The Culture: This Hobby Really Did Go Down The Wrong Path

Night Danger posted a fantastic thread on Twitter the other day. Here's what he said:

"According to Donald Featherstone, Tony Bath served in the Royal Navy during World War II and his immediate family suffered when his father's grocery store was bombed.

It was asserted by Jon Perterson in his 2012 book on the evolution of roleplaying that Bath set his rules in a period far removed from modern combat, but this is contradicted by Donald Featherstone and Phil Barker who state that Bath wanted ancient warfare type rules to recreate the wars from his favourite fantasy world, the tales by Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian.

Although the rules were for the medieval period, the goal was to apply them to the world of Hyboria. This is also supported by various photographs of these early games that have captions referring to Hyborian armies.

Bath's act of generosity was giving his rules away for free. They were a set of instructions, without an introduction; a set of rules for an enthusiast to take and play their own games."

- Intro to Tony Bath's 1956 Medieval Rules, edited by John Curry

TONY BATH BELIEVED IN A HOBBYIST CULTURE!!! HE BELIEVED IN THE COMMON GOOD!!! HE BELIEVED IN PRETENDING TO FIGHT GREAT ANTEDILLUVIAN WARS AGAINST DARK SORCERY!!!

Put another way, he didn't commercialize his hobby.

If you want an obvious example of why that's a bad idea, go look at Games Workshop. They are infamous for changing their games to milk their targets for every last penny in a short period of time, including the promulgation of Corporate-Approved Play via its stores and events as the way to play the game and through that artificial Social Proof scheme they enforce the wholesale change of product lines specifically to get targets to CONSUME PRODUCT to stay Corporate Approved.

Notice that this does not account for any Death Cult pozzing. This is pure Mammon Mobster bullshit.

The hobby is better served by having people take a ruleset and showing others how to play it as it is written. That's service, not product. Back then that meant having locals who knew the rules inside and out teaching the game to others on a regular basis in local stores and clubs. Today you can do that with a YouTube channel, and you can do that with just a smartphone and some basic knowledge of how to shoot and present- you can do this on your own and on the cheap.

"But without Brand the hobby will shrink!"

You mean all the locusts, parasites, and clout-chasers will get flushed out once the hobby ceases to be commercially viable? Sign me the fuck up!

This hobby is far, far better off with a much smaller--but far more committed--population of hobbyists who are in it because the practice of the hobby in and of itself satisfies an itch that cannot be satisfied otherwise.

The irony would be that, being no longer a commercial pursuit, it would become a quieter scene because all of the Soup Aisle derelicts would be flushed out with the Tourists and Casuals (used as stalking horses for the Death Cult); the latter sustain the former because the Soup Aisle are ready recruits for all sorts of dumb shit that the Death Cult pushes- just like their counterparts in other cultural niches do.

And without the rejects and their enablers, the overall quality of the hobby would improve- and its net status would be far better than before. It's be something you'd find men like Peter Cushing playing again.