The Culture: Operational Tempo, Vidya, & Conventional Play

There is no such thing as Operational Tempo in Conventional Play. With Tabletop this is all due to the errors of Flex Time, One True Party, Schedule Your Fun, and so on. Therefore this is a known issue, and it's been one for decades.

What is sometimes forgotten by Tabletop people, but also well-known for decades by Vidya people, is that there is little Operational Tempo in Vidya either. Aside from Player Versus Player gameplay, you only see the better single-player games attempt to approximate this quality by having time limits for players to accomplish objectives before it becomes impossible to succeed.

At which point the common player reloads a previous save, restarts the scenario, or goes to look up a guide and then restarts the scenario. There is no unavoidable penalty for failing to maintain Operational Tempo. It's been a thing for so long as there is a term for those that do this as a standard practice (Save-Scumming), and there's been comic strips mocking it.

Again, Vidya does Conventional Play better than Tabletop.

Enter The Chads That Know the #WinningSecrets

There is Operational Tempo in proper tabletop campaign play.

The thing that is now becoming apparent due to the revival of Strict Timekeeping on a 1:1 ratio of Real to Campaign Time (measured in Days (and the return of enforcing Opportunity Cost upon characters' actions as a result of this), is that proper campaign play puts pressure on players that is absent in Conventional Play- and in Vidya.

Part of this is due to there being Player-v-Player conflict, but that's just the set-up. The real force behind that pressure is consequences are real and permanent.

You can't Save Scum your way through real campaign play. Your man dies?

If you're very lucky, you can bring that man back from the dead, but even that will have its risks and costs- not all of which are on the page.

You lose that treasure to someone else? Tough shit; you can't crack open the Hex Editor to get it anyway. That castle got taken by someone else? Cope. Didn't get back from Iskandar in time to save Earth? Welcome to being one of the few survivors of a dying race from a dead world.

Operational Tempo is all about this stuff. This is why you have backup BattleMechs in your mercenary company's Mechbay. This is why you have duplicate spellbooks for your Magic-User. This is why you cultivate and maintain a top-tier Intelligence network. This is why you gotta go fast, and why you need to know whom you're dealing with because man does it feel good to get one over on your enemies.

And boy does Indy get his own back later on.

Vidya gets close at times, but that is still at best approximation because there is no permanent consequence that results in losing. Not even for well-regarded games like Darkest Dungeon (and man, does that game get very close to proper play).

This employment of Operational Tempo recreates the capacity for concrete consequences in tabletop adventure campaigning, which is a simulation of the real campaigns that this hobby derives from. It is what differentiates Real Gaming from Conventional Play(acting).

And, thanks to RDubs, we are seeing that the Bros are indeed recovering the real game from the memory hole. This is how things are meant to work.

pic.twitter.com/YHg8zmeC2H

— Rdubs , for Law (@pearsesd) April 9, 2024