innerdude
Legend
". . . You may ask yourself, am I right? Am I wrong? . . ."
"And you may say to yourself, 'My God, what have I done?'"
". . . You may ask yourself, am I right? Am I wrong? . . ."
Omg, is life just a railroad??"And you may say to yourself, 'My God, what have I done?'"
I specifically call out that you didn't say that these discussions help us DISCOVER what we care about - and you are correct not to say that, because they don't. Theory discussions around here are not about exploration. If they were about exploration, and we kept coming back to the same points, then I'd agree that we'd solidified around what really mattered. But, since we aren't really exploring the possible theory landscape, we aren't going to find anything in the discussions.
Omg, is life just a railroad??
David Byrne I'm sure would have a comment on that . . . .
Considering some of the surveys that I have seen WotC produce,* I am somewhat skeptical about what the results tell us concretely about the playerbase. This is not to say that the marketing research is wrong, but there are also a lot of unknowns about how they conducted that market research, the sort of questions that were being asked, and the respondents. Moreover, this only really tells us about the market in 1999. Has this shifted (and how) within the last 20 years? The same groupings may exist, though the concentrations of answers may have changed.@seankreynolds used to have an article on "The Breakdown of RPG Players" which was a result of the 1999 WotC market research. Unfortunately, the site that was hosted on has gone away, and I cannot find another copy of it.
However, my memory is that the cluster analysis of their survey data revealed 5 groupings - four of which mapped largely to the groupings you note here (I don't doubt that someone at WotC had read about the Fourfold Way), and a fifth, that was an admixture of the four. If I recall correctly, in fact the majority of players sat in the "mixed" group, rather than adhering strongly to any one aspect of gaming.
And mine isn't an argument that, say, the Fourfold Way doesn't represent the basic real issues of RPGs. It is just that repeated internet argument about one set of things things doesn't itself indicate that those are THE THINGS that matter at our tables.
Considering some of the surveys that I have seen WotC produce,*
So is that an exploration of the theory? Not per se.
Discussions about theory on EnWorld more gravitate toward elucidation and education than exploration.