This is the only Transformers movie worth a damn. Take your (grand-)kids and share the joy (and the pain of seeing Robot Jesus die).
Yes, there's a YT channel using OG G1 TF.
Hasbro feels the heat over fucking up the Bayformers and being unable to do anything else that sticks--no, T1 didn't--like the OG did. Turns out that hand-painted animation cells have a particular kind of magic over the minds of the audience, because this original flavor consistently hooks new fans year on year over whatever came after. The merch sales and tie-in media (i.e. videogames) proves it.
Expect this to cascade into The Only Game That Matters sooner than later, given other crossovers we know is on the table.
Arduin is one of the first expressions of the Calvinball Doctrine that uderlies the Cargo Cult: "The game is broken and doesn't work. Buy this widget to fix it."
Consumerism came into the hobby early, driven by the folks who didn't know how the game worked and never bothered to question their own priors or discover how the game does work- they PRESUMED it was broken so of course they had to fix it.
The entire picture of how Muh 40 Years got it so wrong all this time has become clear, and I can't help but to hate them more for it.
Here is the evidence we do have:
There were a number of campaigns being run was TINY. The expertise of setting them up and running them resided in a SIMARLY SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE.
All campaign instruction documents before AD&D were rough prototypes. No earnest development could have occurred because each campaign was distinct from all others in its theme, concept, and scope.
The people playing in these campaigns may have some nice war stories. But they have no idea what was actually going on due to the rules being entirely in, for example, Dave Arneson's head. (This is the “just asked Wesely” cultural ethos of the era.)
Any commentary on 1:1 time type rules will immediately give you insight into the level of understanding of gameplay dynamics a person has. (See Lewis Pulsiphers's remarks on that from an old White Dwarf magazine as a PRIME example.) We have published material that shows that key figures were unfamiliar with second order effects of the rule and what type of play structures it could feasibly support.
Wargamers of the sixties were not a preliterate culture. Many of them are still alive today. What did they do when there was a resurgence of interest in campaign play? Did they suddenly decide to show up with the “practice and demonstration and mentorship and play reports and conversations at the table” that would help us achieve success at the table?
NO THEY DIDN'T.
In fact, they did the opposite of all that. They elected to outright oppose the efforts to recover campaign play. Because “not even Gygax played that way”, “only David Wesely can run a Braunstein”, etc.
AD&D was the first time in history that anyone elaborated on the subject of campaign play dynamics at all. Apart from Gygax, every one of these “preliterate wargamers” walked away from the very game rules that even make such campaigns possible.
They didn't know what they had. And there would be evidence to the contrary if they did.
The Oldfags, too many of whom being Boomers, did what Boomers do and refused to pass on their patrimony.
The worse part is that what Jeffro describes here is something I've seen across the board from Boomers over the years. It's not just a Tabletop thing. They genuinely do not comprehend why they do (or did) what they did, only that it works/worked that way (at the time) so of course it always does so what's the problem? Why bother questioning a damned thing? It Just Works That Way.
This is why they get mad when you show the receipts. You are telling them, to their faces, with facts and evidence, that no It Does Not Work That Way You Fucking Retard and had you bothered to Read The Fucking Manual and properly comprehend--work through--what you read you'd be agreeing with us and not being an arthritic anklebiting asshole.
Now you know why I've come to call them "OldFags".
And those who echo them might as well be Oldfags, so they get the brush too.
And yes, Griff is a cunt who exploited an aging man for his own gain. Shame.
Griff deserves no credit for the results that have been developed by the BrOSR. He has always advocated for conventional play. In his documentary he asked leading questions to lure Blackmoor players into endorsing the precepts of conventional play. In his “scholarship”, he has made unsupportable claims about early seventies play to intentionally cut BrOSR practices out of the narrative. He has frequently contradicted BrOSR claims. And finally, no one could possibly have developed the gameplay approach of the BrOSR by primarily using his work as a guide. The idea that what I call Braunstein play dynamics are fundamental to D&D is original to me and is (as my critics would tell you) something this is foreign to the doctrine and understanding of both David Wesely and Rob Kuntz. I am the only person in rpg history to make such a claim and the BrOSR is the first group of gamers to ever explain how to use the David Wesely's Braunstein idea to solve the problem of how to play at the stronghold tier in a d&d campaign. This is original work and no documentary put together by Griff ever explained how to do such a thing.
The smart thing for Griff to have done was to lean into it, to accept this as a positive that would feed back into his own project, and encourage this revival because that positive PR would then reflect back on him and lead to increased interest in (and thus revenue from) his documentary work.
But that would entail Griff not being a bottom-feeding faggot, and we aren't in that timeline.
Now Griff has to be all about that lie for the rest of his days or his purloined credibility is shot, and he won't be able to build on what he wrought and then sullied.
Rule of Thule, over at Substack, posted this long note on the Bros and Braunstein.
Braunstein is an eternal construct like the Pythagorean theorem. The people who brought it to us deserve to be credited and remembered.
1) Wesely: discovered it
2) Arneson: exploited & mastered the form
3) Gygax: isolated & enshrined its form into game rules
4) Jeffro Johnson: defined it and completed it
All four points are important. Points 1 and 2 are made plain in Secrets of Blackmoor. We are only aware of point 3 because of the Trollopulous group’s efforts to run AD&D Rules-As-Written (RAW). They did not set out to demonstrate point 3—they were not even aware of the existence of Braunsteins when they started this process. It was totally unexpected that they find anything at all; they were just playing a game!
Thus, this eternal principle—this thing that every roleplaying game wants to converge towards—was identified through the process of obstinately following the rules.
It’s worth restating: the Braunstein conceptualization of RPGs would not be understood right now without running AD&D RAW. This fact underscores the importance of both RAW as well as AD&D, on multiple layers.
What makes AD&D different? Gygax was an intuitive genius, and he (along with Arneson) understood the sprawling concept of ‘fantasy gaming’ very early on in a way that was far ahead of anyone else. He wrote AD&D as a reaction to seeing people run OD&D wrong (this is clear from reading his tortured lamentations and warnings in the AD&D manuals). In order to get it right, he had to lock down the correct behavior into a rules fence so people wouldn’t screw it up. In doing so, he encoded Braunstein play and assumptions (which can be seen in Boot Hill as well) into the ruleset’s DNA.
RAW is important here because look at the path Gygax went on after TSR’s success. If he had not had a RAW mindset—if he had not believed that the rules necessarily communicated structure and precise intent—if he did not believe the rules could enshrine a form of play, then we would all be none the wiser. Imagine all we had was Gary’s interviews and forum comments and remarks from his visits to conventions and a rules-lite You Do You manual: we would think D&D was just a frivolous non-game colored and connotated by the (largely irrelevant) rulebook.
When a “game designer” puts out a rulebook which cannot be seriously followed, which does not seem to encode a form of play or any precise intent, comparison with AD&D (or other more seriously designed games) tells us that there’s nothing there to be examined. RAW is important because only by the players adopting a RAW mindset can a game designer convey (via RAW) a substant vision.
Designers must demand players play RAW. Players must demand that designers give them something worth playing RAW. AD&D is the example we all—designers and players—aspire to achieve, from both directions.
TLDR: The #BROSR saved the hobby. The Clubhouse is their castle. What Wizards of the Coast does, ultimately, is irrelevant; we are the future of the hobby now.
And yes, Jeffro is still putting in work to make the hobby better.
The weird consensus that emerged across countless tables that the AD&D weaponless combat procedures are unplayable is just completely off the wall. That the complaints against these rules came from people that would dismiss old school era D&D combat as being dull and devolving into people taking turns bashing each other with a sword…? Even crazier!
It really is a shame that people overlooked the awesomeness of these rules for so long. Just think of how uninspiring cavalry charges ended up being in countless campaigns due to people not using the overbearing table!
This libel, slander, and defamation will confinue until pain gets inflicited upon them. Take their assets, their revenue, their credit- everything. Leave them in a ditch for stepping out of line. Do it repeatedly. Ensure that they connect Cause to Effect. They will stop when they are forced to stop. No sooner.
This is all in support of the upcoming release of the official English translation, a preview of which is at DriveThru.
This is going to matter in the years ahead as Auto-Translate functionality becomes native and default-enabled across the Internet, allowing cross-cultural communication that we see now on Twitter to go on everywhere without Google screwing things up.
Why?
If there was ever a place where Braunstein need to be seen and heard, it's Japan. So many of the solutions that the Bros found would be embraced as the Real Game does far more for the busy lives they have than the Soup Aisle's Cult Non-Game model that's easily beaten by videogames.
This is the opening post in a thread. It's also bait; he's talking about Forgotten Ruin.
Ruining Braunstein
I'm here to Ruin your Braunstein. By which I mean that I am going to attempt to connect the newest old thing in D&D with my favorite contemporary fantasy series. pic.twitter.com/JLKpjVhFVT
Yes, reconnecting with the culture that birthed The Only Game That Matters is necessary. That takes time to achieve at scale. This? This is a stop-gap measure to get folks playing the Real Game now by presenting it in terms they understand, which buys times for the cultural reconnection to complete itself.
Just as there is, at last, acknowledgement on the disastrous damage of Lester Del Ray's diktat on what "Fantasy" is we have arrived at acknowledgement that The Only Game That Matters is not Le LOTR Game, or Muh Medievalismsmsms but instead a Fantastic Adventure Braunstein game where one comprehensive ruleset is more than capable of achieving the incredible objective of fulfilling the fantasy of being Someone That Matters in such a milieu. Swords, sorcery, six-guns, starships, Solar Rayguns, Psionics- The Only Game That Matters not only can do it all, it has.
Which is why, in the end, you only need one game to do it all- you just need to Read The Fucking Manuals and apply what's written.
Last weekend the Pundit got Uncle Kevin on to talk about (among other things) the late Erick Wujcik.
Wujick's the man behind non-D&D games that still command respect. The most notable is Amber Diceless, which remains the only diceless game worth bothering with.
He's also the man behind Palladium's first big licensed product: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness (today, despite the recent anniversary offering, is officially labeled as After The Bomb), which (along with the first Robotech product run) was allowed Palladium to grow to the point where RIFTS became possible- and so many rules and procedures developed for those games got into RIFTS (including Bio-E; see Lemuria).
This is worth the time for the historical context alone, and Pundit's got a certain knack for being a podcast host so he has an option should his PDF Merchant hustle dry up.
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!
Recently, retards on Twitter (including some OGs) Did The Dumb on Chainmail and OD&D. There's been videos cut about this.
Which is all about this Twitter thread, archived by Jon Mollison here. An intro:
The prevailing belief is that the ACS included in OD&D replaces Chainmail
What is missed is that the “normal” combat system in Chainmail is its Mass Combat, while the derived systems are given clear titles like “Man to Man”.
Chainmail begins by launching into its “normal” / core combat system, which is what we tend to qualify as “mass combat”. While it never receives a name, we can recognize it by certain cues, such as referring to 1:20 or 1:10 figure scale combats.
The normal / core combat system in Chainmail is the most thorough when it comes to rules. Turn Sequence, Movement, Ranged Combat rules, Morale, etc, these are given thorough, multi-page definitions in the “default” system which is simply referred to as “Chainmail”.
When we get to Man-to-Man Combat, we are told “all preceding rules apply”, and that these use a 1:1 figure scale, and that it is “for small battles”.
Missile Fire (ranged combat) gets only a single paragraph of revision. Ranks Firing, Firing Arc, Cover, etc, are all inherited.
And to cap this off, Raker had the Killshot.
"No wrong way to play" is the "Healthy at any size" mental illness for TTRPGs. pic.twitter.com/o8HZMgZRHi
This turned out to be a nice small convention. I should pay attention to the con's page to see about going next year since it was so close that I may be able to commute.
I concur with the comments of the merits for a small convention, especially for creatives, as it permits real-life contact with friends, associates, and colleagues that larger conventions--often far more oriented towards the business side of the hobby--do not; this mirrors comments I've heard from professional and semi-pro creatives in adjacent entertainment media (and my own experience).
This is the sort of convention that is for the hobby, not the big corporate ones. (Mostly) local hobbyists assembling to partake in events that otherwise are impractical; this is a good way to link up local or regional Clubhouses on a regular (if not frequent) basis while allowing for far-traveling hobbyists to play the role of the foreign merchant from that exotic Elsewhere. It was how Car Wars did its annual tournament series: from Clubhouse champion to regionals to The Big Show at GenCon.
I maintain that the future of the hobby is to return to a non-commercial basis. Small conventions play into that. Consider this.
Last night's Dunder Moose stream was another panel discussion reporting what happened when a Braunstein in a Mega-Dungeon turned into a Demolition Derby.
What we see with this stream is an extensive report on how the game, when played as intended, delivers on the promise that Gary and Dave made all those years ago.
Players played adventuring mans and faction leaders alike. Players that got knocked out quickly shuffled over to other mans and rejoined play. Orders flew around, mans did things, mans got things, mans got ganked, and in the end the villains won. As described, the Fog of War greatly enhanced the experience for all concerned and concealing who played what allowed players to go hard without immediate concern of censure.
The advice given on how to get into playing and running the Real Game, when all you know is Current Edition Cargo Cult Conventional Play,
It presumes Conventional Play norms, much like Mr. Welch's Mystara videos do, but with that in mind there's plenty of value to be had here. Give it a shot.
Last night Alexander Macris had on Griff Morgan to talk ArneCon.
First, the movie. You can get it at Amazon here for Prime Video rental and "purchase"; this is the store page for buying a hardcopy, but there's none for sale as of this post.
Second, the tie-in book. Again, Amazon page is here. "Within the pages of this book, you will find maps and writings by David Arneson as he recounts the events and people in his Blackmoor, a living game environment that gamers are still experiencing over 50 years later."
Griff's summary of what went down early on is summarized easily: The Upstairs (creative/business) went to war with the Downstairs (shipping/packing/etc.), in part due to a lot of hair-trigger egos due to most being young adults as well as (at the time) "long-haired hippies" making games in an environment where tabletop games were firmly something for children and not acceptable for serious adults (nevermind the War Colleges and long-running historical hobbyists, but that group kept it discrete).
Griff goes over Braunstein first as preface for Dave Arneson iterating upon this by using the dungeon as a different way to impose Fog of War on players, with the difference being--as he explains it--the former is mostly Player-v-Player and the latter is Player-v-Environment; I notice here that the rise and domination of the latter as the core of commercial publishing to the point of creating the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play mirrors the dominance of PvE in MMORPGs vs. PvP- down to the focus MMOs that go hard on PvP repeatedly crashing as commercial enterprises save for a couple of outliers (e.g. EVE Online).
(Note: Yes, you can conclude that if you want to making gaming stuff for a living, PvE is good for the Endless Product Slop business model that Conventional Play in both Tabletop and MMOs are all about; PvP is not viable commercially in these media under that model, which is why Warhammer and BattleTech are always having crisis issues or end up being Brands where the gaming is ancillary to Brand development, so they need to be either non-commercial or use a different business model.)
Note to the ArneCon ConCom: do more promotion! I didn't even know this con existed, and I'm MINUTES FROM THE HOTEL!
My birthday is a week from today. I may or may not punt on that day; plans are still in flux with the folks.
Dunder Moose did send me his copy of Four Against Darkness and a copy of Secrets of the Undercity for ACKS; I do not have a print copy of ACKS, and I would appreciate it if I got one as a present for this or Christmas.
This retrospective on Kara-Tur went where you expect.
Muh Racisms. Muh Appropriations. BORING!
These Tourists deserve less.
No, there's valid reasons to nock Oriental Adventures: The reliance on classic Bullshido and other pre-Internet martial arts fabulation for its substance.
We are not talking about any serious attempt to turn a pile of history, legend, and a canon of literature into the source material for an expansion to The Only Game That Matters; for all its (many) faults, Legend of the Five Rings did attempt to do that. We are talking about grabbing all the bullshit of the Ninja Craze, mixing it with Sonny Chiba films as related in a drunk-and-high haze by some Soup Aisle sadsack (that would be Ashida Kim, by the way), and then written in a coke-fueled frenzy with a background of Every Kung Fu Cinema Hachet Job Ever running on a loop on a TV from a second hand shop.
Of course it worked--80s Ninja Craze, yo--but it aged like milk.
It aged like milk because, in order to hold up over time, it had to withstand reconsideration with the emergence of post-Cold War access to information and that includes entertainment media; this is what we saw when L5R--again, flawed as that is--arrived as that property did what OA should have done but didn't.
China, Korea, Japan: These are NOT interchangable cogs. They cannot be swapped with each other, nor with the other great empires and kingdoms of the East, anymore than we tolerate England being hot-swappable with France or Spain despite all of them having knights, chain (or plate), and a shared relgion--even a shared church for a time--and so on.
When your product is informed not by myth, history, or an Appendix N literary canon but by Black Belt Magazine and similar bullshit filtered through half-remembered bad movies, you're going to get a crap product that's going to wear out fast when the zeitgeist shifts. The rise of Mixed Martial Arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship did as much to destroy these fake-and-gay fantasies as the rise of Historical European Martial Arts.
(You can bet that Mazteca gets the same treatment, and has the same problem.)
You can't sucker the population like you could in the 1980s on this stuff anymore; the basis for the false belief got demolished on Pay Per View, and backed up by the change in Eastern action films, comics, and television.
On this day next month, I hit another birthday. I mention this now as a courtesy; if--this is not, never has been, nor shall ever be, expected of you--you like, and you can spare it, head over to this page where I've updated things for this year.
As some of this stuff needs lead-time to ensure it arrives on time, I am saying so now to ensure that this happens.
