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if someone asks you to put a seatbelt on, do you wonder exactly how fast they are going to drive, and then worry about trusting the other passengers not to use it to leave you trapped in the car? I wonder if it’s just the novelty of the X-card that surprises you; I believe that when seatbelts...

I want to highlight this point. It’s almost a truism that a fundamental of a good game is that you trust the GM, and the GM is trustworthy, but so many threads are based on problems that boil down to lack of trust that it seems we need to keep saying it. Trust is also something that needs...

Indeed. My group plays a large mix of systems, with Fantasy d20 games maybe ¼ of them, and political shenanigans is way down the list of things they find fun. There's a fair amount of it in the Mindjammer (FATE) game I've just started and I think I'm going to have to cut back. When the players...

um, well, that's a long topic. But in English, most oft them are borrowed or assembled from outer languages. An example is "tele-vision" which is made up run the sense of being coined, but it's not made up from nothing; there are rules that dictate how good words are assembled. For me, one...

Hmmm. I've generally heard the opposite. Even in Living campaigns there has always been a sizable group who didn't care about whether group A, or group B was running city C. They had the following attitude:

Currently running a hard sci-fi campaign using Sarah Newton's excellent Mindjammer sourcebook for Fate sci-fi play. Very different feel from the Bulldogs Fate-based sci-fi game I was in a few years ago, and from the Savage Worlds Flash Gordon game I ran a 24 session campaign over Discord.

Thought experiment time: A: If you were to observe a randomly-chosen set of players during a roleplaying game session, how likely do you think you would be to correctly assign that session to one of the categories in the article? B: If you were to observe a randomly-chosen set of players...

Skipping your continued insinuations that I’m not paying attention; since the blog specifically mentions other written materials and organized play, it’s a bit silly to say “if you just look at the books” Really, you think saying you are strong supporters makes you look like crackpots? That...

oh yes, definitely. In spades. But for 3.5 and 4E it was spades, forks, trucks, containers, tankers ... it might be enlightening to compare the ratio of char-op posts to non-char-op posts for the two; my feeling is that it was much higher 10 years ago

To me, the fact that the two people who seem most supportive of the theory cannot agree on whether the singular most popular RPG is in one category or not, and that the entire "culture" of 5E changes when you look at all books or just rulebooks, argues very convincingly that the theory is vague...

Not sure who you're addressing this to; can't see anyone in this thread with that position. Perhaps you should quote the person you're asking the question of? On the chance it's me, the quote you're looking for is: "most people don't care about the priorities informing a game design" which is...

Well, as you can see from @Ovinomancer's response, not everyone will agree with you that 5E exemplifies the description of OC/Neo-trad in the blog. To recap, the blog characterizes that "culture" with the following: shares a lot of the same norms as trad ("the primary goal of a game is to tell...

I'm with you! I prefer much more directed games with a specific focus. I don't play 5E because yeah, it's only "OK" at everything -- or at least, that's how it feels to me. But just because it's not my thing doesn't mean it's not a good, fun massively enjoyable game that deserves to be the most...

An important point -- thanks for raising it. I disagree, but it's really just opinion so I'm quite willing to be told I'm wrong on this! For me, the fact that most people don't care about the priorities informing a game design means that we shouldn't be as hung up about them as we can get...

Well, honestly, "game design" does seem to be a fairly anarchic. It's pretty hard for me to discern any structure that covers all the designs across the board, so yes, I guess I agree with you -- game design doesn't have any form of organizing structured but instead pulls ideas from wherever...

Simply the plain English definition "a manner of doing something". My observation is that in most people-based data there is a large group -- often the largest group -- of people who just don't care that much about all the details that we discuss and just like doing the thing. The blog does...

So, I have done quite a bit of clustering for a variety of data in my profession (statistics and machine learning) and I disbelieve Ryan Dancey. I looked at as much of the base data as he presented and honestly, I could see little that said there were “very clear segments”. In 20+ years of...

I estimate maybe 20 convention / online games a year with strangers over 30 or so years, so a potential 600 or so. A few recalled me and I recalled them, but well under 5%, so, say 550+

Well then, I’m going to have to ask you to address the latter part of my post. Since there is no fundamental difference between internalizing the rules of language, and internalizing the rules of a game, and since if you do not internalize either, they will block an immersive experience, do you...

I know where you are coming from, but I cannot agree with this as a blanket statement. It seems to me like saying that “sentences” and “grammar” are dissociated from traditional written narrative, which is clearly not the case. For roleplaying, I’d say that mechanics are the way you construct...