Quarterling’s Corner

Read to the end of the post to figure out what this is from. I. I've had a cascade of realizations over the past 48 hours and I feel like if I don't write them all down somewhere they're all going to fly out of my head. I have no idea whether this will be useful to anyone, but at least I'll be able to link it to people if they ask me "hey what ever happened to that G&G thing you were making." This is my second post about the failure of a big project called Goblets & Grues , although the last project under that name was only partially related. (There's a small part of me that's embarassed to write again about my failures, but the rest of me knows that if things are especially hard for me to learn, that just means I'll learn it better. The spark for this new G&G came in July 2021, when I came up with the idea to run some version of D&D for a good friend of mine who lives in another country. I really wanted to run 5th edition D&D

Choose your alignment — which quadrant(s) do you care about defining? I. We had yet another debate on labels and definitions today. I’m sick of everything I write in these conversations getting lost, so I’m dumping it all in a blog post. Everything from here on out is directly taken from messages I wrote on the Discord, with some links added here and there. II. I think Retired Adventurer had it right when he called them " cultures of play ." The OSR, the NSR, they aren't movements — people have such a terrible sense these days of what it means for a group of people to be organized. They are cultures , in the sense that designer Greg Costikyan uses the word. In Uncertainty , Costikyan defines culture as "the transmission of knowledge within a group" and explains that, while some animals have simple forms of culture, "humans have culture on steroids, because language allows us to transmit knowledge far more effectively." He writes, "In a sense, '