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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7448353" data-attributes="member: 996">I'm not trying to brow-beat you into changing your choice of wording, but I'm going to have to work may way through this, every time, because I can't imagine I'll ever be comfortable calling RPGs 'mainstream,' in any sense or context.What you're talking about is D&D, and I suppose d20, and related/similar games, when they are Played A Certain Way, that being some variation on the ways that folks traditionally settled on to get D&D working for them back in the day.  That said Way Of Playing is relatively monolithic, and used by such a large majority that it's relatively un-examined, from within.  And, that this de-facto majority constitutes an 'in group,' with indie games - really, any game not D&Dish-enough - on the outside.  From which outsider perspective, you are looking in.  A "there's two kinds of gamers..." proposition.I don't really quite agree with that way of looking at it.  Rather, I see the community as having a lot of D&D-only to D&D-primary participants who mostly may, indeed, have the sort of in-group perspective you're positing, and then various much smaller demographics who mostly have also or even do still play D&D, but have much greater exposure to one or more other significantly different games, including some who are very cosmopolitan in that regard (like, I'm guessing, you, pemerton, & manbearcat, just for instances).  The D&D-only/primary crowd is by far the largest, since D&D is the only RPG with significant mainstream name recognition (in the actual mainstream of society), so where the majority of would-be gamers start - if they can't stand it, they may not ever find out there's a lot of alternatives, and that's it, they never really join the hobby; if they like it (or learn to live with it, at least), they join the D&D/d20-centric majority ('mainstream' in your terminology, I'd almost have to say cult, since we're talking the core of a fringe-sub-culture that has endured decades of relative obscurity prior to the current come-back), if not, they go looking for other games and fall into admiration of one or a few of them settling into a 'niche,' or eventually become more cosmopolitan.   Well, The DM Provides.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  I don't much care for the Forge conclusion that games have to somehow force everyone who uses them to Play A Certain Way or else the game is 'incoherent,' nor that a game that a game having chosen an agenda to 'support' must do so by blocking or punishing others.   Frankly, I think a game could do well to be fairly open to being played in a variety of different ways, and that a well-designed game that's robustly balanced will naturally tend that way...   I think most of us would have less fun with mainstream games - like monopoly, for instance.  ;PThough, seriously, you don't need to mean to imply it in a comparison like that, the implication is going to be seen by & antagonize anyone even a little defensive about their place (of 'privilege' even) in the hobby's dominant segment.If we're drawing set diagrams, there's a 'universe' of people and an itty-bitty circle for the set of people who actually play TTRPGs.  It's heavily overlapped by larger circles - science fiction fans, people you read comic books, fans of My Little Pony, MMO gamers, CCG Gamers, etc.  It's entirely contained in the broader 'Gamer' set, even though there are some aberrant individuals who play TTRPGs without ever touching a video game, let alone play poker for money....While the actual mainstream largely thinks "D&D" is the whole hobby, we know that TTRPGs are a whole category with many quite different games.  I think it's more important that any two given RPGs (even if one of them will almost always be D&D), are both TTRPGs, and overlap in the experience they provide, than that they're different in what they provide or how.  Though there's certainly value to people realizing there's more out there in the rest of the hobby than they may have yet had personal experience with. How 'bout "DMing" and you can have "GMing" It's just what the current ed of D&D is calling the 'Golden Rule'/'Rule 0'/Illusionism/the-Killer-to-Monty-Haul spectrum of DM Disorders/Variants/House-Rules/Improv/Covert-Freestyle-RP/etc.  "DM Empowerment."  And I'm consciously using DM rather than GM, because there's plenty of games that don't count on the reality that the GM can do whatever he wants, but actually try to present workable systems, even if they might not always be used. Just as the 5e Fighter's "Best at fighting" is 'best' in the Advertising Claim sense of "no alternative has been conclusively proven to be strictly better," DM 'Empowerment' is 'Empowering' in the management-fad sense, of giving you more responsibility, maybe a snazzier title, but no additional authority or pay.  ;P</blockquote>

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