My Life As A Gamer: Real RPGs Make You Think Like Winners

The Domain development gets into a bit of tedium as we get into the exploration of the immediate area. If this were put on a set of maps, you'd have a big scale map where it's 30 miles or so per hex, and a small-scale one that's 1 mile per hex. (The latter then scales down to 200 yards per hex, but that's not relevant here.)

Gygax says that this is tedious--lots of 1 mile hexes in a 30 mile hex--that need to be generated. Each hex, in turn, needs to have its dominant terrain determined, inhabitation determined, and monsters checked for. At the table, it certainly is so. This is perfect downtime activity. Throw on a show, film, radio broadcast, or online podcast and chip away at it a few at a time- y'know, something miniature painters and model builders have done for generations.

I won't expand more on this at this time; better to do like Mandalf does and make monthly reports. What I will do hereafter is to work the procedures, adjudciate the results, and post back on what went down by the end of this month.

However, I will say this. The Domain level of play will be easier to explain to players not used to it by comparing it to Diplomacy than Advanced Squad Leader, or by comparing it to Play By Mail wargames, or to wargames like Stellaris or Bannerlord. You are playing at the level of strategy and logistics, of geopolitics and diplomacy, with occassional squaring up for battle or dealing with an unexpected discovery.

This is the level where all that leveling up and scoring phat lewt pays off. You need resources and power to get things done, to make what you want done to get done, and to deal--permanently--with anything and everything that gets in the way.

Now there's a reason to go seeking adventure, to go seeking treasure, to get stronger. There's a fucking point to doing this, and that point is to pursue Domain-level objectives.

Which means there is no reason to not begin pursuing them as soon as possible, well before your character gets to Name Level. So don't just sit there. Have an objective, a plan to pursue it, and act on that plan.

No wonder Death Cultists hate the real D&D--the real RPG--because it forces players to think is pro-active terms. You don't need special rules to become Alexander The Great. You need ambition, you need resilience (because you will get wrecked and need to recover from setbacks), and you need adaptability (because plans never survive contact with the enemy).

In short, not only can you #WinAtRPGs, playing real RPGs over time will build the character and habits that real-life winners possess- and Fake Gamers can't handle that. Once you start thinking like a winner, you start acting like one, and that in turns means your odds of winning in real life greatly increase- the rest is just doing for real what you game out: filling gaps in skill and acumen while accruring the gear needed to get it done.