The Culture: The Cargo Cult Shows Its Ass, And The Bros Show They Grok It Better Than The Cult Does

Lots of problems solved by their Cargo Cult and Theater Kid priors being taken out back and shot.

Meanwhile, over at Substack, Jeffro recently talked about unfucking this crap.

Why would you “convert” your game to a Braunstein? This is just weird framing all around. Consider: 1) You can delegate monsters to an adversary player in order to work out how a particular entity will respond to player activity. 2) You can set up a session Braunstein in a single region of the campaign map and then fold the results into the overall campaign state. 3) You can run more traditional style adventure scenarioswhile exploring a mix of competition and cooperation both during session play and also in down time. 4) You can set up a fluid conflict between two distinct adventure parties to be played out over several sessions. 5) You can run a sessionless battle scenario over a span of several weeks with troop movements and a mix of strategy and tactics. None of these options require a consensus or significant cooperation from more than a handful of people for any length of time. The only person preventing you from doing this is you.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

Not there won't be resistance, but until the AI DMs come online it's Dexter or Death for these people so wear the black hat and Dexter them for their own good.

That resistance has its root in its wrong assumption of what this hobby is, as Rule of Thule explained.

It’s not an objection to something happening elsewhere, it’s an objection to something real happening—to the game being actually played. Consider an abstract game played in a vast abstract space. Within the spaces are two kinds of players: Navelgazers (Ns) and Conquerors (Cs). The Ns believe that all players are Navelgazers and have a shared common understanding of rules that don’t actually exist in the game such as “don’t be unkind towards the pieces of other players” or so on. The Ns are playing a fundamentally different game from the Cs because they presume restrictions and protections etc. which do not truly exist (i.e. they are not actually rules of the game). When they see something that is the product of real play, they will immediately identify that it doesn’t accord with their presumptions. “No one who was trying to Avoid Unkindness [or other such presumptive descriptors] would have engineered this situation.” As soon as they see signs of the game being played to win, they are immediately on the defensive. This explains much of the maligning of powergamers, as Meffridus intuitively understood, because they represent the same threat: that someone will undo the fake game by leaning into the real one.

- RuleOfThule

Read on Substack

David Sirlin talked about this concept in the context of versus fighters. There are players (he calls them “scrubs”) who come into a tournament with the idea that e.g. certain moves are “unfair” or “cheap” and, despite the obvious signs that these moves are clearly powerful, will be shocked and appalled when they are blasted to pieces by other players “abusing” them. The scrub’s false internalization of the rules has caused him to become blind to the game’s actual rules and has led him, on his path of player development, to not only navigate false spaces but to arbitrarily close doors whose opening is necessary for him to achieve his real potential. In the arena of RPGs, we see that scrubs have found ways to form coalitions. They have the ability to aggregate in collectives. Their particular internalizations are not only sanctified by Rule Zero, but each distinct collective can claim membership under a united Rule Zero collective—so long as they acknowledge all the others—and they feel emboldened to claim that no one can tell them they aren’t playing the game, even when they’ve thrown out half the rules and added others. These coalitions are akin to a rogue tournament scene where everyone involved must abide by the new made-up rules, and anyone who insists on following the plain rules can be exiled. We can see the effects of this everywhere. I think it’s no coincidence that Sirlin’s book is titled Playing to Win.

- RuleOfThule

Read on Substack

This is simple to handle. You don't announce the changes; you just implement them step-by-step until you're in full Braunstein mode.

And remember, it's easier thank you think to teach the real game to people. The Internet is not real life, something Cargo Cultists cannot comprehend.