The Business: Your Tabletop RPG Must Be A Complete Wargame At All Scales

Jon Mollison cut this video yesterday.

The reactions to it are still coming in.

The reactions can be summarized as "WUT? Wat u mean game do big fight thing just fine as is?"

They can't believe the evidence of their own eyes. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition did not ever need BattleSystem because the rules as-written handle mass combat as easily as individual combat and freely allows interaction between the two.

This is yet more proof that the roots of competent RPGs are competent wargames, and that any successful RPG must possess the same capacity to handle individual and mass combat--complete with interaction between the mass and the individual--in the player-facing rules manual.

You do not need to shunt this to a supplement. That's turning out to be a bad idea, and reflections upon the last nearly 50 years of the medium are now revealing that this is a consistent pattern of game design and business failure.

Your wargame rules will naturally include all neccessary information and procedure for logistics: food production, raising armies, producing material, erecting fortifications, building roads, ports, boats/ships, whatever- it's all there.

Your wargame rules naturally allow for Diplomacy interactions.

The concern--which will become open screeching soon enough--coming from folks wanting to make a living pushing product is that this further shows the Normies that they don't need to buy all that product to play.

Good.

This needs to be a hobby medium of doing, not collecting, so those looking to make a living from RPGs need to make their business the facilitating of play--to do this as a service--and stop shilling endless products that always have ever-smaller returns because you appeal to ever-smaller prospective audiences. (i.e. the Product Treadmill).

As I'm coming up on my own end-of-month Domain update, I'll see if I need to apply any of this soon enough.