The Culture: Even Commercial Settings Are Better With Braunstein

Mr. Welch still has his YouTube channel.

When he wasn't cutting videos on The World's Worst Fantastic Adventure Games, he cut videos on his favorite commercial setting for D&D: Mystara.

Are they entertaining? Yes.

The deep value is not in the information he presents, but in recognizing two things about that information:

1. How this stuff presents itself as something that should be run in the Total Nonstop Braunstein manner we see with the Bros.
2. How this stuff gets neutered to the point of irrelevance by the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play and its insistence upon all things being centered around the Get-Along Gang chasing the ruby, and its IRL counterpart being the insistence that all hobby actvity being centered around You & The Boys in the basement.

Everything about Mystara is not only improved, but the full potential achieved when gameplay is restored to the original model and organization of (respectively) layered Braunstein and Clubhouse-centric social organization.

You'll see this replicated when you listen to Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Forgotten Realms lore videos. You'll see this replicated when you listen to Legend of the Five Rings and Shadowfist/Feng Shui lore videos, to Shadowforce Archer videos, and more.

Commercial settings would be more successful if re-presented for the original hobby format, and made available for proper hobby games, but publishers aren't ready for that.