And yes, Griff is a cunt who exploited an aging man for his own gain. Shame.
Griff deserves no credit for the results that have been developed by the BrOSR. He has always advocated for conventional play. In his documentary he asked leading questions to lure Blackmoor players into endorsing the precepts of conventional play. In his “scholarship”, he has made unsupportable claims about early seventies play to intentionally cut BrOSR practices out of the narrative. He has frequently contradicted BrOSR claims. And finally, no one could possibly have developed the gameplay approach of the BrOSR by primarily using his work as a guide. The idea that what I call Braunstein play dynamics are fundamental to D&D is original to me and is (as my critics would tell you) something this is foreign to the doctrine and understanding of both David Wesely and Rob Kuntz. I am the only person in rpg history to make such a claim and the BrOSR is the first group of gamers to ever explain how to use the David Wesely's Braunstein idea to solve the problem of how to play at the stronghold tier in a d&d campaign. This is original work and no documentary put together by Griff ever explained how to do such a thing.
The smart thing for Griff to have done was to lean into it, to accept this as a positive that would feed back into his own project, and encourage this revival because that positive PR would then reflect back on him and lead to increased interest in (and thus revenue from) his documentary work.
But that would entail Griff not being a bottom-feeding faggot, and we aren't in that timeline.
Now Griff has to be all about that lie for the rest of his days or his purloined credibility is shot, and he won't be able to build on what he wrought and then sullied.
Rule of Thule, over at Substack, posted this long note on the Bros and Braunstein.
Braunstein is an eternal construct like the Pythagorean theorem. The people who brought it to us deserve to be credited and remembered.
1) Wesely: discovered it
2) Arneson: exploited & mastered the form
3) Gygax: isolated & enshrined its form into game rules
4) Jeffro Johnson: defined it and completed it
All four points are important. Points 1 and 2 are made plain in Secrets of Blackmoor. We are only aware of point 3 because of the Trollopulous group’s efforts to run AD&D Rules-As-Written (RAW). They did not set out to demonstrate point 3—they were not even aware of the existence of Braunsteins when they started this process. It was totally unexpected that they find anything at all; they were just playing a game!
Thus, this eternal principle—this thing that every roleplaying game wants to converge towards—was identified through the process of obstinately following the rules.
It’s worth restating: the Braunstein conceptualization of RPGs would not be understood right now without running AD&D RAW. This fact underscores the importance of both RAW as well as AD&D, on multiple layers.
What makes AD&D different? Gygax was an intuitive genius, and he (along with Arneson) understood the sprawling concept of ‘fantasy gaming’ very early on in a way that was far ahead of anyone else. He wrote AD&D as a reaction to seeing people run OD&D wrong (this is clear from reading his tortured lamentations and warnings in the AD&D manuals). In order to get it right, he had to lock down the correct behavior into a rules fence so people wouldn’t screw it up. In doing so, he encoded Braunstein play and assumptions (which can be seen in Boot Hill as well) into the ruleset’s DNA.
RAW is important here because look at the path Gygax went on after TSR’s success. If he had not had a RAW mindset—if he had not believed that the rules necessarily communicated structure and precise intent—if he did not believe the rules could enshrine a form of play, then we would all be none the wiser. Imagine all we had was Gary’s interviews and forum comments and remarks from his visits to conventions and a rules-lite You Do You manual: we would think D&D was just a frivolous non-game colored and connotated by the (largely irrelevant) rulebook.
When a “game designer” puts out a rulebook which cannot be seriously followed, which does not seem to encode a form of play or any precise intent, comparison with AD&D (or other more seriously designed games) tells us that there’s nothing there to be examined. RAW is important because only by the players adopting a RAW mindset can a game designer convey (via RAW) a substant vision.
Designers must demand players play RAW. Players must demand that designers give them something worth playing RAW. AD&D is the example we all—designers and players—aspire to achieve, from both directions.
TLDR: The #BROSR saved the hobby. The Clubhouse is their castle. What Wizards of the Coast does, ultimately, is irrelevant; we are the future of the hobby now.
It is good to see that the Tribal Chief sees his significance correctly.
More people have hosted Braunstein events as a result of my efforts than they have due to David Wesely’s. If not for me, Braunstein would be nothing but a curiosity of the distant past, a novelty to be reenacted from time to time, an intermediary form in the transition from wargame to rpg. But I showed how the Braunstein concept was applicable to a wide range of problems that tabletop gamers face TODAY. I showed them how to incorporate session Braunsteins into their continuing rpg campaigns. I showed them how to conceive of their continuing campaigns as being a variety of Braunstein in their own right. And I showed them that roleplaying games are in fact broken without the play dynamics that derive from Braunsteins.
Nobody among the “Blackmoor Bunch” ever anticipated any of these developments. No scholar digging through the pages of old fanzines ever conceived of anything remotely like any of this. And no one ever did more to help more people to pay off the promise of the early D&D rule sets than yours truly. Indeed, no one had the audacity or the social resources to even attempt to play the sort of game described by those rulesets until after I and my friends publicly demonstrated that it was not only possible to play such games, but also that it was more fun and more engaging than the derivative nongame that people call “D&D” today.
Astonishing.
If you have an abiding love of vintage rpgs, not for how they have been traditionally understood but because of what they could be and what they ought to be… then you simply cannot thank me enough. And to all of you that are enjoying a fundamentally different rpg hobby culture today than has ever existed before, I can only say, “you’re welcome.”
You’re welcome.
They don't play. They're Theater Kid pretending to be gamers.
This is not at all surprising, and yet Wizards of the Coast keeps trying to pander to these broke-assed poseurs despite their revenue coming from actual hobbyist gamers because the company is captured by Death Cultists for whom pushing the poz trumps producing playable product.
This isn't working in Vidya, Comics, Novels, or another commercial entertainment media and there isn't an infinite amount of money to prop it all up anymore--yes, it's drying up, but those resevoirs got filled before the cutoff so this is a long draining process; the aim being to outlast the pressure--which (so far) only C-Suite (due to pressure from Hasbro) is at all aware of.
In short, Home Office needs to do some Tard Wrangling in Seattle.
This has to stop, for the cold-as-ICE reason that it's damaging the Brand and with it the Network Effect- and as it goes, the entire hobby goes.
Which means retarded shit like what the LOLcow pulled has to be openly, brutally, and ruthlessly mocked and derided--bullycided--into a ditch.
You can see how badly the Muh Narative brainrot hollowed out his skull.
He doesn't play, by the way. He's a Gamma's Gamma, so no one will play with him; this why all he does is ramble in his car. That's why other OSR guys farm him for content while they bully him for being a retarded megafaggot.
