The Culture: Mr. Wargaming Talks With Night Danger

The other day Jon Mollison talked with Night Danger about campaigning and stuff.

What is going to be apparent to many is what I already intuited: not everyone is going to want to deal with the full array of options that the Real Hobby offers.

There are people who just want the Adventurer Tier of play. There are people who just want the Faction Tier of play. There is no reason to force them to engage in the tiers they don't find interesting.

This is one of the reasons I began talking about the Clubhouse and it being focused around a campaign. Having one Referee handle all the admin work is draining; a campaign, over time, adds Referees specifically because the workload lightens accordingly. Furthermore, a campaign should grow beyond one handful of players specifically because it grants room for the more particular players to get what they want.

By making the campaign bigger than Just One Guy or Just One Clique, you make Muh Narrative impossible because PVP goes from being on the table to a tool that gets used and PVP makes Muh Narrative impossible so the Storytelling crowd filter themselves out right quick.

Which means that I have a new thing to put to all of you: the Tabletop Adventure Game is not just a medium driven by Network Effects in terms of commercialization, but in terms of utility to specific campaigns.

The power of the Real Hobby is that each campaign is one big Network of users interacting. Each additional player becomes a user that can interact with every other player, which means that every player adds value to a campaign in a logarythmic function just like adding users to a telephone or MMO network does.

Recognizing this power, and reconfiguring your campaigns to grow into it, necessitates returning to the Clubhouse to make it viable. It also comes to usurp and consume the space for commercialization because there is no value potential outside the use-case of specific campaigns, so there is no need to pursue commercial ventures via publishing product.

I suspect that we will see more people pick up what I am putting down now over the next few years.