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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gorice" data-source="post: 8995541" data-attributes="member: 7032863">Interesting thread!First, the fly in the ointment: I have to agree with [USER=11760]@Whizbang Dustyboots[/USER]. 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.  [USER=6801252]@The-Magic-Sword[/USER] 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.</blockquote>

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