The Culture: Throwing Down Idols Is Not Consigned To History

Over the week, we had this exchange on Twitter.

Because D&D is actually a religion, and you are questioning their idols.

— Mythic Mountains Folk Tabletop (@MythicMLand) March 18, 2026

Mythic's right. That's why I call it a Cargo Cult.

Cult. That's religious. They worship idols and enforce dogmas and conduct initiations (indoctrinations).

The Bros came in as a righteous crusade, threw down those idols, and tread all over them with their sandalled feat.

Because idol worship is not a good thing, be it in the most literal form or in the more abstracted form of the Pop Cult- which is what "folk D&D" is, a Pop Cult of idol worship.

Jeffro correctly nails down the issue being one of "being inititiated" instead of Reading The Manual like you do with everything else. This is how you get such indefensible Just So dogmas about Tabletop; they are all mutations of an original error, and the freakouts against the Bros are really freakouts against the destruction of their idols.

These are the same people who wonder why most prospects bounce off their non-games when compared against Vidya or Board/Cardgame counterparts and rightly dismiss their cult as a waste of time for losers.

The Bros fix the hobby by returning it to being something that is actually (a) a unique gameplay experience that competing media can't do better and (b) returns it back to being a pro-social social club based hobby pursuit where you can participate no matter where you go because there's local hobbyists playing exactly the same game, exactly the same way as you do back home.

The Cargo Cult wants to keep it to siloed basement cult cells playing Calvinball because that's how cults maintain indoctrination over time; low-key cult psychological abuse is still cult psychological abuse, as we see regularly now with all that very same thing being exposed in the public schools across the West (and, increasingly, going to creep into Japan and South Korea too; the signs are there).

If you're instead in a decentralized, distributed society where the authority is in a manual and not in a man--and reading/comprehending the manual is not only allowed, but required--that can't happen. If you know that rolling a man at the local Clubhoue is the same as it is in Tokyo or Dubai, or the rules for XP and Training, etc. then you know that you're not running afoul of Frustrated Novelists, Theater Kids, or similar resentful spergs (all of whom should be remedially instructed via cranial pugilation therapy into proper behavior).

The restoration of the Real Game and the Real Hobby to its pro-social origins, severing the diseased growths, and carrying on anew from there is inevitable. The cultism deserves to be destroyed.