My Life As A Gamer: You Don't Need To Buy A Marauder To Be One

You can always count on Jeffro to say something that is guaranteed to rankle some precious feathers because it is true.

The fact that nobody gets this is what's wrong with rpgs.

You don't need a rules manual that has a bunch of musketeer crap in it. You need a player that will take the role and play it to the hilt. https://t.co/P2Rea1GD0p

— Jeffro Johnson (@JohnsonJeffro) December 9, 2022

And Jon made certain to hammer that point home.

If they can't buy rules for it, how will they know what to ignore when they play it? https://t.co/eWioDHfUZy pic.twitter.com/lxgwJmNyF7

— Mr. Wargaming (@NotJonMollison) December 9, 2022

It is one thing to have a ruleset. It is another to be a Mech Pilot.

To play the role of a musketeer--come, take a look at the new trailer for the new movie adaptation next year--you do not need a very specific robot chassis (Class) or even to piece one together. You need only to say so and make the most of it.

No, you won't be mindlessly aping Dumas. Actual musketeers (a) wore armor and (b) used muskets. All that swordplay you're thinking about was a musketeer using their sidearms; in today's terms, that's a Special Forces operator using their pistol and not wearing armor because they're not in a forward area expecting combat or similarly on official duty.

Put Athos in a typical D&D expedition and he'll be in a breastplate with a musket, a brace of pistols, and then his rapier and dagger (and using his cloak as an offhand device).

This is no different than John Carter's free adaptation to Barsoom's environs, and John was not only a Fighter he was the Fighting Man that made the Fighter.

We now see what generations of disconnect from the canon of our culture, as well as a disconnect from living real lives, has done to the hobby- a dearth, a paucity, an outright desertification of the imagination. The inability to comprehend abstraction, to make use of the liminal conceptual space that it provides, and thus to benefit from the lubrication of imaginative play that it generates, stems from this severance and disconnection from the real and the past.

"But-"

Don't make me call Bright forward again.

There is a practical limit to gameplay procedure in the tabletop medium. For a videogame, you do need to go into serious detail about what the procedure is and how to execute it; for a tabletop game, you don't- abstraction is a friend here. There is no need for a Musketeer class when Fighter does all that needs to be done; the rest is in the hands of players to use their skill and acumen to make the most of it.

Just as you do not need piles of variant spell-casting classes because Magic-User encompasses almost all of them, you need not have piles of Fighter variants. Both classes are sufficient to encompass so many real and literary characters. Players of those classes should exercise their creative powers in doing so.

This is why Fighter and Magic-User are the first two classes to ever be created--and in that order--and it took major disruptive events in the campaigns of Blackmoor and Greyhawk to get us first the Cleric and then the Thief. Don't even ask about the others.

No wonder actual mecha games are such hard sells; most players already drive one before they even get to that point, so it feels redundant.