Monday, May 10, 2021

Narrative Warfare: A Note On The RPG Medium And Why It's Under Attack By SJWs

There is a very good reason for why you should follow Jeffro Johnson and his rediscover of how to properly play tabletop RPGs.

It is because the habits of thinking that you acquire by playing them as intended are directly transferable to everyday life, and not just in the sense that learning to drive a car is transferable to learning to drive a truck. It also applies in the sense of mindset and attitude, something that men like Ivan Throne charge plenty of money to teach to you, and if you think that's overblown then consider the following.

In a proper RPG, you have no control over your character's genesis. You roll the dice, you take what you get, and you do the best you can with what you've got. Sometimes that's a long run that leads to much success. Sometimes you get curbstomped walking out the front door. Either way, eventually you hit the end of you run, and it's time to start again.

What does this teach you?

  • Resource Identification and Management: You learn how to identify your strengths and play into them, and conversely how to identify would-be collaborators that mirror you so that combined as a team you're stronger than each are individually. This cultivates strategic thinking and rational decision-making, increasingly for the long term and thus to promote long-term planning that's necessary to maintain Civilization.
  • Stoicism: You know that both strength and weakness are passing conditions, so you should neither become intoxicated by the former nor embittered by the latter, but rather to accept all in turn for what it is, and in time you learn what matters and what does not- and thus that danger is real, but cowardice is a vice. Failure happens, so recovery as fast as you can so you can try again, and learn from it as you do so. This cultivates resilience of character and persistence as a habit.
  • Risk Management: You learn how to intuit the probability of an uncertain thing over time--again, the benefit of having and adhering to a knowable ruleset--so that you can, under stress, quickly figure out if the reward for doing a thing is worth the risk of suffering the penalty for failure if you don't succeed.

That's very basic stuff I can suss out of proper RPG play, and if you have sons then I strongly recommend using RPGs in this manner. Using a virtual environment to get them used to thinking not only in terms of being responsible for their actions, but also in terms of having--and insisting--on the authority required to make that responsibility practical and worthwhile well before they go out into the wider real world and have to deal with all the bullshit therein.

It is most effective when used alongside more formal instruction--teaching abstract subjects like Math is easier when there is concrete application, and emphasizing resilience of character gets reinforced when you then take your son on a real trip out into the wilds--and with other real-life referents to attach useful gameplay mindset and habits to.

This is also why the Game Master must be strictly neutral; he must exhibit the solidity and stoic character of a mature man, allowing the characters to be stupid or unfortunate and thus to suffer accordingly- fatally so as the dice dictate. Learning how to sift the real from the ephemeral, the rational from the emotional, is part-and-parcel of maturity for boys into men and this is best done by experience and example- something RPGs are very good at doing when played properly.

This should not be a substitute for doing real things, but rather a place to train in a safe environment; let them crash and burn here, where they can learn without injury, rather than out there where the consequences are real and permanent.

And this, I put to you, is why the Death Cult so badly wants to converge RPGs into SJW trash. It not just "a male space", it's one of the few remaining that have real impact when employed properly; fathers, I implore you, use this to aid in guiding your sons to manhood. You will be astounded at how well it works to begin teaching your boys how to be men when you can point to their own virtual experiences to bring the point home.

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