gorice
Hero
Interesting thread!
First, the fly in the ointment: I have to agree with @Whizbang Dustyboots. This is probably my third time reading that essay, and every time I do, I like it less. For one thing, I'm no expert on the subject, but if you're going to talk about cultures, it seems important to define them by their practices and account for how they are transmitted. Or, alternately, any consistent standard. Otherwise, actual play cultures, RPG theory, subcultural identifiers (like OSR or story gaming), and astroturfed cultures created by products or branding (trad, and again OSR and PBTA) all get lumped together in a way that doesn't tell us much about what's actually happening. That's before we get to the fact that the author clearly has an animus against what they call 'story games', which leads to the conflation of various indie RPG cultures with Forge theory and the misrepresentation of them all. In short: the 'six cultures of play' schema tells us a lot about received wisdom within online RPG discourse, and nothing at all about actual cultures of play.
Case in point: I've seen all of the behaviors labelled 'neotrad' in play, but I'm not sure what to make of them. I refuse to believe that CharOp theorycrafting and freeform roleplay have much in common, except as a convenient schematic bucket. @The-Magic-Sword gives a much richer and more useful description of an actual culture of play (and thanks for that!).
Adding to the confusion, it seems to me that a culture of play, the individual participants' goals for play, and the particular rules used in a given instance are all distinct variables.
First, the fly in the ointment: I have to agree with @Whizbang Dustyboots. This is probably my third time reading that essay, and every time I do, I like it less. For one thing, I'm no expert on the subject, but if you're going to talk about cultures, it seems important to define them by their practices and account for how they are transmitted. Or, alternately, any consistent standard. Otherwise, actual play cultures, RPG theory, subcultural identifiers (like OSR or story gaming), and astroturfed cultures created by products or branding (trad, and again OSR and PBTA) all get lumped together in a way that doesn't tell us much about what's actually happening. That's before we get to the fact that the author clearly has an animus against what they call 'story games', which leads to the conflation of various indie RPG cultures with Forge theory and the misrepresentation of them all. In short: the 'six cultures of play' schema tells us a lot about received wisdom within online RPG discourse, and nothing at all about actual cultures of play.
Case in point: I've seen all of the behaviors labelled 'neotrad' in play, but I'm not sure what to make of them. I refuse to believe that CharOp theorycrafting and freeform roleplay have much in common, except as a convenient schematic bucket. @The-Magic-Sword gives a much richer and more useful description of an actual culture of play (and thanks for that!).
Adding to the confusion, it seems to me that a culture of play, the individual participants' goals for play, and the particular rules used in a given instance are all distinct variables.
I've encountered this kind of thing as a GM. Personally, I'm not a fan (and I don't much like doing what I once heard someone call 'service top GMing'), but I do wonder what is going on here. I understand the pleasure of inhabiting a character. I completely understand feeling that a character is done and needs to be retired. What I don't get, is planning an arc for that character and then merely inhabiting them as they go along. I'd be tempted to write it off as a degenerate form of play (a sort of reverse railroading, or 'story now' play that never gets going because the player can't play in the moment), but maybe there's something I'm missing.I think you're right in that I should have made the fact that those two concepts were different clearer, to me, they came together under what you outline as their commonality of premeditation. I've also noticed that you can get tension if they get it too fast and then the player has to figure out "Ok wait, where do they go from here since I thought that once X happened their story is pretty much over" which is actually something specific one of my most ardently neotrad (my label not theirs) players feels about most characters in stories-- they have their one arc that consists of the growth they were meant to have and then that's it, they live happily ever after aside from helping out. They've also rather candidly told me that they prefer stories where the GM ties together the background antagonists created by the players into one (loosely or otherwise) enemy faction so that the arc isn't fully resolved until the campaign ends all at once.