A friend linked me this post from David J Prokopetz, which I think halfway gets things correct, but is missing some key historical context. It is true that there’s a subset of play culture that believes there is no actual connection between rules as written and play as experienced. It’s much older than Hasbro though.
Back in my day…
It was kind of the dominant play culture in the 80s and 90s. With one major caveat; it wasn’t “the rules don’t link to how we want to play” the advice in many of the games was railroading, either a straight line plot or branching path, but the idea was that the GM was to use Fiat and ignore rules and force things into a specific path, all the while constantly telling the players “they can do anything they want”.
If you want to know why early 00’s rpg theory writing was very concerned with GM Fiat and System Matters it was this.
To give an analogy; remember when a few people started buying thousands of dollars of toilet paper at the start of the pandemic? Even to the detriment of OTHER things they needed? Imagine that was most people, imagine that went on for decades, and you’re trying to tell people there’s a different way to do things. You would probably sound a little off kilter after a point, because you’ve been arguing with weirdos so long. (If you read old RPG sections on GM advice, you can often find the advice to lie to the players, punish their characters, etc. so… yeah… that was normalized).
This is literally where these two posts I wrote in 2009 came from:
Roots of the Big Problems
A Way Out
Sales strategy: Brand as identity, not as design
Anyway, in those, one of the things I pointed out, which applies just as much to current 5E/Hasbro culture, was that some companies realized you don’t have to focus on design when you can simply make the brand an identity issue. Much like how “brand as identity” works in other fields of commerce, it’s about subverting your consumers to not think about something but make it a reflex action about what they side with and gravitate to. “brand name loyalty”.
You can shovel anything out; they’ll buy it, it has the right brand name on it. If it’s not built well, they’ll say “you’re too soft/spoiled for this”, or “you’re a bad roleplayer”, etc.
The pitfall in this strategy is that you have to keep your base from seeing the contradiction in “the system doesn’t matter BUT I should buy the new thing”. If they lean too hard into thinking the system doesn’t matter, why should they buy anything you’re selling? If they lean too hard into “the product is providing useful things” they might measure against that to see if that’s true and find it comes up short.
Anyway, while I’m sure a lot of folks looking around after WOTC burned the streamers are trying out new games, I don’t think it’s an incredibly common experience to constantly run into people who are actually reading and playing rules bumping into people who don’t understand rules exist, outside of maybe conventions. Maybe a bunch of people are still trying to form random groups online?
That said, I feel like there’s not much value in trying to convince people directly, rather than just keep playing your games and showing how they work and maybe folks might take an interest and see “oh wait, rules CAN do very good things, it just has to be the right ones”.
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