My Life As A Gamer: Playing RPGs Right Threatens The Business of Tabletop RPGs.

We've been doing it wrong for decades. Go figure, there's a monetary incentive to keeping players on the Consumer Product treadmill, so bullshitting them into buying more product that they don't need and it's long ago become the norm. Two generations at least know no better, and RPGs are degraded for it. The latest video out of The Joy of Wargaming lays out the hows and whys--and shows how things actually fucking work--such that it argues for the tabletop medium's own superiority.

Of course there's a Jeffro Johnson blog post to go with this, which you will find here, and this is the appetizer:

My pal Bdubs1776 had given us the world’s ONLY breakdown comparing and contrasting 1:1 Timekeeping with the conventional approach to rpgs. Here’s his conclusion:

Jeffrogaxian Time Keeping is superior because it makes downtime easier for a DM (and PCs) to manage well, it allows competing PC parties, and it allows Patron play with major wargames etc going concurrently with normal dnd session play. Variable Time Keeping has no clear advantage on anything that makes a good ttrpg campaign.

What does this mean?

It means that, from the very beginning--at 1st level, with your original character--you can get right into making plays and being a mover-and-shaker in the campaign. Not only that, you should, and in a campaign with strong pro-active players you're going to be compelled to do the same or either get swept up in their wake or get left behind to find yourself unable to do whatever it is you wanted to do.

It means that, as the Dungeon Master, you are there to dispationately arbitrate and resolve actions and nothing else. You are motherfucking Crom; you breathe live into the world and the characters within it, but otherwise you don't give two shits who lives or who dies or what happens. You are to be entertained by the players, not the other way around.

It means that you need not be at the table to participate. You can just read the blog (or whatever), email the DM and tell him your take on this or that or the other thing and he may or may not bother to heed your feedback. Hell, you can participate in the campaign without ever rolling up a man to play.

The interactions with various player-characters, patrons thereof, other NPCs encountered, etc. quickly turn into a perpetual content creation engine that can keep a campaign rolling indefintely so long as the DM chooses to do so. Given the tools now available--and I don't mean virtual tabletops or Roll20 or that stuff--to do so online, that's the easiest thing to do. Play-By-Email/Discord/etc. is just as easy to do as picking up the phone and ringing up Grandma, and makes even boring days at the office passable. (Just be careful not to piss off HR or your boss.)

In short, we are well on our way to restoring the medium to what it once was. However, that means threatening a 35+ old business model built off this psychology.

WOTC and Paizo are the biggest benefactors, but most publishers are no less complicit and they've trained--Pavlovian style--multiple cohorts to think this is how it is. Got an issue? Buy more product. Don't like this thing? Buy more product. Bob being a dick? Buy more product. Always buy product and refrain from unofficial alternatives. Be loyal to Brand, because Brand is God and your table's GM is a shitbag unless he/she/xenoscumthatmustbepurged strictly adheres to Brand.

I'm already adjusting my own thinking accordingly, and have been doing so for a while now. In short, I see no need to buy new stuff unless it provides me something that I don't already have; I may do so for other reasons, but not out of any "need". This is a hobby where a fiver can keep you playing for the rest of your life, and that's if you want a print copy. Consume (far) less; create (far) more. You'll be glad you did.