The Culture: Problem Bros Solve That Conventional Play Can't

Conventional Play Problem: "I can't do anything without Narrative contrivance to shake things up."

Explanation: In order to keep a Conventional Get Along Gang together as a cohesive unit focused on a single objective, there needs to be a violation of player agency that imposes a burden of performance upon the players' characters in order for them to do anything but the safest route to success.

Players come to resent this over time, especially if the game explicitly grants their characters the ability to foresee such threats to their agency and thus pre-emptively work to negate them. As the Conventional Play Cargo Cultist is, at best, unfamilair with alternatives to the Narrative structure that the Cargo Cult promotes--especially with publishers, incentivized by commercial gain to push more and more product consumption on the promise of fulfilling the lack that the game has, having no incentive to tell users otherwise--all he knows how to do is to piss them off (or, worse, habituate them to a Learned Helplnessness akin to what you see in videogames that force results on you even if you otherwise would be able to avoid them). The Cargo Cult's insistance on this reminds me of a Blackadder bit.

Decades of forum and Reddit threads, and before them decades of Letters To The Editor and magazine articles, provide copious receipts- receipts that would later become fodder for comics like Knights of the Dinner Table, Order of the Stick, etc. as well as parodies like Munchkin! and many more.

Bro: "Have you ever just let the players run the parties contending in this scenario?

The problem here is that Conventional Play presumes that all the players are cooperating against a single opponent. This works when it's a delve into a dungeon. It is terrible for anything else, but the older games--being built as derivatives of Faction-based wargames--presumed (because Boomers couldn't be bothered to actually teach this to anyone, like responsible hobbyists do) that players would be playing Faction-based play as well as cooperative delves.

In short, this is a hobby where Long-Term Prisoner's Dilemmas apply. Y'know, like Diplomacy.

The folks who, due to commercial incentives, feel threatened by the revival of the real hobby and its true paradigm of play, are those most vocal and vehement about how heretical this is as it offends the dogma of the Cargo Cult.

What I now suspect is that, while the Soup Aisle Rejects are the ones ankle-biting, the motivation at this point comes from Fear Of A Dead Grift. If a critical mass of players learned that they didn't need to buy Yards Of Product to keep the playable content rolling, but instead could make their own for free, forever by playing the level of the game where the conflicts that generate that content come out of then a hell of a lot of Also-Rans and Never-Were would die off swiftly over a few years (or, at most, diminish to the self-funding hobby that Gonnerman is at with Basic Fantasy).

Sure, we can talk about how breaking the CONSUME PRODUCT dogma also fucks over the Molech Cultists' attempt to socially engineer the hobby into a Death Cult propaganda front, but that is secondary to the fact that the stalking horse they use to do that--the Mammon Mob's Commercialize ALL THE THINGS obsession--is the driver for all of this. Break that, and the poz vector also falls away.

The Bros saving the hobby by de-commercializing it may not be what you expected, but the results speak for themselves.

And if you want to see it be done more or less in real time, read Jeffro's Session Reports for his Traveller event now ongoing.