My Life As A Gamer: Wargaming Is Praxis For RPGs

And now it's time to get some people mad.

Role-playing games don't really exist. They are completely broken when compared to d&d as intended.

— Jeffro Johnson (@JohnsonJeffro) October 20, 2022

Which is in reference to this:

To which I said this:

Almost.

What he gets wrong is that it _is_ a role-playing campaign as well as a political and military campaign. The latter gives context and substance to the the former, imparting meaning and providing a reason to bother at all- an end to strive for.

— Bradford C. Walker (@MrBCWalker) October 20, 2022

That's right: Role-Playing is the act and craft of making decisions AS YOUR FICTIONAL PERSONA. That's it. That's all it is.

What wargaming does is to turn that abstract into something concrete- it is PRAXIS.

Take all that Theater Kid faggotry that Critical Role does, wipe your ass with it, and flush it down the toliet. That is not only irrelevant, IT IS ENTIRELY WRONG!

By taking the wargame approach, you are putting all of that abstract talk and putting into terms ordinary people--which is what most gamers are--comprehend without issue. You have clear, comprehensible objectives to achieve in a clear, comprehensible scenario. You have clear, concise, and comprehensible tools to work with and resources at your disposal. You have clear, concise, and comprehensible obstacles and constraints to cope with or work around. Your character is both of these things.

Your character gives you a limited perspective upon which to perceive the environment, and therefore to receive information and be able to process that into useful intelligence to act upon. Your character gives you a set of tools and procedures to use in making things happen, as well as a set of deficits and other constraints that you have to overcome in some fashion.

That, Anon, is what role-playing actually is- practical problem-solving. That, Anon, is what RPGs inhereit from Kriegspiel by way of Braunstein. The wargame frame is the practical, and successful, application of the RPG theory as proven by the #BROSR at present and in more small-scale terms by decades of player reports (and the comedy made about RPGs; Knights of the Dinner Table wouldn't be funny if it wholly bullshit).

"But I don't want to wargame!"

Your desire to be a merchant lord? Wargaming. Your desire to achieve peaceful unification via diplomacy and cultural hegemony? Wargaming. Your desire to become a successful farmer and found a dynasty of yeoman freeholders? Yes, believe it or not, wargaming.

In each and every instance, you have to deal with a scenario and pursue objectives using limited intelligence and material resources against both passive and active opposition. Just because you can't gank the fuck out of whatever is in the way doesn't mean that you are not wargaming; you're deciding what to do to overcome your opposition and then planning how to do that given what you know and what you have to work with.

That's wargaming, folks. You are doing the exact same thing as a Prussian officer cadet writing down move orders to relay to a referee in the adjacent room. You just don't have the sheer space to play in a Double-Blind manner as said cadet did (or his contemporary counterpart at one or more War Colleges today).

This is what even several of the old-timers at TSR did not--maybe could not--comprehend but the geniuses did and thrived accordingly.

It's also why I can take any RPG worthy of that label and put it into the Braunstein Box: they are all wargames at their root and can be run accordingly.

People will get mad about this. Fuck them. They will be forced to accept it sooner or later, depending on how emotionally invested they are in denying this brick-to-face obvious fact.