The Culture: Conventional Play Gets Ghosted Because Their "Games" Suck

Behold! A perennial topic whine for Conventional Play on the Internet is players ghosting the "game".

Besides this being reliable engagement bait for The Algorithm Gods, it's been discussed (impotently) to death for decades. It's been done enough that Jeffro Johnson summarized it as "The Six Session Campaign".

Get in there, dig deep enough, don't take niceties and dismissives for answers, and there is one thing that comes up time and again as the reason that Conventional Play groups and "games" go under: they are not fun. These people can't be taught better, are passive-aggressive bitches about it, so those players just leave because they want to have fun and these losers don't deliver.

Listen to our Professor. He rattles off all of the Conventional Play tells that this is not a fun experience for most people. Too much time being retarded Theater Kids and not enough time actually playing the game.

The biggest tell: "Preparation".

"I put in all this work in preparing-" they say, and yet the ghosting continues. Even when they say so to the ghosting party. Buddy, there's no more polite way to say it. If people are refusing to show up to play at your table, well-

This is what those ghosting these people hear when those being ghosted flap their gums about why they "play" their "games".

Conventional Play has this problem because the games are boring, the Cargo Cultists that run them are boring, the experience at the table is boring, and anyone with any alternatives--like, say, a videogame alternative--will have no problems flipping the offender into the Loser end of the social sorting system and regard them as Not People Therefore Not Worth Bothering With.

Which is why players that ghost only show up when the experience is not being boring and actually playing a game- not a fucking Art Therapy seminar blending with a Stuggle Session.

Simple. As.

This, by the way, is why the #BROSR wins: they play real games, they do exciting things in and with those games, and they just show up without any preparation to play. Years of receipts prove that not only is this possible, but that is it the #ObjectivelyCorrect way to play and run the game.

Cargo Cultists shall comtemplate this on the Tree of Woe.