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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9629849" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, I'm not really asking you to adopt anything. I'm just asking for explanations or engagement that is more than hand-waving "I know it when I see it"/"It literally can't be discussed, it's just not possible"/"there's so much more to it but I can't put it in words" type stuff.Putting things into words is...pretty much literally what a discussion forum is about. And if a style cannot articulate what it is about, it's hard to see how that style can ever survive or propagate!Then you're going to need more than mere speculative "well it COULD be harmful..." for such a position. Like, I get that you want to not push people away. That's an understandable motive. But the mere fear that someone, somewhere, might be harmed by merely having someone on here speak about TTRPGs by using theory, and by condensing down styles to the actual actions involved in enacting that style, is really tenuous. It borders on raising alarm bells over people talking about smoke, when no smoke has been seen or smelled.The problem is, the position you have staked out above is that we shouldn't use it, not just that it's not helpful for some people. That it is somehow insulting to you to use such theory in your presence, or to use it when we discuss game topics.And of course it's controversial. It's new. RPG game design theory is literally still in its infancy. The field as a whole isn't even a single human lifetime old! Even if we grant proper wargames as the initial inspiration, those didn't exist until the late 18th century at the absolute earliest. (No, I don't count chess.) By comparison, music theory is, at bare minimum, at least three and a half thousand years old--and possibly more than five thousand years old. For a field that is somewhere between 50 and 250 years old, yeah, I think it's quite reasonable for it to still be controversial, to still be figuring itself out and not entirely well-structured yet.</blockquote>

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