The Culture: Your Modules Suck (Part 2)

You don't need modules if you have a competently-designed game.

There is a reason that the #BROSR returned to AD&D1e; it is a competently-designed game. There is a reason the Bros play Classic Traveller; it is a competently-designed game. Other games that prove themselves are those that are competently-designed.

What does this mean? The use of the game in its ordinary capacity automatically generates playable content. AD&D1e has its appendices, CT has its routine procedures, and other competent games lean hard on real-world referents such that you can just read real-life texts and apply real-life to the campaign (e.g. Twilight 2000).

If you need to regularly consume supplementary products to play the game, you do not have a competently-designed game; you have a Funnel Product into an Endless Product Slop business model meant to not-so-microtransact your wallet to death.

This is good for business. It is terrible for the hobby, and it always has been. It was only tolerable because the Original Gamers--the Boomers--refused to put in the work to teach everyone else how to use the tools that they had- that they created and published. Yes, even by way of articles, convention panels, and in-store demos that was a viable thing to do in the 1970s; you train a small cadre, they train more, and soon everyone's up to speed on Best Practices.

But no, it was easier to usurp the gamers' mental faculties and do their imagining for them and no one among them is clean.

The use case for this practice died when YouTube arrived. The means for one-man operations to teach people how to use their game exists; failure to use it is a sign of gross incompetence. Letting your audience do it for you is almost as bad.

You can monetize your videos, folks; that replaces your Endless Product Slop model, serves your audience, and reduces your costs down to something that actually matches what you lot really are: diletantes with delusions of grandeur, denying that your hobby will never be better for generating income than working a normal day job.

Make a proper game. Teach people to use it. Give away the PDF and sell the print version at-cost. That's where the hobby really lies; all else is vanity. As the Collapse continues, more of you will see this first-hand and not be able to delude yourselves any further that this is how it has to be.