The Importance of Braunstein To Fixing Tabletop Adventure Games

Explained in three Tweets.

• Cirsova: "Braunstein is important because it is the playstyle, not the setting or the historical lecture or the half-baked (unbaked?) rules and "ask Wesely" resolution system."
• Jeffro Johnson: "Braunstein is important because D&D developed from it. Braunstein is important because it solves the problems of people that play d&d wrong."
• Me: "Braunstein is important because it solves the problems of people that make not-RPGs and sell them to people who cannot avoid playing them wrong because they bought crippleware."

Braunstein is a Methology not only of gameplay, but of game design itself.

The degree to which any Tabletop Adventure Game is a full and complete turnkey product--i.e. an actual game--is the degree to which it conforms to the methodology of Braunstein in its design. The further you get away from this, the more that product turns out to be dysfunctional crippleware or DevKits pretending to be real games.

The reason most people play TAGs wrong is because they can't help it; the products they bought are crippleware designed by incompetent Cargo Cultists that don't comprehend what they attempted to copy, and that was around 1980.

By now they are so deep into information degredation (copy-of-a-copy problem pre-Internet issue) that they couldn't recognize the real deal when it was put before them even after seeing that this is the very thing that they aim to copy.

Once you see it, all of the Bad RPG Story shit you see on YouTube, Reddit, the Chans, etc. falls into place- they Do It Wrong because they made a fundamental category error.