Time to Sift Out the Wanna-Be Henchmen

This one's for the folks who are long-accustomed to proper RPG campaign play wonder why the youngin's went wrong.

The reason that proper play went away is because of two major threads. The first is that the founding generation and cohort worked off a set of assumptions that turned out to not be as obvious as they thought. The second is that the succeeding cohorts, especially once videogames took off and became the primary gaming medium, acculturated to a very passive paradigm of gameplay for no more nefarious a reason than because videogames work best that way.

I'm talking about the mission-focused paradigm, where the players are (in proper D&D terms) henchmen to a patron, whose primary purpose is to tell the players where to go and what to do. Sometimes they tell the players why. Adventure modules are naturally inclined to go with this structure.

The reason for this go-to structure stems from Organized Play, which came from Tournament Play, at which time the only fair way to score play was to determine who fell furthest from the door (as Michael Monard puts it). In practical terms, it means who got furthest down a linear path of play. You might as well be playing a videogame. At best you get something like Final Fantasy XV, where you go from hub to hub along a linear narrative path and resolve a bunch of main and side quests before moving to the next hub.

It's no surprise that videogames took to this structure and made it their own. The nature of the medium plays well to constricted playable spaces and the funneling of players down pre-selected paths, events, and outcomes. Sandbox games, by comparison, are very difficult to do and even harder to do well; tabletop is superior in all ways to this mode of play.

If this passive player paradigm is all you know, it's not a logical leap to see it be assumed when you play a tabletop RPG. We've had that for a generation or so now, such that even the folks who ought to know better--the WOTC and Paizo crowd--operate under these assumptions (especially now that we know that this is not the case).

Unfucking this fuckup will not be quick or easy, but it can be done. First, let go of everyone who won't make the switch; let them play videogames and be entertained that way- MMOs and similar multi-player games are a thriving niche of the market, so let them serve it. Second, pass on what you know and get folks who want to play this way up and playing. Yes, this is separating wheat and chaff- that's fine, even desirable, because it's good for everyone in the long run.

The big one, however, is this: forking the culture back to how it once was, and that means Making the West Marches Great Again, something that's best done with Open Tables when playing in public spaces or in game clubs. (Home games? Another circumstance entirely.) Big thanks to The Alt-Right DM for being so vocal about his attempt at doing just this.