This is the second time that my post replying to Prokopetz was labelled "discourse". I thought it was just two people mostly agreeing with each other! Like you said, it was just a sort of personal manifesto for a specific kind of designer and the baked-in assumption was that it didn't apply to the majority of designers.
I agree with what you said about the twin impulses of worldbuilding in RPGs. I also indulge (suffer from?) both impulses. I'm a big fan of the Malazan books because they do this twin thing of serving up endless sparkling lore as well as slapping me across the face every time I try to catalogue and taxiderm-ify it. I think if I ever wrote a big tome of lore, I would do that - write lore with an unreliable narrator, offering the exhaustive survey while slapping it out of your hand at the same time.
Not Technically Necessary
This is the second time that my post replying to Prokopetz was labelled "discourse". I thought it was just two people mostly agreeing with each other! Like you said, it was just a sort of personal manifesto for a specific kind of designer and the baked-in assumption was that it didn't apply to the majority of designers.
I agree with what you said about the twin impulses of worldbuilding in RPGs. I also indulge (suffer from?) both impulses. I'm a big fan of the Malazan books because they do this twin thing of serving up endless sparkling lore as well as slapping me across the face every time I try to catalogue and taxiderm-ify it. I think if I ever wrote a big tome of lore, I would do that - write lore with an unreliable narrator, offering the exhaustive survey while slapping it out of your hand at the same time.