The Picture Of The Real Hobby Comes Into View

This is the future that Sorcerers By The Sea want for the hobby.

This is also what Normies, Casuals, and Tourists claps like barking seals for. Their behaviors consistly show that they prefer this over the real hobby, which is why the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play keeps losing against it.

It is also why it loses against the single-player games Asmongold mentioned, and not just for reasons I mentioned previously.

There has to be a better way, something that proves that Tabletop as a medium has a means to compete and win against videogame alternatives. The Bros succeeded in finding it, recovering it, and redeveloping it back into its full and proper form.

I mentioned this on This Is Dunder Moose the other night.

What the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play sells to you is this:

• There is a group of Players and a Referee.
• The Players play individual mans, but they operate their mans as if they were a unit that did everything together like a combat unit or investigative team.
• The Referee plays everyone and everything else.
• Nothing other than the Unit doing their thing is The Game. Everyone and everything else only matters if it interacts with The Unit. This includes Time and Wealth.

The problem is that there is nothing this paradigm of play offers that videogames does better across the board.

The #BROSR has, over the last several years, discovered that the Tabletop Adventure Game is much bigger--and better--than this Get Along Gang subset. The full and complete game is, as Jeffro summarized, about multiple indpendent actors operating under a fog of war. Specifically, they are operating towards a convergence upon a specific strategic objective that does not allow for win-win outcome resolution.

What we have identified reveals a paradigm of play far larger than that subset dubbed The Get Along Gang.

This is a paradigm of play that is too big for one Referee to handle on his own for long. It is too anti-fragile to need external support from publishers, killing its commercial viability in the Cargo Cult norms of product pushing and PDF shilling. It's too decentralized to use the Cult of Officialdom as a means to wield Network Effects to enforce central control.

• The Referee solicits Orders from the Faction Tier players. They are adjudicated.
• The results of the Orders influence what Adventure Scenarios are available and how they are set up. These are played out.
• The results of both Orders and Scenarios are tabulated and processed into a Campaign Report and posted in public. Hidden results get reported by non-public means.
• When the many diffuse actions come into a point of convergence, a Braunstein session goes down ASAP to determine results and is itself reported as above.
• Reset to the top and go again.

I dubbed this re-emerging social infrastructure "The Clubhouse" because it was where it formerly existed before the Boomers just yeeted it like they did so much of the patrimony bequeathed to them generally down the Memory Hole, and it is in that organization that this paradigm of play--Tabletop Adventure Campaigning--can work and deliver upon the promises put forth in so many rules manuals long ago.

Promises, by the way, that Conventional Play cannot and will not ever deliver.

We now see the full view of what this hobby is and how it works. No videogame can replicate it and thus beat it at its own game. Some have tried. Some are trying. None will succeed because the need to be commercially viable is what dooms all videogame attempts in the end, proving that the Tabletop Adventure Game is not commercially viable nor should it be.