Friday, December 03, 2010

Why I'm Blah About RPG Stack Exchange

Hey!, I thought.  A question-and-answer thing about RPGs!  Nice!  I'll try it.

So I registered and got started.  Asked a question, two.  Got some good answers.  Gave a few.  Got a little excited.  Badges...Reputation...okay, that's cool.  More excited.

But then...then.

I looked around to see if there were any questions I could help with.  It went like this:

Okay!  Ahhh...see here...D&D 4.0, D&D 4.0, D&D 4.0...Dogs in the Vin- no...D&D 4.0, D&D 4.0, D&D 4-- AHA!  Call of Cthu-- no, that's got plenty of answers already.  D&D 4.0, D&D--OOH!  HEY!  AD&D 1st Ed. question!

So I peek in on a guy looking for help turning a Thief into a Con Man.  In other words -- where are AD&D's social interaction rules?

The first answer was one of those definitive "AD&D sucks for that, it can't do that, it's all about combat" things, which I hold to be untrue.  I offered polite disagreement, and further added some ideas about how one could resolve these things with dice mechanics in the event that role-playing (as in "Role-Playing Game")  were insufficient.

Cue blustery rebuttals, insistence that AD&D is all about what you can't do, and suggestions that if D&D doesn't say you can't do X, then why not just play "Candyland", since that doesn't say you can't do X either?

...Dude...whatever.  But thanks for undoing my attempt to help on, like, the one thing I could.

Well.  That bathwater's out the window, but all the baby seems to say is, "4.0, 4.0, 4.0."

So why am I blah about RPG Stack Exchange?

Because it's like an ass-kicking contest, and I only got half a leg.