[erganemic]

I've heard people accusing Suckless of gatekeeping, which is fair--when you consider their decidedly /documentation-lite/ approach, it'd be a stretch to call them accessible.

However, I'm starting to increasingly believe that gatekeeping is both good and necessary for movements to maintain their identity.

This is an inherently clickbait-y statement to make: isn't gatekeeping pretty indefensible? Yes--and no.

By way of illustration, let's talk about Dungeons and Dragons. I'm young enough to be a greenhorn by pretty much any standard, but I got into D&D before its meteoric rise back to cultural significance on the back of properties like Critical Role and Stranger Things, which has left me feeling like a dyed-in-the-wool TTRPG curmudgeon. I see people on Reddit complaining about 5e (the current iteration of D&D) all the time: there are too many rules, combat is boring and drawn out (since all people really want to do is roleplay), keeping track of health and statuses is impossible...the list goes on.

The issue is both immediately clear and a massive faux pas to point out within the community: these people shouldn’t be playing D&D.

As adversarial as that last statement might seem, try reading it not as a judgement--but as a suggestion. If you want a rules-lite improv romp with your friends that handwaves combat and emphasizes roleplay /you shouldn’t be playing D&D/. The system itself is built for a purpose that will be fighting you at every step of the way!

These people won't be happy until they start using a TTRPG system that better accomplishes what they want, and at the same time, they'll be massively pissed off at anyone who tries to tell them so.

"I think I finally fixed D&D!" I heard someone on Reddit excitedly explain. "I just make up all the monsters' dice rolls and abilities and do whatever feels most cinematic, my party loves it!"

"That's not D&D," I want to say. "That's make-believe that involves you lying to your friends."

Instead, I suggest another system that might be more conducive to their style, and I get called a gatekeeper.

I mean, you might as well say: "I want to run minimal, lightweight software written in C that expects you to understand and modify its source code, but I want some kind of configuration engine for it, since I don't know C and can't read its source code!"

[jim-jim-jim]

Yes, gatekeeping is a healthy subcultural defense mechanism. Not every community needs to run on corporate logic and expand indefinitely.

[inasmuch]

I often find myself on the extreme end in favor of gatekeeping.

I more or less quit playing D&D because of what I perceive as a significant shift in the culture around the game over the last decade. It's all well and good to say the way a new wider audience interacts with something I love needn't affect the way I do, but in my experience, it's rarely avoidable (especially when that something requires others). I don't spend much energy resenting the Stranger Things, et al.-inspired D&D community (perhaps because I myself was never /that/ deep into it, all things considered), but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel alienated by the attitudes you're rightly describing as ill-suited to the game.

I feel like the centralization of the social side of internet has fostered the notion that all exclusivity is a form of hostility. Which, sure, exclusion is often a form of aggression, but it's just as often a form of defense. If someone would like to frame defense of something he considers sacred as hostile behavior against those who might want to change it, fine, but to then insist that any such action is inherently bad at best makes him seem myopic and at worst makes me wonder why he feels entitled to full read-and-write access to everything.

Maybe this is a stretch, but I find it ironic that the anti-gatekeeping attitude has risen among people who are largely sensitive to the concerns of, say, communities suffering from gentrification.

[nmz]

I don't think exclusion in this case is a form of aggression or anything emotional, the problem is not emotional based but logical based, the main culprit is categorization. If you call something X and nobody can tell its X, then its clearly not X. This is not a bad thing, its just new, and as so, should have a new name (or recategorization).

[eternityforest]

In that very limited sense gatekeeping has value. I like DnD but it is not my favorite system, I like deep lore, emotional roleplay, and, and if needed, I'm perfectly fine with artistic license by GMs/STs. Especially if there are power gamers in the group, because nobody likes plots that become entirely about NPCs and the 2 power gamers.

I also have no interest in suckless, so I have no reason to be upset if I, a fan of exactly the software suckless is a rebellion against, am left out.

The problem is when it expands a bit. Occasionally you'll get people saying stuff like "You shouldn't be using a computer at all if you don't want to use the command line and write C" or "Girls shouldn't plat TTRPGs at all, it's a guy thing and they just do it for the attention".

And of course, the unsolvable problem of whether non-suckless people should make an effort to write their programs in a way that can be used outside of the Red Hat de facto mainstream stack, even though they personally never expect to see a system like that and only a small number of their users will.

[Beltalowda]

It's not "gatekeeping", but suckless is targetted at a very specific audience. There's nothing wrong with that and just as much "gatekeeping" as writing a text in German for German speakers with German cultural references that may be hard to follow even for people who picked up German as a second language.

Everyone is "gatekeeping" to some degree because everyone comes from a different background and wants something different. The only difference is that suckless is more explicit and honest about it.

[handoflixue]

In defense of gatekeeping and walled gardens: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...

Tangentially, I have found the phrase "walled garden" gets a lot less hate than "gatekeeping" - some people still conflate the two, but it helps establish "I am trying to make a space devoted to X" from "I think not-X is bad"

[NoraCodes]

> "That's not D&D," I want to say. "That's make-believe that involves you lying to your friends."

Whatever his faults, and there were many, at least Gary Gygax wasn't this much of an asshole to people who were having fun with his game.

[erganemic]

The specific person I'm talking about was telling their players that the stakes were real: they were calling for rolls (not attack rolls or saving throws, mind: those are too complicated, just anonymous rolls that were immediately ignored), whittling down the party members until they're just on the verge of death, and then--a miraculous recovery! Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat!

Yeah, they might be having fun in the moment, but someone in that thread asked whether their party knew that all their triumphs were predetermined, and the OP replied in the negative. "You should really either fess up to it being railroaded or try to make it less so," someone advised. "Otherwise, they're gonna find out, feel like morons for getting emotionally invested in what's basically a puppet show, feel like double morons for believing you all the times you assured them that their miraculous victories were real, and never want to play again."

The OP took immediate offense to the idea that people are sensitive to having their emotions manipulated via lies, and went on a multi-paragraph rant that basically amounted to "my players are idiots who don't know what they want and will never find out, and even if they did they'd thank me for my awesome storytelling, and basically when you think about it I have to take away their agency because otherwise they might mess up my plans."

Moreover, I maintain that lines of reasoning like that are more common amongst people who want to play D&D while ignoring all its systematic, rules-based elements. "I should be able to control my players at my whim" and "it's unnecessary to have objective ways to resolve a success or failure except through my fiat" are complementary beliefs, and a person attracted to one is more likely to be attracted to the other.

That's why I say (maybe too tersely) "That's not D&D." Because the fundamental element of D&D--the thing that separates it from a book or movie!--is player choice. And if you have decided that a version of the game where you can enforce your will randomly--beholden to no rules--is the one that aligns with how you want to DM...well, it's not impossible to do that right, but I'm leery of any decision that makes it easier for you to stomp on player choice.

[NoraCodes]

Why does it both you so much that other people have fun in a way you don't like?

[erganemic]

I'm not sure how you read my previous comment and concluded my objection was to people having fun in a way I don't like. To be super reductive: I think it's better to not play D&D at all if the only way you can see to have fun with it is by lying to your friends in order to provoke a certain emotional response in them.

The relation this has to my top-level comment is that both anecdotally and through "actual play" media, I've noticed that DMs who don't care about the /systems/ of D&D made to enable player choice instead care about using the /vehicle/ of D&D to tell their own story, and that they're willing to steamroll the agency of the characters to do so. I believe /the essential promise/ of D&D is player choice--no one would agree to meet up if they knew you were just going to read your unfinished fantasy novel at them for three hours, they come because they believe they'll get to make choices and have those choices affect things. As such, I'm leery of DMs who (in my experience) are willing to shove mechanics that enable player choice to the side in order to tell the story they want to.

I don't think this is an unreasonable perspective, and I'm a little confused since it seems like you didn't engage with my previous comment at all?

[saghm]

> I see people on Reddit complaining about 5e (the current iteration of D&D) all the time: there are too many rules, combat is boring and drawn out (since all people really want to do is roleplay), keeping track of health and statuses is impossible...the list goes on.

This is obviously super subjective, and everyone's opinion is right for themselves, but as someone who learned 3.5e first and then eventually moved on to Pathfinder and now plays PF 2.0, it's crazy to me that 5e would seem to rules heavy and combat too complex. I specifically prefer Pathfinder because 5e feels _too_ simplified compared to what I'm used to, and I just don't get the same enjoyment out of having a character that "feels" less powerful.

> "I think I finally fixed D&D!" I heard someone on Reddit excitedly explain. "I just make up all the monsters' dice rolls and abilities and do whatever feels most cinematic, my party loves it!"

> "That's not D&D," I want to say. "That's make-believe that involves you lying to your friends."

Honestly, I don't really see anything wrong with that. I don't DM much anymore, but I totally am fine with the idea that my DM might occasionally fudge things to make the game more fun for everyone. Is it fun if in the first first round of the first encounter of an adventure the monster gets a lucky crit and kills the fighter, leaving it free reign to mop up everyone else? Some people might find it more enjoyable if it's "real" and want there to be randomness and a sense of danger! On the other hand, if this is the very first time this group of people has played, and they were enticed more by the roleplaying than the combat, it could sour their perception to the game to the point where they don't end up pursuing it despite the potential for them to have a lot of fun. I think an experienced DM will generally develop a good sense for their group and be able to tell when something warrants a bit of fudging to make the game more fun for everyone, and that's a good thing. This is sometimes even explicitly written in D&D rulebooks (I believe the 5th edition Player's Handbook includes this) as "Rule 0", which is that the rules are subject to the DM rather than vice-versa, and that every play group is free to customize the rules as they see fit. Obviously, there's a degree to which the rules can be changed or thrown out at which the game no longer resembles "by-the-book" D&D, but personally I don't think that it really matters that much where the line is (as long as you're not, like, trying to market things commercially as D&D when it's not, but that's really the purview of the company holding the trademark to decide).

[tstrimple]

I tend to agree re the complexity of D&D. The combat is much too abstract and unrealistic for my tastes. I gravitate more towards a game system like GURPS for gritty realistic games of any genre because it simulates combat so much more effectively. If I want to shoot someone through their left eye as they race past on a motorcycle there are calculations for the penalty to hit which include the range, speed lighting and other variables. I can certainly understand why folks wouldn’t want that level of detail in their combat and prefer a more abstract system. When I want to focus on the role playing and story telling aspect of these games, systems like Dread or Fiasco are fantastic. D&D seems to want to try to have things both ways but its combat and skill abstractions feel awkward and limiting.