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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8936189" data-attributes="member: 7030755">I don't know exactly what you mean here by "clinical," but its connotations for me suggest a certain objectivity and impartiality in analysis.  As I said far upthread, I think an ideal of such impartiality cannot quite be achieved because we are always analyzing something from a particular point of view and with particular questions/goals in mind; for example, the goal of how to be a "better" GM ("better" being defined by some set of subjective criteria).  Thus, imo, the kinds of "criticism" one finds with respect to ttrpgs is usually confined to advice on the craft of GMing, one practitioner to another.  Perhaps there is the perception that if one presents this kind of hobbyist chatting using abstract terms it will seem more disinterested and clinical, but, well, for me at least it just obfuscates and confuses the conversation.This is compounded by the fact that there isn't a "dataset" per se when we have these discussions, but rather simply individual experiences occasionally conveyed through anecdotes largely detached from their full context.  I know Forge-descendant discussion places a heavy emphasis on play reports, and perhaps they are the best we have, but here you are turning the experience of an hours-long play session into a clipped and fragmentary summary of events, all glossed by only one individual--an individual who might be providing this anecdotal summary for the sake of proving a point in an online argument, no less.  More contemporary discussions make reference to video or audio actual plays, which do provide helpful glimpses but also present their own problems.Think, for example, what an ethnographer would do if taking a ttrpg as an object of study.  It would involve considerable participant observation, extensive interviews, coding of transcripts, examination of all ephemera (GM notes, etc).  Moreover, the questions this research would ask would likely be broader in scope that simply evaluating the effectiveness in the games mechanics in producing a particular type of play experience, since there is a lot more to "what's happening at the table."  For example, say one of the players spends most of the game drawing OCs and posting them to reddit; this might be irrelevant for the purposes of evaluating a system, since these drawings don't feed into the system in a way that 'matters,' but might be extremely relevant considering the broader social dynamics of the whole situation.  And still, even in this case, this ethnographer would need to disclose their own positionally and situate their research within relevant critical paradigms in a rigorous way.  tldr: a critical appraisal of ttrpgs is difficult [on online forums] due the narrow scope of practitioner interests, complete lack of methodology, and most importantly a compromised and effectively non-existent dataset.but we can talk about what games we like and share advice based on experiences</blockquote>

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