath for a few rounds and it'll fly away.  Because Tracy says so.

 This heavy handed style of adventure writing went on to become commonplace.  As the 80s progressed, and as we moved in to the 90s and later, thus more adventure writers employed this style.  Classic open, location-based town, wilderness and dungeon crawls such as Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, Village of Hommlet, and the Giants series, were increasingly replaced by event based 'story' adventures.

So why has Hickman saved our hobby?  Covid 19 has forced many games to move online, and online games require much more work for the Dungeon Master - preparing digital versions of the maps, with tokens.  This is not a problem for groups who run entirely Theatre of the Mind, but with a slower pace of game, it can be quite hard to maintain that level of focus, thus online games tend to be more centred on visual representations. A traditional open game, often very sandboxy, is very very difficult and time consuming to prepare - thus online gaming lends itself to story based play.  Linear.  Event-based.  Railroady.  The Tracy Hickman style.