I enjoyed the essay but im not one that agrees with this recent notion that words are made meaningless. We still need to discuss things to understand each other. The context matters and you will never distill words into entire concepts on their own. "RPG" covers a lot of ground, but its still a common ground.
Ninja'd by Umbran's "sports" analogy.
I've encountered a few games that do a good job of narrowing their focus and funneling players into it. I've also seen the D&D effect derail that process. Sometimes a group comes apart without any fault of the game at all. There is much to the dynamic of an RPG play group to consider.
Divergent playstyles require compromise and adjusted expectations. A good example for me was when I played organized play with PFS. I enjoyed meeting people and seeing how they enjoy the game. Sometimes I really hit it off, and sometimes I hit a roadblock. That was often abotu emchanical applicaiton, but some of it was persoanlity. What I needed was good expectation that the game wasnt going to be consistent and that I needed to understand that to make it enjoyable.
When it comes to my own private games at home or online, im a bit more picky (particualrly now with online). I get to curate my group into a closer fit of mechanical expectation and persoanlity. I dont expect to have to compromise here and focus more on exactly what I want.
How did I get there? Well, organized play and conventions taught me the power of the one shot. A try before you buy routine. I have one rule abour RPG group forming and its never join a long term campaign with folks I have never played with before. I always work up to it through one shots and maybe the promise of more gaming to come. What I have come to relaize is that you can try and lock down a commonality with language such as "role play focus" but you wont really align until you see the execution in play.
RPG is a nebulous term for a hobby that can include multitudes of play styles and interests. Like a discussion, you need a greater context for it to be cosnturctive than to expect total understanding from a single term. YMMV.
Well, I’m glad you enjoyed reading it—and honestly, that’s all I ever hope for, whether someone agrees or not. I think you’ve read enough of my other posts to know I’m not working toward any grand agenda or trying to draw lines for a meaningless “movement.” I’m not here to tell anyone what to think, or to claim my perspective carries more weight than anyone else’s. I just like looking at things from different angles and encouraging others to do the same—even if that means I end up challenging my own ideas in the process.
Anyone can score points with a punchline or post a borrowed meme. There’s plenty of that kind of surface-level noise already—it just doesn’t move the conversation forward. We’ve all been in this echo chamber long enough to recognize how quickly it rewards repetition and discourages reflection. I’m not immune to it myself, but I try to resist it through conversations like these—mental exercises that keep me questioning, writing, and thinking critically.
So I genuinely appreciate you showing up for thoughtful discussion and pushing back where you see it differently. That’s what makes it worthwhile. Even when we don’t see eye-to-eye—maybe
especially then—it helps refine what we’re actually trying to understand.
I think you’re exactly right that context and experience are what give those words meaning. The point I was aiming at isn’t that “roleplaying game” is being used wrong (that may have gotten lost somewhere in the density of my own words), but that it’s become so broad we’ve stopped noticing its flexibility—and its fragility. It started as a catch-all term emerging from wargames, when the boundaries were still forming. A computer RPG and a tabletop RPG could share the same label even when they had almost nothing in common beyond “playing a role.”
Over time, we didn’t resolve that ambiguity; we normalized it. So when someone picks up a “roleplaying game,” they might be getting a story-driven collaboration, a tactical skirmish, or something in between. Most of us navigate that instinctively, as you describe through one-shots and group curation—but that doesn’t mean the label itself communicates better; it just means we’ve learned to fill in the gaps ourselves. That’s why we still sit down for a Session Zero: to define the kind of experience we actually want.
That’s where tension creeps in—not for everyone, but often more than we admit. D&D set one standard for what an “RPG” means; it literally calls itself "the world’s greatest roleplaying game" and remains the cultural reference point. So other RPGs that do things differently, like Daggerheart or Genesys, inevitably get compared to it, even when they pursue entirely different philosophies. It’s not narrow-mindedness; it’s linguistic gravity. The dominant example shapes how the term is understood, even before anyone sits down to play.
The “solution” isn’t a fix so much as a heightened awareness—one that comes from more than cursory thought numbed by generations of normalization. Declaring one kind of RPG as preferred, or interpreting it as the correct and proper way to play
with your table, doesn’t automatically mean exclusion or derision toward everyone else's ideas or opinions. But it often becomes that. And that, more than anything else, is the root of many of our divisions.
