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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8928984" data-attributes="member: 86653">Great post.Video games are a slightly older art form than RPGs and have a fairly well-established set of terms and theory. We could do worse than adapting those to suit our purposes. But most RPG people seem eager to reject those terms and theory.As you say, RPGs are not a monolith, more like 2d20 things stacked on top of each other in a trench coat pretending to be an adult. Likewise, gamers are not a monolith and want different things from the same games. But to make things even worse, the same game can be multiple things, pull from multiple art forms, and need multiple sets of (often contradictory) terms at the same time…to describe one thing.There’s also the matter of serious academic study of RPGs. There basically isn’t any. A few people are starting to write about the history of RPGs from an historical or journalistic point if view, but there’s no serious academic study of RPGs. The few names that come to mind that might loosely fit are Robin Laws and Tracy Hickman, and both are hyper focused on RPGs as story emulators over games per se. So perhaps quite good for that limited application but they utterly fail at seeing RPGs as anything else. Someone will inevitably mention Ron Edwards, but given his “anyone who likes that is brain damaged” comments and similar, he’s easily dismissed out-of-hand as someone to not be taken seriously.And what of the original creators of the genre? Maybe we can ask them? Nope. One is dead and the other has disavowed RPGs as a hobby and gone back to wargames. I’m speaking of course about Dave Arneson and David Wesley. (What is it with guys named Dave in this hobby?)To circle back, we could do a lot worse than borrowing from video games. They have spent a lot of time and money developing their terms and theory. There’s a lot of overlap and several obvious places where there are pot holes. So it should be a fairly painless lift and shift.Anyway…great post, Snarf.</blockquote>

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