The assumptions, intentions, and design of tabletop roleplaying games are infamously broad; seeing eye to eye on how to play is as primary a challenge as finding a time on the calendar for four to six people. Back in April of 2021, the blog The Retired Adventurer published a post called Six Cultures of Play which still sees reference as a succinct overview of distinct play traditions which have evolved over the last fifty-ish years of structured tabletop roleplaying. Between solid analysis and the author’s own admonitions not to see bright lines between the cultures where there aren’t any, I see the article as a useful model to start thinking about how people game and what they want.

Of course, the gaming world hasn’t stayed still, and from the publication of the original post to the renaming of Twitter to “X” in 2023, fragmentation was the word of the day. Since then, we’ve seen continuing fragmentation joined with an upswell in interest in fairly specific playstyle differentiation, driven by migration away from Wizards of the Coast products and strong take-up of “D&D alternative” products including not only Pathfinder but Daggerheart, Tales of the Valiant, and Draw Steel. The core ideas in the Cultures of Play post still hold true, but the consistent signpost in my mind is in the introduction, where the author describes a culture of play as equivalent to a ‘network of practice’. A community of practice is a group which forms around something they collectively do (or practice) which they have a passion for and want to do better; a network of practice is also that but doesn’t assume the same consistent strength of relationships, therefore being a more appropriate term for a larger, more nebulous group. As broad as a network of practice can be, I don’t really think it aligns with a ‘culture of play’ anymore.

So if the cultures of play aren’t the dominant networks of practice within roleplaying, what are? If you look into some of the cultures noted in the original post, notably the OSR, you can see a diversity of opinions and practices which implies multiple networks all under the same umbrella. That fragmentation is everywhere, and results in smaller groups of alignment than something like OSR as a whole. One of those smaller groups of alignment may be the fandom for a specific game; the foundation for fandom and parasocial relationships created by something like a Kickstarter campaign may be a good place to look at the response to criticism of specific games as seen in media recently. Finally, though perhaps least useful, there’s something to be said about the community of practice that is a specific gaming group, and how the hobby as it’s currently structured makes it easy for half a dozen people to establish their own norms and standards.

The fragmented reality of play cultures

It’s worth noting in a discussion of fragmented play cultures that seeing RPG networks of practice as smaller and smaller quanta isn’t a counterargument or criticism of ‘Six Cultures of Play’ as a post. For looking at the broad movements in game design as they exist the post does quite well, with the biggest weakness arguably being the most contemporary movement described in the post, ‘Neo-Trad’. As long as you accept ‘there is no quiz’ and no one group fits exactly in one culture and one alone, the signposts are very good. That said, the signposts end up pointing in a whole number of different directions once you dive in further.

The OSR is a classic example for discussing this sort of fragmentation because we’ve been able to see it in real time and because its fragmentation is clearly influenced by the fandoms of specific designers or games. The last time I tried to look around the OSR, I saw a lot of very different ideas mostly aligned in philosophy. Now, with the benefit of more experience and having played more games, it’s clear that growth has brought some degree of mission drift.

Without making any claim towards being comprehensive, let’s consider a few games that have been at one point or another claimed by the OSR: Old-School Essentials, Electric Bastionland, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Worlds Without Number. These games are all based (at least by first principles) on D&D, with the intent of playing in a classic OSR style where characters are deprotagonized, player skill is more important than character ratings, and the only story in the game is that generated post-hoc by the events of the gameplay. One of these (OSE) is a straight-up retroclone, which exists to support old-school play. Another (DCC) is based on a much later edition of D&D, but is intended to still be ‘old-school’ in its approach to play. Yet another (Electric Bastionland) de-emphasizes mechanics, but is primarily providing tools and inspirations to create characters and adventures within its endogenous setting; the final one (Worlds Without Number) is providing a mix of mechanical and inspirational support to run fantasy sandboxes, emulating without necessarily copying. These are all under the OSR banner, at least to outside observers; at the same time every one of them (save OSE) has been called ‘not OSR’ by a critic at least once for one reason or another.

The point is not to pick on the OSR or claim that there’s more gatekeeping in the OSR than other play cultures, but since we have guiding documents like the Principia Apocrypha, it becomes easier to identify when games align to or violate the published standards. In trad, when we consider games like Draw Steel which are seen as 4e-like, Pathfinder which is seen as 3e-like, and Daggerheart which is seen as narrative-ish, we can still observe fragmentation but don’t have the same stake in the ground at the starting point that lets us measure the drift.

It is worth noting that my points of comparison for cultural fragmentation are all games. Games are often designed for a network of practice or in reaction to one, but when a game gets popular, it tends to create a network of practice all its own.

The “culture” of fandom

As I’ve discussed before, the idea of a monolithic RPG fandom doesn’t align with reality, save the fact that the D&D fandom is so large it overshadows everyone else. As the major social networks which housed RPG discussion were all either shuttered or enshittified, the most active fandoms generally fell back into smaller places, typically Discords or, for older games, extant forums. What makes this interesting is that now these smaller spaces really do resemble networks of practice, but often for the mechanics and assumptions of one specific game. There is a continuum of course, with Discords also housing microcosms of, say, OSR or Indie/story play cultures. But once you get a group of fans for one idiosyncratic game all in one place, the results can be interesting.

I won’t rehash my entire fandom article, but since August a rather interesting case study arose when Quinns’ Quest reviewed Triangle Agency. The review wasn’t entirely negative but was critical, and the pushback, as detailed in a recent Taskerland post, was perhaps more fandom-centered than critique-centered (to be diplomatic about it). The above post goes into the inherent fallacy of demanding that a game be played a certain way for a review to be ‘valid’, and there are enough counterexamples in the world that make it fairly clear that you can in fact write a specific non-traditional RPG and have it be playable with nothing else but the book. In that respect, “you can’t play this right without the intervention of the creator” and “you can’t play this right without reading the Discord” are admissions of failure.

It’s worth noting my own review of Triangle Agency was a bit different, and I didn’t have all the same critiques as Quinns. I do realize in looking back that my own blind spots did cause me to gloss over elements of the game that, in play, are likely to be a big deal…the way actions are performed in Triangle Agency is extremely specific, and if you aren’t coming from a background of reading many specific games with those sorts of specific courses of action, it’s going to throw you for a loop. For me, being immersed in the Indie/story “culture of play” as well as having played Paranoia and a few other unconventional games prepared me for accepting the limited scope of character actions and the ‘unreliable narrator’-ness of it all at face value. If you are coming from the broader RPG fandom (read: Dungeons and Dragons), the game will be opaque. If you’re very well-read in the range of RPGs out there, you may have more than enough information to play as intended on your own. That said, even if it’s possible to puzzle out on your own, claiming a need to be part of a network of practice in order to play a game likely just means the game is difficult to play and the game document doesn’t readily support said play.

TTRPGs as a whole have a bit of a document design problem, but that low bar of accessibility is compounded by the fact that the practice of playing an RPG has historically been wrapped around fixing that RPG. D&D 0e was a bad document, but it had enough ideas in it to spawn a movement. I wouldn’t say that Triangle Agency is a bad document, to revisit the above example, but it’s definitely more ‘House of Leaves’ than ‘Bike Repair and Maintenance for Dummies’. And to that (very specific to my household) example, it’s not even a bad thing that a game is difficult to engage with. If House of Leaves being opaque was simply bad, it wouldn’t have enough cultural cachet to justify me name-dropping it in an unrelated piece of writing. In this way, the actual problem with the Triangle Agency anecdote is less anything about the game and more the fandom problem of closing ranks instead of engaging with the fact that the game is opaque and that opacity is what enables most of the interesting things in its design.

Your specific table

Invoking the first version of D&D and the immense fan reaction that followed means that we have to talk about the two elements of that fan reaction, both of which had a significant impact on the RPG world. The broader fandom/cultural reaction is what historians like Jon Peterson are striving to cover in their books (specifically The Elusive Shift in this case). The evolution of individual gaming groups is harder to trace, and harder to draw conclusions from. While Gary Alan Fine did a sociological review of a gaming club, tables all over the world coming together around the game at different times had different reactions to D&D and its immediate contemporaries. We know this at least in part because some of those tables quite literally published their house rules, evolving into one of those larger fandoms if they were successful.

The more fundamental question, though, goes back to the Retired Adventurer post and a consideration of how it actually impacts you, the reader, and your gaming group specifically. For one particular example, it ends up being quite important to note that both the Indie/story and OSR ‘cultures’ were pushing back on very similar elements of trad play, because while a critic would never confuse OSE and Chasing Adventure, a gaming group that’s decided to move away from trad may very well try both and like both.

While I think The Retired Adventurer acknowledged the single table issue very well with the ‘no quizzes’ admonition, the perception of how uniform or conformant a single gaming table may be is distorted significantly by the few spaces we have where the play cultures meet. The design of discourse on Reddit tends to elevate “one true way” commenters over those who are more circumspect, and even if you discard truly uninformed or deliberately inflammatory comments (of which there are many), you’re still reading a lot of content from people who are promoting a style of play, promoting a game, or are simply more bluntly in favor of something. Reddit biasing towards being ‘bluntly in favor of something’ is the underlying reason why GURPS is recommended in every game request thread, after all.

I don’t think there’s a more complicated conclusion to this other than to say that the tastes and games of individual gaming tables are often much more unique and notably weirder than ‘a blend of these play cultures’. Once you get away from trying to categorize things and relying on secondary sources of data like internet discourse, the modern RPG hobbyist often shares a lot more with a board game hobbyist, developing preferences for mechanics and styles but not necessarily aligning with a culture. Ultimately, the difference between one of ‘cultures’ and one of a single hobby where participants cultivate their own preferences is only how often hobbyists are willing to cross the streams.

---

There is value in seeing how people play games, and from what they derive satisfaction and value. That said, the realities of how actual playstyles break out can get a bit complicated. While I find taxonomies like “Six Cultures of Play” can be useful for thinking about how people play RPGs and what they find valuable, they’re almost always a start point rather than an end. And while the network of practice concept has helped me understand hobby communities better, it’s hard not to think about the liability they represent. Gamers should be driven by a desire to have better play and engage with the mechanics they choose better. At the same time, the network of practice should not be a prerequisite to engaging with the hobby. The biggest weakness of all RPG cultures and the group quanta that slot in below them is that they develop in service to the preferences of the people who have already joined them. Cultures of play are defined by what their members are already doing; the brighter the lines look between them, the less open gamers as a whole are to trying new things. We need to watch out for that.

Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together? First, you can follow me @LevelOneWonk@dice.camp for RPG commentary, relevant retweets, and maybe some rambling. You can also find our Discord channel and drop in to chat with our authors and get every new post as it comes out. You can travel to DriveThruRPG through one of our fine and elegantly-crafted links, which generates credit that lets us get more games to work with (which is eactly what we did here)! Finally, you can support us directly on Patreon, which lets us cover costs, pay our contributors, and save up for projects. Thanks for reading!