@Printdevil @RogerBW @Taskerland I never see The Traveller in Black referenced in discussions of gaming influences. Too weird and impersonal?

@BigJackBrass @Printdevil @RogerBW Ooof... I had to look up the Traveller in Black. Those stories sound very moody.

@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.

Those were some of my favourite fantasy writings growing up, I am always surprised how little they get referenced by RPG peeps.

The pay off at the very end. You knew it was coming but... ooof...

@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 In fairness, they were out of print between 1977 and 2014 - I had heard of Brunner but only really Stand on Zanzibar. @BigJackBrass @RogerBW

Is it that long? I must have read that when I was very young really.

A staff of curdled light...

@Taskerland @BigJackBrass @RogerBW

@Taskerland @Printdevil @BigJackBrass I don't think that can be quite right; ISFDB lists various editions of The Compleat Traveller in Black through the 1980s (and an ebook in 2014).

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

@Taskerland Hello. I agree about the five silos (I'm in the indie one). Not sure about D&D devouring OSR (are you including NSR stuff like Mythic Bastionland?). I disagree about Pbta devouring the indie scene, I think the opposite: Pbta is being deconstructed and cannibalized by the indie silo.

@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.

@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

@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

@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."

The Traveller has a goal, and an end, and the whole thing sort of ages in seasons. It's quite sad really. Certainly if you're 13

@Taskerland @BigJackBrass @RogerBW

@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.

@SJohnRoss In music, as in RPGs, scenes split and become invisible to each other. It has happened before and it will happen again.

My point is that, because RPG silos are about practice and social network as much as about aesthetic preference, the various silos are beginning to lose sight of each other. That is very similar to the formation of ideology.

@mdom Also, lots of bigger games are trying to position themselves as the heirs to 5e while also retaining some degree of visibility to OSR eyes so you basically have a funnel that is absorbing the OSR into a 'mainstream' that orbits D&D.

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.