NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 9704725" data-attributes="member: 2205">Barring that, just RPG buzzwords that you're sick of seeing tossed around. Some of these are a little on the older side, and a few are still new and faddish, but they've already become useless, IMO.Anyway, just a minor rant for amusement value. None of this should be taken too seriously. I mean, these buzzwords really are pet peeves of mine, but whatever. Pet peeves, by definition, aren't really important.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">OSR - OK, this first one is a little tongue in cheek. But given that nobody knows what the OSR really is anymore, and there are at least two overlapping yet also conflicting camps on what the definition really refers to, it's actually not a super useful label anymore.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Cinematic - this one is another one that gets tossed around all the time, but I'm not very clear on what people mean by it. I'm not sure that they are either.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">-punk - this has been a pet peeve of mine for years. Unless it's related to a dystopian worldview and an anti-establishment youth street movement, it's not -punk. Steampunk gets a grudging pass because it's obviously a derivative evolution of cyberpunk, where -punk was actually used correctly. People who think that they're clever talking about hope-punk, or calling Eberron magi-punk do not.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Liminal - I know that it's a pretty cool word, but c'mon. Horror in hallways and doorways? People use this all of the time to describe horror themes that are just... regular horror themes. It's either over-used now, or it's been under-used for decades. You could say that the original dungeon-crawling activity was liminal horror, and it'd be a mostly correct usage of the term. And yet for decades nobody felt the need to do so. There's really no need to do so now either; nine times out of ten, it's just a signal; "look at me; I use fancy vocabulary to describe regular things."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Diagetic - what was wrong with in-game and meta, like we used for decades? Was the hobby over-run by a bunch of sound engineers from the movie business who brought their vocabulary with them to replace words that were already in use? More likely, as above, it's a "more intelligent sounding" word, so people like it because they feel like they sound more intelligent by using it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">TTRPG - I feel like there's no need ninety-nine times out of a hundred to specify the context where an RPG is a TTRPG as opposed to a CRPG or ... I dunno, some other kind of RPG. (LARPG? Bedroom RPG? What other kinds even are there anyway?) Leave the TT off. It's superfluous. And a new, faddish addition to something that worked just fine for decades and still works fine. In fact, the more people play online, the less accurate rather than more accurate it becomes.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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