Thomas Shey
Legend
5e defines the mainstream full stop. Some posters used to get mad at me for calling it mainstream.
I do get very annoyed with all the virtue signaling around popularity used to put other games, playstyles, and entire posters in a box where they are treated as basically irrelevant. Basically if you exist on the margins of our overall play culture it feels like you must constantly demure and subjugate yourself before the dominant culture. Basically apologize for your games, your tastes, your perspective, etc. Have your views, experiences, and viewpoint be treated as less valuable on an individual basis. It feels very patronizing.
This is a bit of a problem here in particular just because this board is so D&D-centric; there's a fair number of people who view the world in terms of D&D and also-rans.
The biggest case and point for this is all the special pleading around the flexibility of mainstream games. If you prefer less popular games well they must be these narrow bespoke experiences. Not just different ones.
People who make that claim certainly can't have seen Cortex.
I don't particularly like being put in a box like that. The call to basically have warning labels for games that clearly have things like binding social mechanics feels very much like asking us to apologize for existing.
No. It just says that people who want things on the margins of the hobby are used to looking for that. I'd find it pretty surprising to find people who are used to Fate or PbtA games who would expect one of the million 5e derivatives to serve their needs. They aren't liable to get an unpleasant surprise, and they're fairly unlikely to hit something that really is disruptive to their group (though its not impossible; I suspect even people used to PbtA could find at least the first version of Monsterhearts a bit much, but that's got to do with its particular topics than anything else).
On the other hand, the number of people who take it as a given that social mechanics will be minor and/or not apply to PCs is very large.
As an analogy, its like allergies: everything that has nuts in it warns people about it because nut allergies are so damn common. If you've got a less common allergy, you have to do your own research, but because its less common, you're used to that for the most part; at least as an adult you don't eat things without checking the ingredients.