The Culture: More Proof That The Bros Are Restoring The Hobby

Friend of the Retreat Jon Mollison cut another video about that book about Blackmoor.

Did you see the way the games ran back then?

Everyone had their own region--Blackmoor, Greyhawk, Tekumel, etc.--but played the same game. Different regions, different cultures and politics, same game. Players' mans would go from table to table--region to region--with aplomb because the game was the same.

For the Bros running AD&D1e games, this is how things work. As Jon notes, the Bros use something straight out of Twin Peaks to connect the various tables together into a single campaign.

You can also see the beginnings of the error that would, in time, lead to the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play (commercialization) and the suppression of the Clubhouse as those incentives seized hold of the minds of those old-timers that went into business and thus ruined a brilliant hobby scene by and for amateurs.

Now we're seeing that Classic Traveller can be run the same way.

This is all great stuff and it is all very much a confirmation that Braunstein play will force you to use pretty well everything that your classic rpg rule set has in it. Independent action combined with 1:1 time produces such a wide range of situations you end up using way more rules than people that are bogged down with wrongheaded “conventional” type assumptions about how these games should work. The rules end up doing more of the work of holding your campaign together and giving it the sense that it is an actual model universe you and your players are developing together.

We're seeing now what the Winning Formula for the Real Hobby is: Many Tables, One Game.

The implication is that this formula can, and will, lead to The Grand Campaign where everyone plays in one massive campaign without needing top-down command and control- in short what all those old Living Campaigns organized by publishers attempt to do, but fucked up because Conventional Play cannot achieve what the Real Hobby does without any effort at all just by playing Rules As Written.

This is sufficient now to act as a sifting filter to cut out non-games from games, and man do a lot of products get sifted out as non-games.