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Episode: 2409
Title: HPR2409: RPG Counternote
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2409/hpr2409.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:26:25
---
This is HPR Episode 2,409 entitled RPG Counter-Note.
It is hosted by Lost in Bronx and is about 19 minutes long, and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Lost in Bronx often is thought is concerning clear to recent episodes about
RPG.
Today's show is licensed under a CC by License.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honest Host.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair, at An Honest Host.com.
Hello, this is Lost in Bronx, and you'll have to forgive the noise and the quality of the
audio I'm actually outside walking the dog.
I just listened to Class 2's HPR episodes on RPGs, tabletop, and then tabletop versus
computer-based RPGs, and the relative merits and possible challenges you might have with
one format or the other, and how they're different, how they're alike, and all of that.
I had a few thoughts, and I thought perhaps I could offer this episode as a counternote
in a way to his views, not that I actually have much of a problem with anything he had
to say, but I too have experience with RPGs.
I started playing Dungeons and Dragons back in the 70s, literally 40 years ago.
I started playing, and I played for many years, but it's been a long time.
I moved away from my group, and I got married, and other priorities came about, and that's
what often happens.
So I do have a perspective on role-playing games, and where I think the relative merits
of tabletop role-playing games, where they fall, where you can expect to see them.
If someone says, come play this game, this tabletop game, we'll say D&D, we'll say Dungeons
and Dragons, because that's the one everyone's heard about.
So someone says, come play D&D, and you're like, I have no idea what to expect.
I don't know what it is, I'm going to experience here, and I think Clatu did an awful good job
of kind of outlining many of the merits of tabletop gaming.
Now I don't have any experience in PC RPG playing.
I think it back, and I don't think I've ever played one, at least not to any great extent.
I might have messed around, but I have never actually gone all the way through any kind
of game, or even a single scenario within one.
Now my reason why I don't, or haven't pursued PC games, many of those Clatu outlined,
but it can probably be summed up, or my reasoning can be summed up, PC gaming by its very
nature is second rate to tabletop gaming, all right.
Not everyone believes that.
Not everyone believes that.
People with as much experience collectively as Clatu and myself may have very different
views on that subject, and that's fine.
That's fine.
One of the beauties about RPG games, either tabletop or computer based.
One of the great advantages of it is its flexibility.
Now as Clatu pointed out, tabletop games are much more flexible, and they're much, much
more responsive, okay.
You don't have to wait for an update to find out what's beyond the town, right.
You might have a game adventure where it all takes place in the town, but then you want
to set out.
You don't have to wait for some company to create an expansion pack to go beyond the
town.
That can be done on the spot, right then and there.
That's how we used to play when I back in the old days when I was gaming.
If the DM didn't have anything set up in advance, they made it up on the spot, and sometimes
it worked really well, most of the time, frankly, it worked really well.
There's no, but isn't that true about anything in life?
For me, that was the experience, and that's why I didn't pursue anything else that, quite
frankly, just doesn't rate, not to the same degree.
One of the things that he brought up, especially, was about the flexibility of tabletop gaming,
but what I don't think he pointed out, at least as well as I think it could be, and maybe
it should be, is that that flexibility doesn't just extend to gameplay itself, okay?
It extends to the entire body of experience because it's individualized.
What I mean by that is the thing that he pointed out several times that he found most compelling
about role-playing games is the simulation of another world, another life, where just
using either tabletop or, again, PC gaming, just using the tools provided for tabletop,
it might be rules in a book, it might be dice, it might be pencils, paper, whatever, but
mostly it's imagination, right?
Just using that you can create an entire world populated with multiple races, these individuals
who have separate motivations and secrets and passions and stories all their own, and
he found that most compelling, and he said that several times, and he said it in other
media as well.
That's true, that's absolutely true, and of course, that's one of the most compelling things
you find out about it right away.
In fact, that you sit down, and within a very short amount of time, you're no longer
in this world, you're somewhere else, that's very compelling, that's only one thing that
a person can take away from gaming, right?
He talked about the social aspect of it, and more or less mentioned how problematic that
might be for some people, but I can tell you that number one, I am not a social person,
I'm very shy, I don't like social environments at all, and I mostly like to keep to myself,
that's just who I am.
However, it was the social environment of gaming that I eventually found most compelling,
it was the reason I came back week after week, is to see these people sit down with these
people that I have come to know in real life, but I've come to know their characters, see?
Now in a way, maybe we're coming back to the simulation aspect, but the fact is there
are people walking around this world right now, this world, not a simulated world, this
world, but I have experiences with them that no one else has, right?
I've fought demons with these people, I have crashed starships with these people, I've
battled for worlds, I've saved the day, I've lost the day, I've had incredible adventures
with these people, not because it happened on this world, but because I remember it, because
when I think of them, I think of all those experiences that we shared at that table, that
is a social benefit that you get from tabletop gaming, and not specifically PC gaming, computer
based gaming, but MMORPGs, that sort of thing, you can have that sort of experience as
well, that, and many people, many, many people who are like in World of Warcraft, or some
of these other giant ongoing games in game worlds, many of them have cited over and
over that, all my friends, all my best friends that I've never met live there, that's where
I go to be with the people I love the most, it's a social bonding experience, and RPGs
can be that, and inevitably, if you have the same crew, the same group of players, whether
in the real world across the table from you, or in the real world, somewhere on the internet,
you can still play tabletop gaming with, and he didn't bring that up really, but that's
become a very big thing, that you don't have to have people in the same room with you,
you don't need that anymore, now you can play tabletop RPGs where you are rolling your
dice on your table with people that are scattered across the planet, because of this thing
called the internet, that's an experience that you can have now too, and that is almost
the best of both worlds, because there are many adjunct tools, computer-based adjunct
tools that you can bring into that sort of game, yet ultimately the game is created
in your brain, and in many ways that's probably the best way to play, I have not played that
way, at least up till now, it's been a long time, but I can tell you that it is that bonding,
social experience that ultimately becomes truly meaningful about this, at least it did
for me and for the people that I played with, the simulation is always there, see that's
the thing, that's the first thing you encounter, so that's the thing you always have, you
always can rely on that, you can always play this game with these same people that you've
been playing with for years and years, and that simulation aspect is still there, that
never goes away, that's always an important part of RPGs, Clatu mentioned that some people
might have social anxiety about that, they might indeed have a social anxiety disorder
that prevents them from experiencing that sort of environment, or game environment, I
should say, and that's a very real concern, however there are, as I say, there are alternatives,
there's World of Warcraft, there's other MMORPGs, there's other gaming experiences that
are very similar to what I'm talking about right now that are available to people, I mean,
there has never been a better time in all of human history than now to experience storytelling,
because in the end RPGs are exactly that, they are collaborative storytelling, and you're
telling it either with the aid of a computer, you can do that, in which case it's a story
made by other people that you're running through and tweaking to an extent, and you could
argue that with the larger games, the bigger games, you know, the fallout games and all
those, especially is they get more and more expansion packs, and so if you could argue
that no two people ever have quite the same experience, and that's cool, that's fine, but
tabletop gaming trumps all of that when it comes to the actual gaming experience that you're
going to run through, now is it perfect? No, and the reason it's not perfect is because
ultimately there's people in the world, right? If you're playing with other people, some
of them are jerks, that's just the way it is, some of the people you work with at your
job are jerks, some of the people at your church, if you church are jerks, some of the people
in government are jerks, some of the people walking on the street are jerks, there are jerks
in the world, and you will find them absolutely everywhere, and gaming is no different.
Online gaming, of course, well, everybody knows what a problem that can be in some MMORPGs
because you get jerks that are able to dominate a particular scenario, there is no check
and balance for that. Tabletop gaming, there is, there's this person called the Game Master
or the DM, if it's specifically Dungeons and Dragons, that person is the ultimate arbiter
of what's right and wrong, and that includes the behavior of the player, not just what's
happening in the world, so if a player is out of control, a Dungeon Master can throw
them out of the game, they can say, I don't want you in my house to get out, and that's
happened, I've seen that happen, more often than not, they try to find a solution that
everybody can live with because no one wants to be pissed off, you know, you came there
to have fun, not to scream at people, so yes, people can be jerks, it does happen, but it's not
that common, most of the time, water seeks its own level, if there are people you don't like,
you tend not to associate with them in real life, and it's the same in the game world, if there are
people in a gaming group or an entire gaming group that you just don't click with these people,
you don't like them, maybe, maybe they're jerks, maybe they just have different habits, maybe
there are a hundred million reasons why you might not want to be around them, but the fact is
they're there, and you may have to deal with them occasionally, but it's not the be-all-end-all
of your experience, so worrying about the people you might meet, I can tell you from my own experience,
that that is not generally a problem you have to consider, it just, it rarely comes up,
it rarely comes up, can it be nerve-wracking, meeting new people in a group, of course it can,
especially if you're new to the game, if you're new to RPGs in general, of course, of course,
you're gonna be a little shy, you're gonna be a little worried, you're gonna be a little
not sure of what's going on, that's natural, that's what happened to me, you know, and if I ever
get back into gaming, it's gonna happen again, because it's been so long, but very quickly,
especially if you have a good group of people, not necessarily the best players, good people
that you're sitting down with, and by sitting down again, I'm talking, in a way I'm talking
figuratively, you know, it might be literally, you might really be in the same room, but
maybe they're across the world somewhere, or maybe they're, you know, plugging into some giant,
shared digital experience, but if they're good people, there's really no barrier to entry,
because they will understand, this is all new to you, and they watch you there, they want you to play,
they want you to be a part of their group, I can tell you, if you don't get that vibe from them,
if you don't feel that they want you there, they don't, and get out, you don't want to waste your
time with people that aren't welcoming, because there are many, many, many people that are,
and I can say, the one thing I can say that I do disagree with, I think, with Clat 2 on this topic,
the social experience, he mentioned that you can play a role playing game with just a DM and a
player, that's true, you can, and he also did say that it's not the optimum experience, and that's
also true, I would go so far as to say that that's so sub-optimum that it is, well, it's kind of like
PC gaming compared to a full desktop game, it's what you do when you can't get the real thing,
it's not as good, and people that do it on a regular basis don't tend to do it for very long,
in my experience, now there's always going to be exceptions, there's always going to be exceptions,
and there's some people maybe that's the only gaming they've ever done, and they've done it for
years, and it works for them, and remember, we're going back to flexibility, that's what works for
them, and that's something you can do, so I guess I'm endorsing pretty much everything you said,
this is just a quick little ramble trying to flesh out some of the concepts, and some of the things
you're going to run into, if you've never experienced this before, again, I place a larger
emphasis on the social end of it, not because it started that way, it really didn't,
when I first started playing D&D, I knew three people, and myself included, so I knew only two other
people in the game, and I got to know everybody else, and time went by, and people came, and people
went, and occasionally I was one of those people that came in with, and over the course of time,
I played with a large body of different people, and the one note that I think I want to end with,
and it's an important one, and it took me years to see it, but the very first night of my very
first game, RDM, his name was Tom Norman, he passed away, he had Lou Gehrig's disease in me,
he died young, but Tom said, he looked us all in the eye, because we were all new gamers,
all of us, no one's sitting at that table, it played before, except for Tom, and he looked us
in the eye, and he said, this game will show everybody who you really are, it will bring out who
you really are, and that's an important point, because at first it didn't seem that was true,
I played Halflings, which are like Hobbits from Lord of the Rings, that was the D&D rip-off
version of Hobbits, I played Wizards, I played Elves, I played Orcs, and Half Orcs, and Monsters,
and this, and that, I played all these different people with cast magic, and I have all these
incredible adventures that I could never have, and none of them were like me, yet every one of them
was like me, and over the course of time you began to see patterns and trends in the gaming,
and the way you approached problems, and the way you interacted with other people, and it was,
as I say, years, but I've realized that Tom was absolutely correct, if you want to know what a
person is really like, you sit and play role-playing games with them, it may not seem obvious at first,
but over time you will see what that person values, and what they don't, and I guess that's it,
just a few thoughts on role-playing games.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
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