Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Just like language is living, and in the US you can say "podium" and mean lectern as opposed to what the lectern is on, so do game description terms get picked up and morph with usage. (cough*Hit Dice*cough)
Reading the original articles about GNS is quite interesting from a historic point of view, but from a practical point of view the words mean what they have popularly come to mean. And that involves waves of usage from people who have heard about them second hand, third hand, and so forth.
So if I talk about 13th Age's recovery mechanism being undocked from characters sleeping, and someone calls that "too gamist for their tastes", gamist in this example is more about what that word has come to mean in popular usage rather than a callback to the meaning in the first presentation.
It's interesting from a historical perspective where these terms came from, but could cause miscommunication to use them in those specific aspects when the majority of those reading the terms will understand them as they are commonly used now.
Reading the original articles about GNS is quite interesting from a historic point of view, but from a practical point of view the words mean what they have popularly come to mean. And that involves waves of usage from people who have heard about them second hand, third hand, and so forth.
So if I talk about 13th Age's recovery mechanism being undocked from characters sleeping, and someone calls that "too gamist for their tastes", gamist in this example is more about what that word has come to mean in popular usage rather than a callback to the meaning in the first presentation.
It's interesting from a historical perspective where these terms came from, but could cause miscommunication to use them in those specific aspects when the majority of those reading the terms will understand them as they are commonly used now.