Your Life As A Gamer: Conventional Play After The Collapse, Part Four

Return To Tradition

The secret that so many refuse to accept is that this is a hobby with a very small liminal space. Because this hobby runs entirely off Network Effects, the only thing that matters is that a game have the largest network of users. Therefore, within a given niche, there is always only one Game That Matters. Among those Games That Matter, one of them will dominate the others in tems of Network Effect; this is, charitably, The Only Game That Matters.

That one game is, always has been, and always shall be, Dungeons & Dragons.

Your club can expand this to include Classic Traveller (space campaigning), Call of Cthulhu (horror/weird campaigning), Gamma World (post-apocalyptic campaigning), and maybe one or two others before you need to dig deep into very niche forms of play (where you will find Pendragon, Runequest, Bushido, and TORG) or cope with some not-game that is nontheless popular (e.g. anything Palladium).

This is where everything that the #BROSR leads to, and therefore whom you need to learn from.

Why does this option work?

• No Scheduling Issues: Everyone can be Referee of their own place in a campaign, so action can and will rotate depending on who is available to run and who will play (and can play).
• No External Reliance: Every game allowed into a Clubhouse is one with robust mechanisms for generating content in-house, rests upon real life for that function (e.g. Twilight 2000, Boot Hill), or is designed as a closed loop (e.g. Pendragon) so there is never any need for any external party (i.e. the publisher) for anything- and each campaign is a bespoke creation by and for the participants therein.
• No FOMO/Social Pressure: There is no need to let anyone in; you are free to discriminate and thus curate the membership to suit. Members are able to come and go at any time, as Real Life tends to get in the way of things, without penalty so long as they remain in good standing with the club- this is not a cult or a gang. Don't want Pronoun Pervs around? You don't have to let them in and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
• No Obsolesence: The games that worked then still work now. Newer is not better; old is not busted. You will not believe how much you did not grok the games that you thought you did when you do things properly, starting with culling most of those shelves down to the very few actual games ever published and then niching down further to just The Game(s) That Matters.

This is no different than going to Poker Night at Bob's house, only he's not going to clear out your wallet.

But here's the one benefit no one's focused upon: the ease of doing strict gatekeeping. No worry about Current Year bullshit, or having someone try to get you fired because you didn't humor their delusions, and so on.

It also means that your products are going to be frozen; no more publishers fucking over your group (and its ability to interact with the rest of the hobby) by making what you did invalid or fucking with rules that didn't need to be messed with. (So many of you publishers are guilty of this.)

By killing commercial activity in the hobby (meaning publishing), it culls not only so much uselss crap from the shelves but also so many bad actors in the ranks- if there is no clout or coin to grift, then there's no reason for bottom-feeders to stick around.

And that is why this is going to be what remains in tabletop after the collapse; an environment that can't sustain Conventional Play won't, but the Clubhouse isn't Conventional Play, so it will live while Conventional Play dies.

There is one more objection to address, but that merits a post to itself- tomorrow.