The RPG Medium

About

I love RPGs, and have played them for most of my life. Relatively recently, I found myself in possession of far more indie RPGs than I could reasonably play, and so my odd little brain demanded I categorize them. I started and quickly quit the project as I found more and more matrices on which to measure these games, and slowly found myself philosophizing about RPGs in aggregate.

The end result was the following tretise with the following theses: much like anime, we should really classify RPGs as a medium rather than a genre; All RPGs are personalized hacks rather than codified systems; and the conflict between an improvised story and a codified ruleset makes RPGs something both more and less than either games or stories.

The other result was a biting need to play more RPGs, as the more I studied each one the more interesting things I discovered.

Eventually, I needed to add an Errata section, as more and more things kept popping up. The medium continues to grow and evolve, as does my treatise…

The List

A Long and Interesting List

Errata

The Articles