Sunday morning and my wife is still asleep while I am reading the entire Internet. Well, actually I’m reading newsgroups!
@wandererbill writes about the three systems that got their own newsgroups and no newsgroups for Traveller, Runequest, Science Fiction in general, and the newsgroups having “frp” instead of “rpg” in their name. Good points all! See his article.
A quote from his post:
What would a modern day list of rpg related news groups look like? I think it would be fair to simply stick with frp as a general hierarchy, but there are some groups I think would make sense to add in 2023. How about:
rec.games.frp.indierec.games.frp.osrrec.games.frp.storygamesrec.games.frp.diyrec.games.frp.sci-fi
Given the overall low traffic on usenet, these topics could of course all go into rec.games.frp.misc for now. But who knows ...
The following is based on my reply.
I think the simple argument would be that there is not enough traffic to split things up. If categories are too fine-grained, there’s no conversation. It seems to me that conversation depends on a certain number of people being present in one “place”. Thus, into “misc” they all go.
There’s an additional argument to be made against the division proposed: These lines are very arbitrary and there is a high degree of similarity between all of them. Sure, there are differences – but it seems to me that these differences are shifting and our evaluation of differences and similarities aren’t easily stated because there’s no single “product” to point to like in the three old product-related groups (D&D, GURPS, Storyteller).
For example:
Indie and OSR are very similar in that they are reactions to the established publishing models twenty years ago when people discovered PDF production, layout at home, and PDF shops were set up and people actually started using them, blogs became a thing, and the idea of free software licenses started spreading into other topics with Creative Commons and software people getting into other jobs. So many things started changing at the same time. It’s true that The Forge started with strong ideas of their own, with Ron Edwards essays and new design goals where as the OSR started with retro-clones, but in as much as they were reactions to the changing means of production, they were very similar.
Storygames were reactions to the predominant combat and dice-rolling focus of D&D. But really, what about Amber Diceless and play by post games without rules and the current ideas of Freies Kriegsspiel, and the fascination with lite rule systems like RISUS, PDQ, Fudge and Fate? Is there really such an easy line to draw between Indie and Story Games, between OSR and Story Games?
And what about DIY? Is that just the non-commercial arm of the OSR? Or is that people with no corporate structure backing them up, i.e. Indie? And why isn’t the DIY spirit not the same as OSR? Only if you push the OSR into the retro-clone corner, perhaps? Again, too many similarities, plenty of counter examples when you start looking.
And Science Fiction? Is Traveller not OSR? Is Mindjammer not Fate and therefore Indie? Is Stars Without Number not OSR? And Cepheus Engine can be used for every Tech Level, like Traveller. So is it Science Fiction?
For all of these reasons, I think we should be careful about splintering groups. Otherwise we end up like those over-engineered Discord Servers with 99 channels and nothing on.
#RPG #News