The Culture: The Tribal Chief Is Still Around

Jeffro is on Substack.

He is active there.

Behold an example of what he posts there.

The "folk tradition" that sprung up around D&D is not a game. It is a failure to play a game. There is of course a modest range of well established variations within the tradition. You have innocent children who play pretend while occasionally roll dies or make rough sketches of monsters and wizards. You have unimaginative adults who hide behind a screen and pretend that the players have only just barely managed to beat the big bad evil guy with their last hit point. You have paid actors that pretend to be amazed and utterly dismayed with their coworker improvises a brief soliloquy while their PC bleeds out in a pivotal scene. But these diverse manifestations of the folk tradition have one thing in common: they are not games. Some people are explicitly pretending to play a game. Others are clumsily or perhaps sometimes charmingly tinkering with and playing WITH the pieces of an actual game and occasionally dabbling with some actual procedures from a game. But the activity they are engaging with is not itself a game. Now, one might be inclined to raise any number of objections at this point. Most of us are familiar with the passages from the rules texts and the accounts from the bad old days that are appealed to in this context in order to lend an air of legitimacy to this "folk tradition". This is of course in vain. Because anyone that is committed to this activity to any degree will tell you that the first rule of this "game" is that there aren't any rules to this game. Only the most imaginative sort of people, they assure us, can look at a relatively complex game, ignore 80% of it entirely, change the rest at will, and then throw out all of the rules entirely during the heat of play because, after all, why would you want to "break immersion" and "kill the sense of dramatic tension" by pausing play in order to consult a rules manual? This is very persuasive to some, I suppose. And sure, the phrase "playing D&D" is of course today synonymous with all of the hokum and balderdash I have alluded to above. And all of the people that pretend to actually believe these things insist very loudly that they are having a great deal of fun. Nevertheless the fact remains they are not playing a game. And the disciplines of game design and game development have nothing to do with what they are doing and what they advocate for. The people that make products to sell to such people could be called any number of things, but in no world could they honestly and accurately be described as being game designers. The correct term, I think, would be "hacks".

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

You'll find more of that there.

The Culture: It's About The World, Not Your Man

Dude makes a valid point.

The Comments confirm his observations about why how you roll your man matters.

The hangup people have over this is that they still think that they are married to their character sheet. That's because they play wrong.

This stops being an issue once you play proper--you play Braunstein--and thus are forced to stop being married to a sheet; the rules of the game force you to play a roster of mans, each of whom is in different places at different times doing different things, and you can add mans to that roster at any time.

Having a roster means you cease to be overly invested in any of them, and being overly-invested is a dysfunction of the hobby that plays right into the rest of the Known Issues in Tabletop.

The Culture: Or You Can Do Braunstein And Get The Same Result Faster And Easier

They keep trying to get in front of the Bros.

They are again doing the meme.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

Meanwhile using Braunstein play I had no problems getting things to happen once players bothered to stop turtling.

Battle Report: The Sack Of The Elves' Capital by Bradford C. Walker

It Was A Bad Day To Be A Knife-Ear

Read on Substack

And there's been consequences in that event's wake immediately that are ongoing and effect everyone else. Players must do more, and players deserve less.

The Culture: RIFTS Proves That Genres Are Fake And Gay

"Genres" are fake, especially in Fantastic Adventure Gaming. While naysayers can claim that universal systems aren't proof, 1990 did see definitive proof that every last Normie on the planet cannot deny and it came from Michigan's Most Boomerific Comic Book Guy.

"Muh Fantasy" is in there.

"Muh SF" is in there.

"Muh Horror" is in there.

"Muh Post-Apocalypse" is in there.

It's all there, all thrown together into a single pot of stew, and in that glorious janky mess of dysfunction that is Palladium it is made crystal clear that it's all just Fantastic Adventure in various shades and grades- nothing making it so blatant as using other Palladium products as "parallel dimensions" or "pre-RIFTS eras".

This is the game that has the no-shit-it's-really-him Old West legend Harry Alonzo Longabaugh (yes, The Sundance Kid) as a significant character along with Boomer Truth Regime Obligatory Nazis, Cartoonish Evil Demons (of various kinds), Space Opera that you'd swear was stolen by Marvel for their own superpowered Space Opera comics (because yes, Uncle Kevin is that old), Barely Legally Distinct Not-Gundams/Not-MADOX01s/Not-Powersuits (from Bubblegum Crisis)/Not-Landmates (Appleseed), and so on along with Not-Jedi/Not-Lensman and such.

That RIFTS is not openly acknowledged as the obvious truth nuke that it is regarding that Genre Is Fake shows how Cargo Cult dogma (derived from the SF Fanatic Cultism, backed up by Lester Del Ray's diktat) is just Commie Demoralization by another name.

The Culture: You Cargo Cultists Are All Liars

No more well-known a figure than Mike Mearls confirms that Cargo Cultists are Calvinball Cockups.

Don't lie to me about this. Most of you CANNOT READ FOR SHIT AND SHOW IT BY YOUR ACTIONS!

You are the meme, you lying Oldfags.

I will not hear anymore your claims of knowing how to play. YOU. LIE. You have lied, for some of you, over 40 years and counting.

You will have to prove that you actually play the game before I will hear a word you say henceforth. Post receipts. IF IT IS NOT SEEN IT DID NOT HAPPEN!

The Culture: The Oldfags Still Trying To Seize Back The Discourse

The Bros are the only reason that videos like this get made now.

We have so gotten in the Oldfag's head that they are forced to cut videos like this now, hoping to regain control of the discourse.

Note that, again, this is a Basic video. Not B/X, but Basic all the same, and they are again forced to read the fucking manual (or at least try to fake it convincingly) to attempt the argument.

Attempt, because the reality is that they remain trapped by their priors. They presume Get Along Gang play, with all the baggage therein, so this cannot help but come across as an irrelevancey because there's no player-controlled opposition (or even player-controlled unaligned party) pursing their own agendas operating in the same area able (willing or not) to intercept and interfere.

Until they accept that Braunstein is foundational, they will always come across as (a) chasing the Bros and (b) Trying Too Hard to fit something they don't really do into their Cargo Cult dogma and practice. This is no different a reaction that the Neocons and LOLberts in the Republican Party trying to fuck over Donald Trump and MAGA and constantly failing due to not comprehending just how hated they are by the base and the people at-large because it's the same phenomenon driven by the same principles and thus has the same reactions and leads to the same result.

Good. Death to the Cargo Cult.

The Business: Yes, WOTC's Copying The Fortnite Model

Clownfish did another follow-up on what Corpo Game is up to.

As I said to them, alas this is nothing new.

From the source material to the early crossovers (before Lester Del Ray's diktat took hold post 1980) and longer, this has been a thing and it's been as stupid as it is now; there's a reason that TSR went HAM on third parties in the 1980s and 1990s, and not just because they wanted all of that for themselves.

There is one other thing I want to make clear: Wizards of the Coast are just copying the Fortnite model. They're doing it because it works, as we've already seen with its use in Magic.

All the Cargo Cultists are going to lose their acquisition funnel to WOTC because what C-Suite wants the hobby to be is more appealing to Normies, Tourists, and Casuals than what they offer- and this is proof that (a) C-Suite sees where the money is and (b) they have an idea (if imperfect) on how to slowly pivot Official Game to conform to this business model that is orders of magnitude more profitable all around.

You're fucked, Cargo Cultists. Adapt or die.