The Culture: Macris Talks Sandboxes & Starter Sets

Last night Macris had on Chubby Funster for a conversation.

We're talking about Warlords of Gavardia.

This is, from the perspective of the Real Hobby, a Primer Conversation aimed at deprograming Conventional Play cultists out of that broken paradigm and into thinking in terms that build up to Total Nonstop Braunstein.

In short, this is a great talk about getting folks out of wondering why they just don't long into WOW or fire up Baldur's Gate 3 and into thinking like a Great Man of History.

The catch is that most people are not brought up to think in terms of themselves as having agency, but only in terms of playing like a PC game: doing what the Very Obvious Indicators tell you to do. Breaking people out of this habit is bothersome, but once they see what it's like to be The Man In Command--The Man That Matters--they'll fall in real fast on the rest of what the Real Hobby is about.

To get the most out of this as a training vehicle for rehabilitating mis-trained hobbyists, you need a competent man in the Referee's chair to get these people out of their passive stance- up to and including "I don't know what happens tonight. That's your problem to solve. I'm just going to adjudicate what happens, no matter how stupid it is, and let you lot suffer the consequences."

Yes, that does work.

Yes, they do get it once they grok that they're responsible for making things happen and start thinking in that mode. Some inevitably do faster than others; they're the natural leaders- others have to learn the hard way.

More and more these folks start getting engaged actively in tabletop campaigns when they see that they can make what they want to happen by seizing the initative and making it so instead of waiting for Mommy NPC to hand it to them. That one mindset shift sets off a cascade of second and third-order consequences that inevitably reveals which products for sale are real games and which are half-ass product slop due to the demands put upon them by such Agency-centered players.

This is also why the Real Hobby is more like history than fiction; you can't have the Fantasy of Agency if the players' actions don't matter due to Fiat from outside, be it by the Referee or by the Publisher.

Fortunately this is all on its way out.