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I've noodled around with expanding Backgrounds and reducing classes down to Roles. So for example you're a Noble, but your Role is Fighter. The aim is to give a wider spread of skills and an element of choice when levelling. It also works as a semi-lifepath system, as older characters might...

IME there's just no accounting for players. Always getting in the way, messing up the good gaming.

Preach it! The Forge's contribution to the hobby far outweighs the silly rhetoric of some of its participants. I think the reason it keeps coming up in this convo is that it would be great to have a similar set of discussions, but with a more neutral tone. That'd be great.

Yeah man, this got tried once and Child Services are still trying to sort it out.

I'm only really interested as D&D+ as fantasy, so I'll limit myself to talking about that. AiME and Beowulf do some interesting things in the design space, but the problem I have is - as you say - wading through all the 3pp stuff to find snatches of useable homebrew to pad out the experience...

Man, that's just the way I lingo, so sorry, no offence meant. Simply put, I don't think the expanded D&D in the OP is any better for the hobby. None of the D&D-alikes solve the knotty problem of missing game systems and most just offer a different flavour of mishmash fantasy world.

Well, academia is both incredibly bitchy and people (especially in the humanities) are forever chasing the same pots of ever-dwindling research funding, so that plays into it. And sure, there's inter-disciplinary research and open dialogue between people. But I'm not sure that could happen in...

I mean, I don't "want" that. There are other games that handle social interaction, economies, relationships, politicking etc better than D&D and it's nice to have them as alternatives. But for me to accept D&D's dominance as a net positice and take a knee before the Coastal Wizards, D&D would...

Vanilla's fine. But there are gaps in what the core D&D system can do. If those were plugged I'd have less of a problem with its market and mindshare dominance.

I'd be more pragmatic about D&D being the 800lb Owlbear in the room if it was capable of delivering a fuller, richer experience than what has become D&D-fantasy. If there's going to be one game that in-the-darkness-binds-them, it would need to be a more complete (complete, not complicated) rule...

This is no different from the way criticism works in the Humanities, to be fair. Different methodologies and approaches, a heirarchy of texts, competition and rivalry along the lines of: You're doing it wrong and Blah isn't worth studying, No you're doing it wrong and Yaddayadda isn't worth...

My (former) academic bailiewick/personal preference would be to use psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches, but this here's a No Politics site so I've danced around that. But rather than defining play experiences, it might be possible to discuss the experiences that arise through the act of...

I think there's room for both examining the games as texts and discussing the experiences play brings about. The two don't seem mutually exclusive. But I totes agree that the most interesting area of study is where the rubber meets the road.

There's absolutely a necessary place for professional terminology in criticism. But there's a difference between useful jargon/shorthand in a professional setting and language designed to create an in-group wielding value-laden language to police what are ultimately matters of taste (and...

Yeah that's exactly the problem, isn't it? Would that it were not so. Even before terms can be defined, there would need to be a strong case made for why criticism is necessary, what the point of it is, and why criticism doesn't hate you and your favourite game. RPGs are just as tribal as...

I smell traces of Munchkin all up in the mix, but that could just be me.

There's an argument that all criticism/theoretical analysis comes from a place of ill intent. The sorts of analysis we're using as analogous - art, film, literature, music, that is the analysis of cultural production - were all designed to create a professional language barrier of exclusion...

It's like they've stitched together the corpses of three different games, given it the brain of Abbey Normal, and called forth the lightning. It's alive!!! Alive I tell you!!!

I think your point here alludes to the ways RPGs might reinforce/create/undermine interpassivity, which is a theoretical area of the RPG space I think would be worth exploring.

This is such an interesting, thought-provoking thread. I come down on the side of the RPG hobby being a very difficult beast to critique, for all the reasons given up-thread. To sum up my immediate thoughts, we can all agree on what a film "is" in terms of the medium of delivery (moving images...