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Gaming pet peeves

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21 Jan 2020 16:22 #306461 by Shellhead
Replied by Shellhead on topic Gaming pet peeves

Space Ghost wrote: When people are talking AP, how long are we talking?

I play the majority of my games with the same friend since 1997 -- and we started playing MTG most of the time; so our turns usually take about 10 seconds or so. For the most part, we take pretty fast turns in board games too...I can't think of the last time it took me more than 30 seconds or so and I start to get anxious if I am taking more than a minute*.

But, I don't think it is necessarily disrespectful if people take longer...at least not intentionally. Where do I have to be that I need for people to speed play through a game. Invariably we talk about non-game related things as well.


I consider AP relative to the overall gameplay. Not just a question of a player playing slowly, but how slowly relative to the rest of the table.

Here's an obvious example from way back when I playing Divine Right with Glenn Rahman, the designer of Divine Right. Divine Right is a light fantasy war game for up to six players, and includes a lot of fiddly chrome rules that enhance the sense of setting. We typically played four-player games. After everybody was familiar with the game, typically three of us would finish our turns within five minutes, unless a battle took place or a rules question arose. Glenn's average turn was more like 20 minutes every time, even though he was the game designer. And it wasn't like he was pondering complex, far-reaching analysis of the game state, it was more like he spaced out during our turns and then would blink in surprise at the state of the board at the start of his every turn. That's some bad AP, and it's annoying because effectively one person is doing most of the playing. The other problem was that we could play for six hours and still only finish 10 turns out of a 20 turn game.
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21 Jan 2020 17:10 #306462 by southernman
Replied by southernman on topic Gaming pet peeves
Ha ha - I'm laughing my arse off reading this thread, just Barnes' comment of games are bullshit and shouldn't be taken (too) seriously makes the whole thread amusing. But I'm laughing mainly at putting people (here) in groups that would end in arguments, table-flips and walk-outs :laugh:

I have common peeves with posts here and are guilty of others here so I'll pussy out and not post :whistle:
(But keep your dirty fingers off my cards while you're spending half the night taking your turn and rolling far too many more sixes than me).
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21 Jan 2020 17:16 #306463 by Josh Look
Replied by Josh Look on topic Gaming pet peeves
My biggest pet peeves aren’t ones that happen at the table, more in design and in how people talk about games.

At the table
-AP
-Cell phones
-Players going an getting impaired right after I explain the rules, in select cases, before I explain them.
-Finishing a game that was enjoyed by all and you have to be that one person who says they’d rather play some other game that isn’t really the same at all.

Talking about games
- (Upon just seeing a game announced) “I already have games X, Y, and Z so this is a pass for me.” This is a HUGE one for me. Just about every genre, every subgenre in gaming is in a constant state of evolution, not all good, but the idea that your old ass games are doing something better without playing the new game or having anything at all to go off of is fucking stupid. JUST STOP.
-Armchair game critics who try to pass judgment on a game without playing it.
-(On BGG, immediately upon seeing a game announced) “Solo?” followed by “Sleeve size?”
-The word “sandbox.”
-The leetspeak use of the word “epic.”
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21 Jan 2020 17:40 #306464 by ubarose
Replied by ubarose on topic Gaming pet peeves

Gary Sax wrote:
True AP is when people spend inordinate amounts of time on easy decisions---no beef if you spend a couple minutes on key decision making in a dense game...nothing moves when they refuse to sacrifice at all. .


Absolutely. This describes it perfectly. Staring at the board state, or your dice, or your cards for another 3 minutes isn't going to change them. The player knows what his options are, but doesn't like them, and believes if he just keeps pondering he will have a sudden epiphany which will allow him to squeak out one more point ---and even with that one extra point that player still won't win the game.

If the decision you are making is THE game winning decision, fine, take your time ponder, calculate, recalculate. But if it isn't, play fast, make mistakes, have fun.
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21 Jan 2020 19:16 - 21 Jan 2020 19:25 #306466 by Jexik
Replied by Jexik on topic Gaming pet peeves
You guys would probably hate playing games with me. I get all quiet and focused on trying to make the best moves. I try to do as much thought and prep time on other player's turns as possible, unless I'm teaching the game, which is quite often these days. I riffle shuffle my cards and my Dominion got so beat up after many plays that I bought a set of the Extra Base cards.

I'm annoyed when people take stuff before I'm done with it. In King of Tokyo or Catan, I like to hand my dice to the next player when I'm 100% certain I'm done. One night my wife kept snatching the dice in KoT and we never played it again. Turns out there were more issues to unravel, but that night stuck out to me.

You can complain about sore losers all you want, but I like sore winners the least. "I won despite having the worst dice luck at the table, can you believe that?" No, shut the fuck up your dice were fine. Gloating, etc... no one cares man.

My worst experience with AP was combined with a sore winner asking me for advice on what to do on his turn when he was up on points in a Heroscape tournament. I got unnaturally mad at that and told him to "just take your fucking turn." He must have spent 50 of our 60 minutes playing, and neither of us lost even half of our points.
Last edit: 21 Jan 2020 19:25 by Jexik.
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21 Jan 2020 20:24 #306468 by Erik Twice
Replied by Erik Twice on topic Gaming pet peeves
Not being interested in actually playing the game. That is, playing irrationally, not trying to win or using the game as a meta way of annoying other players. It completely sinks my experience and makes me feel like I'm being forced to be someone's hostage rather than rival or partner.

It just makes the whole thing pointless. Games just don't work if you are not trying to win. It's not that winning itself matters or that it's wrong to lose, is that you need to try. Not even trying feels like playing football with someone who refuses to get up from his chair. And it's rude as hell. Look, I get it, you don't care. But I do and had I known you wouldn't, I wouldn't have taken two different trains and a significant chunk of my time to be here.

Let's be honest, the old "I'm going to attack you because fuck you" was never funny. And it's specially not funny when the game takes six or seven hours to play and you've been arranging it for weeks. A friend once played Advanced Civilization and the guy on his left went up and said "I'm not going to win, I'm just going to make sure you don't" and attack him every single turn as every possible action. I don't understand how anyone can see that and think "yeah, this is fine, this is how games are meant to be played".

But it's not just a rational thing. It annoys me. A lot. I'm not sure why, I think I got more serious about games somewhat recently and that's why it annoys me. In general, being "unable to play" be it to bad design, poor players or very bad luck makes me unhappy. Oh well, I'm working on it not annoying me as much.
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21 Jan 2020 20:34 #306469 by san il defanso
Replied by san il defanso on topic Gaming pet peeves
Threads complaining about how other people play games.

Seriously though, I can handle a very wide variety of behaviors at the table, if they aren't outright anti-social. I get impatient with slow players, but part of that is because I am a pretty fast player overall. Several years ago we had one guy who was notorious in our group for taking a long time with every decision. We hassled him a lot, would flip over a sand timer to make him go faster. The end result? He quit playing games. We still would hang out with him, but he wasn't interested in playing things with us.

Maybe that was for the best, it might have saved our friendship. But I don't think any of us ever considered that he wouldn't enjoy the game if he was actually being rushed.

I do want people to be engaged in what's being played, but that looks different for different people. I try to give a lot of leeway on that.

As to things that actually do bother me, a big one lately has been a particular form of gatekeeping that goes on in different facets of the hobby. As I've engaged with the RPG community on Twitter and Reddit, there's always this undercurrent of scorn for 5e. I get it, it's popular and dominates the conversation, and it has flaws. But a lot of people (myself included) play it almost exclusively by choice, and it's easy to feel crappy about that, like I don't get to graduate to being a "real" roleplayer.

Another related one is very picky debates about balance and mechanical "flaws." In my experience most such flaws are not much of an issue in practice, but I don't play very analytically either. A lot of people want to engage with games that way, and that's fine. But it doesn't have a lot of meaning for me.
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21 Jan 2020 22:36 #306472 by DarthJoJo
Replied by DarthJoJo on topic Gaming pet peeves
Cracking the rulebook for the first time after collecting players. Set up takes twice as long, and the game itself takes three times as long as every rule question needs to be double checked in the rulebook. Running through the game by yourself is a big ask but at least read the rules and be able to answer all the basic questions before asking anyone else to join you. I only get out to open gaming twice a month at best. Please respect my time.
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22 Jan 2020 05:20 #306473 by Erik Twice
Replied by Erik Twice on topic Gaming pet peeves

san il defanso wrote: As to things that actually do bother me, a big one lately has been a particular form of gatekeeping that goes on in different facets of the hobby.

This is such a dull, recurring topic in the roleplaying community. I'm always baffled at the posturing towards, well, any game that sees play. I still see "VTM is not a real RPG" talk, which is insane to me.


Still, I'm also tired of the "anti-gatekeeping" discourse. "Gatekeeper" has become like "problematic" in that it's used to label someone as evil without actually articulating so. Most of the time, it's used to berate someone for having, not just better standards, but some sort of standard at all. I can think of many boardgame examples, but the best actually comes from the arts "community". An artists well-known for her tutorials was driven out of Twitter because assholes got upset at her advice, namely that you should draw lines in one stroke. This obvious piece of advice was seen as "gatekeeping" and "elitist" because all ways of drawing are great and how dare you tell me otherwise.

The worst thing is, most figureheads complaining "gatekeepers" have a backwards attitude towards those they swear to protect. They treat newbies as if they were emotionally stunted and incapable of handling but the simplest of games. It's such a nasty, condescending attitude. And it's actual gatekeeping. "Oh, you are not good enough to play real hardcore games, here, have a simple game even you can play". And those "real hardcore games" are stuff like Terraforming Mars, c'mon.

Because whenever I try to play Dune or 1830 or whatever, I get a lot of confused people who have been told over and over these games are "too difficult for them". And since important figures in gaming have told them, well, who are they to disagree? The end result is that they are afraid to sign up or realize they are much more fun and acccessible if they do.

Ok, enough rant.
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22 Jan 2020 06:18 - 22 Jan 2020 06:20 #306474 by san il defanso
Replied by san il defanso on topic Gaming pet peeves
I actually was trying to think of another term besides "gatekeeping" because the term tends to be applied pretty broadly.
Last edit: 22 Jan 2020 06:20 by san il defanso.
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22 Jan 2020 07:57 #306476 by hotseatgames
Replied by hotseatgames on topic Gaming pet peeves
Reading this thread makes me want to play board games even less than I currently do.

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22 Jan 2020 08:13 #306480 by Gary Sax
Replied by Gary Sax on topic Gaming pet peeves

hotseatgames wrote: Reading this thread makes me want to play board games even less than I currently do.


What can I say, slow game week.

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22 Jan 2020 18:28 #306494 by boothwah
Replied by boothwah on topic Gaming pet peeves
I don't like to teach new games with other experienced players, unless they are into being co-ambassadors to the game. My personal pet peeve is Mr. Bludgeon the new player with corner case rules and no take backs, ensuring they create a miserable first impression of the game. I see so many of these guys at 40k tables and similar mini games.
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22 Jan 2020 18:52 #306496 by barrowdown
Replied by barrowdown on topic Gaming pet peeves

Erik Twice wrote: I still see "VTM is not a real RPG" talk, which is insane to me.


I am confused. How is this even something someone could argue?

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23 Jan 2020 07:22 #306508 by Erik Twice
Replied by Erik Twice on topic Gaming pet peeves

barrowdown wrote: I am confused. How is this even something someone could argue?

I've seen long arguments about it and I still don't know how they do it, but they do it.

If you are in the VTM side, your game is obviously a superior and more adult "narrative game" instead of silly roleplaying. If you are on the other side, then VTM is not "really a game" because you talk too much. Or because it's not in a dungeon or whatever.

For a hobby based around imagination and doing whatever you want, many poeple have difficulty imagining games that aren't D&D and Call of Chulthu.

boothwah wrote: My personal pet peeve is Mr. Bludgeon the new player with corner case rules and no take backs, ensuring they create a miserable first impression of the game.

Boardgamers are weird about takebacks. Specially when playing with newbies, holy hell why would you want someone to ruin the game for a small mistake? I let people take back moves as long as no information changes hands.
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