I think it can limit play and design. I’m less focused on play — my needs for stretching my boundaries don’t need to be anyone else’s — than I am on design.

And at the same time I think media references can be helpful for accessibility, because when you’ve gotten something super weird with no touchstones (Glorantha, Tekumel, Talislanta, Degringolade) that’s not good either.

I’m not proposing a fix or really even complaining, nothing like that. Just chatting about something I’ve been thinking about. It’s in my sights right now because I’m designing something that I think would be ill-served by saying “it’s like King Arthur” even though that is, at a very shallow level, totally true. But if someone picks it up and says “Yeah sweet, this is a lot easier to run than Pendragon” and then they get into it and it delivers a holy-shit-wtf-is-this experience that’s so not Pendragon, I’m not sure I did anyone any favors by invoking it in the first place.