The Culture: This is One Big Fantastic Adventure Wargame Hobby

By now it should be apparent that you can determine if something claimed to be a role-playing game is one or not by how readily it can be played as a fantastic adventure wargame in the tradition of Kriegspiel and Braunstein.

That list is far larger than many suspect, and--as one ought to expect--encompasses a lot of older games. That list includes the following:

• All TSR editions of D&D, Gamma World, Boot Hill, Metamorphisis Alpha, and Star Frontiers.
• All Palladium Books products. Yes, even Valley of the Pharoahs.
• All World of Darkness games (as the LARP scene proved), Exalted, and the Aeon Continuum games.
• TORG (This game is brick-to-face obvious about it, just incompetently applied.) and other genre-benders like Cthulhutech and Deadlands.
• The d6 and d20 editions of Star Wars
• All versions of Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Mekton, Earthdawn, HERO, GURPS, Battlelords of the 23rd Century, BattleTech/Mechwarrior/A Time of War, Bushido, Star Ace, Sengoku, Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Gear Krieg, Tribe 8, and Spycraft.
• Amber Diceless (where, again, this is explicit) and its derivatives (Lords of Olympus, Lords of Gossamer and Shadow).
• Every iteration of Elric adapted to RPGs and its derivatives as well as its antecedents (i.e. from Runequest forward).
• All Flesh Must Be Eaten and its derivatives (Terra Primate, et. al.), or have you paid no attention to how often faction-based fuckery goes down?

And, as the persistent popular of Palladium's RIFTS single-handedly proves (but it's nice that there are other examples), players have no problems throwing all of that stuff together into a massive stewpot and dining heartily from it for decades on end. (RIFTS is from 1990; it's almost old enough to run for the U.S. Presidency.)

The point? "Genre" does not apply to gaming. Such things are misapplications from the business of selling genre fiction to mass audiences, and gaming is not a medium of passive mass market entertainment.

This is a niche hobby medium of active participation, where players are capable of taking what could be a no-win scenario and--through cunning and applied skill--turning that on its head to become a glorious victory.

The problem is that the entire hobby has completely fucked up how to play the game for NEARLY 50 FUCKING YEARS. Even those who claim to remember those days confess their incompetence by their nay-saying of the efforts of others (most recently, and most effectively, being the #BROSR) to identify the problem, narrow down the cause, and then remedy the damage by retifying the errors.

This, by necessity, requires a change of language. You can't act on thoughts you don't have, and you can't communicate ideas without the correct words to transmit them.

That is why I've chosen to call this a fantastic adventure wargame hobby. That's what the actual model of play is, and as the means to play it properly are dredged back up from the Memory Hole and hammered into the crystal clear language that technical writing--which is what a rules manual is, something else RPG designers and publishers have long forgotten--we'll see this de-occultating and de-mystification accelerate.

Within a few years, at most, How To Win At D&D will be seen as the watershed moment where attempted cultural destruction by the neglect of Boomers and the malice of Death Cultists had been thwarted and the restoration of an older--better--hobby culture began.

From that restoration, a new route forward is taken- and new competition is kindled.

The next step is what is going to freak far more people out than what has already happened. Why? Because it is going to kill the current "industry", which relies on the current errant model of what this hobby is and--like making people sick so you can sell them drugs to dull the symptoms--it fosters the dysfunction so it can sell "solutions" in the form of Yet More Product.

The next step is to kill this business model by Removing Product and focusing instead on Gitting Gud- and thus on connecting players together so that, as iron sharpens iron, they can compete and thus Git Gud. More campaigns, more campaiging, more Sessions Reporting to show receipts, and more people playing in more campaigns.

This is not a business focused on pushing product. It's a cottage business focused on faciliating connections, the grease for which is the game itself.

I look forward to massive Twitter threads all about how Retired Actor rooked Government Official in a massive battle that took a long weekend IRL to resolve and a few weeks on the campaign calendar to finish, only for Cool Musician Guy to have slipped in during the fighting and nicked the widget they were fighting over- and none of them knew who the others were until after the fact when it came up at a party at the Referee's place (a guy whose business is renting supercars to YouTube gurus) where they laughed and had some burgers.

That's the future for this hobby that I see coming as this goes forward. One. Big. Fantastic. Adventure. Wargame.

And those that don't measure up? Like those that reject Christ, they are Left Behind.