Blog Failure–Purple Pawn Judges a Game by its Cover

Purple Pawn is  one of my regular (and favorite) stops in the gaming blogosphere. It is one of the few gaming sites that does not pander to a given game system and actually focuses on the games and the game industry  as a whole. However, the Pawn’s  recent post regarding the “Pangenre” PDF release disappointed me.

The post’s author bashes the release because it is a multi-genre RPG and has bad cover art. While the Pawn is free to post whatever opinion about a game it likes, I am deeply disappointed that the post writer clearly has no interest in giving the game a fair shot due to a clear bias against “multi-genre” games.  In all fairness, I would not care if this item appeared on any other blog, but the Pawn has higher standards than this. A snide hatchet job on a game you have never read is unfair and unworthy of the great work Purple Pawn has done to date.

If you want to bash a game, at least take the time to read it.

You can read the Pawn’s Pangenre post and make your own decision.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

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trask

Trask is a long-time gamer, world traveler and history buff. He hopes that his scribblings will both inform and advance gaming as a hobby.

4 thoughts on “Blog Failure–Purple Pawn Judges a Game by its Cover

  • April 28, 2010 at 8:46 pm
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    I understand where you’re coming from, and I understand not everyone is going to agree with what I had to say.

    When we cover games and game news, we cover them in our own words. When I saw a post about the release of Pangenre, I was intrigued and looked into it.

    The marketing of the system totally threw me off of any further interest. Like I said, I don’t mind generic RPG systems. Hell. I own a company that publishes one. The thing that always rubs me raw about multi-genre “Be what you want to be” systems, is that they always seem to focus on that aspect. They never seem to pride themselves on their great system, or how you can use that system to run an amazing game.

    Most multi-genre systems seem to always focus on “You can be a gun-toting alien cyborg patrolling the leaf-strewn streets of a fantasy elf village” aspect of their games. They want to make sure you know that you can be a beach bum surfer dude who takes out aliens using nothing but his swim trunks and a surf board.

    I understand that there’s some really great mulit-genre systems out there. I’m not here to bash them all to oblivion. I just picked up something I thought was interesting, and posted my thoughts on it.

  • April 29, 2010 at 1:41 am
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    As Andy Warhol said, it’s better to be talked about in the negative than to not be talked about at all. 🙂

    I’d like to thank Purple Pawn for his criticism of our Pangenre RPG marketing copy, although, of course, we would have preferred a critique of the system rather than the concept and the cover. I’ve been considering revising our website with more detail than we can put on DTRPG. I’m now more tempted to push this task to the front burner. The RPG System was our first release, and we weren’t 100 percent sure of how to push it. We’ve since been busy launching other products since that release and working on the first supplement, which will allow players to use the d20/DnD style FRP Magic system with the Pangenre Core Rules.

    As to the question of our cover design, we don’t have a staff artist. We’re all writers and system designers. Therefore, most of our 368 page rule book is content. Foremost, it was designed to give players (including us) a detailed, yet playable system that could be used with almost any setting.

    Our free demo PDF is available both at our website, http://www.pangenre.com, and from the OneBookshelf network of Publishing sites (RPGNow, Drive-Thru-RPG, WargameVault, etc.). It’d about 20 pages in total and shows more of the inside of the book.

  • Pingback:  Pangenre RPG Core Rules—Do We Need This Much Freedom? by Purple Pawn

  • April 29, 2010 at 8:29 am
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    Rkalajian:

    You can’t review something without knowing it.
    You just can’t.
    Kapish?

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