Narrative Warfare: Shatter The Glamour Of The New

Tabletop RPGs, as well as board and card games, are not videogames. There is no such thing as "obsolescance"; there is only "Does this widget work as intended?"

This means that the business of these product categories, when attempting to ape the necessary complications that electronics-based media has, always feels hollow and if not for long-term persistent gaslighting with regard to this fact there is no way refreshing business revenue with edition changeover would work.

Knowing this, I changed my thinking some time ago and decided to go back to playing the specific versions of games that I know work as intended. Thus did I return to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition, Classic Traveller, TORG's original edition (because it required exactly one tweek to work as intended), and so on.

This is also why I prefer the Old School Renaissance over whatever the Sea-Tac Sect pushes, and I will not stop endoring worthy games like Autarch's Adventurer, Conqueror, King or the RPG Pundit's ever-increasing catalog. Even if a specific game doesn't interest me, I can and do appreciate these people seeking to cut off a path proven poisonous and strive to forge ahead down new paths based on the power of proven past product.

Novels and comics, likewise, are not film or television.

The chokepoint here, as with games, has been publishing and then preservation. As authors like JD Cowan dig into the past--and finds that the madness of today's SJW Convergence was well in effect over a century ago--and others, such as Nick Cole & Jason Anspach, work out how to make the new publishing and distribution technologies work for indie authors both the narrative defending OldPub and the mechanisms by which is operates are continually eroded; both should collapse utterly at about the same time, leaving only NewPub to remain.

Slow, incremental progress is how things change most often. It's slow, and therefore invisible to casual observors, until a point of critical mass--of No Return--hits and then the Preference Cascade kicks off and what seemed to be forever suddenly is no longer.

The only thing that can allay this is Narrative Control.

This is why the enemy is so obsessed with messaging, why they care so much about perception--why they are a Face Culture--is because they know that they can delay the inevitable if they can keep control over what is believed about novels, comics, tabletop games, etc. as the smarter people try to transition out of the way of the collapse and either try to put themselves into a position to dominate what succeeds this decaying edifice or to move on to something else entirely. (The latter is what the whole "Lifestyle Brand" thing is about.)

The way to deal with this is to directly gainsay their assumptions.

New is not always better; the OSR's persistence despite the narrative assaults and commercial presence of Bad D&D (et. al.) proves that, as does the enduring appeal of past comics titles vs. their curent counterparts as well as classic heroes of Western (especially American) literature vs. what passes for such today.

While "Get Woke, Go Broke" is a cope--so long as the Blackrock money flows, the Woke are not Broke--certain operations are more expendable than others and will be shut down if they are more bother than they're worth. The tabletop gaming sphere in particular is wholly expendable; if not for D&D, the enemy wouldn't care at all about it, and as you can get D&D without buying D&D thanks to the OSR, none need give money (or time, or attention) to those what hate them to satisfy that craving.

Novels and comics are more important due to their value for narrative control, but even they are subject to the Bern Convention and thus as older works fall into the Public Domain it becomes easier to preserve, republish, and distribute those superior classics to new generations. Most works are not Disney's Steamboat Willy, and because of that fact you can already find massive (and cheap, or free) electronic republishings of classic literature--some of which are even provided by the Big Platform, such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble--and we should lean hard on this to put books into the hands of people disatisfied with OldPub while warming them up to what NewPub provides.

They haven't thrown the better past into obvion yet. They just try their hardest to make it uncool by lying about it on multiple levels.

Now that you know that lying about the past and the present in their game, you have what you need to attack their narrative control with the truth- and you use the truth as the core of your Rhetoric. Once your Rhetoric breaks their hold on their minds via emotional fuckery, then--and only then--will calm Dialectic have room to do its healing wonders. Once they see that this path is poison, then they'll be willing to go back and begin anew from a firm foundation.

That's my say for today. Dispel the Glamour of the New and you'll find a way out of this mire of misery we're in.