Three Princesses: Captain(s) Jack
In the interests of adding some factional play to the un-named island campaign featuring three lovely young ladies, I’ve asked a million of my closest friends to run the troubled character of Captain Jack Cardinal. He’s the guy charged with bringing the Three Princesses back to civilization and he faces a monumental task: the guards helping the ladies out-number his own by at least 3:2 and he has to hunt them down through uncharted wilderness. For all he knows this island is crawling with orcs, natives, and God knows what else. That should slow them down, and who knows? Maybe they’ll learn their lesson after one misadventure and return to his protection of their own accord.
The results were close, but 73 of my closest friends opted to send Captain Jack on the hunt. Repairs to the IMS Skyhook will have to wait. It’s not going anywhere until they can refloat her, drag her up onto the beach, and careen her to assess and repair the damage. That will take at least a month, and it will be easier when he gets his full complement of crew back. Amnesty may be called for if they’re all going to get off this island.
So saying, the Captain leaves his first mate, Burly Jim, and a dozen crewmen behind to guard the beach camp and the ship while the rest of them begin to beat the bushes for his rebellious charges. This is going to take some time, and we’ll all just have to be patient while we wait for things to work themselves out in 1:1 time.
While we wait, let’s talk about what’s really going on here.
Back in the day, the guys who forked the RPG hobby out from the miniature wargaming hobby had a coherent and high-trust society filled with men looking to fill their time. Because the country in which they lived cared enough to give them the time and resources to fill evenings with this sort of camaraderie, and had for generations, they could amass clubhouses with 40-50 participants. In that environment, you could regularly field games with multiple factions working at cross purposes. The modern iteration of table play (one DM versus all the players) just wasn’t on the table.
Flash forward through fifty years of a nation openly hostile to male spaces and cheap propaganda-fueled entertainment, and you get the epidemic of six-session campaigns. But just as Iluvatar worked Melkor’s discordant notes into the plan of creation, so too does God work the naked political slant of Hollywood and AAA gaming into His own plan for men. With film, novel, and video games turning their backs on men, men have responded in kind, and that has resulted in two very interesting examples of negative feedback:
- A lot of good minds have turned off the soporifics, and sought out alternatives, and found that the inherently creative nature of tabletop games frees them up to create or embrace a culture that doesn’t hate them.
- Men who would have been happy to veg out to passive entertainment, no longer have that option to escape the prison of this fallen world. That gives them a lot more incentive to seek out the kind of hobbies that have been left in the gutter.
Here’s the real kicker: we have something that the gamebros of the late-60s and early-70s didn’t. We have instant world-wide communications at our fingertips. Our reach is longer, and our communications more stable. We can find each other easier, and build games around the new technologies. Rather than use tools like Roll20, which can only ape the standard tabletop experience and which are walled gardens forcing us to toe the Party Line or get the star chamber treatment followed by exile, we built our own style of gaming that we can play within our own walled gardens. We can invite who we choose, show what we want to the world, and exclude the usual poisonous snakes who live to subvert everything they touch.
And in a strange way, we’re doing just what those old-timers did back in the Boomer heyday. We’re using every tool at our disposal to push the limits of what gaming can offer. We aren’t just trying to do the same old thing the same old way, but now with screens between the players, we’re adopting modern technology to re-open the doors to the old ways of play.
The rest of the hobby will catch up in time. They can’t help but see how much fun we’re having, and guys like Coalville will eventually find a way to jump in front of the change and monetize the process of just being friends, and that’s okay. Because the real secret to what the outsiders are doing is that our style of play doesn’t work if you don’t adopt a healthier attitude towards your fellow gamers. It’s not about being the smartest guy at the table or begging people to jump through your gaming hoops, it’s about being truly ecumenical and welcoming and turning the wheel over to everyone at the table. It’s about the democratization of the hobby, and reminding hobbyists that the best way to become better at the hobby is to become a better person. It’s about using the tools we have to make beautiful things happen on the tabletop.
But don’t take my word for it – ask Bradford Walker. He’s had his finger on the pulse of these changes for far longer than I’ve been blogging.