The Culture: The Gamer That Adapts Fastest To Circumstances Wins

(Following from yesterday's post.)

We begin today with another Jon Mollison video.

Creativity for a player means problem-solving. A competently made game focuses upon ensuring that the rules generates situations where players must do so to succeed, which is why Jon is correct that competent gameplay means that behavior conforms to the rules and not vice-versa. Let's continue with the time question.

What Jon alludes to when talking about 1:1 Timekeeping is that time spent while in-session is not free. That time must be redeemed after the fact, and the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide explains that this is the case.

All that time you spend going to and from the dungeon, all the time spent in the dungeon, and all the time spent in encounters other than those your party set out to execute are accounted for by the Referee like you're running a tab at the bar. When the session is over, it's time to settle up that bill and the only way to discharge the debt is to go into a period of downtime equal to that spent in play.

That time is mapped on a calendar. One day spent is one day in real life spent in downtime; your character cannot be played until this is resolved because he is already occupied doing what you just played out. Paradoxes are not allowed.

Sooner or later, after a few lost parties due to poor time management, the time spent in transit will start gnawing at players regardless of which character goes delving.

• Problem: Your party loses a lot of time in transit going from their base camp to the target dungeon and back. Round-trip time is no less than four days, and can easily be expanded to a full week in recovery upon exit from the dungeon before returning to base. Solution: Move the base camp as close to the dungeon as you can. Be it the headquarters of a siege operation against an active threat in the dungeon, or an expeditionary camp clearing out a passive danger in a dormant dungeon, dungeon devles are easier to pull off when you're right there at the mouth.
• Problem: Too much time wasted on hostile encounters while in transit. Solution: Skip dungeon sorties until you've pacified the area around the transit route. Wipe out or run off the hostiles, make suitable arrangements with neutrals, and bring in friendlies to patrol the area once pacified to keep it that way.
• Problem: Base camp doesn't have facilities needed to fulfill wanted functions. Solution: Spend treasure on hiring relevent NPCs or installing relevant structures needed to enable or protect those capacities. This is how a camp evolves into a keep.

Start adding things together.

Players have to solve logistics problems. Players have to solve time management problems. Players have to solve personnel problems. The rules govern all of this. Failure comes from expecting the game to conform to players.

What Jon is talking about is that Cargo Cult play changes the game to conform to players, which is a large part of why the hobby degenerated so far for so long. Doing this removed practical creativity demands upon the players, infantilizing them in the process. This is what wargaming is about. Sport--and gaming--is training for war, and war is all about practical problem-solving in pursuit of political objectives.

This is the excitement that comes from playing the game as it is, by the rules as-written, as the complete product that it is and not as a pile of parts to assemble however that Cargo Cult norms insist upon.

This shift in perspective has positive and wide-ranging consequences, receipts for which are all over #BROSR session reports, and AD&D1e is not the only game so enhanced by embracing proper hobby play practices.

We'll see more in practice tomorrow. Hopefully this won't be SAN-blasting for you.