The world of TTRPGs is a castle built of words, and yet of all the posturing would-be intellectuals in the hobby few have dared to delve into the subject of semantics so deeply as Rule of Thule. To do so one would be forced to reveal the tricks and sleights of hand that have fooled the masses for decades. Whether they couldn’t see this deep*, or saw it and deliberately kept this knowledge hidden in order to take full advantage of it, matters little. Either they couldn’t see the importance, or selfishly hid it, and are not to be trusted.
This past Friday, Rule of Thule dropped a masterpiece:
In the realm of RPG discussion, it is evident that the prevailing body of terminology serves to confuse rather than to clarify.
Which goes a long way to explaining the hostility to the blunt instrument of Truths wielded of late by the BROSR. We really do want to understand how these games work and how to get the most out of them. To do that, we have to understand them, tear them apart, and look at each individual part, see how they fit together, and how they can be recombined. To get the best out of them, we have understand them, and we can’t understand them fully if we can’t communicate about them. Hence our insistence on language that clarifies rather than confuses.
The book peddlers hate that.
A second-order effect of relying on the SDT framework to describe our hobby is that a simple lack of virtue or absence of good-faith approach is all it takes to destroy any discussion. This pattern allows the lazy, dishonest, and opportunistic to frame the conversation in whatever way they please.
Understanding the concepts of “self-descriptive terminology (SDT)” and “identifying / indicating terminology (IIT)” won’t just unlock a greater depth of understanding of role-playing games, they’ll help you understand a whole world of hucksters, shysters, journalists, ad men, con men and other sleazy merchants. It might not save your life, but it’ll save you some money, and maybe even save your sanity.
Here again, Thule goes deeper than most. After a surface level look at how SDT leads to weaponized ambiguity in RPG discussions, he dives into second order effects, and that’s where this article really hits harder than most:
A second-order effect of relying on the SDT framework to describe our hobby is that a simple lack of virtue or absence of good-faith approach is all it takes to destroy any discussion. This pattern allows the lazy, dishonest, and opportunistic to frame the conversation in whatever way they please.
Look, I’m not going to filk this whole article. Suffice it for me to point out that BROSR is NOT a portmanteau of Braunstein and OSR. Braunstein is a IIT. OSR is an SDT. They don’t fit together, at all. BROSR really is an acronym for Bro School Revival. We game like men, or in the ever-shifting sand dunes of the English language we cheekily adopted the current-gen term of “bro”. We did this in part because it is accurate, in part as a means of gatekeeping womanish behavior within our ranks, and in part because funny.
But I digress. Thule’s post is important. Go read it.
*I count myself among the number of those who couldn’t see this far. My only defense is that I’ve never sold myself as an intellectual in the hobby. My meager contributions are limited to those of the carnival barker, delighted by the strange mysteries and wonderful technologies, and eager to invite the world to see for themselves. But even that analogy is too grandiose as I’ve little interest in parting anyone from their proverbial one thin dime.