The Culture: Rule Zero Exists To Push You To Buy The Widgets

Do you need supplements if a tabletop game is a competent product, meaning that it is a turnkey product that is complete and comprehensive given its stated aims?

No, you don't.

You also don't have a commercially viable business if that alone is your business. The incentive that designers and publishers have followed since the 1970s has been to create viability by crippling the core of the business (the game) to create room to sell solutions to problems they created.

The other way is to gaslight people into doing it- Rule Zero. This is what the Boomers--including Gary, by Rob's own confessions--did to SO MANY PEOPLE.

If they had bothered to learn and master the game they played, they would see that there was no need to Buy The Widgets.

Now this is Accepted Wisdom, passed down without a doubt as to its veracity until the Bros came along, hence why this is The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play (and it does not work, so they Buy More Widgets, which do not work, etc.). Pure Mammon Mob exploitation.

This is BEFORE the dangerhairs, the folks suffering from hosts of demons in their body, the HR Ladies, and all the other components of the Longhouse moved in because the Mobsters' actions opened the gates to them.

Now, at this moment, we see that the very people we're told to venerate have revealed that they are the huckster pretending to be the Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz.

What have these people to teach when they have never learned anything themselves? NOTHING! The reality is that the Bros not only recovered the Real Hobby back from the Memory Hole, they have not only caught up to the OGs- they have surpassed them in all ways. The Bros are the Masters now.

The hobby is not commercially viable. It never was; it never shall be. That doesn't make it worthless; it makes the hobby a hobby, something done for its inherent value as a cultural pursuit and not because it pays bills or makes livings. There will still be games designed and published, but they will be done as hobby pursuits or as adjuncts to a primary business (as Osprey's wargames are), and not as a business unto itself- that path is now closed, and thank God for it because the ruin it brings isn't worth it.

Protect the hobby. Kill the business. Rule Zero is the Patient Zero; Kill Rule Zero.