The Business: Behold Grifting Beast Shilling Crap No One Needs For Games No One Plays, Again

When I say that most Cargo Cultists are Consumerist Product Pushers constantly shilling on the position of "Your game is shit. Buy this widget to fix it" this is it.

Civilized societies string these leeches up and hang them from lampposts.

You don't need this if you have a competent game. You make your own as you go, and as such you care about what happens because YOU HAVE SKIN THE GAME!

This? This is Frustrated Narrative Faggot Syndrome in action, the refuse shat out the anus of a frustrated fake writer and repackaged as a Tabletop supplement hoping to score some sucker's paycheck. Even the Pundit doesn't crap out this waste of wood pulp.

You need a real game (AD&D1e), a blank map, some dice, and about 15-30 minutes. This, at a leisurely pace, gets you what you need to get started.

Everything else is a waste of time, a waste of money, and a waste of attention. Everything. Else.

The Culture: They Keep Trying To Steer Things Back Into Their Cave Prison

When Jeffro and BDubs shit on Cargo Cultists for willfully misrepresenting things, shit like this is what they're talking about.

Fuck off, retard.

This faggot knows that the Bros exist- I've flat-out TOLD him so.

He's been SHOWN BROZER and UMBROS. He knows about Winning Secrets. He's no different than the Oldfags who keep trying to steal #BROSR developments and try to reframe them in Cargo Cult non-game terms.

He is willfully avoiding the fact that this hobby runs off Braunstein, which means he's not an honest actor- and that applies to all of the Cargo Cultists, regardless of whatever flavor of shitsandwich they shill for. This is what "Gamers are terrible people" means when you hear people like Jeffro or BDubs shit on them.

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.