The Culture: The Value Of Seeing The Game That The Manuals Present In Action

Daddy Warpig made clear what far too many tourists and wankers in the hobby either cannot or will not admit.

AD&D is not suitable for Tolkien.

A long-term dungeon crawling milieu is alien to the very ethos and mythos of Middle-Earth. https://t.co/gphugxH18H

— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) April 22, 2023

This is crystal clear when you play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition as it is written. You will find this to be true with B/X D&D, BECMI D&D, and OD&D as-written also. (You will also find that each of these games plays different from each other when played as-written.)

Observers that are honest with themselves will admit this also when they (a) read the manuals, (b) read the session reports, or (c) observe actual play done competently.

The reason is that far too many people--most of them pig-ignorant about the matter--don't get that any game is a machine, a thing designed to achieve a specific result, and the rules in the manual are the blueprints that explain how it works as well as the instructions on how to build and use that machine.

That people don't get the value of doing this is a display of how degraded the quality of the common tabletop RPG gamer is, especially those who think that they know but show by their actions that they don't.

Rules that didn't seem to make sense do when you see it in action. Procedures make sense when you see it in action. Decisions made make sense when seen in action. The parts are not the whole, and the whole is greater than the parts; when the machine is used as instructed, the machine produces the results that the designers promised to its users.

And that promise has sweet fuck-all to do with Tolkien and Middle-Earth.