EFFORTPOST My bait post about FATAL on /tg/ got 344 mostly sincere replies and hit the bump limit, even though the entire body text was a variant of a well-known copypasta

As you should be able to see, I started my post with a variant of the "Did Vaush just BTFO" copypasta (!soyteens you should recognize this), which was changed to be about Byron Hall, the creator of the infamous rpg FATAL, responding to a very critical review of his game. Byron's response did not disprove every claim in the review, but for the purposes of bait, I pretended that it did. Here is the copypasta I created:

Did Byron Hall just BTFO all of rpg.net's moralstrag arguments?

>https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/FATALReviewRebuttal

>Points out that Darren refuses to offer counter evidence against FATAL being difficult and complex; indeed, Darren also admits the game is difficult and complex as part of his "criticism"

>Points out that boss monsters such as Cerberus are still possible in FATAL

>Explains the origin of "where the dice never lie"

>Explains that Darren is overgeneralizing all of FATAL's possible gameplay when he calls FATAL the "date r*pe rpg"

>Points out that Jason's responses are more juvenile than the language used in FATAL

>Explains that FATAL has potential for much more varied gameplay than Vampire, and has more realistic combat too

>Explains that concepts like ether and physiognomy do not have to be accepted by the author of a role-playing game to write about them, just as a designer of a game with magic does not have to believe in real-world magic

>Explains that a woman can be nearly any class in the game, rather than only a prostitute as the reviewers claim

>Explains that FATAL's averaging rolling method emulates the normal distribution of real-world stats more accurately than games which use a single flat roll

>Explains that the standard deviation of intelligence scores is different between men and women, but changing the standard deviation does not require changing the mean

Where is YOUR evidence to back up your ridiculus claims about FATAL being the worst RPG? By all means, read the entire rebuttal, i promise you that you can't debunk it.

>inb4 I get told to shut the frick up by someone who hasn't read the review and is triggered

>inb4 someone posts the anal circumference chart without context as an "argument" and without an analysis of WHY Hall included it in his game

>inb4 someone uses anecdotal evidence

>inb4 someone says 5E is better

>inb4 someone defends Sartin & Mclellan's safe edgy humor

>inb4 someone links to 1d4chan

As you can see, this copypasta should be immediately recognizable as bait since it omits important information that was stated during the review, is a modified form of an already existing copypasta, indirectly defends one of the worst RPGs without directly praising any mechanics less generic than dice rolling, arguably lies about every claim being disproven, has intentional errors and, most importantly for both this copypasta which I created, and the original "Did X just BTFO" copypasta, It lists valid arguments in the inb4 section to prevent people from using said valid arguments. The copypasta also has 2 intentional errors which only users who care a lot about detail would notice, which are that I said "just BTFO" to preserve the original copypasta's title even though the rebuttal was made decades ago, and that I said ">inb4 someone links to 1d4chan" even though 1d6chan exists and 1d4chan is down, since many 4chan olds dislike 1d6chan removing content that violated miraheze's TOS, however in hindsight it would likely have been a better idea to reference 1d6chan for additional possible replies.

To give /tg/ credit, one poster immediately accused me of being a "contrarianist troll", but this didn't kill the thread:

https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/94402739/#q94403061

Nice baby's first contrarianist troll, but the game's only relevant worth is being a subject of mockery, plain and simple. And I can summarize why with one single sentence: When the simple act of making a character and playing the game is such an unbearably boring waste of time, then that alone is enough to condemn any game even before you get to the r-slurred and the shitty charts. Cause at least the autism in fricking GURPs serves some kind of purpose. FATAL is just unpleasant as a whole.

This reply would be expected when posting bait on 4chan, however the poster also included an anime reaction image, which may depict a character from 40k, but it is unofficial fanart outside of the style of the game. Another user called out this act of extreme oldery:

https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/94402739/#94406623

Consider the following!

anime reddit meme reaction image

No point of substance, just bitching about not liking character creation

2 other users replied back, one of them saying that 40k is board culture, however the user who replied replies again, dropping an off-topic about anime reaction images:

https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/94402739/#94407438

That's not 40k, it's some gay little anime fan image of 40k. Stop being disingenuous and misrepresenting your arguments to worm out of them.

Furthermore, you've yet to present any arguments that aren't complaining about your own personal preferences

This didn't seem to discourage other users from replying to me, Another user accuses me of being Virtualoptim, a namestrag best known for this image:

Another reply which I partially expected due to my inclusion of ">inb4 someone defends Sartin & Mclellan's safe edgy humor" was a response stating that Sartin & Mclellan's humor would have been considered extremely offensive, given that rpg.net underwent a similar transformation to somethingawful (in this case, rpgcodex is the obligatory SASS equivalent)

rpg.net btfo'd themselves. The cute twinks who did this review turned out to be total cute twinks themselves and if someone else were to post stuff like this in present day they'd have a meltdown over it and ban them forever.

I did try to interact with the thread to keep up the pretense of my bait, however this was unsuccessful. First, when another user (https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/94402739/#q94403095) said that the game can't calculate swing force, I immediately remembered that one of the only non-horrible combat mechanics was fulcrum range, which actually does calculate swing force, and replied stating the page number on the online pdf of the rules I had used a search function to find fulcrum range in. Unfortunately, the user I responded to was using a different pdf of the rulebook, and did not find fulcrum range on that page. Secondly, I tried to reply to a user stating that everyone who has played FATAL has hated it by linking to a Kiwifarms letsplay of the game, which I found from this post: https://rdrama.net/h/traditionalgames/post/315746/fatal-and-kiwifarms-a-match-made, but I was banned from all of 4chan for 13 days since my post contained banned text (likely the kiwifarms link). This prevented me from correcting the error made by the user who could not find fulcrum range

The rest of the thread is relatively boring, but some users seem to be unironically defending FATAL as a response to users who responded to my bait, and one user, or potentially a collection of users, began rolling up a character just to prove how bad the character creation system is.

The thread theme, often described as sounding like "Cookie Monster chasing a drum set down a stairwell" is the greatest thing to come from the worst role-playing game ever.