Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
Classic play is oriented around the linked progressive development of challenges and PC power, with the rules existing to help keep those in rough proportion to one another and adjudicate the interactions of the two “fairly”
See in context at Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
Trad holds that the primary goal of a game is to tell an emotionally satisfying narrative, and the DM is the primary creative agent in making that happen - building the world, establishing all the details of the story, playing all the antagonists, and doing so mostly in line with their personal tastes and vision. The PCs can contribute, but their contributions are secondary in value and authority to the DM’s.
See in context at Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
The defining incident for Tracy was evidently running into a vampire in a dungeon and thinking that it really needed a story to explain what it was doing down there wandering around. Hickman wrote a series of adventures in 1980 (the Night Verse series) that tried to bring in more narrative elements, but the company that was supposed to publish them went bust. So he decided to sell them to TSR instead, and they would only buy them if he came to work for them. So in 1982, he went to work at TSR and within a few years, his ideas would spread throughout the company and become its dominant vision of “roleplaying”.
See in context at Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
The focus on challenge-based play means lots of overland adventure and sprawling labyrinths and it recycles the same notation to describe towns, which are also treated as sites of challenge. At some point, PCs become powerful enough to command domains, and this opens up the scope of challenges further, by allowing mass hordes to engage in wargame-style clashes. The point of playing the game in classic play is not to tell a story (tho’ it’s fine if you do), but rather the focus of play is coping with challenges and threats that smoothly escalate in scope and power as the PCs rise in level. The idea of longer campaigns with slow but steady progression in PC power interrupted only by the occasional death is a game play ideal for classic culture.
See in context at Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
Nordic Larp is built around the idea that the primary goal of a roleplaying game is immersion in an experience. Usually in a specific character’s experiences, but sometimes in another kind of experience where player and character are not sharply distinguished
See in context at Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
I think a fair characterisation of their position that doesn’t use their own terminology is that the ideal play experience minimises ludonarrative dissonance. A good game has a strong consonance between the desires of the people playing it, the rules themselves, and the dynamics of the those things interacting. Together, these things allow the people to achieve their desires, whatever they may be. “Incoherence” is to be avoided as creating “zilch play” or “brain damage” as Ron Edwards once called it.
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Created: 2025-06-12
Story games starts with Ron Edwards in 1999, when he writes System Does Matter and sets up the Forge.
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Created: 2025-06-12
the OSR is not “classic” play. It’s a romantic reinvention, not an unbroken chain of tradition.
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Created: 2025-06-12
The OSR draws on the challenge-based gameplay from the proto-culture of D&D and combines it with an interest in PC agency, particularly in the form of decision-making. The goal is a game where PC decision-making, especially diegetic decision-making, is the driver of play.
See in context at Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
The OSR mostly doesn’t care about “fairness” in the context of “game balance” (Gygax did). The variation in player agency across a series of decisions is far more interesting to most OSR players than it is to classic players.
See in context at Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
The OSR specifically refuses the authoritative mediation of a pre-existing rules structure in order to encourage diegetic interactions
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Created: 2025-06-12
the OC RPG culture shares a lot of the same norms as trad, secondly because I think people who belong to this culture believe they are part of trad. You also see this style sometimes called “the modern style” when being contrasted to the OSR
See in context at Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
OC basically agrees with trad that the goal of the game is to tell a story, but it deprioritises the authority of the DM as the creator of that story and elevates the players’ roles as contributors and creators.
See in context at Six Cultures of Play
Created: 2025-06-12
The term “OC” means “original character” and comes from online freeform fandom roleplaying that was popular on Livejournal and similar platforms back in the early 2000s.