My Life As A Gamer: RPGs Don't Work As Intended Without Wargaming (A #BROSR Revelation)

This happened on Twitter yesterday.

Serious question without ad hominem responses please.
The wargaming nature of early D&D was integral to the game. The other part was the dungeon-crawling aspect.
The wargaming aspect became rare while the dungeon game flourished.
Haven’t consumers voted with their feet? pic.twitter.com/mg4HtAehER

— Moldvay INC knows where the Black Fortress is... (@ARRGETSTUFFED) November 13, 2022

Implied is that "Wargaming BAD! Wargaming NOT NEEDED!"

As those who work in businesses where fulfilling customer demand is a thing can tell you, customers rarely know what they want. As those who fix broken machines can tell you, customers routinely fuck up their own machines by making changes to them out of stupidity and ignorance.

With tabletop RPGs, you get both of this in spades.

The removal of the wargaming roots of the medium directly created this very common whine: "I'm at endgame. What do I do now?"

Just as common is this one: "I'm bored. The Game Master didn't make anything so there's nothing to do!"

No wargamer thinks like this.

The reason that dungeon crawling took center stage was due to an influx of curious children--me included--who flooded into the hobby at an early age. We had no background in wargaming, so we did not comprehend what we read. As we did not comprehend what we read, we threw out what we did not understand. Dungeon crawls are boardgames in all but name, so that didn't take much brainpower; that stayed, and so did everything directly tied to it. Everything else got yeeted over time

Now we're finding out that a lot of Gary & Dave's hangers-on weren't that powerful between their ears either and it shows in how they tell their old stories and it shows in how they ran their games. The same revelation is now increasingly obvious throughout the medium and the business--once you know Kevin Siembieda's roots in comics, you can't unsee that influence in Palladium's products--and so is the conclusion that they too yeeted what they did not comprehend.

What was the result? The RPG medium as we know it- a dysfunctional mess of a machine that creates and promotes dysfunctional social norms. Norms that, now through videogames, are taken as "This has always been the way things are." because the RPG Cargo Cult mentality has been that strong and no one that knew better did anything about it.

Guess what happens when you take the wargaming and put it back into the RPG? Everything wrong with the medium is fixed as if by magic.

That's because the machine actually fucking works as intended when you have an actual endgame gameplay loop, a loop that also acts as a perpetual content creation engine, that also acts as a workload distribution mechanism, and that also works as a schedule liberalizing mechanism.

That, folks, is what the #BROSR has recovered from the Memory Hole and put back into practice.

That, folks, is what solves all of the tabletop RPG problems--social, cultural, business--with its restoration.

No more need to put all the load on the Game Master to come up with every last little thing to play or know how to play it; that workload gets cut down and spread out as players are free to empire-build (by whatever name you wish to call it) and otherwise deal in the Big Picture- up to defining their own domains and running adventures therein under the Game Master's auspices.

No more need to have all characters do everything together, forcing a scheduling nightmare that holds entire games hostage to the one guy with the least commitment to it; players are now free to play multiple characters, to play whenever their time and interest allow, to play without having a proper character via Patron Play (and thus to play remotely), and to engage in more aspects of play than tactical combat and right-goddamn-now levels of timekeeping- long term planning, logistics, economics, and diplomacy are all back on the table.

No more reliance on the Game Master to make things happen. You and the other players can, and should come to expect that you can, make things happen without asking permission. The Game Master, in turn, can stop stressing out about what to do come gameday and just let the players figure that out for you with their plotting, scheming, and campaigning- all you need to do is sit back, enjoy the show, and issue rulings as required, which is much easier to do when you run the game Rules As Written.

No more "just a couple of people" games. Campaigns can once more have dozens, even scores, of participants each of which can run multiple characters; Game Masters will need, at some point, to delegate just to keep things managable and that's entirely intended. Players can freely come and go without worry about Fear Of Missing Out, and even the Game Master can hand off the reigns if he needs to and take them up again when he's able. This is a pro-social change that people foolishly discarded because it was not brick-to-face obvious AND NO ONE TOLD THEM OTHERWISE!

We have solved the problem with RPGs as a medium. We did it by picking up a piece discarded and fitting it back into the piece-shaped hole in the machine.

So no, the customer didn't vote with their feet. They broke the machine because they didn't get how it worked, then whined about it not working. That's how you know that the customer is fucking retarded and not to be heeded.

Now we fixed the machine. The machine now works as intended. Now we're getting what we were promised all those decades ago. More people need to see it in action.

That's happening, and it can't be stopped now. First tabletop, then videogames. The Doloros Stroke has been healed at last.