Over On The Wizards Boards...

I think I kind of get it...
The whole "dumbing down" (so-called) of D&D and the reaction to this isn't really in direct reference to the rules. It's in reaction to who these rules are going to attract.
It's like the players are trying to close ranks against, shall we say, outsiders. From where I've been sitting, being a player/gamer holds a certain sense of pride. Geekdom is not a dirty word. Casual gamers are... well, a lesser breed, shall we say. They play, but they don't quite get it.
I've spoken to some people about this in the past, and there does seem a general idea that digital gaming created a whole lot more of these casual gamers. Rules and systems were no longer that much of an issue, because the computer was pretty much doing all the thinking for you.
Therefore, when people start recognising systems like, well WoW has been tossed in there, then the little alarm bells go off. "Here come the casual gamers - duck and cover!" In short, here come the players we don't want playing our game. I'm not entirely certain why this is. Maybe because the game is precious to us, and we don't want it changed to attract the... the "others". Or maybe because gamers have a bad enough rep out in the "real world" as it is, and this just isn't going to help matters. I don't know. I really don't know.

And then there's what I've discovered is termed "grognardise" - "It seems the term has been mutated on these boards to represent a person who likes how a previous edition did something and complains about how it works in the current/future edition." There's also a vague idea that this is what's killing the settings (Eberron has died its proverbial death? I'm not sure if that's helpful to my thesis or not.) It's not, couldn't possibly be, the beautiful destruction the rules are wreaking on them. I have to side with the "grognards" here at this point in time. Changing something so that new players don't have to wade through backstory is not really an argument. I came to the Realms eight years ago (they began 20 years ago) and had no problem with the backstory. That was actually the drawcard. It's numbing to watch it disappear.

I don't mind being miserable about it. I can always pretend that we're still back in v3.5 and that the Realms is still functioning like it does in my head. I do mind reading these boards, though. It's squirmingly uncomfortable, watching people gripe back and forth. Flame wars, anybody? Not a happy place to be, and very hard to figure out what anything means...

D&D v4 Concerns and Criticisms Board

The Next 8 Months of My "Life"

A few hours ago, it all made sense, finally.
Now... not so much.
All I know is, between my two supervisors and myself, we managed to turn my thesis on its head. Again. First, I was doing D&D and how it influenced computer games. Then, I was doing D&D and its history. Now, I think I'm doing D&D and its audience, and somehow, sometime, someone mentioned fandoms. I hadn't been going to touch this, except I accidentally started a rant which was apparently relevant. It did, however, get me a thesis title. Yay for rants.
The term hasn't quite started yet, and I'm not going to get too hasty and excitable about getting books from the library just yet. However, the vague horror of realising that I now need to go and find and buy v1 and 2 D&D books is starting to sink in.
History: find the history of D&D, ie who wrote which version when and what that entailed and who it was being marketed to and how. I can do that.
Influence: try being asked by two really intelligent women who are about to oversee your life for a year what you meant by "influence" and if you could use another word. It's not easy. My answer was a full two minutes of silence and an eventual groan. It basically got nutted out to : the game changes over time to attract a range of (intentional) target audiences. (basically, I have to go and find all those articles I read vaguely without realising I was going to have to make it academic months ago) What aspects of the game has changed, how do the target audiences get redefined... do supplementary books cater to, or define, a smaller player community than the main game does?

I know a great deal of people are happy with the changes being made in v4. I also know there are some people who aren't. For a few months, I was too busy to really pay attention, so I got the shock of my life when I discovered the changes intended for the FR setting, and also discovered a nice little cache of people who really really aren't happy, to the point of already speculating when Wizards will realise its ultimate mistake and release v5. Hence, I am led to start looking into fandoms and the possession these rabid (yes, that includes me) players have over their beloved game.
This is really kind of simple, and I haven't really looked at it much, but my first impression is that the new mechanics are making people happy, but the roleplayers are tying themselves in knots of unhappiness. Which is kind of related to the above fandom point, about having a possession and love for something, and a sense of belonging and having it pulled out from beneath your feet, painted purple and then thrown over your head. It also made my supervisors send me out into the world with an extra addition to my mission: discover the difference between the roleplayers and the rollplayers (and along the way, please unearth the history of the word "munchkin".... I'm serious.) and if the middle ground has perhaps gotten bigger. And something about the whole... doing vs being, aka male vs female gamers.
Unholy frag. That's a lot of material and ideas.

Somehow, that's all got to fit into a nice little exegesis, because there's a couple of feature articles I'm meant to write as WELL. It seemed like a nice idea at the time. Liz seems to suggest general audience pieces and I tend to agree, because it's damn hard to find and pin the specialist demographic. I'd really like to write one about the violence of female players (via their characters) because everyone thinks we're lovely figure-out-the-problem-in-peaceful-flowery-mannered-ways players. Otherwise... I just don't know. There are so many topics. And I only get to choose three.

*rubs head* And this is better than it was yesterday...

Killer Queen

Everyone's all worried about how computer games are violent. At least, this is what "Got Game" is pointing out to me. They do, nicely, point out that despite the anxieties of the movie "Mazes and Monsters" (I'm tempted, yet not nearly enough) that there have been no D&D related deaths ever. They think.
But, given I'm meant to be doing a comparison between D&D and video games... I do wonder about the violence thing. Sure, cg violence can be pretty graphic, courtesy of FPS and other such things. I don't think it can really be taken quite seriously, though. At least, I don't think that if you shoot someone they will somehow be reduced to bits of kibble on impact. Unless its a grenade or something. And, maybe I've missed something in some game somewhere, but you don't really get to be all that... inventive with computer game violence. You shoot, you hack, you keep on running to wherever it is you're going. You don't get to think, hey, I really want to kill person x in y fashion. It also usually seems to have some sort of reason for being. You don't shoot the monsters and you die, that sort of thing.
RP, on the other hand - now that can get well and nasty. For the most part, in combat, its the same as in computer games - you have to kill it because you really don't have a choice. What you can do, however, is decide, "let's knock this guy out and take him captive."
Not so bad. Until "taking him captive" becomes "carving his eyes out" + "casting inflict moderate wound" + "cast heal moderate wounds" + "do it all over again". And it's being done, not because you have to, but because you want to. Good roleplayers are inventive, so they'll keep coming up with new ways, and sometimes with a lot of detail.
And this is not to say that violence is restricted to males players. In fact, the most cruel and violent characters I’ve seen were being run by female players, and it ran the spectrum from random, exuberant displays of village-scale destruction, to calculated, cold torture of individuals, all for no reason other than that it could be done, and was deemed well within character. Given that these players view these (female) characters as extension of themselves, “not bound by the laws I am.”

It’s just a thought, really.

You’ll excuse me now. I have an addiction to feed that was only helped by having no less than *six* ff alerts on my email this morning. Sweet hallelujah.