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Great blog post! In general table culture is underdiscussed. Perhaps because it's hard to quantify, or sell. I find a lot of the arguing about what is and isn't OSR or Trad frustrating. Is it OSR? I don't particularly care. Do you have a good time playing with your friends? Now that matters a lot.

I liked this, although as with all play culture articles I've read, I've never played at a table that was only doing one of them. Every table I've ever played at was some weird mixture of two or three play styles, usually because people came from different games and traditions.

Brilliant post. Until play style and our tendency to form micro-cultural islands becomes central to discussions of play experiences and group formation, we'll be retreading this path of frustration endlessly. A system can't solve this, thanks to the second-order design problem.

10/10 post just for the return links on the footnotes

I think there's a semantic rebuttal hidden in that last sentence. If it had a title it could be "No, Games, not Rulesets". But I disagree because "Game" is too vague a term. So I say "No, Cultures, not Rulesets".

Good blog. Also, this is pretty much how I first felt when I got Electric Bastionland

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast," so I've heard

But the post points out that, in all likelihood, the culture might not change that much. But maybe they'll get benefits from trying something new.

I love this post. It is frustrating how much of RPG culture is arguments about practices going by like 2 ships in the night cause it's actually a culture difference. We really need better taxonomy and history.