The Business: What It Looks Like When It's A Wargame

What would RIFTS look like if it were a competent product?

Remaking this product into a complete, comprehensive, and competent fantastic adventure game means doing the following:

• Designing, testing, and perfecting a complete tabletop wargame whose rules and procedures scale up seamlessly from Man To Man to Massive Fleet Battles & Cosmic Entity Combat- all going on simultaneously (i.e. the scales interact). Full support for diplomacy, economics & logistics, exploration, and politics are required because all of those things matter to players taking charge and making things happen in the campaign.
• Designing a setting whose backstory has a fixed end date and never going past it because that's where players take over and do their best Great Man impressions all over it. Furthermore, that setting ends right as the Grand Campaign conflict is about to jump off- giving players an assisted launch into campaing play.
• Designing a campaign map with a well-defined scale, several smaller-scaled maps to focus on particular regions, and not half-assing climate patterns, day-night variations over the year, and so on.

The game is meant to be played as a Grand Campaign. The idea is that there will be ordinary adventure sorties going on here, there, and everywhere and those sorties will have consequences that change how the conflicts between the major powers. Players will also take control of the major powers, who will have campaign objectives that define Win and Loss Conditions, and the interactions of these powers will have a varying level of intensity.

In a low-tide phase they are in the background pursuing objectives via Downtime activities and interactions with ordinary characters, but in a high-tide phase they are actively engaged in a short, intensive Braunstein action where major power objectives come directly into conflict- and ordinary characters with sufficient ambition and luck can exploit those events to rise up themselves into becoming worthies of note.

The map and the calendar are necessary to keep track of who moves/does what, where they come/go, and how long all of that takes.

Ultimately this means that the Four Pillars Of Proper Play (Strict Timekeeping via 1:1 Time, Always On play, Rules-As-Written, Faction Play) are put front-and-center in the game's rules and procedures, ensuring that the game remains the same regardless of who sits in the Referee's chair and that players are solely responsible for what goes down in play- for good or ill. That's the price for playing a game that focuses upon, emphasizes, and faciliates total player agency- no take-backs.

This also means that, in time, someone's going to win. Good. The one other thing that needs to be restored to this hobby is that games have end states, and whomever hits theirs first wins.

But this means that you're going to put in work, and half-assed (or worse, tofu dreg) work won't cut it anymore- not when you're competing not only with other tabletop hobby games, but with all other entertainment media. You cannot afford to chase some mythical General Audience because that audience DOES NOT EXIST.

You are going after a specific audience. You are going a specific psychological profile. You are selling them a fantasy of agency in the form of a fantastiv adventure game, with the explicit--not implicit--promise that successful play means that their man goes from Private Conscriptovich to General Chadovich to His Imperial Highness, Emperor Theodorus the Dark, He Who Sits Upon A Throne Of Skulls.

That man on the throne?
He could be your man in a proper game.
That is, if you know how to #winatrpgs.

Which means that your play experience is not just at the table. You also have email discussions. You have Discord discussions. You have Twitter group DMs. You have people making gimmick Twitter accounts to talk shit to each other in-character while reporting on campaign developments, including the posting of Session Reports and podcast episodes talking about who did what to whom and how Lt. Dan got his legs blown off for the fourth time this month- those Cyber-Docs are loving his ill fortune.

And if you can't be around all the time, then you play a True Atlantean or a Ley Line Walker and just phase in and out via Ley Line Phasing (or something like that- a Rogue Scholar that goes between research (Downtime) and field work (active play) works).

It's a big project, but not at all impossible. This is down to a matter of will meeting a team of competent people, two things that seem to be lacking in this hobby.