Cultures, not Games

28 Jun, 2026

Alright, imagine two groups of friends who both come together to play, let's say Dolmenwood.

The first group's referee is well versed in the OSR. She has run a few campaigns and her players know what they are getting into. They roll up their characters and are already planning what to do with their first dungeon haul. Enough treasure to hire more retainers. Fund bigger expeditions. Maybe eventually become important enough in the region that the local factions stop treating them like disposable pawns.

In the meantime they are trying to stay alive and figure out how the world works. They plan routes, argue about how much rope to bring, hire someone who will probably die in a ditch, and hope the next encounter is willing to talk.

These guys are using the procedures from the book. The referee rolls for random encounters as they move through hexes. Reaction rolls decide whether the strange creature does in fact talk to them or just wants to eat them. Encumbrance becomes a problem the moment they find anything worth taking. And the quick and deadly combat is ideally avoided when someone has a better idea.

The world of this group doesn't revolve around their characters. They make decisions and then deal with the consequences that come out of it.

Let's look at the other group.

Their referee lives and breathes the modern 5e values of actual plays. His players do too. During character creation they spend more time thinking about who their characters are, where they come from, and what brought them together and to Dolmenwood in the first place.

They are still interested in treasure, obviously. Mainly because it gives XP. But they aren't entering their first dungeon only because some drunk told them there might be silverware inside. No, they are here on a quest. Likely a personal one. Some beloved relative of one of the characters went missing and this dungeon has a clue.

During the campaign, more people from the characters past appear. They meet rivals who turn villains when they join forces with the Nag-Lord in a twist. Dolmenwood isn't merely a place they are moving through. It becomes entangled with the fate of these characters.

They too use the procedures from the book. From random encounters, encumbrance, to the same quick and nasty combat.

Now, let's say both groups encounter some mossling pilgrims while travelling through the woods. Both referees use the same encounter procedure and they both get an uncertain reaction.

At the first table, these pilgrims are simply here now. They have their own reason for travelling and aren't sure what to make of the adventurers. The players have to work out what they want to do. Can the mosslings be trusted? Is it worth the risk of getting involved?

Things take a different turn at the other table. Here one of the pilgrims recognises a character's name and knows something about their missing relative, but they aren't sure the characters are honest about who they are. This encounter turns into something personal. A complication that follows them for a while.

The first table has a situation that exists independently and has to be navigated. The second table is presented with a situation that becomes part of what is happening to these particular characters.

So here we are. Both groups are following the same rules and procedures. Both are playing Dolmenwood and having a great time with it.

The first group is playing OSR. The second is playing neotrad.

Woah... hold on... wait a minute... isn't Dolmenwood an OSR game?!

Well, yeah. That misconception is the whole point.

We are actually talking about:

Fucking Cultures, Man

It has been five years since Retired Adventurer published Six Cultures of Play.

Jesus. Five years.

I remember reading it shortly after. At the time I was mostly running 5e, barely knew what the OSR was, and hardly read blogs. I knew story games existed, but I had no real idea what trad was. A lot of it went over my head at the time, and I came away thinking it was a taxonomy for games, despite the post clearly stating it wasn't. Apparently I wasn't alone in thinking that.

The hobby had been classifying games long before that post, to be clear. We always want to put a label on a book that tells us what kind of play it assumes, so we can either welcome it to our tribe or condemn it.

What changed after the Six Cultures post was that, over time, these labels became more prominent and the language of the discourse adapted. Despite the post telling us that it was about cultures, NOT games. I can only assume a lot of people never read the post.

Now arguments about whether or not a game is OSR often come down to if it has enough dungeon crawl mechanics and if characters can die easily. Classic is dead because it gets absorbed into old school play. Games with a lot of mechanical progression for your blorbos must be trad or neotrad. And the moment players get some say over the fiction, someone is going to call it a story game.

Look, I'm not pretending people will stop putting labels on games. I do it sometimes too. They are useful in the quick argument. But there isn't a shared understanding of what they mean, so sooner or later they get reduced to mechanics.

And once that happens, we end up having the rules argument again.

But the Rules

Yes, the rules of a game system matter. That's why we bother choosing one game over another in the first place. Rules decide what gets a procedure and what gets abstracted. They decide what the game slows down for and how uncertainty gets resolved. But they don't decide what the table is trying to do.

A game doesn't become trad because its rules are thick and it gives players a lot of options. I mean, just look at AD&D. It's not considered trad, though I wonder how much of that is just because it's old D&D and therefore gets mentally shoved closer to Classic OSR. Hmmm. But the point I'm trying to make is that a game doesn't become OSR just because it has a checklist of B/X mechanics inside it. You can have procedures that originated or were intended for one culture of play and still use them toward completely different ends.

Let me repeat that. A rulebook can point towards or originate from a specific culture of play. That doesn't mean the game is played that way, even if you follow the rules. Everyone brings their own habits, assumptions, and expectations to the table. Some of those take the form of social rules about what is accepted, from manners to what counts as fair play. Others are more internal, like what each person thinks they are trying to get out of play in the first place. There are more factors, obviously, but the point is that the printed or formal rules are only some of the rules. They are not solely responsible for how a game is played.¹

Where Is the Game?

Folks don't only bring expectations into play. They also bring expectations about what is supposed to be in the book.

When Mythic Bastionland broke containment and attracted a lot of curious new players, it felt like watching people get confronted with a different culture of play for the first time and brains kinda melted. I saw and had discussions online that went along the lines of: where is the game? How do I even run this? Did I really just spend all that money on a book that doesn't tell me how to play?

Meanwhile I read the same book and thought it was completely fucking obvious. More than complete, really. It gives you the structure of play and enough material to build a world and keep going for a long time. Then the addendum goes out of its way to show the procedures in action with commentary.

The disagreement isn't only about how much information is there. It's about what information a game is supposed to provide and what that explanation is supposed to look like.

Someone used to modern D&D might go looking for a familiar support structure. What is the campaign about? Who is the villain? How do I pace all this? What reasons do the characters have to get involved? How do I keep the group together? Where is the loot? What are they supposed to do next?

Sometimes the book answers those questions, but the answers aren't trusted because they don't look like what was expected. Sometimes folks came expecting another way to play D&D and the game is trying to do something else.² Which means, to make it work the way they wanted, they need to do a lot of legwork to drag it back toward the shape they already understand.

Yeah, some books do a poor job explaining themselves. I don't want to let bad writing or structure off the hook by pretending every confused reader is just culturally ignorant. But saying "this book didn't answer the questions I expected it to answer" isn't automatically the same as saying "this book doesn't explain how to play". I also don't think every game owes a full explanation of all its cultural expectations so nobody ever has to look beyond the book. That would be tedious as hell.

Common Sense, Apparently

Beyond all that I think there is a problem that's often too obvious to even state. The question of what a roleplaying game even is supposed to be. For many many people that's the D&D way of playing. Or not just D&D, really, but the referee and adventuring party shape.

The referee provides the material of play. The players find themselves together as a group, and it's expected that they remain one. Their characters can have personal motives, sure, but not so much that they threaten the campaign. They can make trouble, but not so much that the prep gets derailed. The referee can improvise, but the expectation is that there is enough substance of play. Characters may argue with each other, as long as it serves the drama and does not become so difficult that the table has to renegotiate what play is about.

Let me say that none of this is bad. I really mean that. It works for a reason.

The problem is that this default assumption often stops looking like one possible culture of play and starts looking like basic roleplaying common sense. Then everything else gets pulled toward it. Individual cultures of play aren't exempt from this either. They often keep bits of the broader party based adventure game around, even when they are pushing against other parts of it. Classic play assumes less drama and story, but it is still often a game where you go down a murder hole as a group and steal everything that isn't nailed to the wall. The desire to reduce the friction of a game leads to a common path of assumptions. That's not bad. But that doesn't mean it has to be this way.

The moment you step outside that common sense, people start acting like this is where horror stories come from. Though more often than not, those stories have their own underlying issue of playing with shitty people.

Making everything pull toward the common sense means that a game about individual desire gets dragged into questions about party cohesion. A game of exploration gets turned into every session needing exciting reveals. A game about factional ambitions gets questions about where the adventure locations are supposed to be. And if a game expects characters to pursue incompatible goals, suddenly we are talking about whether that is antisocial, because the baseline assumption is cooperative goals.

I wonder how you are supposed to play a compelling character if they always have to give in to the majority, the group goal, or whatever opportunity the referee has arranged for them. At that point a lot of character motivation becomes superficial platitudes, or something the referee kindly hands you when it's your turn.

And I don't mean mixing cultures is bad. I want to be clear about that. Great stuff can and has sprung from that. The issue is when only the mechanics survive, not their context. Take Dungeon World for example. By no means a bad game, but a common criticism is that it doesn't really get what PbtA is doing, yet it is probably one of the most successful or best known games in that space. That's what happens when the dominant culture takes something from another one and tries to make it D&D again.

These aren't neutral expectations. But they feel neutral when you are used to them. That's the annoying bit. Every culture has some idea of what a successful game looks like. Which is why I care about understanding cultures beyond their mechanics in the first place.³

Why Bother

Cultures of play help us see what's happening at the table beyond the game someone picked. Folks don't just play differently because they bought a different book. They bring different habits, expectations, and ideas about what the whole thing is even for.

The cultures of play post gave us better language for that. It helps explain why one person can sit at your table and have a grand time while another finds it miserable. Not because one knows how to play and the other doesn't, but because they are looking for different things. Cultures are one step toward articulating that.

It helps with design too. A rule is usually someone trying to solve a particular problem for a specific kind of play. If you take it away from that context, or don't understand that context, it might still be useful. It might also become a weird ritual of habit. Why does 5e still insist on having ability scores instead of just the modifiers?

Once you look back, you find that this hobby is exceptional at fucking reinventing wheels. New folks usually don't go out of their way to look for what someone wrote on their old blog, so a lot of things get worked out again from first principles. We keep forgetting that people had the same arguments already twenty, forty, or sixty years ago.

And then there's the obvious flattening of cultures into product labels, which makes everything worse. We have seen the hype where people want something different from regular WotC stuff, so OSR becomes trendy. Slap the OSR claim on a product and you attract consumers. It becomes a checklist of rules, little accessories to signal that the book belongs to a scene. It's all vibes anyway, right? Meanwhile the accumulated knowledge around those rules and the values behind them slowly starts to disappear.

If every conversation starts with the common sense default assumption, anything outside it has to arrive wrapped in disclaimers. Which is exhausting. Just be fucking open to other experiences.

The moment you say any of this too directly, I kid you not, someone is going to hear "your fun is wrong". So you have to begin every conversation with the tedious ritual of apology. Of course all playstyles are valid. Of course you can do what you want at your table. Of course this is only my opinion. I'm not attacking you directly just because you like heroic goody two-shoes parties with backstories and character arcs.

But after enough disclaimers, the actual point of discussion has usually been softened into mush and can be dismissed. All because the people who need those disclaimers most are often the ones who were going to read the whole thing in bad faith anyway. The absence of reassurance already feels like an attack. Now nobody has to have their assumptions challenged, and the status quo remains.

The common sense assumptions have the reach, the money, and most of the hobby already speaks their language. They don't need to preserve the values of whatever they absorb. They can take reaction rolls, clocks, whatever else seems useful, and fit them back into the kind of play everybody already recognises.

We are never going to out-trad the trads. So if we want other cultures to survive as more than a few mechanics under a new label, we have to work harder to make their actual practices understandable.

Conclusion

I don't really have a conclusion. I'm not going to pretend that a blog post is going to change anything lmao.

We should make it easier to learn about the cultures and history of the hobby. For the curious minds among us at least. The people who want to know why things are the way they are, where these practices came from, and why anybody cared enough to argue about them for decades.

If we just flatten everything into products and labels, even the folks who care have to start again from nothing.

#rant