Based on this thread and the participation I’ve seen thus far on this forum, this place is not a place I want to participate in. Maybe it will be in a few months, but it’s not there now.
I really like a lot of the stuff in the guidelines, I really do. But I really don’t feel like I am, nor the stuff I want to talk about is welcome here. Perhaps I will check back in a few months to see how this place has developed. But if you all don’t hear from, good luck, I hope this place works for you.
It’s still not clear to me what “stuff that you would like to talk about” looks like. Could you give an example?
P.S. I am very put off by the need to announce one’s departure. It’s passive aggressive, and that’s that. You’ve already stated your disagreement once—the first time is good feedback, the second is just to be obnoxious.
There is definitely always the possibility of a culture shock in this sense.
However, on the other hand, if you want this to be an international space, it’s an issue if your forum only seems accessible or welcoming to people who share your heritage, right?
Speaking of culture clash: I don’t read Yoshi’s message here as passive aggressive (although I do understand why you might). It reads to me as an honest reaction to the general atmosphere here, and leaves the door open to returning later. It’s phrased in gracious, polite, and well-wishing terms. I don’t think it’s a good precedent to read “tone” into such things - that can easily turn into a form of escalation (e.g. Yoshi might now feel the need to defend himself against an accusation of “being passive aggressive”, and I don’t think that’s a conversation the forum would benefit from).
I think that in a mixed-culture environment we really really need to read charitably. Or, at worst, ask a question before stating disapproval. That’s my take.
I add my two cents to the whole issue of culture management and agenda, starting from the incident.
I admit that I’ve written too quickly my reply to thebrand without pondering too much the tone. (Add on top that I’m not a native speaker but just a user with a good fluency.) I apologise again for that.
I consider how @Froggy has handled the issue satisfactory: he closed the thread, and helped both the sides understanding their respective faults and what went wrong. What I appreciate here (and on the “twin” Italian forum La Locanda dei Gdr) is that Froggy treats each user as a human being and not just a number: he listens to the people involved and addresses the problem in a direct but respectful way. I stress that this approach is rare to be found in other communities: most of the time, the moderators apply the guidelines mindlessly without the effort to dialogue in cases like this.
Also, I join @zeruhur and @thekernelinyellow in stressing that the culture @Froggy is trying to establish (i.e. accountability, focus on concrete tabletop play, argumentative standards, etc.) creates a positive environment in the long run. There is no censorship nor control on the content: Froggy wants to frame the conversation in terms of first-person role-playing table experience (e.g. “I was stuck when I described this scene…”, “I don’t understand why the player…”, and so on). The approach has helped many people increasing the enjoyment received from the RPG hobby since it addresses their practical concerns. This goal is obviously different from the standard and appears as weird, but it’s not different from what was common practice on The Forge. Trust the process. The successful experiment with the Locanda in the Italian community proves it.
I don’t think this is what’s happening here, at all. The feedback I got in private indicates that non-native-speakers (including but not limited to the Italian contingent) are still reticent to post due to the perceived intrusiveness of North American culture in english-speaking spaces. The language that I received in private is very much harsher than this, for the record. So, international space also means taking a critical look at the dominant culture. I don’t think reframing it as me being close-minded is at all fair.
Regarding passive aggressiveness, overt politeness doesn’t make a message nice. Again, I received a lot of feedback in private regarding that message, and you’re the only one praising its politeness. The content is fairly clear—I don’t like this and I’m not staying. If taking all of the politeness markers out, the content of something is not good to say, then it’s just not.
Yesterday I got distracted and totally forgot to respond to this, which is very bad on my part because I strongly disagree with this phrase and I want to give my feedback on the issue.
I don’t think the line here has anything to do with nationality or culture. I believe it has all to do with how much of your moderation style we’ve experienced in the past. To make an obscure Italian pop culture reference, you are so not Italian[1]. Italian spaces don’t work as La Locanda at all, think of the L-guy incident on Ruling the Game[2] or how multiple Facebook groups work on a daily basis (even if you don’t use it anymore, we moved in pretty similar spaces and discussed their shortcomings every now and then, I can tell you nothing ever changed).
I think that if a random Italian player who never ever visited La Locanda (or interacted with you in another space) comes here, they’ll have the same doubts with this as Paul or Yoshi. On the other hand, I believe that any of them who stick around long enough here will grow the same trust in this space as we “old hands” already have. You have a pretty direct style of communication[3] which people tend to read as more aggressive than it is and it tends to require some time to get used to it, which is clearly not helping in this case because people come here with the standard set of expectations for a forum and find something which is aggressively different.
I don’t exactly have a solution for this, but I believe that framing it as a culture clash isn’t an effective way to deal with it. As can be seen in this thread, all the people who support your moderation style reference a space which has been running for years (and some of us have been there since the beginning), which is something that, due to the linguistic and cultural barrier, other users can’t really use as a reference.
If you can find it in your country, Boris is a great TV series (and a course on Italian memes which covers a good 50% of them). ↩︎
If those words mean nothing to you, it was just a guy with a lot of clout in the Italian mainstream RPG community who tried to bring it to bear on an OSR chat which didn’t exactly appreciate the move. It was extremely messy and a culture clash between mainstream Italian TTRPG talk and the weird stream of consciousness style of that specific space. I’m not using the guy’s name because he’s not here and there’s no reason to speak ill of him where he can’t respond. ↩︎
Which is also an extremely not Italian thing. There have been multiple misunderstandings in Italian spaces (both on- and offline) involving Claudio and people used to the more indirect style of discussion which is the default in Italian culture. ↩︎
I stress out that it’s not only @Froggy’s task to harvest this culture of focusing on concrete play and direct table experiences. Everyone who joins Wynwerod should contribute. The goal is having something similar to The Forge in such sense. On the Locanda, everyone aims to that. If a new user isn’t accustomed to this style, we simply make explicit what expected without direct intervention from admins and moderators. That’s why on the Locanda there is the feeling of culture being a shared effort and not something enforced on the users.
To clarify: I’m only taking inspiration from the Actual Play sub-forum of The Forge. I don’t want to re-tread the theorizing—that’s explicit and in the guidelines. Adept Play’s actual play section is a better modern example for how Actual Play should look like, where Wynwerod aims to be a slightly looser experience with other sub-categories such as Your Instruments, The Vault and Just Chat that are not necessarily restricted to actual play discussion, just in service of it.
While I don’t have any direct experience with @Froggy as a forum moderator, I have come to really appreciate venues where there’s a focus to the discussion. Talking about role-playing online is really hard – I think it’s probably one of the hardest subjects to tackle online, for a lot of reasons, but a major one being that the subject of the conversation is ephemeral and it isn’t like a discussion about a book or a movie where at least everyone involved can point towards something objective, “out there”, to anchor the conversation. Because of that, I’ve found that grounding these kinds of discussions in some kind of concern, issue, or observation that arises from things that have happened during play at least connects the conversation to a specific (albeit still ephemeral) instance, rather than having to add layers of “what if” and speculation to something that’s already extremely slippery and hard to pin down.
I’d also add that in my experience, tying something to actual experience is a much lower bar than a lot of people assume: it doesn’t require an elaborate write-up of an entire session; it can come out of a simple observation about a single moment in play.
I’m looking forward to the potential of having another venue to have these kinds of discussions.
Responding to the first idea here, I think prioritizing non-North-American voices on an English speaking forum is a laudable goal, even if that involves someone telling me to chill out every so often. I probably won’t shout “How dare you!” and fall out of my chair with fury. If I do, just link me back to this comment and I’ll remember what I said.
For what it’s worth, this is my impression as well!
Claudio, I believe I’ve expressed to you before that trying to draw lines between different cultures might not be a fruitful way to do this (even if it was true), as it can push people into “us vs. them” thinking.
The way I’m interpreting your position on discussion around design is that it shouldn’t just focus on the theoretical but should first be grounded in an actual play experience and reflect how the design of a given game may have effected the play experience. If one wants to get more theoretical at that point—such as, discussing design alterations that could tailor the play towards a desired style or the like—this would be okay. But the idea would be to try to take those theoretical ideas into praxis, and the fruit of the theoretical discussion would be following up with how these changes effected the real world play experience once implemented. In other words design discussion would be fine but it needs to be grounded in play rather than just hypothetical abstract discussion that never becomes grounded but is simply an intellectual exercise.
If one was not sure where the boundaries were when discussion design would “Just Chat” be an appropriate place to discuss design that is a little on the theoretical side, which may be speculating on how the design would effect a given play experience; rather, than an actual play experience one has had at the table?
Hey, Jeff, welcome! I encourage to post a welcome message in the welcome thread.
I think that you summarized my position on design and making games pretty well.
So, first of all, if you post in the wrong category, I’ll just move it. It’s not that big of a deal.
Just Chat is as you correctly assumed the place for that kind of speculative discussion (and other things). The assumption here is that, as you said, that type of discussion will at some point be attempted to be followed up as practice. If the thread ends up later containing a large amount of actual play, I will move it to Actual Play or split the relevant content there.
The line where I would find it not acceptable even in Just Chat is when it just becomes hypothetical discussion without any grounding or attempt to ground it. At some point I’d say “alrighty, everyone has said their thing, it’s time to go and try it”.
Another type of thread that I don’t want is out-of-context “How do you do/manage X in your games?”, where X is something like “base-building”, “sandbox”, or “investigations”—an incredibly generic thing that can mean anything based on the context and type of game. In this case, the Original Poster is under the assumption that everyone knows what the word means, and/or all RPGs are similar and mechanics are interchangeable—I disagree with these quite strongly. I usually ask the user to contextualize the request. Otherwise, the result is generally each poster taking the opening post as a prompt, and piling on their opinion without much dialogue at all.
An example
You can see an example of what I see as treading the line in this La Locanda discussion (auto-translators are your friends).
La Locanda started as a Dungeon World forum, and there are a lot of Dungeon World players on it trying to hack the system. The above thread regarding “fluid magic systems” struggled to even find what the term means, derailed quite often into baseless speculation and “if you do that, the players will do that” type of talk. All of that said, I allowed it to continue, because (a) several users were attempting to keep it on track beyond my intervention and (b) it seemed to serve a purpose to some people that didn’t conflict with the rest of the forum.
I still consider it quite a failed thread, but not enough to do anything about it. The thread spawned a bunch of experiments, few of which were actually tried, most of which failed.
