people can definitely relate to a joke that involves the words "topological sorting" right

the fascinating thing about RPGs is that playing them involves on-the-fly game design and fiction-creation, even with tools which try to be very prescriptive & exhaustive. every table can incubate something weird that nobody's done before. but often it will only be legible to that table.

but maybe that's a good thing. evolutionary analogy: having lots of 'islands' allows radiation. I believe a lot of the most interesting things in all media come out of niche creative bubbles (dōjin circles etc.) which can adopt their own norms and wander to a different area of aesthetic space.

since I have a limited sample (tbh most of my design touchpoints are a decade+ old now), can only guess at wider trends. everyone feeling the economic squeeze and world getting scarier? so, retreats from the public internet panopticon into the safety of niche discords. lots of friend-group bubbles.

right now I am thinking of RPG design mostly in terms of creative tools, recognising that the players' skill/creativity is what makes an RPG manifest. so I want to offer useful scaffolding/affordances rather than an auteur experience, and trust people to put their own spin on whatever I offer.

so with everyone exploring similar design spaces, and others able to bring more time/effort/resources/experience to bear on presentation etc., probs anything I make will be lost in the noise. better to focus on ad-hoc stuff for my friends, rather than More RPG Books to fill ppls shelves/hard drives?

shared with videogames, we have the 'everything that everyone has ever said' issue: the number of existing 'games' (in terms of rulebooks etc.) is enormous and always growing. the space of techniques is rn perhaps still in more of a 'normal science' phase than the 2010s Kuhnian revolution...

can't claim to be an active TTRPG Designer(TM) yet, but for me right now, I'm paying a lot of attention to any ppl coming out of theoretical silos/one-true-wayism to try to cross-pollinate different theory traditions (storygamers, OSR, mainstream game design theory, philosophy etc.)

in the light of morning I feel like this analogy struggles to account for the Suitsian aspect of RPGs explored in the first half. like, in 3D graphics, you don't try to create arbitrary additional goals and obstacles to strive against. I mean, unless you're a demoscener... oh shit

ty to friend who sent me an attestation from 2008! suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/2008...

this thread seems to be exploring variants of the idea and assuming existing knowledge, so it must be older, but it's pushed the date back a year!

*2009, not 2008. I can't find anything from 2008 with before:2009, but I think GiantITP purged their archives at some point so it may have been deleted.

I appreciate it! lemme follow you on there ^^

thank you for reading!!

like, thanks for giving so many tools to help this random woman nerd out about her hobby, and I hope this effort to stick all your ideas together like lego bricks can give something back in turn... (she says... trying not to sound too 'notice me senpai' about it...)

oh, while I'm going through 'wait half the people I cite in this thing are on Bluesky', I depend a ton on @increment.bsky.social's research into early RPG theory, and the parts relating to the Root video and Bernard Suits are heavily based on @add-hawk.bsky.social's analysis. so ty to you as well <3

I think at the end of this one I came to somewhere new and maybe useful for understanding the role of game design in RPGs without getting stuck on a Forge-y rules-fetish. Basically, an analogy between RPG systems and creative tools like Blender or programming languages. I hope it proves interesting!

I'm leaning on another video of Vi Huntsman on the RPG 'Dread' and what can and can't be attributed to systems, which has fascinating observations by @adira.bsky.social

Also, on @liberludorum.com who assembled an incredibly useful collection of RPG theory, and a great article on the art question!