Where do we go from here?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Cognitive behavioral therapy?

[pragma]

I disagree that densely archived information and historical context is what is keeping people from participating in the forum. I think the main barriers to entry are:
1) Finding the place. tgdmb is not a common name in gaming circles compared to, e.g. GiTP.
2) Getting over a fear of being mercilessly ridiculed. This is a hard community to get along with, especially if you only get crapped on. I imagine that drives a dynamic with lots of lurkers and few posters.
3) Being kind of irrelevant. Talking about SR4 and 3.5 hacks is not where the dominant RPG conversation is today. A "How to Make 5e Playable" thread / series could help a lot.

I think the Den would be a more fun place to be with more active threads, and more participants helps drive that. We should talk about 5e and have some kind of mechanism for explicitly welcoming newcomers. We should also consider merging its my own invention into IMHO to make our front page look more active than it is.

On a more positive note, I think the Den has a lot to bring the TTRPG world and it is therefore worth preserving. It's unique because there is a widespread agreement here that "game design exists" and "there can be good and bad rules," which is a tremendous value proposition. I've been regularly blown away by comparing the quality of conversation here to other forums.

Aside: I'm playing way more games in virus times because my friends don't have anything better to do than hang out online.

[Chamomile]

3) Being kind of irrelevant. Talking about SR4 and 3.5 hacks is not where the dominant RPG conversation is today. A "How to Make 5e Playable" thread / series could help a lot.

I think all three of your points are important, but this one is the most important. This forum rarely cares for or responds to anything other than older games that newer gamers do not care about. Even 3.5 and SR4 discussion have dried up quite a bit, just because most people have gotten those systems to about where they want them to be, or at least good enough for government work.

[Grek]

Sounds like I should do a Lancer review then, because that's the first new TTRPG in over a decade where I felt like the contents of the book were worth the effort of having read it, let alone the price to get it.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Lancer is fascinating, and I would definitely be interested in seeing what the Gaming Den might notice about the system and setting. If you decide to start a thread, I'll definitely post in it.

[Prak]

Cognitive behavioral therapy?

"Cock and Ball Torture," it's a fetish.

Also, low hanging fruit. ...Literally.

[Koumei]

3) Being kind of irrelevant. Talking about SR4 and 3.5 hacks is not where the dominant RPG conversation is today. A "How to Make 5e Playable" thread / series could help a lot.

At risk of feeding into your second point, people who don't want to play the former and actually want to play 5e can fuck off, along with all the "community activity" they bring - this isn't a youtube channel where even the garbage is useful because it pleases an algorithm. I'm not particularly interested in bringing in new people as opposed to retaining the more productive people we still have, especially if the new people walk in with "5e is basically fine as is, why do you hate fun?" Or indeed the 4rry 4venger "raids" we used to get, if anybody remembers those.

[Prak]

I'm not so much on the "5e is basically fine as it is" side as the "if people are having fun, then who gives a straining shit?" side.

[Thaluikhain]

Yeah, as someone who doesn't actually care about D&D (beyond, say history of RPGs and worldbuilding), what brought me to this place was the discussion of old and obscure stuff. IIRC, was looking up the Duelmaster gamebooks when I found here.

Admittedly, I'm probably in the minority.

the den has had a lot of information in it that conversations are still built off of. I've archived crawled through the den & the sheer unorganized but dense information still results in there being things referenced that I have no idea about

Not just me then.

[MisterDee]

While I think attracting new blood is necessary (if only to combat attrition), I really don't think we need/want to be Yet Another Gaming Forum. I'm fine not reading tens of cookie-cutter "my DM is a dick"/"my players keep derailing my Cool Story (TM)" threads a week.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You people have the memories of fucking goldfish. Did y'all forget that blow-up in IMHO about coming up with acceptable reasons to kill orcs? How is THAT not political?

Let's be real here: the TGDMB was never about not being political. IMHO always had a strongly left-liberal/social democratic bent compared to other boards, which is why people like tzor and elennsar stood out when their opinions would not be considered controversial on, say, GITP.

What's really been going on is that people are uncomfortable defending their old politics now that the discourse has shifted left in preparation with what's going on with the world. FrankTrollman isn't mad about tone, he's mad that the world is moving past him. If you want to ban reminders that certain peoples' politics aren't keeping up with what's going on in anti-reactionary discourse, fine, but let's not pretend that you're not being political. You just want to keep TGDMB sitting comfortably at the left edge of liberalism.

[erik]

Sounds like I should do a Lancer review then, because that's the first new TTRPG in over a decade where I felt like the contents of the book were worth the effort of having read it, let alone the price to get it.

Yes please. Do this thing. I was disheartened that Lancer was using some system as its core but I don’t even remember what (bearworld maybe?). If they got it right despite that then I wanna know!

[fbmf]

fbmf, if you choose to shutter the forum, can you please make a backup available for download from your Google Drive or MegaUpload or suchlike?

I don't know how much more valuable content the community is going to produce going forward, but there is certainly a huge amount of valuable material here from the past that I'd hate to see lost.

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
1. I have no plans to shutter TGDMB at this time.

2. If I ever do, I will make every effort to announce it waaaaay in advance.

3. Even then, I'd preserve the (gaming) original content and commentary if at all possible.
[/TGFBS]

[Chamomile]

I'm not particularly interested in bringing in new people as opposed to retaining the more productive people we still have, especially if the new people walk in with "5e is basically fine as is, why do you hate fun?" Or indeed the 4rry 4venger "raids" we used to get, if anybody remembers those.

The 4rries were trying to prop up a failing edition by yelling at anyone who expressed doubt as to 4e's popularity until they shut up in a vain effort to create an illusion of omnipresence. 4e players never had anything to contribute because they chose 4e.

People playing 5e are mostly just people playing the actually most popular edition of the game right now. If you want to play a tabletop RPG of any kind, your odds of finding a group go up drastically if it's 5e. Reacting caustically to people trying to improve the game they are able to find a group for is not preserving a higher level of discourse, it's edition war tribalism.

[Libertad]

I'll confess that I haven't read every post in this read, but there's a few things I wanted to highlight on.

Game Discussion: In regards to discussion of opening up the forums to new blood, I have mixed feelings in the effectiveness of this tactic. Some of the most popular 5e (and Savage Worlds, and WoD, etc) communities are on Discord, social media, and Roll20. Forums are still around but they're becoming a smaller pond over time with the exceptions of big holdovers like RPGnet and EN World. Forums who majorly cling to one style or system inevitably become niche communities. A lot of them (like OSR forums) embrace this niche and form small tight-knit groups were virtually everyone knows each other. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's a notably different feel.

Secondly, there's also the fact that the Den has been unremittingly hostile for years towards games and fanbases of most tabletop games. I recall someone on another site saying that "Frank and the Den hate every RPG that's not heavily house-ruled 3rd Edition." While it's a bit of an exaggeration, the overall tenor certainly communicates that impression.

In some cases the Den does good criticism and analysis of underlying mechanical issues, a thing that's often all too lacking in broader tabletop culture. But when all you have to give is "this sucks, this sucks, this sucks" and when someone asks "oh okay what would you recommend?" slapping down the D20 System is going to drive away a lot of people who view such rules as a labyrinthine nightmare to GM.

And speaking of criticism and negativity...

The Angry Gamer Shtick: A long time ago I did a review of a sexually-charged Pathfinder rulebook, Sisters of Rapture. It wasn't very good, and was chock full of squicky stuff. The criticisms I did back then I agree with today, but there were times in the review where in hindsight I was getting too personal or...overly critical, for lack of a better term. I was trying my hand at doing the "Take a look at THIS!" style of critical review influenced by Something Awful's Trad Games as well as the Gaming Den. But in hindsight it put my mind in a bad place mand I found that it wasn't a thing I wanted to continue, so I edited some things to 'dial it down' and tried to be more...emotionally neutral in my future reviews, for lack of a better term.

As to how this ties back into the Den, I feel that the site's infamously acerbic community is part genuine, part play-acting a shtick like the Angry Video Game Nerd. The Drunken Reviews are a pretty good example of the play-acting. However, the "angry gamer" persona is something that isn't always done well. A sadly larger amount of such personalities and communities ended up toxic and absorbed into the broader GamerGate to Alt-Right pipeline, or the character started to bleed into real life like what happened with Alex Jones. I don't think this last part is as great a risk given many Gaming Denizen's leftist takes, but the slow evolution of general toxicity is a thing.

Frank Trollman was a pretty big staple of the Den, and attracted posters of a like-minded disposition if in personality but not always in politics. But when I look at his posts for years on end on this forum, he’s regularly belted out thousand-word mini-essays being angry about something or at someone else. I don’t know how fast he writes or how much free time he has, but with a likely busy life as an emergency room doctor and husband and with genuinely few comparative posts about what he enjoys in life...he comes off as an angry, bitter person who I wouldn’t want to hang around or talk with in my spare time. And it wasn’t just him: I see much the same in Kaelik and some other posters here both old and new.

I’m not saying that the Den should go the complete opposite direction, but when a forum, site or other place cultivates a culture of negativity without some means of balancing itself out (“oh we hate MtG but we’re all good friends and like stuff like this,”) it starts to bleed into the general personalities of the posters and the character becomes the actor.

POLITICS: I’ll confess that I’ve mostly stayed out of the various political threads on account that getting into Internet slapfights is not a way I’d like to spend my spare time. But I did read a lot of the posts, and I could see how stressful things got for various people and I sympathize for FBMF being in an unenviable position. For the most part the Den’s been rather good at pushing back against the more toxic aspects of gamer culture; the banning of Sacrificial Lamb for his racist dog whistles, or the universal condemnation of Armor Class 0’s white nationalist talking points disguised as “maximum individual liberty,” are things I don't often see in other gaming spaces. And I think that it’s important to take a stand against what is quite clearly now a Masks Offs white supremacist movement among mainstream conservatism.

But I lost a lot of respect when people like Frank contorted themselves into stanning for Joe Biden by rationalizing his predatory behavior towards women, and found the more acerbic apocalyptic doctrines to be unproductive. Kaelik claiming that Biden voters are pro-genocide, even say southern black voters and others who view Biden as a “safe bet” and worrying about Bernie being too radically alienating, isn’t really advancing anything productive. Granted, the latter’s histrionics are not as bad as rape denialism, and I still think that leftist ideas are worthy of preservation when you look at the right-wing’s hellworld, so overall it’s not as large a priority as keeping out chuds from the community.

The problem with a no-politics rule is that it can end up like GiantITP, if it affects even the games we play or shuts down discussion due to some peoples’ identities being “inherently political.” A lot of D&D social media groups view wanting to play a gay character as an explicitly political stance and will delete your post or lock the thread. GiantITP doesn’t view LGBT people as being political, but their support thread bans talking about what real-world groups and figures are for or against their rights. I don’t think that FBMF is going to do this, but this brings up the question of to what extent the sliding scale of what particular political topics are okay and to what extent they are appropriate when it is in regards to tabletop games vs general chat. It’s one thing to talk about rampant corporate corruption in Shadowrun being political. It’s another thing to have an off-topic thread discussing whether or not a centralized planned economy is ideal IRL. The Den seems to be more of a case of liberal/socialist/etc infighting than having a big conservative problem which is the broader case on the Internet, but the previous points are still worth discussing.

The problem with policing political chat is that it requires a significant amount of work to familiarize oneself with topics and concepts. I’ve often had to explain to moderators on various forums how a poster was using code and dog whistles to skirt on by the “no racism/sexism/etc” rules, or doing effort posts on how some YouTuber was being intellectually dishonest with their sources. The average gamer admin who doesn’t hang out in certain social spaces, or comes from a background where such prejudice doesn't affect them, isn't going to be as good a judge when such reports pass by their virtual desk. A lot of lefty and ‘woke’ forums often have multiple moderators with their own areas of experience, or have a general-purpose informational thread of collected works, PDFs, videos, and other such things on social justice topics to help inform those who’d be unaware.

BTW I don’t know FBMF’s race/orientation/etc and he seems politically aware from what I’ve read. Just sharing my overall experiences with “political chat” and it’s regulation.


So yeah, those are my thoughts. I may have more later.

[Libertad]

Making this a separate post from my above.

This is probably a thing. I can't remember the last time I gamed in person, and that's not just because I have a poor memory, it was definitely several years ago

Dare I say it, that the average Denner starts off non-young, and gets older as the years go by. I gamed a shit-ton in my youth, but now...Sounds like some (many?) here are in similar situations. Getting older = less time and interest for gaming.

So you're right, with less and less gaming there's less and less to discuss. And with the current "modern world", the youngsters are less likely to A) game and B) seek out forums like this to post on.

I haven't run a game since May because for a while my players didn't want to meet in person... and then they decided they didn't want to play online, either, because they'd been playing Dungeon World over Discord and it was way easier for them than playing PTU. Kinda left me up shit creek, honestly. What's the fucking point of being unemployed if nobody will meet up to play games?

The COVID19 virus has had a silver lining for me in that there's a lot more people on Roll20. Even so, people still have various priorities and scheduling conflicts, so group games remain ever-elusive.

I've had a lot more success in doing 1 on 1 and small group games, and the good news is that there's quite a bit of rulesets optimal for nonstandard party sizes. I can very comfortably say that without things like Scarlet Heroes for OSR and some "minion/pseudo-PC follower" rules for 5th Edition then my gaming would be all but dried up.

Another factor is that tabletop gaming has a sort of "silver age" going on, and there's an awful lot of systems out for just about everything. But the D&D Ghetto is omnipresent and there's a huge number of people who refuse to touch any other rules system. I'm blessed that I have friends open-minded enough to try out other games, but the "I'd rather play investigative noir if it was 5e" is a real thing.

I think that the Den's negativity towards non-Tome rulesets is much like this, but from another perspective. I get the feeling that many lurkers and posters here who wanted to gather buddies for Stars Without Number, Champions, or whatever would pass by the Den given the posts here.

[Zinegata]

You people have the memories of fucking goldfish. Did y'all forget that blow-up in IMHO about coming up with acceptable reasons to kill orcs? How is THAT not political?

Let's be real here: the TGDMB was never about not being political. IMHO always had a strongly left-liberal/social democratic bent compared to other boards, which is why people like tzor and elennsar stood out when their opinions would not be considered controversial on, say, GITP.

What's really been going on is that people are uncomfortable defending their old politics now that the discourse has shifted left in preparation with what's going on with the world. FrankTrollman isn't mad about tone, he's mad that the world is moving past him. If you want to ban reminders that certain peoples' politics aren't keeping up with what's going on in anti-reactionary discourse, fine, but let's not pretend that you're not being political. You just want to keep TGDMB sitting comfortably at the left edge of liberalism.

You’re pretty much the only one thats anywhere close to the truth, but it’s still a bit colored by your own politics.

Frank didn’t leave because he was being “left behind” politically. He still posted gaming related stuff from time to time. He didn’t see this place as his political refuge.

Frank left because everyone who interacted with him was basically just a sad parody of what he was. Which was the Alpha Male who led-by-ranting. .

Granted, Frank’s rants were insightful which really got the Den rolling originally. But as the years passed and interest in 3.5 waned, people started turning the forum into their personal soap boxes and emulated Frank’s style but often with little substance.

Thats the real reason for the Den’s death spiral. Nobody picked up the mantle to produce actual good, interesting discussions about gaming. And when people tried, the response was universally cynicism from the Frank wannabes.

Thats why there was so much thread-shitting. It wasn’t any sort of discussion. It was just insecure man-children trying to prove they’re the big dog in the house. The politics really just became the focal point in the end because there was basically nothing else to talk about.

Which is why people really need to stop thinking politics was the problem. Yeah the political situation is much worse now, but the compared to places like reddit or twitter this place is pretty mild and completely inconsequential.

The problem instead are the people who don’t want to admit that this place is politically completely inconsequential. That all the rants were worthless in the end and didn’t move the needle one bit.

Instead all the rants were just pissing contests to try and prove that they’re the big dog in an empty junkyard. Sure some people get satisfaction from such meaningless achievements, but most people simply see a waste of time and move on.

[erik]

Always interesting to hear other people’s wildly different perspectives. Weird to hear them with the tone that suggests an authority of factuality, but you do you.

[Zinegata]

Always interesting to hear other people’s wildly different perspectives. Weird to hear them with the tone that suggests an authority of factuality, but you do you.

And whats interesting is that its always the ones who are least confident in the validity of their own views who always make a lot of hay about “tone” to begin with.

Frank’s tone was always authoritative, but it was never an issue in the early days when most of the posters worshipped him. It only became an issue when people started realizing that just following the same tone didn’t create the same kind of following he did. Then it all became about attacking Frank (or whichever new “threat” at every opportunity.

[Prak]

Two things, Zine-

1- more than one person who disagreed with Frank are female or nonbinary. To accuse them of "trying to be alpha males" is in fact misgendering. Not that I'm surprised to hear that from you again.

2- Frank's authority resided solely in the areas of (1) general practice and emergency medicine, and (2) his particular experiences as a freelance RPG writer. Everything else he spoke on he was just blustering and assuming a mantle of authority fueled by being the biggest name on the Den.

Wait, a third thing-

You're doing the exact shit you're accusing others of.

[Kaelik]

Kaelik claiming that Biden voters are pro-genocide, even say southern black voters and others who view Biden as a “safe bet” and worrying about Bernie being too radically alienating,

"a vote for either major candidate will kill all of human civilization"

I'm confused by statements like this. I thought I made very clear who I think is responsible for the bad things that have happened and will happen when bad Democrats are in power, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, the DCCC blackballing anyone who supports a challenger, Barack Obama telling Buttigieg to drop out and endorse Biden, and who isn't responsible, random voters being mislead and manipulated by systematic factors.

I repeatedly outlined that 85% of people's votes literally don't matter, that media and powerful figures manipulate and direct public sentiment, that the allocation of dollars decides how votes will turn out, and that the information needed to make decisions is deliberately withheld from voters. I changed my signature to explicitly express my contempt for the idea that voters actually decide the outcomes of elections and the laws that are passed between elections. I argued repeatedly against the assorted people engaging in vote shaming and blaming individual voters or voters as a collective for the results of elections or elite decisions each time it came up.

What else was I supposed to do to convince people that I blame Joe Biden for his actions and the people who choose him to be the nominee like Barack Obama, not some random person who's vote distributed 1/10000th of a delegate at a convention where Biden needed 3000 delegates voting in a system that is fundamentally designed to mislead them and constrain their choice.

[fbmf]

Kaelik claiming that Biden voters are pro-genocide, even say southern black voters and others who view Biden as a “safe bet” and worrying about Bernie being too radically alienating,

"a vote for either major candidate will kill all of human civilization"

I'm confused by statements like this. I thought I made very clear who I think is responsible for the bad things that have happened and will happen when bad Democrats are in power, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, the DCCC blackballing anyone who supports a challenger, Barack Obama telling Buttigieg to drop out and endorse Biden, and who isn't responsible, random voters being mislead and manipulated by systematic factors.

I repeatedly outlined that 85% of people's votes literally don't matter, that media and powerful figures manipulate and direct public sentiment, that the allocation of dollars decides how votes will turn out, and that the information needed to make decisions is deliberately withheld from voters. I changed my signature to explicitly express my contempt for the idea that voters actually decide the outcomes of elections and the laws that are passed between elections. I argued repeatedly against the assorted people engaging in vote shaming and blaming individual voters or voters as a collective for the results of elections or elite decisions each time it came up.

What else was I supposed to do to convince people that I blame Joe Biden for his actions and the people who choose him to be the nominee like Barack Obama, not some random person who's vote distributed 1/10000th of a delegate at a convention where Biden needed 3000 delegates voting in a system that is fundamentally designed to mislead them and constrain their choice.

The correct way for Deaddm to phrase that would be "every single person I know who decided to support Biden, including me, did so because they thought it would be a good idea to give up any chance of saving the planet from total destruction or ever improving anything at all because the media told us that a thing no one could possibly know was true."

Game On,
fbmf

[Mask_De_H]

I just haven't really wanted to post here because it feels like without having an elfgame to dunk on, the "fuck you, suck a barrel of cocks" rhetoric got turned on each other, circular firing squad style. Now a lot of that was due to mask off moments, but it's exhausting. I can get the entire litany of filth in the world from Twitter plus porn. MPSIMS was like being on Twitter but with years of grudges. Like the 2020 Primary and Elections threads didn't feel like places to get informed, it felt like Frank and Kaelik hatefucking each other to death. E: And this wasn't a new thing; I specifically remember asking in MPSIMS in 2016 why Frank and Kaelik were hatefucking each over over Bernie and Hilary and got a response about sectarian betrayal. Shit just got worse after Trump won, the worse still after the Tories swept England.

I come here for TTRPG reviews, insights and design principles, which mostly came from Frank. Regardless of how deranged he got near the end in MPSIMS, he mostly kept his nose clean in IMHO, so him being gone is a pretty big blow. Disregarding him, I honestly wonder sometimes why we're all still here. Inertia, I guess, but that doesn't make a vibrant community. Some of us don't even game and it feels like everybody hates everybody else, so how are we even supposed to work on creating new content? IMOI is a ghost town even with people posting new shit semi-regularly. And even if we do make more stuff, it feels like the accumulated hatreds and grievances we have for each other will scuttle any project that isn't a solo job.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

That's what new blood is for, isn't it?

[erik]

I still enjoy a lot of people here, and do still learn things from what people share, and people do still produce new work albeit at a slower pace than in the past.

For me it's not just inertia.