I had completely forgotten three previous mentions, that I found out later searching the forum. The comment in Vincent's blog was MY first encounter with that polemic, I did read the precedent posts much later, so I tend to forget them...
Anyway, this is the REAL chronology:
The first mention in almost exactly one year before, on February 8, 2005: Ron wrote, in the thread [Sorcerer] Introducing a New Player:
"All of Judd's and Eero's advice is pure gold, and I hope that you are pretty comfortable with trying (a) lots of solid preparation but also (b) no pre-planned outcomes for any scene. You see, who I'm concerned about isn't Sarah at all - it's you. All of my experiences with Sorcerer, and that's going on ten years plus now, suggest that newcomers to role-playing have no difficulty with it at all, but that most gamers are absolutely baffled - and unfortunately, that bafflement is hidden to them until the dice hit the table. They think they're all set, but they aren't, and in play, the net effect resembles brain damage. Yeah, it's that bad.
And this effect is most pronounced with GMs.
I know all about this because I'm no exception. From 1994 through 1998, my experiences with Sorcerer demonstrated to me that I was simply going to have to abandon most of the skills I'd developed in the previous decade and a half, and that all of my in-game practices about preparation and character and story were going to have to be re-tooled. Conceptually, I was on the right track - the various references and ideas currently expressed in my Narrativism essay were definitely my guiding aesthetic - but how to do it was ... not working. And every time I played Sorcerer, it worked a little better, often in spite of what I was trying to do at the interactive ground level.
All of the "but you didn't say it that way" objections to Sorcerer as a text are correct. That's because the game taught me, not the other way around. My answers to various queries, here in this forum over the last four years plus, are all derived from play-experience and were revelations to me at the time.
So I suggest that Sarah should be taken for granted as an effective, powerful, and prepared Sorcerer player, and that you should consider yourself to be, oh, a recovering crippled person, in terms of the game. Not very edifying, huh? I can only say that to you because that's how I had to consider myself in order to learn how to play this game.
[pause]
Assuming that you're still speaking to me after what might seem like gratuitously insulting you ... here are some practical suggestions.
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Go to the thread if you want to read the suggestions, this summary is not about Sorcerer. But this quote is REALLY interesting. Because it's the very first mention of "gamer brain damage" in the Forum, by anyone (this time I checked). And what we see, in the parts I have evidenced to make them stood out?
That from the very first mention of this, Ron specify that he is talking about himself, too.
So, if this was simply a thread to prove that Ron didn't "insult the people who don't play his games", as some people with the reading comprehension ability of a baboon scream even these days, I could stop now. But I would not have wasted the time to write this to explain this simple thing to them, this is not the point of this thread. So let's continue...
The first point is that I encountered the same problems Ron talks about in that quote. With different games and different situations, maybe different bad habits, but I had to "unlearn" a lot of bad, awful, moronic and stupid habits before I could be able to run Dogs in the Vineyard (for example) as well as... my friend Claudia who had never, even GM'd anything before. I had to un-learn twenty years of bad games simply to get to point zero, the starting point of "not damaged people".
Later (and we will see when , in this summary: we have already seen a little of it in his comments to Vincent's post) Ron will change the metaphor for these kind of common problems and limit "brain damage" to very few worst cases, but no matter, even if the metaphor change, the meaning is the same
So, it's the beginning of 2006, I am fighting against all my old GM habits and I am not making a lot of progress. Every time I try to GM these new games, that with other people running them works so well, I make a mess. And it's at that time that I read Ron's post about these problems. And you can guess what jumped out to me. I was not some self-proclamed "good GM" that would see only an unforgivable insult to my overwrought ego, missing all the rest: what I did read was how everybody had these problems at the beginning, even Ron!
So this is part of the reasons I see that as a very optimistic and hopeful set of threads about the future role-playing games, and not as a menace to my ego. There are other reasons but before talking about them, let's continue the list of threads.
The next mention is in Narrativism and Simulationism a natural hybrid? (July 21, 2005):
Many of those confusions are based on, well, to put it bluntly, social and creative programming that produce something like brain damage.
Then, in the Lumpley games sub-forum: On removing homosexuality and violating gender roles as sins..., a thread that is a perfect example of "damaged clueless GM meet thematic play for the first time, and it's not pretty" if I ever saw one (OK, I saw really a lot of these threads in the italian DitV forum, almost all of them are perfect examples...)
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Wow.
Sometimes you realize that someone just doesn't get it, and sometimes you don't have to realize it, he's standing on the Empire State Building and shouting it out.
Dude. There are no "demons" or "sins" when you play Dogs.
Those are terms people use in the game-world, and they think in those terms, yes. You can even dramatize those perceptions and attitudes all you want, by having magic flare up visibly and demons cackle and materialize.
But those are just dramatizations.
There is no in-game-world objective reality to which you must conform. There is no in-game-world morality. There is no in-game-world religious faith that is "true" in that game-world. When the Book that the Dogs carry says something in it (and who knows if it does, let's say it does) about how homosexuality is wrongly wrong ... well ...
... it's still up to the Dogs. It's their call, in that town, and in the face of this particular situation. You see? It's still up to the Dogs, and you play the Dogs' judgment.
I'm talking now to all the folks who keep posting here in what appears to be a state of RPG-induced brain damage. When the rules say, "What the Dogs decide is right," they are not talking about the in-game "reality" (which of course is not real). They are talking about you, the real people. It is on you to make the Dogs do what is right, and there is no in-game-world canon to turn to. The game-play process is asking you.
Say my Dog character, Jeremiah, drags that obviously demon-ridden Sally girl from her room, and prepares a terrible scorching exorcism to rid Sally of that demon who "obviously" made her do that awful act with her best friend Sue.
Now I, the player, and my friends, the other players, are about to find something out about me, and about one another. Do I have Jeremiah do it? Does he escalate to shooting if it goes sour? Perhaps he cannot. If he can't, does that mean he's a bad Dog? No - it means that's what I think is right, and Jeremiah has demonstrated it.
And it can be more subtle than that, too. Let's say I do go on with it! What kind of fallout does he take? If I pick something like "terrible scar," frankly, I just demonstrated that I, Ron, am comfy with a story in which homosexual acts are treated as demonic.
But what if I take "gnawing doubt" instead and pump it up to massive dice? See the difference in what that says about me? See how I just begged my GM to turn up the volume on later conflicts involving homosexuality? See how my fellow players are going to have to decide how their characters deal with my gnawing doubt?
From the text, p. 45:
Quote
Does this mean your character can't sin?
No. But it does mean that no one's in a position to judge your character's actions but you yourself. Your character might be a remorseless monster or a destroying angel - I the author of the game can't tell the difference, your GM and your fellow players can't tell the difference, only you can.
... Sin, arrogance, hate bloodlust; remorse, guilt, contrition; inspiration, redemption, grace: they're in how you have your character act, not (just or necessarily) in what's on your character's sheet. Those moments, in play, are what matters.
Your character's conscience is in your hands.
No. But it does mean that no one's in a position to judge your character's actions but you yourself. Your character might be a remorseless monster or a destroying angel - I the author of the game can't tell the difference, your GM and your fellow players can't tell the difference, only you can.
... Sin, arrogance, hate bloodlust; remorse, guilt, contrition; inspiration, redemption, grace: they're in how you have your character act, not (just or necessarily) in what's on your character's sheet. Those moments, in play, are what matters.
Your character's conscience is in your hands.
If I had my way, I'd insist that no one be allowed to post in this forum until he or she turned in a 500-word essay to demonstrate their understanding of that section, and had it critiqued. Lucky for you, I don't have that power.
But boy is it called for.
Best,
Ron
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That thread contains a lot of very good explanations (from Vincent and other people, too) about DitV, check it out!
After this thread, the next mention was in the "Anyway" discussion cited in the first post. Next (finally!) the Brain Damage thread, itself!