Roleplaying Purity Quiz

[Incarnadine]

For folks who haven't seen it yet:
http://www.theferrett.com/rpg/

[fbmf]

My average was 43%.

Thanks, Incarnadine. :Thumb:

Game On,
fbmf

[Maj]

I'm 75.09% pure.

Which is about what I figured.

[Draco_Argentum]

95.71%

I've got to play more.

[Josh_Kablack]

51.45,

Although that quiz pissed me off, in that it was heavily D&D-biased (crits, level-drain, etc), heavily player-based (your character), biased againt towards nerftastic DMs, and unfairly biased against metagaming.

Is asks bullcrap loaded questions like if you have:

"Fought a God in a game? (Not just argued with - fought, with drawn weapons and all) and won? (And if you've done this and were over fifteen, you should be ashamed of yourself!)

Which is a sentiment totally, and I mean totally, out of place on a survey that also asks if you've played any of the multiple incarnations of Marvel Super Heroes (Hello, Thor is a playable character in that game and he regularily beats on his half-brother Loki).

Come to think of it, Frodo Baggins, Cloud Strife, Heracles, Odyesseus, The Ghostbusters, Fingolfin, Faffhrd and The Grey Mouser, Jacob son of Isaac, Alias of the Azure Bonds, John Carter Warlord of Mars, characters from Discworld and This Guy could pretty much all be said to have fought against one or more gods and won. And well, that's a huge chunk of the D&D source literature right there, so you should probably be ashamed of yourself if you're over 15 and are so unread that you can't realize that.

It asks if you have "Rejected a PC because the PC was too mix/maxed or overpowered? " But fails to ask "If you have ever rejected a PC because the PC was too underpowered to be effective?" So apparently party balance is a one-way street in this author's mind.

It also asks if you have:

Used outside knowledge that your character could not possibly have known in order to drive his or her actions? ("I'll go rescue Ardenal from the demonspawn!" "You don't know she's hurt yet, Fred - she's in another room.")
...on purpose?
...and gotten away with it?

And yet there're no options for "...in a way that helped the story along"? or "...in a way that helped other players enjoy the game?"

Which seems to presume that this is a bad thing. Somehow, I find acceptance that a protaganist just luckily happens to make the right choice without a key piece of information far more palatable in a heroic fantasy (or really, any genre other than horror) game than the alternative of having a character die due to somebody stubbornly insisting on ROLEplaying that he knows solely the information that the GM has told him. I mean, does saying stuff like "Hey Mari, your character died because Rob was staying in character." really make for a good game in anyone's opinion?

Dammit, Metagaming is a good thing, when it is used to enhance the gaming experience!. The attitude that acting on out-of-character knowledge is always a bad thing upsets me deeply. It seems to me to be the same as the tale of my great grandfather complaining that he couldn't watch Tarzan movies because they'd show characters getting on to the steamer, but wouldn't show the characters getting off of the steamer. In all works of fiction, details are ommited - it is okay, and sometimes even necessary for characters in those works of fiction to make reasonable assumptions about those details. And while "reasonable" is subject to quite a bit of interpretation, I flat-out refuse to game with DMs who don't accept that some metagame knowledge is beneficial

[Maj]

The first comment you made I also noticed and thought was total garbage. The second comment not so much, though once or twice I took pause. And Earthdawn and Everway are two roleplaying games I have played - but weren't on the list. There should have at least been an "other" box.

Oh, well...

[Absentminded_Wizard]

89.5% pure. I haven't gamed as much as I would have liked, either.

[Tae_Kwon_Dan]

71.34%, but I agree with a lot of Josh's assessments.

[Incarnadine]

Josh, you had a lot of good comments. Did you direct them the way of the author? On the results page, he says, "Or you can just make a suggestions for future versions of the quiz," so I bet he'd be open to your suggestions.

He's at
theferrett@theferrett.com.

[Username17]

I've taken that test before. I came out less than 30% "pure".

Of course, large parts of the test are, on the face of it, bunktastic. I'm fairly certain that I have a firmer grasp of roleplaying mechanics than does Gary Gygax, for example.

The test is, seemingly, designed in reference to the kinds of gaming that a friend of mine named Ryan did in Junior Highschool. The kind where everyone starts off characters in Starwars (the old d6 version) and then immediately become:

Pirates
Jedis
Dark Jedis

since of course, each of those character paths give you free money if you take them in play but cost the big kahunas if you "start out" that way. Thus, the test more than anything else, is meant as a humerous reminder of the kind of powergaming which seems abominably clever if you happen to be twelve years old and stuck in a very boring town dodging Mormons whether you are presently doing anything Satanic or not.

At that goal, I think, it succeeds - if only marginally. There's no real powergaming questions for Vampire ("did you ever figure out the correct collection of disciplines needed to find, awaken, and harness the power of one of the Antedeluvians?" or "did you ever gain the requisite powers and traits needed to make an army of Abomination Vampire/Werewolf OVerpowered Crossbreeds for your personal army?"), and no real "anti-powergaming" questions (except for a few based on LARPing - an offshoot which many people do not even count as "Roleplaying" at all). Thus, it is completely failing in every respect to do what it is supposedly doing - that of identifying how intimately you are connected and embroiled within the RP community. But it is funny - and that's the real point (such as it is).

-Username17

[Ramnza]

I was 69.98% pure...yeah:biggrin:

[Alhadis]

I got only so far before I got frustrated and just checked my "geekiness", when I was at least 10 questions into the "Sensitive Role-playing" side.

I'm with Josh_Kablack on this one... Even IF the quiz was purely humourous-intended, it's still totally stupid. And yes, it's all *strongly* biased towards D&D... what if we played Alternity? Vampire? Magic: the gathering? All of these questions seem to assume that our "D&D gaming purity" defines our "gaming purity" overall.

I rated "79.25% pure", not that I care much. Not to sound like a grumpy-guts, or anything (as I'm fairly easy-going and easy-to-please), but this is a pretty poor implementation of these types of surveys (and it was long! WWAAAAY too long!)

[Boulie_98]

I hereby resurrect thee, thread!

I got a 76.11% score, but I cannot for the life of me figure out if you're supposed to get a high or a low score. And what it means.

EDIT: teh grammer

[fbmf]

The higher your score, the less of a geek you are. Note that Frank ot less than 30%. He has a terminal case of geek-itus.

Game On,
fbmf

[MrWaeseL]

You are 73.89% pure