The Culture: No, It's Not Unworkable Or Unknowable

One more example of what Jeffro's been saying.

Interesting video, very illuminating. Some surprising positions are taken here, which I will paraphrase: You can’t play AD&D RAW. Characters retire at 9th level due to the lethality of play at that tier. Delegation of high level NPC’s to players is declared to be destructive to the campaign. Strict timekeeping… but not 1:1 time. (Players can skip a year into the future to go play in JapanWorld or whatever.) NPC’s are not active in the campaign world in the same way that the PC’s are… though they are active. They have goals with arbitrary “clocks” set on each stage of their activities. Players see the result of this progress as they travel the world and pick up rumors. A formal concept of “drift” is introduced— i.e., that the rules of the 45 year campaign necessarily change over time and that the rules of the various long running AD&D campaigns will naturally diverge over time. The AD&D referee is thus expected to make elaborate house rule additions, use articles from Dragon Magazine including “NPC Classes” and so forth. Each of these axioms or assertions work together to suppress the emergence of the sort of gameplay dynamics that the BrOSR have championed over the past several years. And based on Rick’s account of his campaign, it sounds as if this framework results in something relatively close to what we call “conventional play” that is sustainable for A VERY LONG PERIOD OF TIME. Naturally, people would like to know who is right. Rick… or the BrOSR? Phrased another way, the question is “which side in this dispute is playing the game described by the AD&D core rulebooks?” An in depth breakdown of precisely where and how each side fails to live up to the greatness of those extremely influential rules volumes would of course be very VERY tedious. In any case it would be pointless to go through with such an effort. Because Rick has already announced that he is not even trying to play RAW. I am not sure that I have heard him say anything like this before. It seems like an extraordinarily strange position to take, though. What could possibly motivate it? The most reasonable explanation that I can think of is that attempting to play AD&D RAW is going to lead you to play more like the BrOSR than not. And Rick hasn’t been doing that and doesn’t want to do that, so he has now conceded “RAW” to us. I am glad that he did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZUgeMReBb4

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

Read The Manual. Do what it says. Simple as.

The Culture: Commentary On The Elf City Battle

What Jeffro had to say about my article on the Elf City Battle.

Several things to note here: Braunstein Play generated a unique battle scenario that is unlike anything in any game module. Player engagement was maintained over a long span of time without the benefit of standard “wargaming” practices as codified by (for example) the varied and well developed products of G.M.T. Games. The game elements and factions can be anything a player is excited about. No game design or product purchase is required for people to play what they want. There is a significant population of people that will get better wargaming experiences from these techniques than they would from traditional wargaming products. People don’t need to know much or buy anything to participate in these types of games and it is not terribly hard to get them to keep coming back. The results of this battle scenario will significantly impact the campaign state and new conflicts and scenarios will develop organically from the outcomes of events spread across the campaign map. The AD&D combat rules which have been on most of our game shelves for many decades and which THE ENTIRE WORLD said were terrible and which EVERYONE house ruled in the exact same half-dozen ways have qualities which contribute greatly to these people being able to resolve anything that happens in this cutthroat free-for-all. Combat rules which look smarter or better on paper are not actually being used to produce gameplay of this quality or duration or scope. And note the painful cognitive dissonance that results from contemplating the fact that nobody played rpgs or wargames this way between 1980 and 2020… while simultaneously rule sets on basically EVERYONE’S shelves pretty well told you what you needed to know in order to do this stuff. Everything about this is extraordinary start to finish.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

You don't need to buy a damned thing other than the rules to play satisfying campaigns. Ever.

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

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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!