rec.games.frp.* hierarchy

[Laurens Kils-Huetten]

Hey usenet using rpg enthusiasts,

let's have a look at this hierarchy from a bird's eye perspective:

rec.games.frp.advocacy
rec.games.frp.announce
rec.games.frp.cyber
rec.games.frp.dnd
rec.games.frp.gurps
rec.games.frp.live-action
rec.games.frp.marketplace
rec.games.frp.misc
rec.games.frp.super-heroes
rec.games.frp.industry
rec.games.frp.storyteller

Three things I find interesting:

1. three specific game systems where important enough at one point
to warrant their own newsgroups: There's a group for DnD, of course.
Now, that's obvious, no explanation needed. Then there's GURPS, which
is interesting given it having rather faded to the background these
days. Expectations in the generic universal role playing game must
have been high, back in the day. Finally, there's Storyteller, the
system used in early Vampire: The Masquerade, and other World of
Darkness Games. While Storyteller probably had an important impact
on the rpg scene, maybe more so than GURPS, it also has faded into
the background. At least that's my impression.

But looking back from today, I wonder, why are there no groups for
Traveller and Runequest?

2. While the other generic groups pretty much make sense to me, there
seems to be a glaring omission: there's no sci-fi group!
Why on Jupiter?

3. The general term for the genre seems to have been "fantasy
role-playing", thus frp. I sort of like the expression, since it
hints at the theatre of the mind aspect of the game. Even if you
play a cyberpunk game it all happens in our fantasy, after all.
If those hierarchies would be created today, they would of course
be called re.games.rpg.*


What would a modern day list of rpg related news groups look like?

I think it would be fair to simply stick with frp as a general
hierarchy, but there are some groups I think would make sense to
add in 2023. How about:

rec.games.frp.indie
rec.games.frp.osr
rec.games.frp.storygames
rec.games.frp.diy

and yes:

rec.games.frp.sci-fi

Given the overall low traffic on usenet, these topics could of course
all go into rec.games.frp.misc for now. But who knows ...

Usenet's not dead!

Cheers,

lkh

[Alex Schroeder]

Laurens Kils-Huetten <l...@sdf-eu.org> writes about the three systems
that got their own newsgroups and no newsgroups for Traveller,
Runequest, Science Fiction in general, and the newsgroups having “frp”
instead of “rpg” in their name. Good points all!

> What would a modern day list of rpg related news groups look like? I
> think it would be fair to simply stick with frp as a general
> hierarchy, but there are some groups I think would make sense to add
> in 2023. How about:
>
> rec.games.frp.indie
> rec.games.frp.osr
> rec.games.frp.storygames
> rec.games.frp.diy

> rec.games.frp.sci-fi
>
> Given the overall low traffic on usenet, these topics could of course
> all go into rec.games.frp.misc for now. But who knows ...

I think the simple argument would be that there is not enough traffic to
split things up. If categories are too fine-grained, there’s no
conversation. It seems to me that conversation depends on a certain
number of people being present in one “place”. Thus, into “misc” they
all go.

There’s an additional argument to be made against the division you
propose: These lines are very arbitrary and there is a high degree of
similarity between all of them. Sure, there are differences – but it
seems to me that these differences are shifting and our evaluation of
differences and similarities aren’t easily stated because there’s no
single “product” to point to like in the three old product-related
groups (D&D, GURPS, Storyteller).

For example:

Indie and OSR are very similar in that they are reactions to the
established publishing models twenty years ago when people discovered
PDF production, layout at home, and PDF shops were set up and people
actually started using them, blogs became a thing, and the idea of free
software licenses started spreading into other topics with Creative
Commons and software people getting into other jobs. So many things
started changing at the same time. It’s true that The Forge started with
strong ideas of their own, with Ron Edwards essays and new design goals
where as the OSR started with retro-clones, but in as much as they were
reactions to the changing means of production, they were very similar.

Storygames were reactions to the predominant combat and dice-rolling
focus of D&D. But really, what about Amber Diceless and play by post
games without rules and the current ideas of Freies Kriegsspiel, and the
fascination with lite rule systems like RISUS, PDQ, Fudge and Fate? Is
there really such an easy line to draw between Indie and Story Games,
between OSR and Story Games?

And what about DIY? Is that just the non-commercial arm of the OSR? Or
is that people with no corporate structure backing them up, i.e. Indie?
And why isn’t the DIY spirit not the same as OSR? Only if you push the
OSR into the retro-clone corner, perhaps? Again, too many similarities,
plenty of counter examples when you start looking.

And Science Fiction? Is Traveller not OSR? Is Mindjammer not Fate and
therefore Indie? Is Stars Without Number not OSR? And Cepheus Engine can
be used for every Tech Level, like Traveller. So is it Science Fiction?

For all of these reasons, I think we should be careful about splintering
groups. Otherwise we end up like those over-engineered Discord Servers
with 99 channels and nothing on.

[gbbgu]

On 24 Jun 2023 at 18:01:35 AEST, "Laurens Kils-Huetten" <l...@sdf-eu.org>
wrote:

> 3. The general term for the genre seems to have been "fantasy
> role-playing", thus frp. I sort of like the expression, since it
> hints at the theatre of the mind aspect of the game. Even if you
> play a cyberpunk game it all happens in our fantasy, after all.
> If those hierarchies would be created today, they would of course
> be called re.games.rpg.*

Thanks, I was wondering why it was frp. I couldn't work out why those
initials.

All good points on missing modern groups. I wonder if osr would take off as it
probably contains a lot of grognards that know the old ways.

--
gbbgu

[cwatters]

Ancient Old One here...

RPG was a moniker for the RPG computer games, so we didn't want that
traffic crossing...

Back in the heyday, the D&D topic was threatening to shutdown the whole
newsgroup, the single rec.games.FRP newsgroup was in jeopardy of getting
cut everywhere just due to sheer volume, often more than 50% of the whole
of Usenet including binaries.

It was hard for many to filter given the tools of the time to get to
something other than D&D. And it seemed every thread somehow turned into a
D&D thread, no matter how obscure or system specific.

After an extensive flamewar and a very extensive voting process, the
groups were split along topic/traffic lines.

Very high volume traffic like D&D got a group of its
own; .announce, .archives, .marketplace were low volume but at the time
important topics. Everything else was .misc

The other groups developed from Usenet voting, at one point GURPS was very
popular and generating a lot of very specific traffic about point-builds,
minmax, etc. so a vote was held and creating a new group in the hierarchy
was approved. Similarly, most of the other groups grew out of the .misc
group via audience voting.

With the rise of the web, and the segregation of topics out to commercial
hosts, traffic fell over time (quicker than many of us expected).

[ArthurBDD]

On 17/07/2023 03:23, cwatters wrote:
> The other groups developed from Usenet voting, at one point GURPS was very
> popular and generating a lot of very specific traffic about point-builds,
> minmax, etc. so a vote was held and creating a new group in the hierarchy
> was approved. Similarly, most of the other groups grew out of the .misc
> group via audience voting.
>
> With the rise of the web, and the segregation of topics out to commercial
> hosts, traffic fell over time (quicker than many of us expected).

True that. I'd love to know about any pockets of discussion still
happening on Usenet - RPG-related especially.

[gbbgu]

On 18 Jul 2023, ArthurBDD wrote:

> True that. I'd love to know about any pockets of discussion still
> happening on Usenet - RPG-related especially.

Most groups for things I'm interested in seem pretty quite, apart from
computer related ones.

I've started posting here cause F(&^^*#K reddit and their garbage.

--
gbbgu

[Alex Schroeder]

cwatters <coyt.w...@gmail.com> writes:

> Back in the heyday, the D&D topic was threatening to shutdown the whole
> newsgroup, the single rec.games.FRP newsgroup was in jeopardy of getting
> cut everywhere just due to sheer volume, often more than 50% of the whole
> of Usenet including binaries.

Sometimes I feel that role-playing games really drive a lot of the newer
text media out there. My impression at the end of Google+ was that it
was mostly role-playing games, too. What an interesting niche. :)

[Laurens Kils-Huetten]

gbbgu <gb...@gbbgu.com> wrote:
>
> I've started posting here cause F(&^^*#K reddit and their garbage.
>

enjoying your posts! keep them coming!

~lkh

[Gottfried Neuner]

On 7/18/2023 9:15 AM, Alex Schroeder wrote:

> cwatters <coyt.w...@gmail.com> writes:

>
> Sometimes I feel that role-playing games really drive a lot of the newer
> text media out there. My impression at the end of Google+ was that it
> was mostly role-playing games, too. What an interesting niche. :)

A lot of stuff seemed to gain traction mostly with roleplayers. The
whole Cthulhu thing was mostly a roleplaying thing for the longest time,
then all of a sudden it went mainstream (to the point that there's an
anime that references Call of Cthulhu rules in it's theme song).
I think for a long time a lot of creators have been rpg geeks, and now
it slowly seepsinto the mainstream.

[John]

I think attributing rising interest in Cthulhu to an excellent but,
let's be realistic, niche RPG is a bit of a stretch.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting your message, though. I had certainly read
Lovecraft long before I knew there was a CoC RPG.

Hell, Cthulhu's been a "nerd culture" (retch) shibboleth for years, with
those little stuffed dolls sold by wretched sites like ThinkGeek et al.


john

[kyonshi]

On 1/14/2024 7:35 PM, John wrote:

> Gottfried Neuner <gmk...@gmail.com> writes:

>
> I think attributing rising interest in Cthulhu to an excellent but,
> let's be realistic, niche RPG is a bit of a stretch.
>
> Maybe I'm misinterpreting your message, though. I had certainly read
> Lovecraft long before I knew there was a CoC RPG.
>
> Hell, Cthulhu's been a "nerd culture" (retch) shibboleth for years, with
> those little stuffed dolls sold by wretched sites like ThinkGeek et al.
>
>
> john

You might have read Lovecraft before, but he always was a shibboleth.
The RPG was a reliable way to steer geeks who were into roleplaying into
reading him. At least that's my experience with it (because I first
learned about him that way and so did others).
While Call of Cthulhu is a niche game it also has been published over
multiple editions since 1982, and has editions in multiple other
languages where it is far from a niche rpg (it is VERY popular in
France, Germany, Japan, and China for example, often with their own
regional books created by local producers)