The Business: Boomerism, Tabletop RPGs, & Hope For Tomorrow

Over on Twitter, Jeffro's been talking about doing a campaign using Gamma World or RIFTS or something like it.

Rifts doesn't include rules or guidelines for creating a post-apocalyptic regional map and then letting the players move around on it. My gut instinct is to use Rifts for character generation and combat, but then use Gamma World 3rd edition for wilderness stocking and movement. pic.twitter.com/2AbEMTEKv8

— Jeffro Johnson (@JohnsonJeffro) October 23, 2022

Palladium Books has consistently failed to have any defined procedures for movement, travel, encounter design, or anything else that actually helps run the game.

The issue is that Kevin Siembieda is a comic book guy at heart, and every single report about his Game Master style has him running things like a Silver Age comic book even when it's not what needs to be done.

This is why there's powers and classes and widgets and lore aplenty, but sweet fuck-all for actual gameplay procedures outside of combat and that combat procedure only works in the context of a Silver Age comic book action scene. Want to establish a freehold? Good luck; the rules are silent. Want to know how long it takes to manufacture a starship? Silent. Maps? Barebones at best. How long does it take train a recruit into a soldier? Not one word.

"Just make it up." WHY AM I PAYING YOU? You're getting paid to answer these questions and establish these procedures; that's what "making a RPG" means.

There's a reason for why Palladium has the reputation that it does, and that reputation has a lot to do with what the users see in the products. These users, by the way, that do not see things as Kevin does and therefore draw completely different conclusions about how to play the game or what it is about- differences in perspective that Kevin is on record as being frustrated since he's ranted about them from time to time over the years in print.

I am not inclined to do the work that I paid someone else to do for me.

Jeffro is right to lean to Gamma World over RIFTS because of this deficit, and there is an opportunity here to do all of this better by filling in the gaps that Kevin unwisely left.

This is one of many examples of '70s era RPG hobbyists reacting to Gary Gygax by rushing to market products that compete with wha they thought Gygax was about, instead of sitting down and analyzing what Gygax actually said and did to figure out what it is. The continuing reaction of old timers ankle-biting Jeffro shows that they never bothered to do this, a very typical Boomer attitude to take (as they are Boomers we're talking about here), and thus perpetuated the error to the present.

If you want an opportunity to seize, here you are: making the products that the Boomers should have made, but didn't because they fucked up and refuse to admit that they're wrong.