The Culture: The Funster On Cognitive Load In Tabletop

Professionals somehow fuck this up. Amateurs certainly do.

Note what Funster specifies: this is load ON THE REFEREE.

The answer is simple: move the load to the players.

Guess how the Real Hobby works? By distributing the cognitive load to all the participating players. This also includes a major change in mindset: you only play with people that are High Trust and Low Time Preference, which is not everyone current in the hobby scene, and thus those that cannot be trusted to play within the rules without supervision are those that get shoved beyond the gates.

The next big mindset shift: You Are Not Smarter Than The Game. Read The Fucking Manual. Study that thing; it's the user manual to the machine you bought, so read it and study it as if you were learning how to use any other complex machine with interconnected mechanisms that have internal feedback loops which affect performance. Write down, or draw, procedural flow charts if you have to- or watch someone else's video doing so, like a certain Hawaiian man has done.

In short, Referees are not demanding enough from players. This is a hobby, not a passtime; you are expected to put in work for hobbies. Make them shoulder more of the load and the rest becomes readily handled; let them handle Encumbrance, tracking durations of effects, etc. instead of the Referee doing it all- and that applies to all other modes of gameplay. Those that can't or won't get the boot; they want an analog videogame, so just make them play videogames.

You realize that this is normal in boardgames. This is normal in cardgames. Only in Tabletop do people think it is not, and they are wrong.

The collapse is going to involve more than the commercial sector falling away. Lots of people who have no business being here are also going to go, but those who remain--and those who come in after--will be higher-quality people, and the hobby (now back underground where it belongs) will routinely produce superior results and experiences for all the hobbyists thereafter.

The Culture: When They Demonstrate That They Don't Know (Or Want To Know) What They Are Talking About

They talk all around the conclusion but dodge that conclusion like women dodge responsibility.

They can, and will, point out the symptoms of the problem with Tabletop but refuse to engage with the conclusion because they are all Conventional Play Cargo Cultists so they are also among those who profit from the problem and thus profit from the Endless Product Slop spewed and shilled as non-solutions that don't fix the problems.

In this video, they are all talking under the presumption of Tabletop as a Narrative medium. The conclusion to draw from all their anecdotes and observations is that Tabletop is not a Narrative medium, but instead a form of wargame centered around the pursuit of objectives where players engaged in extended Prisoner's Dilemmas.

They also express all the usual Cargo Cult shibboleths: Get Along Gang, Presumed Success, Videogame/Narrative priors, etc. Therefore they end up arging in favor of competing media like Vidya and Anime/Manga because those media do what they claim to be about better, cheaper, easier, and with far superior convenience (and are, cleaning Tabletop's clock to the point where "RPG" is presumed to be a Vidya category).

This is, unfortunately, the norm for Tabletop Conventional Play across the board. 50 years of doing it wrong has consequences, and we are only now correcting them.

The Culture: When They Confess That They Suck At The Game

I am not be surprised that the Boomer OSR folks are not good at the game. Merely that they are this shameless about.

Joe's video complains got Tenkar to respond.

It would help if they stopped thinking they were smarter than the game.

It would help if they played a proper game also.

But the fundamental error is a failure to Read The Fucking Manual, to think through how the rules and procedures work, and to consider that the game is not a pile of LEGO to fuck with as they please but rather a purpose-built machine designed to be operated in a specific manner to produce a specific result just like games in all other media are.

Joe's complaints come down to "I don't have enough players playing all sides like the game is meant to be run, and I don't run the game properly, so I have to do it myself and I suffer from cognitive overload."

Play a different game, Joe. You want a game without hexcrawls and megadungeons? Current Edition is right there, Joe. You don't even need to give Wizards of the Coast any money. You can poof and faff about as you like because it's not like WOTC actually does proper game design, expecting you to do unpaid labor for them which they then appropriate and sell back to you. But that would damage your Boomer OSR self-identity, wouldn't it?

May I then, to salve your ego, offer you another alternative? Go ahead, buy it Joe; plenty of Endless Product Slop to satisfy your CONSOOM PRODUCT habit and you can rest assured that the designer has as much contempt for Reading The Fucking Manual, Playing The Fucking Game, Best Practices, and Proper Design as you do so you'll get along just fine.

The Culture: Pat Notes That Current Edition Causes The Problems By Design

Pat may be pozzed, but Pat gets that something is wrong.

Pat's right: Wizards of the Coast wants players to engage in Mary Sue cozy power fantasies where there is, at best, the illusion of the illusion of danger.

The rules of the game, and the way they design and publish playable content, as well as how they present that which they design, shows this in action. That's why we're seeing so much more dysfunction in the hobby, and why Theater Kids are running rampant in Conventional Play; they sense that there is no real danger by design, so they are entitled to win and thus are entitled to pop the Loot Pinata if they put in sufficient time doing performantive bullshit.

Because of the Network Effect, the only effective move for Conventional Play Cargo Cultists is to tap into The Only Network That Matters by offering sidegrade products that appear to address the problem but don't because they only serve to reinforce Official Game's dominance, just as has been the case for the last 25 years. The claim of commercial success should have an asterisk affixed; it is less than nothing compared to WOTC (and WOTC's real competition), but something in the microniche world of Tabletop Also-Rans and Bottom Feeders that Shadowdark and others inhabit.

This is how they intend to endure: by simultaneously cleaving harder to The Only Game That Matters while claiming to be the alternative to it. Wherever you are, Ryan Dancey, I hope you're happy with being proven right so hard that if you got a dollar for every instance of it you'd be a billionaire by now. At the rate things are going, there will soon only be WOTC and its bottom-feeders still around. The consolidation and centralization trend will only accelerate as the collapse continues because that's where the value will go.

The Business: Collapse Confirmation By A Conventional Play Channel

From the horse's mouth.

Watch the video. He just confesses it.

What he does not say is that Wizards of the Coast is tanking this like a boss because, being the center of the dominant Network Effect, it is least effected by what it does and most influential on what the Network deals with. All of those scandals? They broke players on the network's periphery, not WOTC. WOTC itself is fine, like it or not.

The other confession? Having to pivot to begging and producing Luxury Goods No One Uses. That's what those products are: books as Funko Pops, never to be used because they cannot be guaranteed to be WOTC-compliant (a problem since 3.X and the introduction of the OGL).

Note the man's tone. He's exasperated. He knows he can't keep this up, and if he has any sense (or someone in his orbit who does) then he knows that what he's shilling is useless crap that's wholly at the whim of discretionary spending- something cratering like the Hindenberg as of this post.

Note that the push to publishing is diminishing in its returns; the collapse is real, and the D&DTubers are going to reflect those declining fortunes until they just (at last) stop.

The sooner the hobby stops being Consumerist and thus stops centering itself on Endless Product Slop and commercial activity, the better.

The Culture: When They Confess That They Don't Read The Manuals

Shit like this is why the #BROSR plays AD&D1e better than Gary and the other Grognards. We know that this is not contradictatory.

I figured out how the Bard works a while back.

• Human Version
  • Roll as Fighter
  • Level up, ensuring you have Dexterity requirement for Dual Class by no later than 7th level
  • Switch from Fighter to Thief
  • Level as Thief, ensuring you meet Bard requirements by no later than 8th level (this includes finding a Druid trainer)
  • Swap to Bard

  Half-Elf Version

  • Roll up Fighter/Thief
  • Level up Fighter first, ignoring Thief, until you hit desired Fighter level; you can choose to NOT level up when you are eligible, but XP is frozen until you do AND you still have to split XP rewards (so half is defacto wasted)
  • Level up Thief next, ignoring Fighter, until your Thief level is one higher than Fighter; you need to meet Bard requirements by this point
  • Swap to Bard

Unarmed vs. Armed Melee is stupid easy to figure out; you use what applies, and yes it does scale so you want to be aware of being Overborne before being Grappled and then stabbed or beaten to death/submission.

Tenkar's talking out his ass here, and he's not at all the only Boomer OSR guy who doesn't know the rules to the game he's blathering about, which is why Muh 40 Years guys have a 100% miss rate vs. the Bros.

It turns out that not only do you need to READ THE FUCKING MANUAL, but you have to APPLY WHAT YOU READ AS IT IS WRITTEN. Make flow-charts--some of the Bros have--if you need to until you get it; this is why the #BROSR keeps and publishing the receipts proving that we're right about this shit.

Gary wasn't the best technical writer, but this is not a fault of the writer- it's the fault of the reader to not comprehend what was written, since folks younger than these oldheads had no problem grokking the game, running it as instructed, and getting the results promised in the manuals.

The Culture: Oldheads In Tabletop Need To Be Checked

This past week, Cirsova mentioned this stupidity from one of the oldheads.

I concur with Cirsova's reaction.

"Tell me you haven’t read any Appendix N without telling me you haven’t read any Appendix N.

Tell me you haven’t read the pulps without telling me you haven’t read the pulps."

I've been reading Lin Carter's Zarkon: Lord of the Unknown series of pastiches of classic Hero Pulps. There's been dungeons in each one. Those are pastiches of the old pulps, set in the 1970s and '80s, and they have dungeons that could have come out of Appendix A of the AD&D1e DMG.

The first two books are from 1975. Carter put out plenty by that point, hence his inclusion in Appendix N (and why I've been reading his stuff), and Carter was well-known by folks like Gary and Dave at that time; there is no way that the presence of those dungeons were not known, especially as Carter (along with others like L. Sprague de Camp) were instrumental in keeping Conan (another hero that delves his share of lairs and dungeons) alive and in print during the long night before the ressurrection and rehabilitation of Howard's original writing that we've enjoyed in the last 15-20 years.

Sandy's talking out of his ass and you can read for yourself to prove it. He, like so many other oldheads, are showing their ass by consistently getting things wrong that we can independently verify. Shut the fuck up already, Boomer!