None of these graybeard oldfags would even broach the subject if weren't for the #BROSR reviving the Real Game and with it the Real Social Institution that makes it viable, playing the game good and hard for extended periods of time, posting the receipts early and often where people can easily find them, and talking about it loudly and proudly where everyone can hear it.
Fuck these wankers and their Basement Boys cult cells where they do the Get-Along Gang chasing the ruby while putting up with Calvinball bullshit while shilling for Endless Product Slop from PDF Merchants. I look forward to all of them cutting their own "I Quit" videos as the gravy train dries up- all of them. You know who you are.
How useless is this twat? So bad that another D&DTube LOLcow had his number.
Don't tell me that the Cargo Cult ain't feeling the pain when their YT mouthpieces are falling off, having to either pivot away or quit entirely.
What did our LOLcow say about him that nailed it? "He had nothing unique or valueable to say about Dungeons & Dragons."
When a LOLcow has you dead to rights, give up and walk away in shame. That's why his rants get any attention at all, despite being himself being a total shill for Current Edition and the Cult Non-Game of the Cargo Cult as preferred by Wizards of the Coast, because he's got the Stopped Clock thing going for him: he hits just often enough to maintain an audience, who otherwise laugh at his way off base bad takes (as we see with him being positive about FD "I'm a Resentful Spiteful Mutant Commie Traitor Screaming About Muh Oppresshusns And Muh Reparationisms" Signifier).
This is what opens the noetic space for the Bros to take over, and they are taking over because these desperate dingbats are going to keep stealing from the Bros to stave off their own demise while WOTC crushes them from the corporate level by freezing them out.
You think I joke about the corporate stuff. Nope.
This is on top of the digital-primary pivot. They are seizing full control of the Network Effect. You either get in line or get cut out to wither and die.
Most people in this scene aren't even Kevin Siembieda; they won't be able to stand on their own, so they will wither and die, so they will bend the knee and get in line so as to stay in WOTC's good graces.
Meanwhile the Bros, eschewing the idea that this is a commercially viable hobby at all, cuts off the Cargo Cult's line of retreat by freezing them out of the Clubhouse.
Hammer, meet Anvil, with the Cargo Cult and their shit-tastic takes on what this hobby is and how it works as the sad sacks stuck between them to be struck repeatedly until they either get hammered into shape or get broken into bits. Count on the latter. Why?
This guy didn't realize it, but he proved that "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction" ARE FAKE GENRES!
TLDR: All that changes are the trappings and the setting. The narrative structure is IDENTICAL so they play out EXACTLY THE SAME WAY!
This is why Andre Norton and Leigh Brackett can write "science fiction" that is really "fantasy" with a bare whiff of justification for the tale's telling: they are both doing Fantastic Adventure fiction, same as Burroughs, Meritt, Moorcock, Howard, Smith, and everyone else in Appendix N.
It's also why Shadowrun is just D&D With Chrome & Guns; changing the trappings and the setting didn't change the substance of gameplay one damned bit.
Dune (and its knockoffs, 40K and Fading Suns) is just a resetting of The Sabers of Paradise (go look that one up).
Star Wars (the original) is The Hidden Fortress plus The Dambusters.
Never, ever mistake a Product Category for a Genre; the former is a Brand Name thing, while the latter is all about narrative structure- seeming vs. substance.
"Fantasy" does not exist. "Science Fiction" does not exist. There are other fake genres; they also do not exist.
First, and foremost, they immediately went all Muh Relativisismsmsmsmsms and Muh Graygoo Morality. That alone makes them incapable of surviving the changes that are upon the hobby; it demonstrates such a degree of intellectual capture that they get rendered fragile due to inability to pivot as required to conform themselves to the environment that they are now in.
But the real killer? Despite being plugged into the discourse, they again show the meme is true.
They maintain the Cargo Cult Just So Cult Non-Game priors. This is why they hold that wrong opinion.
They cannot conceive of proper play, and recoil like vampires confronted with the Cross when they do encounter it, so they expose their capture into this small-minded thinking by their reaction.
They can't adapt. They won't adapt. Therefore they will be crushed as the ground shifts out from under their feet and the weight of Wizards of the Coast's Walled Garden crushes them from above while the #BROSR cuts off their retreat from below, trapping them in the middle where they get squished and killed as a direct consequence of their own willful and proud ignorance of how this hobby really works- the fate these Endless Product Slop merchants deserve.
On Thursday of last week, Black Lodge Games cut this video on RuneQuest.
Ars Magica got this right.
The trick is to design the rules of the game to be the reality of the world and then present those rules in the manner that your man would comprehend them in situ.Runequest somehow fucked up what Pendragon/Paladin/Prince Valiant and Stormbringer/Elric! as well as Call of Cthulhu got right.
Doing this is how you ensure that, no matter who picks up the manual, they operate the machine the same way (so long as they actually follow directions). What has gone on instead is what too many Official Setting projects do: become Setting Bibles for Intellectual Property development.
Furthermore we see that these guys became lorenerds for their own creation. No one fucking cares about your fucking lore. Players need to know the stuff that matters to play here and now; if it does not directly and immediately matter to play, it is irrelevant and should be discarded. If rolling a man looks like it involves doing homework, you fucked up and you deserve to fail.
This is what Ars did, across its editions, which is why it still gets played by its cult-like and cult-sized following. You don't need to know shit about Europe in the Middle-Ages; you need only to know what your man's specific situation is, and how he relates to everyone around him. Everything else can be done as you go. Hell, even the "Hermetic Magic" is made-up bullshit (vs. IRL Hermetic Magic).
AM is what Steve here wants RQ to be.
This why RQ is on borrowed time; its fuckups are catching up to it, and to Chaosium, which threatens both game and publisher in ways unique to them unless and until they correct course and put out the proper products that people have consistently revealed--there's that Revealed Preference thing again--that they want.
In the larger discourse, there is good news; this came out on Monday this past week.
This is not necessarily across the board, and Elon's people don't necessarily adhere to his Free Speech dogma; he too has Stay Behinds to flush out.
Take the W, folks. Twitter is still better than it was before Elon bought it and began his purges and reconfigurations, and it continues to improve. Everyone wants to be there as it is the place to be; it has the Network Effect. With still more improvements to come, it will only get better.
Boardgame alternatives to the Cargo Cult have also been around for decades and were also a better option.
Same thing: play when I want, how I want, for as long as I want with no ongoing commitments. No bullshit rules fuckery.
This isn't as good a value proposition as the Vidya comparison, but it is still far superior for fulfilling the Cargo Cult Game paradigm of play than what they insist Tabletop has to be about.
Oh, and it's cheaper overall because edition changes are few (if ever) and definitely far between. I can also include Talisman, Advanced Heroquest, Runequest and a lot more than that- and if Sword World does well enough in translation there may be PDFs made available of those Japanese boardgame counterparts also.
Tabletop is not boardgaming or cardgaming. It is not Vidya. It is something separate, distinct, and apart from all of them- which means it is not as the Cargo Cult insists it is either.
It's Braunstein, and that demands something very different- and very human.
