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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5098578" data-attributes="member: 4720">It doesn't tell me everything, but it tells me orders of magnitude more than "I played D&D".  The definitions are better operationalized.  There's a larger social construct supporting pick-up games at the playground than there is around all of D&D.  There's a larger social network supporting games of HORSE than there is all of D&D.  I am thereby provided a set of questions I can ask to dial in exactly what kind of basketball you played and your answers will contain usable data even within a sentence or two."I mostly played on my high school team" provides an order of magnitude more precision than "I played mostly 2e".  "I love to play pick-up games at Reddit Park" provides vastly more information than "I prefer low magic games."  "I was starting point guard" gives 1000x more information than "I prefer to play wizards and sorcerors."The basketball quotes give me a lot of information because we're drawing on a huge amount of cultural shared knowledge.  The D&D quotes give me almost none.  One person's 2e is entirely different from another's.  One person's "low magic" is another person's monty haul.EDIT:In general, I'm not disagreeing much with anyone.  I don't think this is limited to gaming.  Any niche activity suffers from this to one degree or another.  I run into it constantly in research circles, too.I do think we're extra bad at codifying our jargon, though.  I have literally seen "low magic" campaigns where everyone was running around with talking artifacts and flying carpets.  When you're scuba diving or mountain climbing, codifying your jargon gets more important because a miscommunication could kill a real person rather than an imaginary avatar.  Miscommunications in D&D are able to be so common because the stakes are so low.</blockquote>

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