Let’s get a couple of things out of the way first.1. Paul Beakley how dare u.  2. it is now 100 percent legal to point at Brand Robins and frown whenever he speaks; he doesn’t like bluegrass, I cannot stress this enough.

You just have to look in magazine (and zine) letters columns in the early 80s to see that hating how other people play RPGs and considering them awful, terrible people is baked straight into the DNA of this hobby. Look at the first extended communication between designers and players on Usenet in the 1990s – designers almost universally hated virtually everything every player reported to them about what they were doing. This should have been a clue that once you got away from 1983 by more than a few months in any direction, people simply despised what each other wanted to do and all had different ideas. The failure to embrace this is the main failure of the hobby so far. Punks bought guitar strings and drumsticks; jazz musicians bought saxophones and quilters bought fabric, my great-grandmother bought a shit-ton of canvas and paint, so there’s still money to be made selling raw materials of individual expression to individual groups and then making the hobby about expression and learning instead of consumption and purchasing. Yet somehow that isn’t the direction we’re going. Or the direction we’ve ever gone.