The Culture: Oh Look, That Thing The Bros Talked About Turned Out To Matter After All

The thing Oldfags say never happens happened.

Oldfag PRESUMED that a greeble did X, when the rules state that it did Y.

Why did Oldfag do this? Calvinball.

When you go "Rules LOL, do whatever, LOLSORANDOM ain't I hip and cool?" you end up making these kinds of fuckups because you never take the time to do the one thing that always prevents this fuckup from happening.

What would that be?

READ!
THE!
FUCKING!
MANUAL!

Lazy faggot got caught out and now he has a sad about it. Off to the Carousel for you, Oldfag. Time to Renew.

Play the game. Play as-written. Do not deviate. This means that you read the rules, study the rules, and master the rules as they are- not as you wish they were. This may involve exercising reading comprehension skills long rusted to due decades of disuse, but that's not my problem.

The Bros are right again.

The Culture: Yes, Point Out The Obvious One More Time

Oh look another Oldfag having to pivot to softer targets after breaking his ego on the Bros.

Again, a summary:"This system shifts player motivation from "killing everything" to finding creative ways to secure loot. Because combat is highly lethal in older editions, players are incentivized to use traps, distractions, and clever negotiation to avoid direct fights"

Again, "Fucking duh." Again, too many Commies and retards in the hobby so this needs to be made brick-to-face obvious.

That's nice. Why are they after the treasure?

It's not for the XP. It's for what that treasure buys, which XP is symbolic of: power, prestige, property.

You need it to pay the Training costs. You need it to pay medical costs. You need it to pay Upkeep costs. You need it to do Spell Research. You need it to do Item Creation. You need it to hire/retain Henchmen and Hirelings. You need it to build our your man's power structure--the castle, the town, the farms, the mines, the manufactories, the housing, etc.--needed to seize and hold land, land in turn needed to be the base from which your man strides forth to achieve his objectives and win the campaign.

All of that needs metric fucktons of gold and gems to do, as it is the fuel and the lubrication that keeps the war machine that is your man going.

Doing all of that cannot help but to lead to acquiring the experience needed to accomplish the Objective; Gold For XP merely formalizes this into a playable useful abstraction.

Which would not need explaining if this OldFag actually played the game properly.

The Culture: Early Cargo Cult Consumerism

Last Saturday, the Pundit cut this video.

Arduin is one of the first expressions of the Calvinball Doctrine that uderlies the Cargo Cult: "The game is broken and doesn't work. Buy this widget to fix it."

Consumerism came into the hobby early, driven by the folks who didn't know how the game worked and never bothered to question their own priors or discover how the game does work- they PRESUMED it was broken so of course they had to fix it.

The entire picture of how Muh 40 Years got it so wrong all this time has become clear, and I can't help but to hate them more for it.

The Culture: Can We Not Argue For Failed Ideas FOR ONE FUCKING MINUTE?

Oldfags repeating old errors.

No, retard, this is a bad idea.

"What idea is that?" you ask. Hit Locations.

50 fucking years, and this retard says "Slow down your combat resolution with a mechanic that only works when it's a man-to-man duel because otherwise you're wasting everyone else's time." Yes, that's been the consequence every single fucking time this has been done. Only in videogames can you do this at-scale because that automates all of the bitchwork that is required to make this functional.

Meanwhile, bog-standard Hit Points has proven itself far easier to implement, adminster, and scale across multiple media FOR GENERATIONS.

Fuck this retarded faggot. Hand him a hemp necktie and give him the Troon Retirement Option.

The Culture: Yes, Dungeons Are Good, But That's Not All Of The Matter

OSRfags confess their defeat by the Bros through studious avoiding of mentioning them while using their arguments is a theme for this week.

Case in point, below:

To save you the time, a summary: "This video features a discussion between Joe, Tim Shorts, and Paul Turner about why modern Dungeons & Dragons (5e) adventures—often written like long, novel-style modules—can detract from the creative joy of being a Dungeon Master. They argue that the best adventures should be defined by a dangerous location and a reason for players to explore it, rather than a rigid, predetermined plot."

To which anyone with the sense of a syphlitic surfer slut will say "Fucking duh" but NarrativeFags Are Not People so they lack this.

What is missing is WHY GO THERE?

Braunstein answers this by making that location be somewhere that either has something your man needs to achieve his Win Condition, has something an enemy needs for theirs, or otherwise is useful to control for strategic purposes. Yes, even the smashing of a random monster lair has uses to it; it provides a location that your side can control and thus operate from in turn.

Dungeons, once they're more than That Place To Jumpstart That First Wave Of Newb Mans, are ready-made defensible locations for ambitious actors to exploit for their own ends. Overworld lairs are the same way; they are no different than the castles, temples, guildhalls, etc. we see in other locations on a campaign map.

Which also means those in the dungeon should also be using them as bases to run their own operations from.

The result is that any serious move on a dungeon or lair should result in a Braunstein session, assuming you have enough players on hand to toss around playable actors like that- and in a proper Clubhouse, you will.

The Culture: The Booker And The Tribal Chief Talk Victory And Conquest With Dunder Moose

Last night Jeffro and BDubs1776 come back two years later to share with you the Triumph of the #BROSR and TTRPG's bright future!

No one comes at us anymore with any teeth.

They are all found out as fake-assed faggots, especially the Oldfags, so said ankle-biting assholes have pivoted to softer targets. They refuse to Git Gud; they sucked out just like the Theater Kids they whine about.

We have won, decisively, and as such we are moving on to fix problems that the Oldfags could not and cannot even comprehend.

Note the BrOSR’s departures from the old guard: Wesely’s Braunstein One: Each player has three goals. Players are scored based on whether they perform their goals. Wesely’s players: “Okay, let’s just read our goals to each other and see if there is anything we can collaborate on.” Jeffro and Budbs after reviewing 12 playtest reports on session Braunsteins: Braunsteins are better without assigned goals and without point scoring mechanisms. The key thing for producing great play is honestly… for the players to lean in to playing their roles. When the dust finally settles, nobody will be able to deny who the winner was. Gygax’s: “As this book is the exclusive precinct of the DM, you must view any non-DM player possessing it as something less than worthy of honorable death.” Gygax’s Players: “Derp derp… Gary didn’t use his own rulez! Lolzololzo” Jeffro: This game is too big for me to master on my own. I need all of the players to be familiar with the rules so that they can help me run the game. The BrOSR: Here are a dozen ways to remove the referee from the position of being the bottleneck on campaign activity. Here is the best way to distribute the load he bears across every player in the campaign so that scaling becomes possible. The old guard did not isolate what made these games work. They did not identify what was holding campaigns back. When Gygax attempted to make a giant leap of refinement in the medium… they turned on him because of his attempt to walk back rule zero type thinking. The old guard was committed to chaos and disorder from the very beginning. About the only reason they speak up at all is to take credit for creating the nongame that D&D quickly became during the eighties. But they don’t even deserve credit for that. People that had no idea what in the heck the early D&D pamphlets were talking about were quite up to the task of inventing that without any help from anyone in Wisconsin or the Twin Cities.

Read on Substack

We not only drive the bus, we designed and built the bus. It's our bus now; you're just riding in it and being a bitchy backseat bozo. Either step up or fuck off.

The Culture: The Oldfags Never Bothered To Figure Out Why So They Had Nothing To Pass On

Not one untrue word said. NOT. ONE.

Here is the evidence we do have: There were a number of campaigns being run was TINY. The expertise of setting them up and running them resided in a SIMARLY SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE. All campaign instruction documents before AD&D were rough prototypes. No earnest development could have occurred because each campaign was distinct from all others in its theme, concept, and scope. The people playing in these campaigns may have some nice war stories. But they have no idea what was actually going on due to the rules being entirely in, for example, Dave Arneson's head. (This is the “just asked Wesely” cultural ethos of the era.) Any commentary on 1:1 time type rules will immediately give you insight into the level of understanding of gameplay dynamics a person has. (See Lewis Pulsiphers's remarks on that from an old White Dwarf magazine as a PRIME example.) We have published material that shows that key figures were unfamiliar with second order effects of the rule and what type of play structures it could feasibly support. Wargamers of the sixties were not a preliterate culture. Many of them are still alive today. What did they do when there was a resurgence of interest in campaign play? Did they suddenly decide to show up with the “practice and demonstration and mentorship and play reports and conversations at the table” that would help us achieve success at the table? NO THEY DIDN'T. In fact, they did the opposite of all that. They elected to outright oppose the efforts to recover campaign play. Because “not even Gygax played that way”, “only David Wesely can run a Braunstein”, etc. AD&D was the first time in history that anyone elaborated on the subject of campaign play dynamics at all. Apart from Gygax, every one of these “preliterate wargamers” walked away from the very game rules that even make such campaigns possible. They didn't know what they had. And there would be evidence to the contrary if they did.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

The Oldfags, too many of whom being Boomers, did what Boomers do and refused to pass on their patrimony.

The worse part is that what Jeffro describes here is something I've seen across the board from Boomers over the years. It's not just a Tabletop thing. They genuinely do not comprehend why they do (or did) what they did, only that it works/worked that way (at the time) so of course it always does so what's the problem? Why bother questioning a damned thing? It Just Works That Way.

This is why they get mad when you show the receipts. You are telling them, to their faces, with facts and evidence, that no It Does Not Work That Way You Fucking Retard and had you bothered to Read The Fucking Manual and properly comprehend--work through--what you read you'd be agreeing with us and not being an arthritic anklebiting asshole.

Now you know why I've come to call them "OldFags".

And those who echo them might as well be Oldfags, so they get the brush too.