# New Wave Fantasy Game Puritanism tags: #thoughts A Twitter thread:  The answer: a lot more bland and monotonal with less creative input, more pretentious preening, and an even narrower surface of appeal leading to smaller numbers of people actually playing. And that's even if the effort was successful, mind you. I'm going to need someone to explain to me why it is that all of these discussions involve "what if the industry looked more like the one thing that I like and nothing else?" After a while, he doesn't that get tedious for you guys? Doesn't the excitement of the fact that there are multiple ways to do things evolving independently, each of which might suddenly develop some thing that does better than what you're currently doing so you can take it and integrate it… Doesn't any of that sound far more like a viable industry or a living hobby than "everyone should be doing this one thing"? I don't lie awake and ponder this question but nearly every morning I get up someone is saying something stupid like this. It's become more frequent of late. I blame The Algorithm™. I want to be clear where I stand on this. I love – absolutely adore – a good fantastic adventure wargame. You throw **[[Warrior Heroes - Adventures in Talomir|Warrior Heroes: Adventures in Talomir]]** out on the table and I'm your huckleberry. Let's go. Pop me some **[[Five Leagues from the Borderlands]]** and we can rock that story-positive adventure wargame action. Let's go. But for some reason any time something like this comes up, it's not a celebration of the fact that there are a dozen different ways to do things and most of them have already been done, you would just have to get lazy people to learn something new. Now, instead – it turns into someone pushing their own "new" [[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]] fantasy heartbreaker with a new slightly stank coat of paint on it. Great. I'm sure those "Sacred Cows" are going to get gored. I'll tell you what. I'll take you seriously when you say such things when you evidence you actually had experience of more than two or three games that are so similar in mechanic and assumption that they might as well be identical. It's interesting to note that this doesn't ever seem to come from anyone but the D&D-obsessed fantasy folks. **[[Traveller]]** is technically part of the OSR architectural theme but **Traveller** fans are some of the nicest, most pleasant people to deal with in fandom. (There's always a few. You know them. We just accept it.) The OSR-space fandom which led to **[[Mothership]]**? Incredibly nice people. They would never, ever say "what if every game looks like our game?" They're smart enough not to even want that. This is a huge problem. This is a massive problem. And it happens over and over and over again in this hobby. It's kind of sad. I keep expecting better but… I've been expecting better since the 80s, when I first started having exposure to the industry. Puritanism is a toxin. Once you take the position that one idea should drive out all the others and it's your idea, you've got a good handle on stagnation and failure. There's no hope to attain hybrid vigor in that kind of situation. That's a shame. But the same people seem to be walking the same path over and over. You would think that eventually they would pick up the notes that reality is putting down. It never happens.