The Culture: The Bros Are Cracking The Containment

Jeffro had a post where he reacted to the champion of the Women's Division pointing out that Conventional Play's practice of Stop Time makes things suck harder for players.

This is a nightmare. It’s a wonder anyone plays rpgs at all. Actually, they don’t, though. They just collect rpg books to put on their shelf mostly. Anyone that is even remotely normal will run away within moments of dipping their toes into nearly any rpg scene. We need to do better. We can do better. And we need to show people how to do better. But for now I just want to bask in the satisfaction of knowing that a 1:1 time campaign just utterly beats the pants off of whatever is going on with this lame store group.

Yes, he does offer a contrast.

Weak referees would be tempted to dispense with 1:1 time because it doesn’t seem to offer anything in this particular situation. After all, why shouldn’t we just pick things up were we left off every single time? Well, the answer to that is, a real campaign has more going on in it than just the activity of a single group of characters. And a real campaign has more constituents and stakeholders than just a single group of players. If you stick to applying the 1:1 time rule consistently, you will periodically get new sessions that serve as an ideal point to bring on new players and new parties. Even better, you will know in advance when these are happening, and you can make plans to specifically leverage this quality of a 1:1 time campaign!

The key point to make here is in bold. This is something that a well-organized campaign operating in a Clubhouse environment, such as being hosted at a game store, will exploit to its advantage early, often, and repeatedly.

All of the elements rediscovered by the Bros prove themselves in practice to be far superior to Conventional Play in practice. This becomes obvious in a public-facing game such as one operating out of a game store, which is defacto advertising and marketing for both the store and the game being played.

Put players into conflict? No need to prepare a scenario; the players do that for you. Strict timekeeping? Now players can't be married to a character sheet and Opportunity Cost actually means something, forcing players to either rotate through their roster or take breaks when their man's on the bench. It stops being a shit analog knockoff of a videogame and becomes the very thing Gary and Dave promised.

When I say that Conventional Play has no future in Tabletop, this is part of what I am talking about. It's not just SOBS' Big Move; that's just one end of it. It's also things like this breaking containment and getting out into the wider hobby scene where people can see it in action and compare the superior results (on top of copious receipts) for themselves to the shit-tier crap they've suffered with until that point.

That's why there is no future. The power source for Conventional Play is abandoning it like a Kardashian divorce-raping a husband on the way towards replacing him with a richer, better-connected, and higher-status alternative. With nowhere left to turn, the Old Ways are primed to come back with a vengeance because there is no other option and Dear Old Dad ain't going to be a softy about (a) how wrong the Cargo Cultists were or (b) what needs to be done to prevent backsliding henceforth.

There will be videogames for Conventional Play, and Tabletop will return to the Real Hobby.