The Culture: The Rot Set In Well Before Current Year

Last night, Jeffro made a pithy post.

How do you teach people to play rpgs when the game rules are incomplete, incoherent, impenetrable, or not actually explained? pic.twitter.com/083knoPvUb

— Cardinal Jefforieu (@JohnsonJeffro) October 16, 2023

Check the date: June 1990.

The deletorious shift in hobby competence that began around 1980 had all but completed by this point. A year or so later, you'd get Vampire: The Masquerade and all of the rampant bullshit to come in its wake.

But Make (Rein-)Hagan didn't make that conclusion from nothing. When he co-created Ars Magica years before, he already sensed that Narrative bullshit had polluted the waters and fouled things something fierce even if he could not recognize it or articulate it as such. (Which, being that he had attended a Minnesota college just an hour's drive south of where Dave Arneson held court, says a lot about willful ignorance and Boomer refusal to pass on what they received.)

In short, Narrative faggotry was already a problem by 1990. It would be another 20ish years before it metaticized into the full-blown cancer that it is now. The Leonards--the turncoats in the hobby--were already enough to form a 5th Column by this point.

The result, even then, was a lot of "What the fuck is the point?" and despite this article it comes down to the opening to "Who's Line Is It Anyway?"

And folks wonder why people never got into the hobby, and--like the ghettoization of fantastic adventure fiction into "Sci-Fi"--it became mired in a pustulant swamp for spiteful mutants with delusions of grandeur, mutant who pulled off a coup by 2000 and became the High Priests of the Cargo Cult.

When you do not have complete, comprehensive, and competent rulesets for your products you lean so hard into Subjectvism that it opens the door to Cultural Marxism and you end up with Tourists and Spiteful Mutants trying to defile every last thing that they do not yet possess. (e.g. 40K and the incessant Muh Fem-Marine faggotry).

Having crystal-clear rules and procedures, and crystal-clear standards of behavior in both the administration thereof and the play therein, enforced with ruthless efficiency by one and all is necessary and proper- down to summary termination of unrepentent wrongdoers. The culture needs to go hard like Bukele or you end up with this mess we're in every single time. It's why only those few that are actual Games and not merely Products endure, with such standards, and around which the original hobby culture yet survives.

And I am long past my point of exhaustion of things that do not measure up. I expect someone selling me a hobby game to sell me a turnkey product that Just Fucking Works, regardless of the medium; tabletop has gotten away with failing to measure up for far too long and there's far too many alteratives that do just that now for me to waste time on that which does not.

And there are still people publishing these things that Do. Not. GET. IT!

I look forward to Jeffro doing the impossible again and turning Palladium into a proper product.