The Culture: The (Lack Of A) Future For Tabletop (Part Two)

Definition By Comparison

In a moment of serendipity, Jeffro Johnson did a thread about GURPS and GURPS Fantasy (specifically 2nd Edition) and why it's terrible as a tabletop adventure game. As he's still in Protected Status on Twitter as of this post, most of you can't read it. Rather than embed a series of screenshots, I'll just cut and paste the raw text.

I think this game is still on my want to play list, but you know the setting is kind of lame and stale and I wish there was some way to breathe life into it and... gosh... a regional Braunstein set in Caithness or Megalos would be just the thing to get things rolling.

It would be just as much work to set this up with an original setting as it is with a canned one. Further, nothing in the rules is much help for doing something like this. The lack of a useful/playable combat system that scales up is a dealbreaker. As is the learning curve.

Ah, but GURPS combat *could* scale up with blocks of 10-20 figures representing small armies. Rolling 10 sets of 3d6 for the attacks and rolling more for the parries would be cumbersome. Average damage for the hits... and simply removing a figure each time an HT total is reached.

But this is exactly what I hate about GURPS. Every time I sit down to do anything with it, it feels as if all of the duties of a game designer have been pushed onto my shoulders. But slow down. Breathe. Think! Can I soldier through this...? Could I just make things work? Yes.

You need friends. At least I do. Megalos has 4 pages of detail. You send this out to them. You say... "just come up with something that would be here that you want to play." The only restriction is it would have to be something that could contend with what everyone else brings.

I think we already know that if you Braunstein with this in almost any imaginable way, you will have a good time with it regardless of what rules you have making it work. With GURPS we don't have the dungeon and wilderness crawl systems set up to allow for zero-prep play, though.

Melee and Wizard are the GURPS equivalent of the D&D filler game. To get everyone up to a requisite level of rules mastery for the Braunstein, they would be required to submit a few valid NPC or Monster writeups built according to the rules and also play a few arena battles.

People often buy rpgs and make lots of characters for them that they never play. Asking your players to create the Monster Manual that Steve never wrote is an easy ask. Especially if the players figure out they are in competition with each other to make the most compelling stuff.

These pre-game things are really important. The land grab for Brovenloft kind of set the bar for this. Stakes are important. A game of Melee or Wizard (or the GURPS Second Edition equivalent) is dull in an of itself. "Patron" players bidding on the fights would be better. But...

If you could make a game out of setting up the game like, I dunno, SOMEBODY has done then that would be intriguing. I think... in this set up... people that win three victories in the arena become significant elements of the Braunstein somehow. They continue their adventures.

Looking at the adventure seeds in the manual... this whole idea puts all the burden of world building and adventure design on the shoulders of the GM. Worse, he has to do this for whatever stupid character concepts the players bring to the table. This whole premise sucks.

Conventional rpg play is not actually a game. It's a semblance of a game that allows people to churn out countless books that don't actually address actual problems people face at the table. Those problems can never be solved because the whole concept of rpgs is dumb and flawed.

As to this little thought experiment, I don't think there are enough people that could have the interest in existence to ever see it through. No more than two people would commit to working up characters and then tinkering around with this on a Monday night. Not worth the bother.

Only AD&D and 5e and ACKS have the pull to bring together people for a serious campaign.

Nobody is genuinely curious about the oddities of rpg history. Not enough to play.

If feel like if people were actually successful running games with systems like this you would see a lot more evidence of it.

The conversation surrounding them would be entirely different.

GURPS has no random tables. It doesn't have stuff to put on the random tables. It leaves all this as an exercise for the referee but then declares that anyone that uses random tables is playing a childish game.

Anything above in bold is my editoral change as that is the key point Jeffro made here. Furthermore, I will add that Current Edition is only able to do what it does because of massive Social Proof artificially generated by the Publisher exploiting its supreme position in the marketplace via having The Only Network Effect That Matters. Take away that boosting and Current Edition because worse than Palladium immediately. That AD&D1e and ACKS are able to complete--even to win--against Current Edition without that boost says so much for the superior quality of both vs. Current Edition.

Jeffro, by comparing GURPS (and no, the current edition of that product is no better) to AD&D1e/ACKS, defines what Conventional Play by exposing it for what it is not: a full, complete, and turnkey-ready hobby game product.

This is the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play: a mindset and paradigm of non-play by people who never comprehended what the medium is or how it works, so they turned it into a proto-Consumerism lifesteyle brand because that's the only thing they knew. Publishers responded to them because Consume Product is a lot easier to do than Make Good Product.

The result is that by 1985, just over 10 years after the original D&D game's publication, the Clubhouse got kicked down the Memory Hole because Boomers found it easier to sucker kids (and their parents) than to properly on-board them into the hobby and teach them how to play properly.

Others tried to copy the initial success without comprehending what was going on, figuring that if they match the perceived inputs that they'll get the outputs; due to a series of factors outside their control, including being the first movers in an emerging market, they got lucky and got away with it for a while. Very few of them are still with us now, but Palladium Books is one of them and Kevin Siembieda still has no idea what the fuck this medium or hobby is about.

And Now The Failure Is Almost Complete

Now, again, I ask you: Why would a prospective player want this dogshit when the videogame alternative does all that this Cargo Cult claims (but fails to deliver upon) and does it better across the board? Furthermore, this is not recent; videogame alternatives superceded Conventional Play in Tabletop in the 1980s- as reviewing those old games now available on Steam and GOG reveal.

Videogames have only gotten better over time. Card and Boardgame alternatives have caught up in the interim and now satisfy the same desires without the massive flaws that Tabletop Conventional Play is notorious for. Couple that with the complete lack of any viable alternative to the massive support that Sorcerors By The Sea (and TSR before them) provided in single-handedly propping up Tabletop Conventional Play; you aren't finding anything but Current Edition in Walmart, Target, or Best Buy on the shelf or something that SOBS licensed. No, not even the Mouse Wars stuff or anything using the Marvel brand is on those shelves.

This is a total business category failure, and the Big Swinging Dick here--the Game Manufacturers Association--has not done one damned thing to fix it ever, and they are not starting now despite advanced warning shouted from the mountain tops.

The post-Corona-chan World Tour bump has worn off; things are not only back to normal, but declining especially as awareness of how superior videogame versions are grows.

Once the pillar propping this category up goes, this zombie market is going to get crushed under the weight of a collapsing marketplace.

The #BROSR, by reviving how the medium actually works and identifying which existing products actually work properly when used as written, provides one path out of disaster.

There are two others. Each one gets a post, starting tomorrow.