Narrative Warfare: When The Enemy Senses That Containment Will Fail

The True Campaign, dervied from the #BROSR's rediscovery of True D&D, has these key elements:

1:1 time allowed us to break free from the single party spotlight.

Patron play allowed us to break free from the single DM bottleneck.

The only way we can construct a campaign with this many moving parts is by using rules as written.

Rule zero is a hoax. #BrOSR

— Zanzel Melancthones of Trollopulous (@JohnsonJeffro) April 2, 2022

This is, as Jeffro noted in a previous post recently, applicable to other games with similar ludological roots such as Traveller. I say that this is applicable to far, far more tabletop RPGs than those of the 1970s and early 1980s- including games that don't seem so at first glance.

The issues that arise outside of OD&D/AD&D come, frankly, from poor game design and poor technical writing. I do not exaggerate when I say that D&D informs a lot of tabletop RPG culture, as its model is the default condition and thus Best Practices rest on that default condition; it is hardly unusual for a game that doesn't specify otherwise, or have a set of mechanics that emergently produce contrary results, to implicitly default to D&D's norms, especially after 1983.

(Why then? That was the launch of Mentzer/BECMI Basic and the iconic Red Boxed Set, the publication of which launched D&D into the mainstream and fixed D&D into its dominance position which--aside from a very brief window around Cultural Ground Zero--it has held uncontested since.)

In short, this campaign model is the standard and everything else is the deviation.

The proof comes from its general applicability, and the consequences therefrom. As quoted above, this model solves so many common complaints about the hobby as well as allowing users without needing special knowledge or any such faggot nonsense to actually achieve the promised gameplay experiences that this hobby general and many games specifically put forth to entice prospective users to take it up.

It makes the game decentralized, takes the power out of the publishers' hands as well as bothersome Death Cultists, and returns the game into a static toolset and not a dynamic Game As Service or whatever corporate muddlespeak is popular this week.

It makes the game, and the hobby, exoteric. The game is what it is, nothing more or less. The only improvement to make is that of presentation; write your technical manuals properly, meaning with crystal clarity of communication to the end-user on what this toolset is, how it works, and how to use it properly to achieve the desired results. There is nothing served by using more difficult language that is absolutely necessary, or using more words than is absolutely necessary, especially when your illustrations should be right there to make plain what your words say.

It makes the game, and the hobby, user friendly. So what if Puce Torchlight is offworld for six months and can't be played? Bob can play another character at the table, take up a Patron-level character and play away from the table, or--and this is a big deal--not play at all. He can go do something else, whatever that is, and suffer no penalties of any kind. Six months later, Bob can show up with Puce Torchlight in hand and carry on like Bob was there the whole time. This is a hobby; it has to be like this to be worthwhile to normies.

That has a lot of people--not just Death Cultists--terrified, and their behaviors are the tells betraying them. If this is just a thing you can pick up and put down, like hunting deer in November or doing canoe trips in June, with maybe reading some texts or emails when you're not actively playing then it's just like other normie hobbies and it's not Very Special anymore. That bothers people like you wouldn't believe.

That revelation, believe it or not, is going to hit like a truck. There will be a metric fuckton of performantive dismissals, but reality will not be denied; seeing how the True Model breaks the enchantment that made RPGs into a ghetto as surely as the Futurans turned adventure fiction into a ghetto called "Science Fiction" is going to be paradigm-breaking with all that entails, and for everyone's good it has to be shattered.

Yes, you can apply this to bigger--political--contexts, and you should.

And since I said I'd show this with more games, I'll pick that up again tomorrow. Until then, follow Jeffro here.