The Business: What Good Hobby Games Must Look Like Going Forward

Let's review the four pillers of the hobby:

• Rules As Written
• Strict Timekeeping
• Faction Play
• Always On

Going forward, games are to be accessed based on how well the design fulfills these criteria. Doing so necessitates having the following functionality:

• Double Blind Play: Each player must contend with Fog Of War; he does not know where other players are unless he or those he commands encounter them, and remains aware of those others only so long as contact is maintained. The Referee sees where every player (and their subordinates) are at all times, deciding who sees whom and when contact is broken.
• Competitive Multi-Player: Each player must contend with all other players. The game allows players to cooperate or contend as they wish (Diplomacy influence), but while everyone can lose the odds that more than one player can win is slim at best.
• Arbitration Decentralization: Multiple Referees exist to meet player demand for action, be it active at the table or during downtime away from same, with the workload distributed among them as they agree upon.
• Scalability: The game must be able to go from Man-To-Man to Mass Battles. For a typical Fantastic Adventure Wargame, this includes Naval Combat (Ship-To-Ship and Fleet Actions tacked on to Man-To-Man/Mass Battles) and should include Aerial Combat also. Space adventures will mix those latter two to varying degrees. Top level play, where politics and economics are at the institutional level, should be included also.
• No Benefit From Digitization: This exists because someone's going to say "Why not make it a videogame?" and point to Magic-Users doing just that for Next Edition. The game's rules must not benefit from being translated into an application of any sort, and that puts a hard cap on complexity of design; anything involving "character builds" is outright Dead On Arrival- looking at you, Edition 3 through to Current Edition as well as GURPS/HERO. If you can't Keep It Simple, make a videogame and be done with it; there's a lot of fun stuff there that I have no problems recommending (e.g. Outward).

You can see, right here, how this is different from Cargo Cult gameplay.

A campaign that takes off quickly looks, from the outside, like watching Time Ghost do one of the World Wars week-by-week with theater-level updates and side stories about notable events or people. That's what a public-facing campaign log would look and feel like.

All that "living world" talk from various Cargo Cultists is just so much Potemkin Village bullshit compared to the real thing. This paradigm of play puts the substance behind that styling because you have multiple parties independently acting--and interacting--in pursuit of their own objectives.

This paradigm of play, because it is inherently competitive, kills all Narrative conceits dead. You can't have any storytelling in a proper wargame environment; there is no plot armor when it's Player Versus Player because that is cheating and everyone knows it. Hero status has to be earned by taking risks and surviving the consequences. No one cares if your man dies- especially if he dies due to his own stupidity. Shut up, shrug it off, reroll, and go again.

There is also a clear direction due to there being an explicit campaign premise as welll as an expiration date due to the presence of both Win and Loss Conditions. Once someone wins, or everyone loses, the campaign concludes immediately and it's over- time for a celebratory dinner.

Do you see how this obviates all need for a product treadmill? The players produce what they consume; they have no need for anything other than the ruleset itself. To make room for a product-pushing business model you have to cripple the medium into what it is now, such that it compares to alternatives and loses every single time (and then publishers wonder why they have retention problems).

I'll continue this tomorrow, where I go into settings because those ought to be segregated from rulesets entirely going forward.