Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jacob Lewis" data-source="post: 9782243" data-attributes="member: 6667921">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.</blockquote>

Verification