The Culture: Discovering The Origins of The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play

Remember what I said about the Bros inevitbly going abroad to reasses other hobby products to see if they are real games?

Square up, Runequest. It's your turn.

Where does this fake, broken, and dumb gameplay hail from? It comes from people that picked up the original D&D rules booklets who had NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE LOOKING AT WHEN THEY READ THEM. The tell is in everything they left out. Things like mass combat and naval battles aren’t just omitted from Tunnels & Trolls and RuneQuest because the designers did not understand how to set up wargame campaigns. They left them out because the players in their games would never be able to experience the kind of autonomy where they would have the chance to use such rule systems.

They omitted them because they were developing a new type of game that wasn’t a game at all.

First Jeffro showed that Tunnels & Trolls is the first Conventional Play product, and now we're seeing that the venerable Runequest also has its origins in a bunch of wankers that couldn't Git Gud at the real game and would not if they did.

They could have competed with D&D as a real, full, and proper campaign game but biffed it early on and never got close again in any later edition (or fork thereof).

This is becoming a pattern, one we can already extend to the entire Palladium Books library, and we're going to find more and more examples of this as more Bros take other products off the shelves to asset whether or not they are real games.

(Hint: Most will not pass.)

What is interesting is that we're seeing some serious work on unravelling the origins of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play. Like the original cargo cult, this one arose due to a group of people wanting to recreate the result of something they witnessed or experienced without doing what it takes to acquire the acumen and tools needed to do so. They turned what they misunderstand (willfully or not) into a ritual practice, and then when it didn't work they did anything but fill the gaps in their acumen or tools to be able to produce the result.

Instead they made up more bullshit to rationalize their ritual practice.

That is what drove Conventional Play, and with that ignorance came in the opportunists that surround any commercial pursuit. Find apparent problem, and sell "solutions" to them.

Now we have a feedback loop, one that within five years of AD&D1e's launch had already captured the hobby scene and become normalized, and largely because the men who made this hobby refused to properly teach it to non-wargamers. This likely has something to do with a larger generational trend.

Man, this is going to be a much bigger change in the hobby than some folks thought.