My Life As A Gamer: Removing Logistics In RPGs Was A Mistake

One thing I note that gamers who grew up with videogames as their primary frame of reference also tend to have little appreciation of, or tolerance for, logistics.

This means that they run into problems when dealing with strategic situations, especially when playing fantasy adventure games like Real D&D editions. They have no appreciation for time, supplies, or other logistical matters or how they intersect with strategic operations.

No, what they want--and Revealed Preference confirms this--is a High Time Preference style of thinking brought about by massive dopamine saturation. "It's not fun" is the common complaint.

In practice, this means "I refuse all consequences short of death". We see this most often with injury and magic. "It's not fun that my guy is out of action for (X) days/weeks because I fucked up and got mauled." and "It's not fun that I ran out of spells/had inapplicable spells at hand and need to spend hours/days/weeks changing/recovering them" are so often heard that you could set your watch by them.

Thus did the changes in later D&D editions, and other adventure games, change to conform to their lack of vision and discipline. These complaints also came about due to a lack of multiple characters per player (so you had someone to play while another was on mandatory downtime), and often a lack of proper accounting of both time and space.

In short, the adults in the room--literally and otherwise--failed to do their ONE FUCKING JOB when dealing with the children that came into the hobby en masse circa 1980.

Playing Real D&D as-written has forced those exposed to it to acknowledge that logistics and economics--real economics, not fiancial fuckery--matter. Do you really want to tie up Clerics on casting spells to make food and water every day, or do you want them available for other matters? Since you can grow, cultivate, and hunt for food and water sources do exist (in most places) it is a bad use of resources to do so. Do you tie up Magic-Users on Wall of Stone/Iron castings, or do you find a suitable quarry or mining site and dig that out of the ground?

You get the idea.

Having multiple characters per player, enforcing the passage of time, the traversing of space, tracking material resources (including spell components), training costs to level up, etc. are all matters of logistics and thus of strategic importance. The superior players, the ones that #winatRPGs, are the ones that quickly acclimate to this and begin thinking like staff officers in an army or ministers of a court.

In short, like people that deserve to be running a society.

I am surprised at what comes up when we Regress Harder to the wargame roots of RPGs. More game designers and publishers should play the #BROSR way; even if they don't change what they design and publish to conform to what they find in a properly-run AD&D campaign, at least they will comprehend why it works the way that it does and thus take away the Cargo Cult mentality that dominates game design in RPGs.

Ashes of Creation team, I am looking at you. You're almost there.