Re: Dark Gate OOC Thread
In deference to Tass' wishes, I'll keep this as subdued as I can manage. Not short - acts of god couldn't make my posts
short. But, subdued.
There are two things in this world that can immediately and supremely piss me off.
...Well, alright, probably more than two, but two that are relevant right now.
The first is idiots that don't realise they're idiots... and the second is idiots that realise they're idiots, yet subject others to their stupidity despite that.
And I
do not often suffer stupidity.
...I suffer
from stupidity fairly often, but I do not often
suffer it.
Lets get all of the unsaid, complimentary points of view out of the way here:
I have nothing against people making suggestions for DG, or anything else; I realise that people making suggestions for DG is valuable, and got the game where it is today... and I have nothing against posting part of an idea, and then improving and adding to it over time. My only standing issue is with displays of stupidity.
I imagine someone could make the natural mistake of confusing stupidity and silliness, so I'll make that distinction as well. Silliness, which would be things like the orgasm ghosts or Pano, I have nothing against in and of itself. Stupidity is what I take issue with; it is neither funny, nor intentional.
There's no nice way to put it: Flayer's initial race suggestion was stupid. I've already gone into detail about why, and it's easy enough to see in his post without being explained, so I won't repeat myself.
I will have to break niceties here for a moment, because while cruel to state, I feel that the reasons behind my dislike should be noted. Because there are so many different aspects of Flayer's post which I find distasteful, I'm actually not sure how much of my annoyance should be attributed to each part. Still, those parts are: the stupidity itself; the lack of care, in not doing the work needed to make the suggestion a good one in the first place; the slight threat that the idea might actually be accepted as-is and stain the game; and the brazenness of a person believing that their idea 'needed' to be added.
With that said, Flayer has made several excuses for his post, but I don't consider any of them valid, for the reasons below.
Reason 1:
"Other people will find the flaws in my idea, and then I will improve it." ...is not a good reason to have suggested something stupid. I'm bad at explaining things in a direct manner, so instead I'm going to subject you to something roundabout. I promise I'll be back on track in a moment!
Consider the following conversation:
DG player1: "DG is bad, Tass should fix it."
DG player2: "What a pointless comment, don't speak unless you have something constructive to say."
DG player1: "That -is- constructive, now Tass knows that someone dislikes part of the game, and because he knows that I don't like it, he can go look for places where the game can be improved."
DG Player2: "If you found something you didn't like, you could at least say -what- you didn't like, instead of expecting Tass to hunt for it and figure it out himself. You're still a terrible person because your comment wasn't sufficiently constructive."
My point is that 'constructive' has a minimum threshold - a point where, sure, you're providing some useful information, but primarily you're requiring other people to do work for you - especially when you would be able to easily do that work yourself.
My claim is that Flayer's suggestion doesn't meet the necessary threshold for 'constructiveness'. There is maybe one thing of value in the suggestion, which can be summed up as 'dogpeople would be cool'. The lore description, the stats, the fetishes; all of it fails to be useful since the whole of it does not fit with the rest of DG. Yes; I realise that plmnko, Haf and others have found ways to make constructive use of the idea - in the same way that Tass might actually fix part of DG if someone simply commented that "its bad". The fact that something good came out of it does not excuse the fact that the initial suggestion was stupid.
Note: Before anyone mistakes my intentions, I do not generally mind if a post is not constructive... but if you are posting a serious suggestion for a game, then yes, I expect you to make your suggestion a useful one.
Reason 2:
"I don't know enough about the game to write good lore, so I wanted others to fix it." ... that seems like an odd thing to hear, from someone who is supposed to be GMing the game. But, given that non-Tass threads are of arguable canonicity, and that I'm playing nice, I won't press on that point.
My actual response: Not only do I not accept that as a good reason for Flayer's post, I actually find it damning toward him. He -knows- that he isn't up to scratch with the lore and the building of races... but he still tried to make lore and stats anyway. Imagine if Flayer had simply posted the following:
"I want to add a wolf race to DG; one that lives all tribal-like, but I don't know enough about the lore to be sure that I have a good place to fit them in. Can someone suggest one?"
I would not have minded the above post! At worst, I would have still been peeved that Flayer was getting other people to do work that, with a little effort, he could do himself, but I'm generally in no position to criticize the laziness of others. If he knew he couldn't make good lore, he could just
not make lore.
Hell, he could have even said,
"I was thinking of having the race be Anudorians that turned into dogs instead of cats, and then they ran across the continent into the amazon and lived there, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea for the lore."
There is a world of difference between an ignorant person who states that they are ignorant, and an ignorant person who plunges in head-first. Flayer could have kept every bit of stupidity in his suggestion
and then some, without drawing more than mild annoyance from me, had he simply shown some humility and admitted that he was lacking in information.
'But Host, he -did- state that his idea could be improved! You can take it from the part where he says, "Anything is subject to change"!'
Why yes, astute reader, those words are in his post... but they aren't actually an admission of
ignorance. 'Anything is subject to change', means, 'if you can think of something better than I have, suggest it and I'll change things'. This is not even
close to what he needed to say, which is 'I don't know what I'm doing'... and without that, the post isn't pardonable.
Reason 3:
"I showed it to Tass, and he told me to post it." ...which is not actually relevant to the issue. Yes, Tassadar told Flayer to post it, so I admit I should be directing my ire at the
public-ness of the display of stupidity towards Tassadar, rather than Flayer. But the one who made the idea, and failed to put sufficient effort into doing so... wasn't Tassadar. Tass could have saved a few people a bit of time and effort, if he'd made Flayer re-think the lore, or rejected the idea... but Tass is not required to fix bad ideas. If he decided the best course of action was for the rest of the GMs and players to see the suggestion, and weigh in on it, then that's his prerogative.
I find that the creation of the Shadow Demons is a stunningly good parallel, when it comes to highlighting the difference between a suggestion that is insufficient, and a suggestion that, despite not being too good, is workable. Admittedly I am not exactly an unbiased judge in this comparison, but I'd like to think my initial suggestion for the Shadow Demons held worth.
Just like Flayer's dogs, the first suggestion of my bugs was... well, kind of stupid. My only real reason for wanting them in the game was because I wanted to ply them, and because I felt that they fit well with the world. I was giddy on the thought of actually getting to add a race to DG, and I sort of meandered from one weird idea to another, writing run-on sentences... several of them seeming almost totally incoherent, when I look back at them now. To make matters worse, this was back in an era when we knew very, precious little about the situation of the demons, so there were huge parts of my idea where I simply had no idea whether or not they could work with the existing lore. I wrote the whole of the post when I had to rush, and didn't have enough time to actually go over it and think about things afterwards. So: my post was written badly, rushed... and I lacked enough background information, causing a lot of what I wanted to do to potentially clash with the world - on all accounts, exactly like Flayer.
Here's where the differences start:
I spent as long as I needed to figure out the lore of the world, and then, after I had fleshed out the idea, I beggared Tass to consider if my lore could possibly fit into the game. I gave him the base lore that I strongly believed would fit with the game; I believed that because I had done the work to make sure that it would fit and was sensible for the setting, before anyone else ever saw it. I started out by admitting that my ideas seemed silly and I wasn't sure that they'd work in the game even before I sent him the lore, and when I reached a part where I couldn't tell if it would work with the current game, I gave multiple options for it and asked Tass if any of them seemed applicable.
My whole suggestion for the Shadow Demons was... excessively long, as is my style; especially long when considering all the additional PMs after the first. Still, I'll leave part of that first lore-post here for comparison's sake.
The way I intended them to appear in Dark Gate is mostly the same, though with important differences. I'll largely allow you to decide just how they came to being; personally I was thinking something like “the result of demon corrupted fey from the second demonic invasion”, but it could be demon fey crossbreeds, or even something like a demonic experiment... or even just another faction of demon that has always been there. Having fey in their background isn't massively important, but parts of their bodies glow with silvery light, a colour you’ve usually associated with the fey. Of course, this could just be passed off something to do with the fact that they're born directly out of souls (which is what I believe it was supposed to represent in the actual game they came from, though it is never really explained).
TLDR: there is no excuse for making a dumb suggestion.
@Tass: heh, "putting Flayer's idea down". I don't know if that was intentional dog-humour, but I laughed.
Not siding for or against what Host was about.
Wh... what?! RJ... d...don't you find me attractive anymore...?! *sob*
