The Culture: The Bros Continue To Show That Braunstein Is The Way

One of the hosts of Geek Gab, Dorrinal, has decided that he too wants to run a Braunstein.

His game to run? Let's say that you've definitely heard of it.

(It could be another edition, but 2020 is still the best one available. Sorry Red fans.)

Which means that there is instant recognition that the other game you probably heard of would work very well.

Yes, I prefer 1st or 2nd Edition.

The crazy thing is that, when you get down to it, this will end up looking a lot like Fluid's recent Gangbusters game only with way more factions in the mix both sides of the law. You just have a different set of tropes and trappings to play with.

It will also, I think, solve a lot of long-standing problems with the games such as having your hacker characters playing a completely separate game from everyone else becauuse (surprise, surprise) you can actually handle the hacks away from the table. Same with doing legwork, getting medical work done, sourcing supplies, recruiting muscle, etc. because all of that can be handled as Orders to the Referee or played out directly player-to-player with the Referee being informed of the results to report to everyone else.

Which means that what goes on at the table is the run itself. All that other stuff? Players diffusing into separate angles that then converge back on the run when it goes down, and we see who got the drop upon whom and thus which runner(s) come out on top and which get toasted and left face-down in a ditch.

Good luck, runners. You'll need it.

The Culture: Videogames Superseded Tabletop For Conventional Play By 1980

Do you want to know why I keep harping on Conventional Play being surpassed and superceded by videogames?

What do they go on about? "Muh Narrative" (read a fucking book, and not the wizard book) and "Muh One True PC/Party".

That got solved by 1980.

This is where "Rogue-like" came from.

The following year, Conventional Play had its first Muh Narrative videogame.

Which would soon have others joining the party over the 1980s.

SSI's Phantasie would join that list by the end of the decade alongside the officially-licensed Gold Box AD&D games.

Now add in the Japanese games such as the long-running Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series, then arcade games for more fast-paced versions, and it becomes very easy to see why those not already involved in the tabletop hobby by 1990 presumed that "RPG" meant "videogame genre".

Yes, 2nd Edition. Yes, Palladium. I was there; I remember.

And I recall that getting anyone to play any tabletop game at all who was not a Gross Nerd was like pulling teeth, and then it was 2nd Edition, The Anne Rice Game, or Uncle Kevin's Kitchen Sink Non-Game (which still has the best wholly unintentional tie-in movie adaptation).

They were right to refuse, and not just because of who did the pitching.

They didn't have to round up a bunch of people to play. They didn't have to put up with bad behavior. They didn't even have to worry about purchase prices because by 1990 we started to see rentals be a thing.

They had a better Conventional Play experience before Ronald Reagan left the White House.

You had something closer to the real game with folks playing Car Wars, BattleTech, and SpaceMace 39K.

Meanwhile, people now going on about how they were playing the real game all this time were deep into Not Teaching Hobbyists What They (Claim To) Know like the Boomers they are.

And folks wonder why I say Conventional Play in Tabletop is screwed.

The fight got lost nearly 45 years ago. It's been nothing but a long, slow defeat ever since.

Why should I stick with a losing proposition when videogame alternatives are 100% superior and the real game gives me all I ever wanted from this hobby. Tabletop Conventional Play has never delivered, and it cannot deliver, so I welcome its demise in Tabletop.

And you can take your wretched "industry" with you.

The Culture: The Need For A Forever Edition

The Recognition of the Need

One of the things I noticed with the serious exploration of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition is that having a single, settled, static edition of the game turned out to be a massive benefit to attracting and retaining new people.

Having a ruleset that does not change because it is not subject to commercial considerations is a massive boon to any hobby campaign built upon that cornerstone foundation. This is confirmed by how Car Wars and BattleTech endured for so long despite neglect or even hostility by the controlling Publisher; the rules manuals could be had online, and before that the used market, that remained as they were since publication as well as less-than-legal sources (photocopying and mimeographing).

Therefore the conclusion is obvious: a stable, healthy hobby scene cannot be subjected to Edition Churn. It must use one unbending, unyielding, unchanging Forever Edition such that someone learning the game today learns exactly the same rules to play exactly the same game as someone a thousand years from now.

Yes, this means that Product Development is going to completely change. Good.

The End of The Consumer Product Cycle

Rules are not shoes. Rules are not cars. They are not goods to be used, worn out, and discarded when no longer fit for purpose.

Rules are like software, in that it is a pile of mechanics and procedures that operate like a machine. They are better than software in that you do not need electricity or a computer to use it.

That means two things: it is possible to hit "good enough" during development, and it is viable to aim for "perfect" as the end goal of development. The former term is self-explanatory; the latter merits qualification, so here it is: "Perfect" is defined as having achieved a state where any further changes can only damage the ability of the rules to achieve the stated outcome to be had by playing the game.

"Good enough" is where development starts. "Perfect" is where it ends. The transition between the two is what development is: the refining from a rough, but usable concept into the final finished product that does what it is meant to do- no more, no less.

That this is at odds with what is considered Best Practices for commercial operation, be it in physical or in digital products, should not be a surprise to anyone. Edition Churn is a commercial practice that is at odds with the fostering of a healthy hobby environment, and it has been known as such since Stupid British Toy Company deliberately weaponized it as a business practice in the 1980s.

This practice needs to be taken into the town square, strung up at the gallows, and hanged for all to see before being doused in jet fuel and lit up to burn to ash.

There is one very obvious reason for why this needs to die: it is no longer necessary to do this at all.

The technology now exists for a rules manual to be posted online for all to see, and to study, at their leisure. It's been around for over 30 years at this point; there is no need for anyone to churn editions anymore for any form of tabletop game of any kind. Put the rules online; mirror that site, make PDFs available for offline use, and sell Print On Demand copies at-cost.

Once the rules have achieved their final form, lock the site down as well as its mirrors. Do similarly for the PDFs and POD listings.

Now you have that game that shall be the same for the rest of time. Good.

But Why?

To kill the threat that Muh Officialdum, almost always fostered as a headscrew by Publishers to weaponize Fear Of Missing Out to induce a cult-like dependency upon the Publisher via control over the Brand, has upon a hobby.

If a rulebook from 10 A.D. and a rulebook from 3010 A.D. are exactly the same, then the Hobbyists will be able to enjoy the game for generations on end without any worry that some dangerhair dumbass, some status-striving slut, some grifting guru, some poncy politico, etc. will seize control over the game via legal fuckery and shit-can the game and its Brand.

Keeping cultural institutions out of the hands of obvious attack vectors for bad actors is part-and-parcel of good stewardship over one's culture. That includes games, especially those who have a habit of teaching people ideas and practices that some folks would rather not spread around.

The Business: Operational Tempo & Proper Campaign Play

There's something else that needs to be kept in mind when we talk about how Vidya beats Tabletop for a lot of adventure game stuff.

Vidya, for certain games so far, does a far better job realizing how a man in that environment has to think and act to succeed than on Tabletop. The game that illustrates this best is BattleTech. Both the Harebrained Schemes adaptation and the Pirahna Games one handle all of the actual campaign stuff better than tabletop because it's shoved into the faces of the typical player; you have to master logistics to win the game.

Streamer commentary makes the experience so much better.

Notice that both of these games have their own ways of doing Conventional Play's disregard of Strict Timekeeping because both of these are single-player games with no pressure upon them by hostile actors; they are both games with Narrative at their core, so you have to trip Plot Triggers for things to happen that matter- just like Conventional Play.

When you go to an Open World mode of play (which both of these videos do), even that is gone. You can do all the refits, train up pilots, go wherever, and the only costs that matter are time and (sometimes) availability. Yes, this is exactly same thing as the old joke about JRPGs where you have to Save The World Right Now, but you spent as much or more time doing sidequests than the main quest because that's where much or most of the game is.

As JD Sauvage said on Twitter the other day, Operational Tempo matters. Conventional Play does not have this. It cannot because it is taken as Referee cheating players, and due to several infamous episodes that got turned into comic strips and running jokes there is substance to that seeming.

Pressure comes from outside the player. Want your man to get that loot in the dungeon? Got to get down there and grab it before some other man does, and that someone else is run by a player- not a NPC run by the Referee.

That player can be you, as you may be forced to bench your first choice man due to what goes down at the table and have to resort to a backup choice to secure that bag instead. (Get used to the idea of having a roster of mans when you play in a real campaign, rotating them on and off the bench as required.)

That player can also be someone else, whom you do not know, and you will not know until that treasure is taken or otherwise removed from the campaign and thus no longer relevant.

That's how things really work when you play a real tabletop adventure game, and you play it in a proper campaign environment. It will not feel like a Narrative; it is not play-acting. It will feel like war, like business- like the competition that it is. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose- and sometimes you win or lose for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

And the experience is vital to achieving the full power of the tbletop adventure game as a medium.

The Culture: Cutting Out The Corporate Gatekeepers, Part Three (#Shadowrun)

Catalyst also controls Shadowrun. The same problem is present, and the remedy is also the same.

• Buy Used
• Play Older Editions
• Ignore Metaplot
• Share The Tapes

Shadowrun doesn't have the online tools that BattleTech does, or is as visible as BattleTech, but you can find some stuff out there- starting with PDFs of the character sheets for the edition you prefer to play and runs.

You will need more than a rulebook; FASA bought into the Supplement Treadmill hard, to the point where the game wasn't complete until a handful of vital supplements hit the shelves- one for each core activity in the game (Magic, Matrix, Combat) and resources for both Runners (Gear, Vehicles) and OpFor (Monsters, Gangs, etc.) as well as places to go do stuff.

That varies by edition, and I suggest using First or Second Edition, but Third is okay.

Tossing the metaplot tosses all of the problems that the game has ever had, such as Stupid Ideas (Harlequin, et. al.) and Publisher Inserts being more important than what you do at your table.

All of this also applies to R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk (even now, most prefer 2020 over Red) despite Maximum Mike being far more reasonable than Catalyst's Poz Parade, and running them as proper games is a lot easier when you take the inhibitors off.

You'll find this to be a persistent pattern when cutting corpo gatekeeping.

The Culture: Games To Investigate: Shadowrun

Back in 1989, FASA put out (until recently) the more famous and successful Cyberpunk game.

Nevermind the recent edition. Go with 1st or 2nd. You're already dealing with what is now alternate history (because the Great Awakening of 2012 didn't happen), so it doesn't matter if you use earlier (i.e. FASA) editions over Wizkids or Catalyst- don't give money to people that hate you.

Strip out the metaplot, junk the modules, and be careful with certain supplements that extend things like the Matrix, Magic, and all that gear.

Fix the timeline at 2050; play things forward from there.

Now, the questions:

• Does the game work when played Rules As-Written?
• Does the game work best when using 1:1 Timekeeping?
• Does having players assume the roles of Faction Leaders improve campaign play?
• Does having periodic Braunstein sessions keep the campaign fresh without resorting to publisher diktat via supplements?
• Does having the all of above questions answered as "Yes" still maintain the promised Cyberpunk experience?

This is something for Bros--especially those of you not yet involved in the scene--to consider taking up and running for a while.

I contend that if all five questions come back affirmative that we can say that the #BROSR's overall position on tabletop adventure games is one that will force the Cargo Cult to face an existential crisis from the other end of the spectrum. Wizards of the Coast threatens them from the macro end; the Bros threaten from the micro- from the end user at the table end of things.

The Culture: The OTHER Problem With Conventional Play (And Why There's No Future)

We break into our usual boosting of proper campaign play to address Catalyst Game Labs being a Converged Poz Dispenser.

We have been hard at work updating our community guidelines. These guidelines will be in effect across all platforms that are operated by CGL.

We will have more information for the community in the coming weeks.#community #guidelines #catalystgamelabs pic.twitter.com/9lYhVka3Cs

— CatalystGameLab (@catalystgamelab) January 23, 2024

There is a video about this. (h/t Mage Leader, who is an Okay Guy.)

The Executive Summary is that the Death Cultists already inside the company are further converging all possible information channels about what they publish. This includes the tabletop forms of BattleTech and Shadowrun as well as related tie-in media that they publish. This is a preliminary step before turning the poz outward on new product and public events.

This is despite known issues that Catalyst has in fulfilling its stated business objectives. Instead of taking all the dead weight (who happen to be the Pozzed) and tossing them in a shallow ditch, they're doing what SJWs always do when the lies are insufficient: Double-Down and Project.

A lot of people, including those at Catalyst, are about to be reminded as to why both of the aforementioned properties endured--thrived even--despite FASA and Wizkids being pants-on-head paste-eating retards that crashed the business with no survivors.

Already there's a big underground scene in making 3D Printer-ready miniature sculpts, making printer-ready counter sheets and stand-up sheets, maps, and ALL THE PDFS!- not to mention the very healthy, very large, and very active trade in used product out there. With MegaMek capable of inserting user-added units and printing out tabletop-ready record sheets, it is now very easy to enjoy BattleTech without giving these Death Cultists a penny. Shadowrun is about as easy to do.

And for everything else, here's all you need:

You get a Letter of Marque, and you get a Letter of Marque, and you- and you! Of course the friend of free men everywhere has one.

All this is to point out that Conventional Play, because it is a popular Consumerist Lifestyle Brand, is vulnerable to subversion by bad actors like the Death Cult.

This will remain a problem so long as this remains part-and-parcel of your hobby experience.

The Death Cultists at CGL want you to be an atomized, soulless bugman who's only source of identity is in the products you consume- and both BT and SR are, as long as CGL has control of the IP, going to be exactly that.

This is the other reason for why Conventional Play has no future. If the inherent shitty business model and social dynamics--already full of the sorts of freaks who eagerly glom on to the Death Cult for yet more unearned power, prestige, and potential for revenge against Normies and normalcy in all things--would kill it, accelerating that by having Cultists seize control and make suicidal runs at the culture like the fanatical cultists that they are will.

So go ahead, cut CGL out of your hobby by taking away their revenue at every opportunity. Use old books. Spread PDFs around like candy. Make hidden guerilla POD storefronts. Use 3D printers to make your minis, or go really old school and just use counters and stands. Shun the poz, shun the pozzed, and don't give money to people that hate you.

The Clubhouse ain't about that sad excuse for a hobby, or a culture, which is why it is hated- and feared.

The Culture: Yes, The Big Two Cyberpunk Games Are Wargames At Their Roots Also

The two cyberpunk tabletop RPGs that matter are Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. Both are brainchilds of the late 1980s that didn't truly break into popularity (compared to the all-mighty AD&D) until their early-'90s second editions.

Both of them, therefore, are capable of being run as wargames in the usual Braunstein model and you can go full Kriegspiel campaigning with them. The reason that this didn't happen is because neither publisher made it obvious where that level of play was going to fall, despite it being in the face of users from the start: the very parties that hire the street-tier adventurers who do the dirty work for dirty money.