The Alt-Right DM

2022 Update: Mark Hines is a giant gaping vagina who probably still wears a covid mask in the shower.

If you’re here because of his second-rate hit piece of a PhD scribble you should know that he’s also a hack and a fraud and a damn dirty liar. He has the audacity to refer to my sainted self as “ANONYMOUS” when my name is plastered all over this blog.  Ask yourself: If he can’t even find my name, how can you trust anything he says?

Particularly given the fact that his hit-piece accuses me – ME of all people – of politicizing D&D after twenty-five pages of whining about WotC not treating Chult with enough political correctness.

What a fag.

Anyway, back to the classics:

Hopalong Bradford makes a good point here:

That’s right. The SJW Death Cult wants tabletop RPGs to be a reflection of r-selected psychology, with all the stupidity and degeneracy that entails, and manipulating how the normies see D&D is meant to change the narrative of D&D. Control of the narrative is control of the culture, and culture is downstream from politics.

Great guy.  Great writer.  Go buy his book.

We’ve talked about it here at length and bracketed by gross-out humor, but he neatly sums everything up in two sentences.  Playing D&D the way Saint Gygax handed it down to us in the sacred texts isn’t just a better way to play the Greatest Game, it’s a better way to save indoor toilets.

Lose the game, lose the culture.  Lose the culture, lose western civilization.  Lose the civilization, lose the ability to take a dump without putting on your galoshes and a coat.  The Left knows this, but they’d rather rule over a cholera choked wasteland than serve in a toilet paper paradise.

It really is that simple.

Strike a blow for Christendom.  Run any version of D&D published before 1989.

While we’re talking about Against the Giants, did you ever notice how seamlessly you can pick up the basement of that module and drop it into the space beneath The Moathouse?

Yeah, I noticed it.  And I pulled it off at a con once.  It was great.  First level characters in the hands of older, crusty players.  They planned this great raid on the Moathouse only to find the bandits desperate for help as they were hard pressed to hold off the rampaging monsters trying to swarm up from below.  The wound up allying with the bandits, who became henchman, in a big raid on the lower level, which none of the players recognized was lifted from Nosnra’s basement.

Those old modulars were sheer genius.  I’m trying to think of how one might mix and match ideas from more recent Official D&D fare, and it just doesn’t work.  It would be like dropping Conan into Star Wars.  Or dropping the Mule into Starship Troopers.  Everything is too bound up with everything else in the name of pre-narrative and immersion and other fun-ruining ideas.

One of these days I’m going to find a way to bolt Palace of the Silver Princess onto an island beneath The Lost City, which will be a jungle ziggurat buried beneath the roots of massive trees on The Isle of Dread.

I wasn’t going to talk about the “murderhobo” nontroversy.  Some rando said something stupid on Twitter and the windowlickers of mainstream D&D fell all over themselves racing to assure the world that they also very much enjoyed having D&D AIDS.  Must be Always O’clock again.  But then everybody’s favorite squish and crazy cat leaf had to race for the mic to reassure the world that he isn’t like those nasty little mental hobbitses.  He just can’t resist dancing like a puppet when they pull his strings.  In the process revealed something rather astonishing, and something that is far more interesting than the latest mombo-jombo from the Cult of the Woke.

GASP!  The phone call was coming from a Storygamer inside the party the whole time!

The tl;dw* version goes like this:

Murderhoboing is dumb.  My precious games make sure that you place the story first and the game second.  Winning a boon from an Earl is worth way more than 20,000gp.  Playing an immersive style of play where the characters act like retards because of narrative continuity that arises from my failed fanfic writing career makes me le smart.  Also, despite my pretentions of greater intellect I have no clue about the libraries full of literature about wandering ronin and knights errant and cowboys who saunter into a town, defeat the evil warlord/dragon/rail baron and saunter out leaving a trail of broken hearts and broken heads in their wake.  Does anyone have any poop that I could eat?

I might be paraphrasing, but that’s more or less an accurate translation.

We here at Casa de Wright are Game First Respecters.  We believe in the oracular power of the dice.  We understand that the story emerges post-facto from the game.  We do not place a premium on familial relationships and political intrigue and other girlish pursuits.  We’re all about clambering down into dank holes and squarshing chaos and clambering out just long enough to refit, refresh, and return.

RPGpundit running his latest campaign (cat not pictured).

Storygamers like the RPGpundit take the opposite tack.  They loves them some stories and they loves escape from the real world of their pathetic jobs and lives.  They want immersion into the game so that they can forget for a moment their poor life choices and their small penises.

We here at Casa de Wright embrace our small penises – wait that came out wrong – what I mean is that we love the game and ourselves enough that we don’t need to immerse ourselves in the Fake News of the Fake Lives of our pawns.  We embrace the challenge of the game first, and apply the story once the game has allowed us to suckle on its drama-teat.  While we enjoy slathering on a nice story frosting, we appreciate the rich game cake.  And that’s actually a much harder road to walk, mentally.

It’s really easy to write the stories first and then just nudge that narrative a little bit when the real world of the dice get in the way.  Or to just fudge the dice a bit and ignore them when the results aren’t what your nice little pet theory dictated.  That’s how SJWs,  like Pundy (who is the REAL SJW lol** ) treat everything from D&D theory to political theory to gender theory to fedora tipping their way into the utter stupidity of the atheist religion.

How much harder is it to have to actually pay attention to the dice, to have to remember the results and find the patterns created by the fates and then to offer suitable explanations?  Way harder.  As in, that one pawn that was a combat beast but couldn’t hit the highest AC orc if the thing was tied to an altar to Gork.  You gotta remember that stuff.  You gotta notice it.  And you gotta come with an off-the-cuff explanation that his to-hit rolls failed because he was afraid of orcs and didn’t like them because he secretly wanted to have sex with orcs.  Okay, maybe not that explanation, that’s as dumb in D&D land as it is in real land, but you get the point.

Murderhoboing is the game of champions.

Any doofus can adventure in the same town session after session.  Having to up stakes and start all over dungeon after dungeon?  Never knowing if the cleric in this keep can be trusted not to betray you to the temple of chaos?  Never knowing if that next hex contains a hermit and his pet cougar or a lizard tribe or bandit camp?

That’s the stuff of champions.

*Good choice.

**Boomer zing FTW!