My Life As A Gamer: What To Expect From Learning #EliteLevel Play

You're a brand-new player, with a brand-new 1st level character.

You've never played a real campaign before. What should you expect?

You are an adult. Ask the Game Master.

That said, there are some things that are often true in real campaigns:

• Backstory: Irrelevant. Who you are, where you came from, what family you (didn't) have- all pointless detail that will never come up during play. Don't waste your time; who your man is shall be decided entirely by what he says and does at the table and during downtime actions.
• Ambition: Because the main driver of XP cultivation comes directly from bringing in big scores of treasure and erecting revenue streams, players that are aggressive and entrepreneurial regardless of class will be far more successful than those that are risk-averse and passive reactive sorts.
• Roguelike: PCs get killed (or might as well be dead) through no fault of their own. Furthermore, due to training requirements and other time-intensive activities such as injury recovery or spell research, PCs will be out of action and unavailable to play from time to time. Being attached to one PC is a recepie for disappointment; expect to roll and play multiple PCs in the campaign and swap between them.
• No Guarantees: You are not expected to bulldoze your way through it all, but instead to avoid unfavorable encounters. If you don't have something to instantly solve the problem before you, that's your problem and not the Game Master's to solve. Sometimes you get it, and sometimes you get got; someone's got to be the corpsepile of the previous party who fooled around and found out- why not you? If it happens, shrug it off, roll a new guy and go again next time.
• Wargame: Not just pitched battles, but the full package: Intelligence, Logistics, Diplomacy. Real RPGs are rooted, via Chainmail, to the game that made Prussia into the powerhouse of Europe and the core of modern Germany: Kriegspiel. Once you see how similiar real wargaming is to real RPGs, you can't unsee it and you can't avoid acknowledging how superior this is to the fake shit Critical Role and others push on us. You can be a serious and powerful figure in a campaign by focusing on this- and certain character classes can't avoid doing so.

You will be far more successful as a player by reading history as well as classic literature, especially the history of great men and powerful states because this is the direction that any successful character (and the groups or institutions that they create) will tend towards over time.

You will be far more successful by recognizing that RPGs are wargames, and wargames are not storytelling media; they are practical exercises in problem-solving, and that is why narrative tropes do not apply and narrative expectations are routinely thwarted.

The combination of these two means that you will be able to find viable models in history and literature to consider, such as Gaius Julius Caesar or D'artangan.

You will find no Chosen Ones in a real campaign, people born great and merely having to show everyone else that this is so. Instead, you will find only those that become great because they made themselves great by their own hand and thus proved their worth through merit alone- no one fixing the game for or against you here.

If this is what you want from RPGs, then you're ready to #winatrpgs and become #EliteLevel gamers and learn #winningsecrets that transfer over to your real life.