Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Dungeon Fantasy Tone - Correction and Continuation

Last post I wrote a bit about the tone of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, and I started with a quote from the SJGames forum by kmunoz. Unfortunately I misunderstood something he said, so I'll try to rectify that today.

kmunoz writes:
While you make a good counterpoint, you hide an important part of my argument by citing paragraphs 1 and 4 rather than 2 and 4:
Break it out when you don’t feel like dealing with complicated plots, fussy social interactions, and so on. The results won’t be refined. They might not even be “real roleplaying” (whatever that is). But they’ll be fun!
Paragraph 4 snipes at the content; paragraph 2 snipes at the players.
I think I missed this because honestly I don't see the mockery here. Yes, it pokes fun at gamer elitism but I don't see it doing it in a mean-spirited way. This is an admonition to check your elitism at the door here. I probably need that admonition every once in awhile, personally,

Snobbery isn't the same as taste. I think snobbery is more of a lazy shortcut around actually deploying discretion and critical analysis in art. So snobbery about "real roleplaying" isn't actually helpful to the hobby, especially if it stands in the way of fun.

2 comments:

  1. Knowing Sean Punch pretty well by now, it's not mockery. It's just telling you, forget about that stuff, it's not really the point of this game here.

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    1. Yeah that is totally my read too. Although since tone is subjective, and people apparently do have an issue, there may have been a better way to write this. Maybe I will come back to this in a bit.

      Although it is hard for me not to think that if you are offended by the quoted text maybe you are a bit of an elitist snob.

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