The Culture: Another Conventional Play Error is Mistaking History For Storytelling

Year Ten of the Retreat begins now.

What does this video-

-and this video have in common?

Answer: They are both discussing the events of a history.

It does not matter that one set of events is fictional; within its own context, it is history and it is the best kind of history- the one drawn together from the disparate perspectives of those involved on all sides. That's how After-Action Reports, when incorporating multiple perspectives, come to resemble Muh Narrative Storygaming. We have, again, found the source of another error in the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play.

The reason for that error? The impacts upon play at the table by players not at the table resembles, to the Cargo Cultist, the interventions of a Storyeller-as-Referee. This is compounded by not having the perspectives of those other players be known by way of posting After Action Reports, showing (at the very least) other players what went down and how such that those impacts happened.

That, by the way, is why I posted that big Invicta video as a point of comparison. I could have just as easily used any of Napoleon's big battles, or Midway during World War II, because military history demonstrates the same principle to the observor in the most brick-to-face obvious fashion.

When people see, from the outside, how events here compelled impacts upon events there, even the most obtuse of observors must admit that the Real Hobby is as the Bros say it is and that is yet another thing that's going to cause problems for the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play (and the Tourists that use them to push the poz). By destroying the basis of their argument for Hobby As Narrative Medium, you take away the Cultural (and thus Moral, for the Tourists) High Ground they presume to possess.

Which further weakens their position and makes it easier to defeat the rest of their case- and, as usual, it is grouned by doing where it can be seen (i.e. by showing receipts).

The Force From Below cannot be denied any more than the Force From Above. Hammer and Anvil shall unite to smash the Cargo Cult.

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My birthday is next Monday. While the Lodoss War game on my Steam Wish List is no longer on sale, Super Robot Wars 30 is.