Discovering new ideas is hard, but have you ever tried accepting them?
It’s a strange thing that a hobby built on imagination and experimentation is so filled with people who resist those very principles. It’s baked into our human nature. TTRPGs,like every other human community, has accumulated traditions, assumptions, and accepted ways of doing things. This is not normally so bad a thing. It is good to honor the old ways of doing things – it gives the men of the past a vote, and someday we all turn into men of the past. If we want those who follow us to listen tonis, we owe it to them to set an example by doing the same for the men who came before.
And yet…you still have to think about what you’re doing, about what they did, and judge the traditions, assumptions, and accepted ways based on what they produce. Old things are not valuable because they are old – Belloch’s five dollar watch notwithstanding – they are valuable because they have stood the test of time and continue to provide the best outcomes.
And so…we must be willing to examine our practices honestly, and keep an open mind when better methods become available.
This is where the sunk cost fallacy enters the conversation.
The sunk cost fallacy in a hobby represents not just the fiduciary cost of shelf after shelf of unplayed games, but investments such as time, effort, reputation, and identity. A guy who has spent forty years running games, teaching others, writing advice, and building a brand as an experienced game master has sunk a tremendous amount of costs into his hobby. But the fact that he has invested heavily in a method does not automatically mean that his method is the best available method.
And here’s where the difficult psychological hurdle enters the chat for the weak-willed and mid-witted gamers among us: changing your mind can feel like admitting that your past was wasted.
But that is the wrong conclusion, and the BROSR has been trying to convince the hobby of this for over five years now.
A healthy practitioner does not look back and say, “Everything I did before was wrong.” That’s not what the BROSR preaches. All those years of bad play were not wasted, because we learned a great deal from them. We’ve walked that road and understand its appeal. But we’ve inculcated a healthier grindset-mindet that reminds us, “Everything we learned before gave us the foundation to recognize something better.”
For all the BROSR’s swagger, it is they who have developed the humility and curiosity to move beyond the forty years of dead-end play, and to experiment with the process, and to keep learning.
A veteran carpenter does not become less skilled because a new tool is invented. A musician does not lose decades of practice because a new technique is discovered. A pilot does not become incompetent because the jet engine has overtaken the rotary engine, and a baker is not useless just because sliced bread became the standard by which the best things are judged.
In the same way, the real choice before the hobby is not between respecting tradition and embracing innovation. The choice is between a living craft and a preserved artifact. A living craft allows practitioners to experiment, test assumptions, and incorporate better methods. A preserved artifact protects existing status structures by treating established practices as untouchable.
That distinction matters because status can become its own kind of sunk cost.
If someone’s identity depends on being one of the people who already understands the hobby, then any new paradigm feels threatening. They cannot talk about whether a method produces better play because they are too caught up in the defense of their personal history and reputation.
But the goal here isn’t to prove that people were foolish for playing differently in the past. The goal here is to make the hobby better going forward. One would expect the most experienced people in the hobby would be the ones most excited to investigate new possibilities, as their experience should give them the ability to evaluate change more intelligently than anyone else.
Sadly, in a hobby filled to the brim with theoreticians and snake-oil salesmen peddling untested advice, change is terrifying. Change means that somebody grabbed the reins of your gravy train and shouted, “Woah!”. Change means you have to adapt to a whole new hobby, and one where you are pushed back into the role of student and experimenter rather than the salesman and profiteer. It might be more lucrative in the short term, but the opportunity costs are poisonous.
The role-playing community deserves practitioners like the BROSR who value discovery over defending status. It deserves communities where changing one’s mind when confronted with new facts is seen as growth rather than defeat. The future of the hobby belongs not to those who have invested the most in preserving what already exists, but to those willing to use their experience to discover what comes next.
And you can experience that by getting yourself a copy of the most important supplement ever produced (WHICH IS PRICES TO COVER PRODUCTION COSTS).
