The Culture: Your Games Are Shit Because You Shun The Foundation

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A Fantastic Adventure Game needs far less geejaws and far more systematized procedures.

Character Generation--making your man--is the only such procedure many recognize as such. Combat is usually recognized, but sometimes is not; Injury, Illness, and Recovery often is not. Anything else? LOLno, it's not.

The reason I returned to AD&D1e is because it has the needed systemized procedures to be a full and complete game. There are very few others that can claim this honestly.

This is what you need before you even think about labels like "Fantasy"

• Man Generation
• Combat/Tactical Manuever
• Injury/Illness/Recovery
• Strategy Manuever

Note that I said nothing about Races, Classes, or Levels. Nor did I say anything about Experience Points, Skill Systems, or Special Abilities. There's a reason for that: your core gameplay model for design purposes is Historical Adventure: Frontiersman Tales, Westerns, Pirates, etc. where there are no special powers, no special abilities, not Number Go Up, nothing but raw grit and real environments. This is your load-bearing structure, to which EVERYTHING ELSE is attached.

"But how do I make Number Go Up on my sheet?"

Time, motherfucker. You park your man's bitch ass on the bench and make him sit the fuck out until he's paid the Time Cost required to make it go up. The same applies to healing from wounds, recovering from illness, travelling distances where Nothing Happens, and while he's riding the pine you rotate an available man out of the sidelines and on the field to play. You should have a vast roster of mans at your disposal, not your One Precious PC.

This is why the hobby is, in reality, a form of wargaming and not a fucking narrative medium.

It is clear that this needs to be shown to get people to grok how fucking fundamental this is.