The Culture: The Impact Of The Bros, Memified

If you want a meme to express the impact of the #BROSR upon the hobby, here you go.

I like to make memes. I take what I observe and learn on this platform and have fun with it. Maybe someone’s head will explode because of this. One can hope. pic.twitter.com/WRoF3ILeK1

— PLFA (@PJL_Art) February 16, 2025

Until the Bros came along, Tabletop had been in a long, slow, inexorible slide to extinction due to Videogames doing everything that Conventional Play does better.

Yes, everything. Including the stupid Death Cult shit; none of the Cultists in Tabletop are good enough to get sinecures in Vidya- that's how bad they are; their own Fellow Travelers won't help them out of self-interest in furthering The Cause.

Yes, everything. Especially in terms of satisfying the demands of corporate investors to maximize shareholder value; Conventional Play is notoriously bad at being able to try to achieve that objective without doing Edition Treadmill, Officialdom Cultism, lobotomizing product and Pushing The Widgets. (Nevermind that there is a superior model that would actually do the job, but no one in Conventional Play is capable of executing on that one.)

What did the Bros do?

• Expose the general incompetence of the OGs.
• Expose the specific incompetence of those outside the Twin Cities-Lake Geneva axis.
• Expose the origin of the Cult of Conventional Play as stemming from the mixture of incompetence in terms of acumen and malevolence in terms of deliberately lobotomizing the product to make it commercially viable and then gaslighting everyone about it so they can make a living Pushing The Widgets to people that don't know any better.
• Restore the correct Order of Authority and thus Duty of Care obligations (Game, then Campaign, then Players).
• Restore the original wargame paradigm--mutilple independent actors, playing at multiple independent tables under multiple Referees, operating under a Fog of War towards their Win Conditions until someone wins or everyone loses--that makes the promised gameplay experiences happen.
• Restore the necessary hobbyist practices that allows the real paradigm to work as promised and intended.
• Reveal that none of the commercialism in the hobby is necessary, but instead that hobbyist skill and acumen is what is required--mastery, expressed practically and creatively--and not Endless Product Slop consumeriam because of Widget Pushing.
• Begin reconstructing the hobby by going down The Road Not Taken because the Conventional Play route is running into an Extinction Level Event. (YOU ARE HERE)

Conventional Play Cultists are, of course, having a normal one about all of this. Not surprising, as they are thralls of the Longhouse and the Bros smash that.

This has been my experience with a majority of the TTRPG "Community" vs the #BROSR. pic.twitter.com/2x9ComXfJp

— Krafty Matt (@KraftyMattKraft) September 22, 2024

Which is why I've been pushing for The Return of the Clubhouse, and in the specific model I've used for it. A hobbyist culture needs to be anchored in particular hobbyist social and cultural organizations- not commercial enterprises. "The community" cannot do this; only a fraternal network, centered in the Clubhouse, can. The Bros are bringing this back, bit by bit, and thus we are going where Conventional Play never could and thus never will- they can't even conceive of what is possible.

Good. It will make the divergence easier.