@RogerBW @Taskerland @Printdevil The collection I had was certainly an eighties paperback.

@BigJackBrass I was probably misreading isfbd. I just saw a 77 collection and a mire recent reprint that included some of the Traveller in Black stuff. @RogerBW @Printdevil

Either way I was certainly very young reading it. I just love the concept of the instigator, the one who turns the wheel in it all.

@Taskerland @BigJackBrass @RogerBW

@SJohnRoss I think we are headed in that direction. Real-world ideologies are never perfect and they do have some flex to them but they do also limit the boundaries of the imagination and the viseceral horror that people display when they encounter different approaches does look a lot like ideological difference. It's not just 'these people are wrong' it's 'there is something wrong with these people'.

@Printdevil It reminds me a bit of manga stuff like Golgo 13 and Lone Wolf and Cub which is basically hundreds of episodes of 'terrifying amoral assassin is hired to murder a hyper-bastard, bad things follow' @BigJackBrass @RogerBW

@mdom My sense is that the NSR has been re-absorbed by the OSR - Mythic Bastionland is procedural in a way that Into the Odd isn't. Ditto, the Non-fantasy elements of the NSR are increasingly ignored outside of Mothership.

My sense of PbtA is that while there is an legit influence, PbtA people also lay claim to Brindlewood and Forged in the Dark stuff suggesting centralisation rather than the fragmentation you suggest but I suspect your sense is clearer than mine.

@Taskerland There are always individuals, in every area of interest, that see differences in taste as proof of deficiency in the other person.

A friend of mine, reacting to my musical tastes, once confidently diagnosed me as having hearing trouble in the upper frequencies. It just made more sense to him that I must be deficient in some way to like music he disliked.

That's a mild version of things that happen in every subjective realm. "Those who don't choose as I choose must be broken."

@Taskerland You're probably right about the OSR. I think D&D is becoming hegemonic in an aggressive way we haven’t seen in recent years. It’s a tsunami of marketing flooding the hobby, especially targeting new players.

@Taskerland I don't buy the ideological thing. To be sure, there are noisy _individuals_ who think everyone should share their tastes.

But tastes are all there is to it.

There will always be nerds who need their tastes to be somehow _objectively_ "valid," because some people have fragile needs. But no amount of that kind of emotional damage adds up to ideology, IMO.

S. John Ross The idological thing feels very real and accurate to me, it’s just that the idologies aren’t “D&D” or “Blades/Apocalypse”. From what I’ve seen, it’s “tell me how to resolve this” vs “let me decide how to resolves this”. And while this often gets broken down as “rules-light” vs “rules-heavy”, or “rulings” vs “rules”, so many people play crunchier games like D&D in the latter way (and I play PF2e in the latter way) that it doesn’t quite break down in the prescribed way.

But treating a very systematic game like Pathfinder 2 as a playground has caused me to run against the grain of that community so thoroughly that I can’t help but view it as being made up of people who don’t see tools or toolboxes, but orders and mandates. And I think those are the idologies at play here. The ideology of “high trust” tables vs “low trust” tables.

@kichae There will always be individuals who judge taste irrationally or who want to establish their tastes as objectively this or that ... not just in games but in every area of entertainment or art, and online they'll always seem more common than they are offline.

Just regular old taste.

Calling playstyles and play cultures "ideology" is inflationary. Par for the Internet, but not in the fun, cat-memes way.

S. John Ross I’m gonna need you to describe what, exactly, is inflationary about it. Because the only thing I’m seeing here that’s even remotely inflationary is your aggressively haughty dismissiveness.