My Life As A Gamer: The Restoration of The Wargame Roots of RPGs Also Restores The Gates

The Death Cultists afflicing our cultural pursuits are not geniuses. Their dogma does not promote anything but a locust or rabbit psychology, since they are a status-obsessed (and thus status-anxious) lot where the top status people centrally control resources via dispensation of favors for those below them in status. They move into something they can consume for clout and signal for status, strip it bare like prey to a pirahna, and move on as the clout wanes in favor of fresh meat.

Tabletop RPGs have clout far outsized their actual presence in the wilder culture because of the number of influential videogame designers, musicians, novelists, comic book authors, actors, directors, and producers who played them in their youths. It took about 25-30 years, but today that influence cannot be denied and is not by any serious obseveror of popular culture.

However, the convergence of the medium into the hands of the Death Cult presupposes a paradigm of play that runs contrary to how the medium actually works. So long as this error persists, the convergence will also; the end goal of the Cultist presence is to centrally control the medium, to dictate what is and not as well as who can or cannot, much as their fellow travelers in banking and employment seek to do likewise in those realms.

The true gameplay paradigm completely countermands this.

The wargame roots of the tabletop RPG medium compels a decentralized paradigm of organization and play, where each campaign stands alone separate and distinct from all others, and neither needs nor wants the intrusion of external actors in its affairs- not what is allowed to be played, or who may (or may not) participate.

Allow me to specify:

• Death Cultists presume success in all that they do. They truly believe that so long as they go through the motions--as if it were a ritual, because they see it as such--they are not only guaranteed effortless success, but that they are entitled to it. It is a Cargo Cult mentality at work.
• The wargame paradigm completely upends this. Success is the result of careful preparation, diligent and consistent practice, and well-timed action. It is, in effect, work. Stupid characters and stupid players--and Cultists are often the latter--routinely end up rooked, mooked, and cooked by smarter competitors. To a Death Cultist, this is unacceptable; they Did The Thing, so any result other than Total Victory is not only an error but a criminal act of theft in their eyes and they throw tantrums accordingly.
• The ability of Death Cultists to use social pressure to browbeat compliance works only in environments where they can exercise power via control over necessary functions or resouces. The wargame paradigm upends this by removing that centralized control; they can't control what you can play, who can play, how you can play, where you can play, or when you can play.
• Asychronus play and Patron play further removes Cultist centralization by removing One True Party presumptions (and with it social browbeating access) as well as making it possible to play anonymously; it was then, and moreso now, possible to play with (or against) people you never even meet or even know to exist. Cultists cannot unperson those they can neither see nor hear.
• Having players drive gameplay and interacting to create emergent scenarions, ala Diplomacy, removes Cultist presuming of We Against Them by permitting player-versus-player interactions. Couple this with never knowing whom you play against, and the means for Cultists to impose dogma wither.
• The lack of need a Consumerist paradigm of play, and the lack of Muh Officialdum, means there is no status to signal by playing the game conspiciously or by displaying product in a video or a livestream- especially if you can play by sending the DM a text while you wait at Five Guys for your order or for your girlfriend to finish getting ready for your date night on the town.
• If there is no means to effectively enforce Cultist dogma on wrongthinkers, then gameplay will not reflect Cultist dogma and when the tantrums don't have their desired effect (and you can't unperson others to indirectly attack the DM), the Culists will leave the campaign and may even advertise it for the DM by endlessly bitching about it on social media.

The gates to the hobby are built upon a foundation whose environment is inhospitable to those possessed of the psychology of rabbits and locusts. If there is no status to signal, no clout to cultivate, and no mechanism by which to impose central control over the hobbyist scene, then Death Cultists will flee in favor of more favorable climates with ample fodder to satisfy their aberrant psychologies.

Return to the wargame roots, be as uncaring and inhospitable as the deep deserts of Arrakis, and watch the Death Cultists flee as they have no Sadukar to save them. Become the Graveyard of Empires for cultural despoilers, and enjoy grinding them down to dust.