My Life As A Gamer: The Standard Is The Gate

Okay, bad to RPG talk.

We now have a standard. Summarized.

• Rules AS WRITTEN.
• Multiple characters per player.
• One-to-One time w/ Strict Timekeeping.
• Status Quo is the Enemy.
• Actions have consquences.
• The game doesn't stay at the table.

The rules provide the structure for play. They are the manual for participants to refer to for ordinary operation of the game. The mechanics, therefore, define the conceptual spaces wherein play occurs as well as the liminal spaces between them; you can't have thresholds unless you have spaces to keep separate. This is true in physical space as it is in conceptual space.

If you do not understand how the machine works and why the machine works as it does--how and why the game as-written plays--then you have no business making criticisms about it because you don't know what you are talking about. You don't know what you're talking about because you did not conform to the standard, so you have no basis for comparison. You are no different than some cunt whining about guns, cars, or games despite not knowing the first thing about them- and just as we dismiss them out of hand, so do we dimiss you as incompetent to participate in the discussion.

And there is no greater undermining of one's own claims of relevance or competence than to brag about how you flout that standard.

Holding to a position contrary to the standard is to embrace a form of the Post-Modernity heresy and error that is "Death of the Author" and its weaponization: "Reality Is As We Decree". Indeed it is how the Death Cultists got their way into the hobby scene, how they performed their entryism, and wielding Muh Diversity as a moral argument they leveraged "No rules are actually rules" into "Make it Diverse, Bigot, or we cancel and unperson you" because the lack of adherance to the standard allowed no viable counterattack to their moral position.

The standard exists for more than just to give order to a campaign. It exists to give order--itself based on a moral order, one superior to the Cult--to a hobbyist subculture, one that ordinarily is inhospitable to Death Cults because they can't readily browbeat compliance to their moral vision.

Let those that cannot accept this standard meet their fate, for this standard is tried, tested, and proven against all would-be successors. It needs no massive consumerist industry. It needs no big presence in popular media. It needs no influx of capital. It is decentralized. It is decapitalized. It is, at its heart, a discipline in its practical form and it is in the cultivation of that discipline that its fruits are grown. Those unwilling to conform have no right to its benefits, and we are right to exclude them.

Measure up, or move out.